Wind Turbines Switched Off Because Grid Can’t Cope With Extra Electricity
A report by the National Grid says wind turbines will have to be switched off for 38 days each year because the grid can’t cope with the extra electricity they generate.
The National Grid report says the grid can’t cope with the extra surge in power generated by wind turbines and therefore some of them have to be switched off so that the transmission networks are not overloaded.
The problem is that electricity can’t be stored so the only way to reduce the amount of electricity going into the grid is to turn off wind turbines.
However, as part of the government’s move towards a low carbon economy it wants to increase the number of wind farms significantly by 2020. However, there are now concerns that this could be the wrong way forward as wind farm operators are being given “constraint” payments when their turbines are turned off. It’s suggested that by 2020, when there will be around seven times the number of turbines, this payment could cost around £300 million a year – a figure which will be passed on to energy consumers in the form of higher domestic and business electricity prices.
At the moment wind turbines are turned off for around 25 days a year but the National Grid is concerned that an increasing number of turbines along with warm but breezy summer nights could mean there’s a surge in electricity generation. The warm nights will mean that demand is lower and therefore the answer will be to switch off power supplies.
As more turbines are connected to the grid, more of them will have to be turned off as part of the “balancing mechanism”.
Operators of wind farms were paid £2.6 million to switch off wind turbines just last month and this is a charge which is added to energy bills, both domestic and business.
It seems strange that when there’s actually excess electricity being generated and supply is outstripping demand – that business electricity prices should actually increase – because there’s no way of storing the extra power generated. Normally when there’s an excess of a product in the market the price goes down.
The problem however, is that the transmission network can’t cope with the extra capacity. Furthermore, wind farm operators are already paid subsidies to generate green energy as part of the Renewables Obligation. Each turbine receives incentives worth £250,000 a year while generating around £150,000 worth of electricity.
The director of policy research at the Renewable Energy Foundation, Dr John Constable, said “This work from National Grid acknowledges that wind power may cause very high system management costs in 2020, at around £286 million a year. When combined with the required subsidy costs of upwards of £6 billion a year in 2020, the consumer burden entailed by the renewables policy is looking increasingly unsustainable”.
A spokesman for the National Grid said “Over the past year we have had to reduce output from wind generators on 25 days, amounting to less than half of one per cent of the output of wind generation connected to the high-voltage transmission system over the same period”.