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World's Largest Offshore Wind Farm Opens Off Northwest England (reuters.com)
The world's largest offshore wind farm has opened off the northwest coast of England. "The wind farm has a capacity of 659 megawatts (MW), enough to power almost 600,000 homes, and overtakes the London Array off England's east cost which has a capacity of 630 MW," reports Reuters. From the report: The Walney Extension (as it is called) is made up of 87 turbines built by Siemens Gamesa and MHI Vestas, and covers 145 square kilometers (55 square miles), which is equivalent to around 20,000 football pitches. The 40 eight-megawatt MHI Vestas turbines being used stand 195 meters (213 yards) tall and are the largest wind turbines in operation globally. Britain is the world's largest offshore wind market, hosting 36 percent of globally installed offshore wind capacity, data from the Global Wind Energy Council showed. Walney Extension was among the first renewable projects to secure a so-called contract for difference (CFD) subsidy from the British government in 2014. The contract guarantees it a minimum price for electricity of 150 pounds ($195) per megawatt hour (MWh) for 15 years. You can view some drone footage of the offshore windfarm via Orsted.
See also https://www.electricitymap.org... for realtime CO2 intensity of electricity production across a big chunk of the world... e.g. right now (morning peak), the UK's running on 28% gas, 24% nuclear, 19% wind, 8% coal, 4% solar.
Not necessarily. For one thing, we need more power generation that doesn't emit CO2, even at the expense of having to pay for it.
If cost is not a concern then why not use an energy source that is more reliable and emits less CO2? Such as nuclear power.
http://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/2018/08/why-i-favor-nuclear-power.html
Also, consider what happens if we stop these payments: we'll end up with fewer wind generators. This'll save us money at times where the wind is very high and we're generating too much wind power, but what about the rest of the time? We'll end up having to pay to generate that power in gas plants instead. If the extra money spent on gas is greater than the constraint payments being paid to wind farms, then you'd be stupid to stop the latter. It'll cost you more money.
Or, they could use nuclear power. That's what they could use the rest of the time. Nuclear power has lower environmental impact that natural gas so that seems more logical to use nuclear power to cover when the wind doesn't blow.
The article you linked hints at this when it says 'The National Grid said the wind constraint payments were “the most economically efficient way of managing additional green capacity”.'.
I don't have data on how often these payments are being made, but I can tell you that the UK's wind farms spend a significant amount of time generating less than the highest amount they generate, which suggests they don't spend a lot of time in shutdown mode (and it's worth noting that "shutdown mode" doesn't mean they're shut down; it means they're generating lots of power, which is great because that's exactly what you want).
I'm not saying these payments are desirable in and of themselves; obviously the grid needs upgrades to avoid wasting wind power (while considering the cost of doing so, and the impact of reduced constraint payments on the rate of new wind generation capacity, because we still want more of it). I'm just pointing out that this may very well be the overall cheapest option available, even before considering that we want to subsidise wind generation in order to get more of it.
It seems counter intuitive to keep adding more wind generation capacity and pay them to sit idle. It would seem more productive to put that money towards the structures needed to manage the wind power they have now so they can store that excess generating capacity, or do some kind of load shifting. Paying for more and more wind power when it seems they have too much already is just making the problem bigger. If they keep building more wind farms then at some point, or so it seems to me, that this paying wind farms to sit idle will not be so economically viable. Something would have to become cheaper than what they are doing now.
I found a document on the UK nuclear power plans and I didn't read it all just yet as it is very long.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-t-z/united-kingdom.aspx
It appears that the UK is planning on building more nuclear power plants. There must have been a change of heart on nuclear power 10 or 20 years ago. Seems like an awfully long time to build some nuclear power plants while they are spending so much money to subsidize wind power they can't use.
I'm guessing "big wind" has a strong lobby in the government to get such a sweet deal on subsidies.
This is a huge money pit and the UK should shut this off, or at least dial it back, until they can figure out how to better manage wind power than paying the windmill owners to not produce power.
Here's a suggestion: instead of having multiple private companies involved, this could all be money moving from one pocket of a public energy company to another pocket of the same company, without the tax payer being burdened by the inefficiency of this made-up "competitive market".