Britain has wasted £1,112,293,718 switching off wind turbines in 2025
179 comments
·October 15, 2025grues-dinner
amiga386
This is all true, the NIMBYs are real and we must construct additional pylons... but the largest part of curtailment costs come fron 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 Scotkand, 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...
notTooFarGone
Who opposes Power lines?
Never heard that this is a thing. As a foreign influence I'd be delighted to target all infrastructure proposals and bombard it with trolls.
grues-dinner
People oppose everything.
* Lattice overhead powerlines? Eyesore (should use the new T style ones), house values, wind noise, hums, WiFi interference, cancer, access roads, hazard to planes, birds
* T-frame pylons: boring (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/13/electr...), eyesore (we prefer the lattice ones), most of the above too
* Underground: damaging to the environment, end stations are eyesores/light polluters, more construction traffic, should be HVDC not AC, house values
* Solar farms: waste of good land (golf courses are fine) noise somehow, construction, eyesore (but a 400 acre field of stinky bright yellow rapeseed is OK), house values
* Onshore Wind farms: all the birds all the time, access, eyesore, noise, dangerous, should be offshore, house value, waste of land, I heard on Facebook the CO2 takes 500 years to pay back
* Offshore wind farms: eyesores, radar hazard, all the birds, house values somehow, navigation hazard, seabed disruption
* Build an access road: destroying the countryside, dust if not surfaced, drainage, house values
* Don't build an access road: destroying roads, HGVs on local roads, house values
* Nuclear: literally all the reasons plus scary
Some of them are fair on their own, but it really adds up to a tendentious bunch of wankers at every turn who think the house they bought for 100k in 1991 and is now worth 900k is the corner of the universe.
> As a foreign influence
I'm sure these people would never take foreign cash: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c93k584nvgeo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyk1j92195o
arethuza
We can see a lot of windmills from our house - probably at least 60 in a few different windfarms. They are all nearly 40km away, but I actually like seeing them.
There are others much closer, which I also rather like seeing (closest is about 2km) but you can't see them from where we live.
myrmidon
There is no need to speculate on Reform members being on the take when they are literally pleading "guilty" in court: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj6xwy015ngo
Scum.
vlan0
The problem is, and always has been, land owners and their ego.
HPsquared
House prices are the UK's version of "the spice must flow". The whole Ponzi scheme is dependent on that market, as there isn't much else. Too big to fail.
BolexNOLA
Saw multiple people on HN literally 2 days ago complaining about how noisy solar is. Absolutely baffling.
1718627440
Do you want to have power lines instead of a garden?
bargainbin
It’s so prevalent there’s a dedicated term for people who oppose it: NIMBY.
scrlk
This has been going on for decades, e.g. 275 kV and 400 kV Supergrid construction back in the 1960s:
> Supergrid planners commented that compared to the first Grid build in the 1920s and 1930s ‘we’ve been in a completely different ball game, with planning officers that want to study our proposed routes in absolute detail and then make their own suggestions’. Another engineer complained about a route near Hadrian’s wall, saying ‘It’s a good job Hadrian wasn’t around now…. He’d never get planning permission for all that’.
> What price should be put on ‘amenity’? In a sense the CEGB could never do enough. This was demonstrated one November evening in 1960 when the Chairman of the CEGB, Christopher Hinton, walked into the Royal Society of Arts to give a paper on the efforts the Board was making. In his talk Hinton outlined the basic problem of NIMBYism. The power stations and transmission lines had to go somewhere. For people in the area the benefits were nil, but the immediate and visible impact of the infrastructure was considerable. Reducing the impact on amenity cost money. Underground cabling in one area would inevitably lead to the question why not do it in other areas. Hinton was not trying to win an argument. He concluded that this was a ‘problem that cannot be removed’. No precise definition or set of rules that could be called on to resolve the intractable dilemma.
> The audience was in the mood for a fight. Mr Yapp of the National Parks Commission claimed that underground cabling was only more expensive than overhead lines because the Board hadn’t tried hard enough. He reasoned that the old London Electric Company had been told that a 2,000 volt underground cable was technically impossible. ‘So we go on… we are now told that 275 kV can hardly go underground’. Mr Yapp then fell into the volume fallacy. ‘I am reasonably certain that if only the cable was ordered in large lengths, it would be much cheaper’. This is the same muddled thinking that leads gas companies to claim that if only we properly commit to hydrogen, then the costs will fall. Hinton was one the country’s finest engineers. He pointed out that the laws of physics trumped the volume fallacy. ‘Overhead cable uses air, which is free, as an insulator’.
https://energynetworks.substack.com/p/why-dont-we-just-put-e...
Cthulhu_
I would, overhead powerlines are not something you want near any houses for various reasons. Underground is fine.
sapiogram
In Norway, power cables have been a top-tier political issue for years. They make electricity more expensive locally, since the surplus power can be exported instead of needing to be dumped for 0 or negative cost.
postexitus
Even without new physical cables - very recently Nordic power markets switch to Flow Based Market Coupling (FBMC) - which basically takes physical properties of the existing lines (coupling points) in grid balancing operations, which allowed some underused lines to be used more (practically) - which made electricity cheaper in some locations, and more expensive in others (because cheaper electricity flew from that region to more expensive ones). It is akin to blocking train lines to a holiday resort because poorer people will be able to access it.
p_l
Heard lots of grumbling from an acquaintance in Germany that a big issue is, I quote, "Bavarians not wanting either overground nor underground power lines that would bring power from north to south, so at best we sell wind power from north to west and the south of germany buys nuclear from france" ;)
ErikCorry
It's a huge issue, see the depressing web page on Südlink. Massively delayed, much more expensive, and less efficient because it has to be underground. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suedlink
Germany, like the UK, has dynamic national electricity pricing, which makes no sense when the interconnections are not powerful enough to actually make it a single electricity market.
elric
Same shit is happening in Belgium. We need extra transmission lines to connect the offsore wind turbines to the rest of the grid, and to improve grid stability in general, but NIMBYs have been campaigning against this for years.
Oarch
Bit of context, the gov announced a series of "anti-blocker" amendments to the planning bill last night, which is theoretically designed to address issues on large infrastructure schemes like this.
mixedbit
I wonder how practical it would be to build a system that would let home appliances cheaply overuse energy when there is a peak in wind or solar production. For example:
* Let heat-pumps heat homes to say 23C instead of 20C
* Let freezers decrease the temperature to say -30C instead of -18C
* Let electric water heaters heat water to say 70C instead of 50C, such water can then be mixed with more cold water
Such overuse would then reduce energy consumption when the production peak is over (heat pumps could stop working for some time until the temperature decreases from 23 to 20, etc.)
radu_floricica
You don't "build" such a system. You change the metering to follow supply, and everything else will follow naturally.
You'll have enthusiasts that'll do homebrew systems to take advantage of the economy, then you'll have companies catering to their (tbh, hobby), then you'll have products that are actually useful, then you'll see mass adoption. Like in everything else.
Trying to plan a huge strategy from the onset feels (and is!) daunting. Just make sure the price fits the reality, and savings will follow naturally.
AstralStorm
Yeah right. Because building a freezer that goes to -30 C is as cheap as going to -18 C. It's much beefier hardware with a lot more insulation.
Likewise a heat pump can only boost so much.
This, like other environment related changes never happen by market forces. Not once. And small tweaks even on large scale produce small effects, insufficient for our needs.
robocat
> You change the metering to follow supply, and everything else will follow naturally.
Tell me your wonderland where this has happened . . .
There are whole countries with wireless meters. There must be papers showing how much effect it has on consumer consumption? Ignore one-off examples, I'm interested in population level effects and statistics.
not_math
There's a program called Hilo [1] in Québec where it's using the Hydro-Québec Rate Flex D [2] to automatically stop the heating during peak demand.
> With Rate Flex D, you can save quite a bit of money, since most of the time in winter, you’ll be charged less than the base rate, except during occasional peak demand events, when you’ll be charged more than the base rate.
[1] https://www.hiloenergie.com/en-ca/ [2] https://www.hydroquebec.com/residential/customer-space/rates...
Cthulhu_
Personally, homes and freezers should have a consistent temperature; if there's ways to store the excess heat / cold somehow that'd be neat. But for homes, the best ways to store excess energy would be batteries and electric cars, or worst case sink heat into underground storage.
The electric water heaters are a good idea, but you'd need the space for extra storage. There's existing heat exchanger systems with e.g. rooftop / sunlight water heating systems, if excess cheap energy could be used to also heat that storage you'd have something.
Angostura
Already kind of in place. I’m on the Octpus agile tariff that gives different electricity tariffs every 30 minutes - with 24 hour notice if tomorrow’s prices.
Whenever electricity prices go negative I have automations to force-charge my solar batteries from the grid, turn on hot water heaters in my hot water tank (normally heated by gas etc. ).
cameronh90
I do similar, but without the batteries.
I just have Home Assistant turn on everything: dehumidifiers, heaters, lights, set the freezer thermostat to -25c.
So far I've earnt about 10p, but the real saving comes from having a little bit of thermal inertia to carry through to when prices are higher.
ragebol
To add, so called 'dynamic energy contracts' are getting more and more popular, at least in my native Netherlands. The European day-ahead electricity market switched to 15-minute price blocks this month, to more accurately follow the supply and demand.
The market for power imbalance was already on 15 minute blocks.
I'm using a HomeWizard smart plug [0] to enable my electric boiler to only run during the cheapest hours of the day
ratherbefuddled
Having just had solar and a battery fitted by Octopus I'm interested - would you mind sharing what you use for automation here please?
jon_adler
Not op but may I suggest looking at Home Assistant, Octopus Energy Addin and Predbat: https://springfall2008.github.io/batpred/energy-rates/
Angostura
Sure, I use Home Assistant running in a little raspberry pie in the lift.
There is an Octopus Integration that exposes current prices (and much else) to HomeAssistant.
There is another Integration that works with my solar panels and another that works with my batteries and can change mode (self use, force charge, force discharge etc.)
So from there it’s really just a question of setting up some if-then automations to turn on smart switches, charge the batteries if prices go negative.
You can also gradually add more nuanced automations like turning on water heaters if the panels are generating more than 1kW and the batteries are over 90% charged.
I’m not a programmer, it’s all fairly easy to do.
wongarsu
The only thing you would have to do to make this happen is to change electricity pricing from a fixed rate to a dynamic rate based on actual market conditions, along with a standardized way of accessing current pricing. This would drive consumers to shift their behaviors to take advantage of cheap prices, and smart appliances could access the price feed to make decisions like the ones you mention. Another simple one is washing machines, dryers and dishwasher offering to delay their start time to coincide with the cheapest energy price within X hours.
The issue is that most consumers don't like unpredictable prices. You can make a crude approximation by having 2-3 fixed rates for different times of day, but that leaves a lot of potential on the table
k33l0r
Electricity contracts with 1-hour pricing are already pretty popular at least in Finland, even for consumers. I myself have one.
Plus large parts of Europe are currently transitioning to more granular 15-minute pricing: https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/trading/transition-to-15-mi...
You can still get fixed tariff electricity contracts but you'll end up paying a bit extra in return for greater predictability…
bombcar
> The issue is that most consumers don't like unpredictable prices.
The key is to not take this away; make it so that those who want predictability can get it (but they end pay more for the privilege) but those who want to try to "game the system" can (and incidentally help with the overproduction problem).
Done well, things like Powerwalls, thermal mass storage, etc could absorb quite a bit of load during peak production times, reducing load at inopportune times.
_kidlike
they are installing now smart meters with sim cards in Greece, and of course everyone started complaining, shaming the gov, claiming corruption, etc...
General population doesn't understand that fixed pricing includes an extra cost which is the risk that the electricity provider has to account for. That risk has a calculable price, which is passed down to the consumers. But because it's baked in the flat rate, nobody complains.
Smart/dynamic pricing actually benefits the consumer.
bombcar
It does, but people are really bad at understanding it.
It's like how there's a substantial portion of the population that counts the best commute time ever as their commute time, and are perpetually late. "How can it take 30 minutes to get to work, one time it was only 15!" - ignoring the reality of traffic, subway delays, etc.
lmm
> Smart/dynamic pricing actually benefits the consumer.
No it doesn't. The customer has low risk appetite and would rather pay a premium for predictability.
littlestymaar
Even if such a system was set up, it would take years before the appliances where all updated to take advantage of it.
And in the meantime it would be very unpopular for people who can't just afford to renew their otherwise fully functional appliances.
wongarsu
For your old appliances you still pay the same on average. A fixed price contract isn't cheaper, it just smooths prices into a long-term average. And many of the changes can be done manually. On your old dishwasher or washing machine you decide when they start, and most of them even already have buttons to start with a fixed-time delay. Instead of starting them at the end of day you can just start them when the wind is strong or the sun is shining, or watch the price feed. You even get to feel smart for saving money
I agree on the popularity, but you'd absolutely see an effect even without anyone buying new appliances
cameronh90
Years isn't that long.
The aim is net zero by 2050, lifespan of a fridge-freezer is about 10 years. Even assuming designing a system and putting it in place took 5 years, that's still enough time to have most appliances on it by 2040.
Given the current energy prices, it probably even makes sense to replace appliances sooner than their normal lifetime. My fridge-freezer is only 5 years old, but if it broke today and cost more than ~£150 to repair, I'd end up saving money by replacing it.
mynti
This will probably take a little longer for private use, but the industrial sector is already doing this. Cooling chambers being cooled down further during cheap electricity prices (or sunshine when they have their own solar) or storing heat/"cool" underground
eigenman
When I was working with NREL back in 2017, they were thinking about coordinating water heater electricity use with a “smart grid.” Each device attached to the smart grid would measure the electricity spot price and would “store” energy to minimize cost. At the time the goal was to reduce peak load on the grid, but the same ingredients to maximize power use from intermittent power sources.
For example, see https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/82315.pdf
fidotron
You have to get the energy to the appliances though, and there is the bottleneck.
It does looks like it will make some sort of sense for compute workloads to move around to be at locations near surplus energy generation. As someone else mentioned bitcoin mining (with the benefit of heat generation) could also be used, but if this practice becomes widespread the attachment of bitcoin pricing to what is in effect negative local energy prices may prove to be a structural problem with it.
adrianN
I really don’t think that that’s the bottleneck. Peak demand is much higher than average demand. There is a lot of leeway in moving around domestic demand
jcattle
This literally is the bottleneck which wastes the energy and is so stupidly expensive in the case of Britain (and Germany).
The issue is lots of renewable generation far from places where it is used and not enough transmission capability.
This is called curtailment and is really, really bad. Energy providers need to pay the windfarms for the energy that they (the grid operators) fail to transmit to where it is needed, and they have to pay backup generation (usually gas) at the place with the load.
fulafel
It's practical enough that this is how it works now in many (most?) parts of Europe at least. Electricity at the wholesale level is priced hourly or quarter-hourly and households often elect to have a correspondingly hourly priced eletricity contract & program their appliances/ev charging/whatnot to follow the price.
See eg https://www.euronews.com/business/2025/02/20/fixed-vs-variab...
myrmidon
It's good to raise awareness of this.
I think that grid upgrades are the only good solution here (and those are already happening), because shifting enough consumption towards where the windfarms are strikes me as ridiculous (what fraction of London is going to migrate to Glasgow once electricity is 40% cheaper there, honestly?) and just luring a handful of new datacenters to Scotland (with cheaper electricity) is not gonna cut it.
Demand-side anything (or even storage) is not gonna solve this either, because the british north/south grid connections are already close to the limit most of the time; this is not just a peak-power problem.
There are very similar problems in Germany (insufficient north/south grid connectivity), and expected long-term costs (within 2037/2045) are in the €200b range (roughly half is for off-shore connections):
https://www.netzentwicklungsplan.de/sites/default/files/2023... (take with a grain of salt because this is material from the grid operators, not some neutral source).
lars512
Isn’t that just assuming that people, rather than industry, is the main consumer? Perhaps there are energy hungry industrial applications that could move.
grues-dinner
UK domestic electricity is roughly equal to industrial (94 vs 82 TWh). Commercial is 62. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/688a286564785...
A lot of curtailment happens at night: strong offshore wind and low demand. So not only do you need to provide enough of a price delta for the industry move to be worth it (sacrificing proximity to other amenities and customers, eating the relocation costs, loss of employee supply, etc) but you also need the industry to be operating 24/7 (or start doing it). Some industries can do that, but not all.
And then one day when the grid upgrades are done, the risk is the incentives are cut and now you're stuck at the wrong end of the country.
stepbeek
Absolutely. I had imagined green hydrogen production or something similarly intensive to be the solution.
daedrdev
The UK has notoriously long build times for new power lines which heavily contributes to this problem. I think the FT said a new connection for a big user or power supplier often takes ten years, with planning alone now reaching 4.5 years and half of all new connections getting sued, which is insane considering the productivity loss and how it’s a already known problem. Sadly the government seems dar more interested in forcing digital ids.
petercooper
Tell me about it. I live in a region of the country which has had a very active "no pylons" campaign running for several years now with no resolution in either direction yet. The latest proposal is to bury the lines instead which results in far longer build times, destruction of land, and inconvenience for everyone along the route, and they don't seem to like that idea either.
wongarsu
Same issue in Germany. And people obviously started resisting the buried lines too. They don't want pylons, but digging 2m deep trenches to put cables in is also too much disruption because now you can't plant trees on those corridors, the ground is disturbed, worries about the heat from the cables, electromagnetic fields, property values. Of course those are the same regions that are also strictly against building wind turbines in the area
ChocolateGod
The UKs level of bureaucracy makes Brussels look like a breeze.
For any new project it seems we have have years discussing whether we should have a discussion about whether to start a new project.
raverbashing
NIMBYs dragging things down as usual
They would probably object to battery installation next to the generators as well
petercooper
They do. A "battery farm" in my area was recently vetoed by the council despite being approved by planning. However, the government has just overridden the council so it's back on.. for now.
I think a big problem with the UK is how many "layers" there are for such a small country and how each layer has its own processes of appeal. So you have to get past the local residents, past the planners, past the local council, past the county council, and past the government (not to mention the local MP, if they decide to get involved!) before anything happens when, historically, a more top down approach would be taken to get things going quickly.
cameronh90
Also each of those layers have a bunch of sub-layers. Look at any large planning application and you'll find hundreds of pages of consultations with various stakeholders who have no incentive to support it.
The NHS, police, fire service, etc. usually raise objections to everything because, obviously, any development makes their jobs more difficult. It serves little purpose besides fodder for the NIMBYs.
actionfromafar
Everyone knows battery installations radiate 5G vaccines. Subscribe to my Kennedy-adjacent newsletter.
manarth
A vaccine against 5G? That'd really blow some peoples' minds!
formerly_proven
It of course makes sense when you consider that statistically NIMBYs are mostly the property-owning class, which are mostly boomers.
cmsefton
The craziest thing about UK energy is that it uses marginal pricing, where the price of energy is dictated by the most expensive generator to meet demand i.e. gas. Doesn't matter if your energy is coming from wind or solar, you're still going to be charged according to the price of gas. Until this can change, consumers are always going to suffer and think green energy isn't cheaper.
3D30497420
This website doesn't provide much context if you're not familiar with the situation.
I found this article helpful: https://www.the-independent.com/climate-change/octopus-energ...
ErikCorry
The problem is they are treating it as a free market issue with hourly auctions, but the 'free market' system ignores transmission. So the windmills can sell cheap electricity in the auctions that can't be delivered to anybody who needs it. Then after the auction you have to pay the windmill operators to switch off the excess production.
The OP linked site lists one of the solutions as "Make energy cheaper where supply is strong." This sounds obvious, but UK (and German) politicians don't want to do it, so we continue to get this dysfunctional system.
misiek08
Thanks. This make it even more crazy. Paying for not produced energy (probably some great deals secured there - with guarantees from both sides no matter the reality) and also same owners of both types of production sites. Funny how such deals get done, probably only to meet the magic "2030" rules, without taking into account situations like the one happening right now.
eigart
Thanks!
It would be interesting to see how this looks on a map.
Electricity exports (/prices) is a MASSIVE controversy in Norwegian politics, so it would be pretty funny if Norwegian power is replacing the curtailed wind power.
ragebol
I've only heard about this, but do I understand correctly that: - Norwegian hydro-electricity is normally quite cheap - 'They' built a cable from Norway to the rest of Europe to couple the markets - Since the markets are coupled, mainland Europe buys the hydro-electricity from Norway, driving up prices in Norway. - People are pissed, understandably I guess.
Correct?
eigart
That is correct. The historical price for consumers is by my guesstimate $0.03-0.05 USD, now it’s at least double. Grid fees come on top of that.
The anger is completely out of proportion, IMO, as the net effect is probably very positive. 1. Hydro is typically state owned and taxed at a very high rate 2. 50% of the price difference between markets is pocketed by the public grid operator (reducing grid fees) 3. We also import power when needed and typically at a net profit.
Telaneo
Correct. One additional problem beyond the price hike was also the fact that the price came to be wildly unstable. One day it was bascially free and the next day it was approaching 1 euro per kwh, where as before, the price usually came to about 1 NOK (10-12 eurocent) per kwh after taxes and such, and hadn't moved significantly from that in over 10 years.
See Fig 2 here[1] for just how spiky the market became after the price hike.
Also bear in mind that Norway does most of its residential heating with resitive heating, precisely because electricity has historically been so cheap. Heat pumps are getting more popular, and burning firewood got very popular during the price hike, but basically no-one heats with gas, as there's no infrastructure to support it.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266695522...
punnerud
Norway already have this kind of solution where a companies on the same land can register to the grid companies, and the production and consumtion within the same messurement intervals is not counted as selling to the grid. This way you can use the public grid for your own "internal" transfer.
misiek08
It looks like UK, like many other countries, already have grid that can't cope with casual usage and transferring power from farms to users. Adding "renting" of grid sound like it could make it even worse (if possible).
ErikCorry
The Norwegian grid is divided up into different regional grids and they each have different electricity prices. Those who build interconnects between the areas can get some of the price difference. It's very different from the UK market, which pretends to have a single area, runs auctions to determine the price and then has to make post-auction adjustments (in the billions) to fix the fact that electricity can't be transmitted across the grid.
See https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes
vollbrecht
The pressing question is, how much £ per £ lost need to be invested in grid infrastructure to reduce this number?
c0n5pir4cy
A lot and is fixing the grid is full of other complexities - but that's not actually the best fix here. The UK could change it's wholesale energy pricing model to something that encourages usage to move closer to generation (zonal or nodal pricing).
Currently customers using cheap wind power are essentially punished if there is gas backed generation elsewhere in the UK and the energy companies reap the profit.
tomaytotomato
A family member lives on the Outer Hebrides of Scotland.
There is a community trust on one of the islands which has built wind turbines.
However it took about 2 years before they were certified and connected up to the grid, and rather disappointingly it hasn't made local prices cheaper.
The electricity is sold to the grid and that money goes to the community trust.
Which seems bureaucratic?
I wish we could have decentralized electrical grid generation.
(not an Electrical engineer)
jacquesm
But we do have decentralized grid generation. What we do not have is fixed price transit rights and the ability for smaller generators to make direct deals with local customers.
If I put up a lot of solar panels I'm not even allowed to give my electricity to my neighbors, they have to buy it from the grid which I am allowed to sell it to at a stupendous discount. The so called free energy market has mostly failed, it isn't fair to consumers and commercial grid operators have taken over resources paid for by those very same consumers and are milking them for every penny while slow-walking the required investments so they get more subsidies.
ghusto
Out of interest, what would happen if you were to sell/give it to your neighbours anyway? Is it a slap on the wrist, or are we talking of multi-thousand pound fines?
I ask because whilst I believe there are no doubt (probably very strict) regulations around the selling of electricity, I wonder how enforceable they are on the average Joe. If I were to run a cable to my neighbour and just deny I was sharing my electrical store, how far would they go, and who would _they_ even be?
p_l
Well, unless you invest non-trivial extra work, you're going to start showing up on grid monitoring and finally someone will drill down in problem looking for broken substation and find you doing exactly the things that caused the problems and the reason for it being illegal to "just hook up".
It's just that often in many places law lagged in ways of dealing with islanded operation, and semi-islanded cases (where you invest in serious gear to separate your local micro grid from external grid preventing the issues that cause technicians to show up and report you)
jacquesm
Hypothetically for obvious reasons, I would put a socket on the outer wall of my garage with a sign saying 'do not use'. This would enable an enterprising person to siphon off up to 3600 Watts continuously while the breaker in my garage would be in the 'on' position. I could use my home automation setup to determine whether there is a surplus generated and only enable that socket through remote control as well.
manarth
10% of turnover (Electricity Act 1989).
Realistically, no-one's going to care about running a cable to your neighbour. If you start running cables to multiple neighbours, or connecting the cable directly into the mains supply of the other properties, you may attract attention.
Mostly for the potential of microgrids to upset the delicate balance of power-delivery and frequency-stability of the wider grid. There are a few initiatives around peer-to-peer power sharing and microgrids, but nothing particularly mainstream in the UK yet.
PeterStuer
Direct neighbour as in your properties touching might be a different matter, but to get right of way to cross public or another entities property as a random person or company, that will most certainly be problematic.
mytailorisrich
It is illegal to sell electricity directly to someone else. To sell electricity you need to be licensed as an energy supplier.
So currently it is illegal to, for instance, sell your excess wind or solar electricity to your neighbour. You have to sell it to the grid and it goes into the "common pool".
keyringlight
With battery storage is it feasible to isolate/disconnect, move and then reconnect at another location, or once certified and turned on is it considered part of a system that can't be divided. It would be adding a significant cost to enable 'movement' of energy if you didn't need storage before and would need to be charged ahead of time, but it seems similar to fuel where I could give gas to a neighbor. I wouldn't expect that kind of scenario to work for the vast majority of people, but on a remote island it could be the kind of solution that gets engineered to keep homes working when an official solution takes a long time to arrive.
ragebol
There are plug-in batteries these days. Charge it in one home, then chuck an extension cord over the fence to discharge to another home (ignoring safety concerns...)
rapsey
Wind turbines are not base load, so they do not lower electricity prices.
moooo99
That is just false. Of course wind turbines can and do lower prices, regardless of wether or not they‘re base load not
apelapan
They lower the prices a lot when they are producing at full tilt. This means that prices, at least to some degree, go up when wind turbines are not producing at full capacity, since the other power sources need to amortize their fixed costs across fewer kilowatt hours sold.
Maken
They lower electricity prices by a lot in Spain.
scrlk
Multiple transmission network upgrades are planned to reduce excessive curtailment: https://www.nationalgrid.com/the-great-grid-upgrade/where-it...
arethuza
Those 4 "Eastern Green Link" projects look interesting - pretty sensible given how close most places in the UK are to the sea to go for subsea cables. Fewer problems with planning permission as well...
seanalltogether
Ireland has the same problem, they're waiting on getting another interconnect to france online before building out more windmills. There's enough offshore wind to power the whole island, but it's not predicable enough to power the grid 24/7
VagabundoP
So much energy being left on the table. Grid scale batteries will really help here.
hunglee2
Massive scale out of EV's should help with this - each car becomes a storage unit absorbing excess energy production. You really need a continental if not global scale grid system to constantly distribute the energy inputs. Only a few geographical units are big enough to make this happen, China being really the only one who can do it, and is doing it.
Something like 400,000 people are opposing the Norwich-Tilbury power lines to bring wind energy to where it's used. Including a Green Party MP: https://www.dissmercury.co.uk/news/24840985.green-mp-adrian-....
And you'd better believe wherever they buried the lines they'd have objections and expensive consultations about the disruption and the HoUsE VaLuEs caused by trenching, drilling and service structures. Like this objection from a village near (but not actually on) the underground stretch near Manningtree: https://holtonstmary-pc.gov.uk/assets/Documents-Parish-Counc...