[amiga386]

This is all true, the NIMBYs are real and we must construct additional pylons... but the largest part of curtailment costs come from the UK energy sector's project mismanagement.

1. We have two undersea cable projects (EGL1&2) to provide transmission capacity between all the new windfarms in Scotland, and SE England where it's used. Both projects are years late.

2. But we keep approving and switching on more windfarms in Scotland anyway ("connect and manage" policy)

3. The bottleneck that the undersea cables aim to get around - the transmission lines between North Scotland and Northern England - are at lowered capacity because maintenance is due, and it's non-negotiable.

Basically everything will be great in 2030 when every project delivers at once, but until then, enjoy exhorbitant curtailment costs.

https://ukerc.ac.uk/news/transmission-network-unavailability...

[londons_explore]

The solution to NIMBY's seems simple... "We would like to put a power line through your village. Here are the plans. We will to give every resident £400 to compensate them for the trouble, and it will only happen if at least half the residents vote yes. If the plan goes ahead, all voters will be eligible for the £400, even if you vote no.".

It turns out most people don't really care about a power line, but do like money. You won't have to offer much money to have a majority saying yes.

[hylaride]

IMO, it should be "if village votes no, they're top of the list for brownouts/blackouts".

NIMBYism is 99% wealthier people pushing the costs (visually or literally) of modern society onto others instead of bearing it themselves.

[amiga386]

The government were mooting "we'll give you free electricity for life if you let us build the pylons near you" in 2024

https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-government-electricity-py...

It's currently "we'll give you £250 off your bill per year, for 10 years, if you let us build the pylons near you" (the average bill is currently £880 per year)

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/households-near-new-pylon...

[pjc50]

Yeah. I especially think this should be linked explicitly to power bills. Vote no and get a 10% increase on your bill for "supplying electricity through wishful thinking rather than pylons".

Localized ballot initiatives are basically unheard of in the UK, though. Everything is routed through central government and its press officers.

[syrgian]

Wouldn't all the houses in the village lose way more than £400 in value?

Last I was comparing houses in a neighborhood, the houses near a powerline were consistently worth 15k-30k less (3-6% less).

[amiga386]

Yes, but you have to factor in that you can't eat houses.

Being given money immediately for your living costs might be more attractive to you, than trying to retain value in an asset you'll only realise in 20 years time when you sell it, or perhaps not at all if you die first.

[ErikCorry]

It's easy to blame project mismanagement, when it was always well known that undersea cables are much more expensive and difficult than the on-land cables that the Nimbies scuppered.

And it's unsurprising that windfarms in Scotland keep getting planned when the operator can collect these payments while switching off their turbines to reduce wear and tear.

[amiga386]

EGL2 was proposed in 2015 and was meant to be operational by 2023. It wasn't even approved until August 2024. Construction began a month later.

EGL1 has already suffered a 16 month delay thanks to its constructors: https://www.offshore-energy.biz/supply-chain-constraints-pus...

> The partners attribute the delay to market conditions, supplier withdrawals, and a delayed final offer from an unnamed supplier, asserting they took all reasonable steps to secure the supply chain given the challenging circumstances.

We can certainly "what if" with NIMBYs pylon-blocking, but I'd still say it's mismanagement of the EGL, either by the government, Ofgem or the constructors, that have led to these delays. If these delays hadn't happened, we'd have EGL2 available today and the maintenance on old pylons would have less of an effect.

It's actually good news that there's so much interest in investing in wind farms! Scottish windfarm companies do have to bid at auction to be permitted to build, it's ultimately up to the government what bids they accept. The Tories fucked up and set too low a price, no investors were interested - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66749344 - their successors aren't making the same mistake: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly8ynegwn4o

[ErikCorry]

If EGL2 took 9 years to get approval, that's the fault of the Nimbies, right?

[amiga386]

The project was proposed in 2015 but it didn't seriously start until 2020. That's purely politics.

I'd say the lion's share of time was spent seeking planning permission, writing environmental impact documents, planning the route, building the justification for any compulsory purchases, consulting with interest parties, etc. Some of that would be NIMBYs, but I don't think there was a sustained campaign to hold back EGL2, it just took a lot of bureaucracy, and effectively "death by a thousand cuts". A project gets to be 5 years late one day at a time.

See the timeline and some of the documents here: https://www.easterngreenlink2.co.uk/project-to-date

[ErikCorry]

I guess I'm using 'Nimby' in the wider sense to include all the red tape that slows down or blocks every building project in the UK. A project doesn't have to be individually targeted by Nimbies to be slowed down, they have enough regulatory quicksand to stop building wholesale. Then when you get through that, they can target your individual project.

And Nimby is politics, so I don't see a distinction between Nimby and 'purely politics'.

[amiga386]

Perhaps I'm being pedantic, but you're not seeing the distinction because you're expanding the definition of NIMBY beyond what it means (a person who objects to developments done near them).

You used a fine phrase there, "red tape", which describes all the bureaucracy over and above localised objections to national infrastructure. NIMBYs can certainly use the red tape to hold you up, but there's also NIMBY-free red tape that holds you up anyway.

[Aside: If you want a word for "globalised" NIMBYs, those are BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything), the sorts of people who weaponise the environmental impact assessment. Some examples are https://www.vice.com/en/article/why-doesnt-america-build-thi... and https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/06/09/why-america-cant-bui... -- it seems especially galling that "environmentalists" don't want a train line that could replace 100% of air travel between LA and SF, because it might affect their specific piece of the environment, meaning that the planes just keep on flying, dumping CO2 into the atmosphere, warming the planet, and contributing to the increasingly severe weather that leads to massive destruction of their nearby environment via wildfires and such]

Under "politics" I'd include NIMBYs and red tape... and also political will. The project was proposed in 2015 and didn't really start until 2020. That's politics -- convincing the appropriate people in power that they can and should do something, and commit to funding the project, assigning the appropriate governmental bodies to begin work on it, and in this case engage the companies responsible for electricity transmission and get them to work on it too. Only then do they start planning the route, applying for planning permission, compulsory purchase, holding consultations, hearing objections, etc.

Getting the project going took 5 years, it could have been 0 years if the political will was there.

[bee_rider]

I wonder why somebody doesn’t open a datacenter in Scotland. Sounds like they have too much power… also it is a bit chilly, right?

[citrin_ru]

Despite wind energy being in excess in Scotland AFIR end users are still paying very high prices due to marginal pricing used in the UK - electricity cost is set by the most expensive source of energy (even if it is 0.1% of the mix) and most of the time gas is the most expensive source. I think marginal pricing is detrimental but there is no political will to axe it.

[MagnumOpus]

“Marginal pricing” is just how a market economy works.

If there weren’t marginal pricing, nobody in the private industry would build more wind farms or submarine power lines or battery capacity - which are lucrative because they produce peak-time power cheaper than imported gas — and these are the things that will drive power prices down eventually.

[bee_rider]

It sounds like there’s some sort of rule in the UK where al of the suppliers have to charge the same price per watt (or something), and they’ve named this rule “marginal pricing”? So, it is not entirely the same as a market based pricing.

Whether it is better or not, I have no idea. One could probably see an argument for allowing renewables to price themselves below the sustainable rate for petrochemical based fuels—let them outcompete based on price. Of course that gives them less money to reinvest.

On the other hand, power grids are never entirely market based; the grid needs some dispatchable power for stability sake, and it is hard to get consumers to express their tolerance of power outages in terms of how much extra they’ll pay to keep unused plants in reserve…

[aregue]

One solution is to have several markets. Norway also has transmission problems. The land is divided into 5 areas, each with its own price.

[rbanffy]

What if the datacenter buys bulk energy from a single provider and only uses the grid for excess demand? Can also go the xAI route with massive batteries smoothing out power use.

[mapt]

Is there a rational reason to do that?

[shawabawa3]

The idea behind it is that everyone who supplies energy gets paid the same

E.g. it would be unfair to pay wind farms 10p/kWh and gas turbines 20p/kWh when the electricity they supply is the same and fungible

If there was enough grid storage this wouldn't be an issue, but because there isn't, there are always times where we need gas turbines to top up and those turbines won't turn on for less than it costs them, which is a lot

The upside of this is renewables are very profitable and incentivised

[mapt]

If that's the case, doesn't it make a huge amount of sense for the utility to tell the silk incinerator selling it 0.001% of its electricity for 40p/kwh, "Bugger off, we'll buy batteries"? Cutting its overall power costs in half for a tiny operational shift.

You don't actually need the 0.1%. There are easy ways to make it up. There AREN'T easy ways to make up 7%, though.

[pbmonster]

Simplifying wildly: Electricity producers sell their electricity at auction. They all offer a bid (x Wh at price y), the utility accepts bids from lowest to highest until demand is filled, and then everybody gets paid the highest accepted price to fill demand. Wind and solar pretty much always bid their forecasted capacity at $0, because they have no additional costs between producing and getting curtailed.

So the silk incinerator only gets to sell electricity if demand is extremely high and the utility needs to accept even the highest bid.

Batteries would fix a lot of this, but western nations have extremely long interconnection queues (project waiting to be allowed to be connected to the grid), mostly because of stupid bureaucratic reasons.

[MagnumOpus]

The utility will bill the 40p/kWh to its industrial customers (and residential customers on “agile” smart meter tarriffs), and the customers can decide whether they need the power even at 40p, or whether they shut down their bitcoin mine/aluminium smelter/EV charger/floodlights for those two hours.

In the longer term, price spikes like this incentivise the building of batteries - which might be marginably profitable most of the time but profit big time (and help big time) in periods of price spikes.

[bee_rider]

It is nice that is keeps renewables extra profitable, but if they could price down a bit they could just run fossil fuels out of the market entirely… so, it doesn’t seem like a great favor to them.

OTOH treating all units of energy “fairly” ignores the added value of dispatchable generation, so it doesn’t really seem fair at all.

On the gripping hand, if pricing was set by the market, customers could be incentivized to help fix the intermittence problem by making their loads dispatchable, which seems like it would be an all-around win…

[StopDisinfo910]

> if they could price down a bit they could just run fossil fuels out of the market entirely

What do you propose we do when the intermittent sources don’t provide enough energy and all the other power sources have gone bankrupt?

[infthi]

>it would be unfair to pay wind farms 10p/kWh and gas turbines 20p/kWh when the electricity they supply is the same and fungible It is not the same, supply from gas turbines is more flexible/predictable, this might be worth an extra premium.

[vidarh]

What makes you think they haven't? At least half a dozen operators have more than one data centre in Scotland, and many more have one.

[ErikCorry]

Are you sure?

> Despite campaigning for more data center development two years ago, not much has come to fruition in Scotland. In December of 2021, Oracle closed the Sun Microsystems data center in Linlithgow, Scotland. DataVita has opened a new data center in Glasgow in its parent company’s office development, as well as expanding its Fortis data center in August 2022. No major construction projects have been announced since the campaign began. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/scotland-continue...

Why would you open a datacenter in Scotland when the UK rules mean the electricity price is the same throughout the UK, regardless of supply and demand? This is precisely the issue that OP highlights - the UK electricity auction is at a national level, but transmission is limited and the actual supply and demand is not evenly distributed, causing huge curtailment payments to have to be made.

[vidarh]

About the number of data centres in Scotland? Yes, I am sure. I have done business with operators of several of them.

You'd open them because of plenty of customer demand.

[amiga386]

According to an article today, there are 16 data centres in Scotland

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c77zxx43x4vo

[api]

Chilly is good. A lot of DC power is cooling.

I don’t know why Northern Canada is not full of data centers. There’s untapped hydroelectric potential up there as well as free cooling.

If Russia wasn’t a basketcase politically Siberia would be great too.

[bee_rider]

Agreed! That was what I meant, sorry for any ambiguity.

[blitzar]

Plumb in some district heating and everyone wins.

[sameesh]

spawn more overlords!