Green energy delays?

In the i newspaper last Saturday there was an article suggesting that new green energy schemes, windfarms etc, may have to wait 10-20 years to be connected to the grid because of lack of capacity or cables in the wrong places. Can this be true? It seems to make a nonsense of efforts to meet renewable targets. Can anyone with knowledge of the electricity distribution industry comment please.

I do know they've been laying quite a few new "interconnectors" as they call them

(if you do a search)

Edited By Ady1 on 02/01/2023 16:52:10

Just read the article you refer to. A lot of these sort of headlines come from the companies (and their trade bodies) hoping to make money out of their projects and not their concerns over energy bills for customers.

However, it will be true that some schemes will have to wait for the necessary reinforcement to be done.

 As this article correctly says, Ofgem regulates how much the companies that own and operate the networks can spend to keep short term costs down. This has meant that for years, despite the politicians telling us that we should be moving away from fossil fuels, there has been insufficient investment.

Ofgem has however paid regional electricity companies large sums to investigate ways to get more out of the existing network. I have recently installed an electricity monitoring system at home that records the voltage and current every few seconds and I have noticed that the voltage will suddenly drop by about 15 volts and stay like that for between 20 and 40 minutes. This is because of a system to reduce load on the network when National grid need it.

Stuart

Edited By Stuart Smith 5 on 02/01/2023 17:24:01

Edited By JasonB on 03/01/2023 06:57:24

Does it mean that the windfarms and solarfarms are in the wrong place.
I was told years ago by someone who worked on the national grid that there was no spare capacity and that outages could bring down the whole grid as parts of the grid were byepassed adding strain elsewhere.

Some weeks back I watched Country File on BBC1 one of the presenters was talking to a Welsh farmer looking to diversify into both wind and solar farms and he said he'd been told that he could not be connected to the grid due to lack of capacity, he was also told it would be many years for increased capacity would be in place

H

Maybe in 15-20 years time we will also have sufficient base-load generation for those dark nights when the wind isn't blowing?

Regards,

IanT

YES ! it IS true. The wind farm of 100 turbines was built off Skegness although there was NO infrastructure to handle the power, only after SEVERAL attempts to lay an undersea line about 40 miles down the deep to Sutton bridge power station, at VAST expense was power produced when it is only 6 miles off shore. The many Notice to Mariners issued let the cat out of the bag. Noel.

New Year = New forum Rules

… or is there just something extra-special about this thread ?

MichaelG.

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Ref. __ final posting, by Jason, on this page: **LINK**

https://www.model-engineer.co.uk/forums/postings.asp?th=177207

Back on track now, lets concentrate on the actual question not the why or use it as an excuse for a general rant.

We don't have 24/7 moderation so follow the rules and don't waste yours or the moderators time by posting something that is likely to be deleted..

Edited By JasonB on 03/01/2023 07:22:59