Wind Farms
Posted: Sun Feb 16, 2025 8:36 am
Joanne Nova says
"When failure becomes a commodity…
Ponder for a moment how intrinsically unsuitable, maladapted, and worthless wind turbines are to a grid. Their failure is so comprehensive, multifaceted and inevitable, an entirely new and bizarre market was invented to reward their failures. Even when they generate electricity, if the time is wrong, the demand is low, or the network can’t handle it, they will still be paid. The grid can’t use the power, but the customer still gets slugged for something they didn’t use, or they couldn’t get. In the UK the costs for this useless power grew to nearly £400 million last year.
The largest provider of useless power was SeaGreen wind plant which made nearly twice as much from being “constrained” than from being of service. The Renewable Energy Foundation (REF) reports that SeaGreen earned £100 million for making electricity, and £200 million for being “constrained”. Effectively, the useful electricity it made costs a shocking £2.70 a kilowatt hour, after the other payments are included.
Obviously, when the government rewards failure, the market responds by planning to fail. It follows then that industrial wind plant developers would be bonkers if they weren’t looking for sites where their output would arrive at the worst possible time, or through the most remote and overloaded corner of the network"
We are working on the parsing of URLs so please be patient. Meantime add the usual www in front of this to see the article.
joannenova.com.au/2025/01/the-uk-pays-wind-turbines-for-failure-so-the-market-wants-to-install-more-failures/
"When failure becomes a commodity…
Ponder for a moment how intrinsically unsuitable, maladapted, and worthless wind turbines are to a grid. Their failure is so comprehensive, multifaceted and inevitable, an entirely new and bizarre market was invented to reward their failures. Even when they generate electricity, if the time is wrong, the demand is low, or the network can’t handle it, they will still be paid. The grid can’t use the power, but the customer still gets slugged for something they didn’t use, or they couldn’t get. In the UK the costs for this useless power grew to nearly £400 million last year.
The largest provider of useless power was SeaGreen wind plant which made nearly twice as much from being “constrained” than from being of service. The Renewable Energy Foundation (REF) reports that SeaGreen earned £100 million for making electricity, and £200 million for being “constrained”. Effectively, the useful electricity it made costs a shocking £2.70 a kilowatt hour, after the other payments are included.
Obviously, when the government rewards failure, the market responds by planning to fail. It follows then that industrial wind plant developers would be bonkers if they weren’t looking for sites where their output would arrive at the worst possible time, or through the most remote and overloaded corner of the network"
We are working on the parsing of URLs so please be patient. Meantime add the usual www in front of this to see the article.
joannenova.com.au/2025/01/the-uk-pays-wind-turbines-for-failure-so-the-market-wants-to-install-more-failures/