“Something-for-nothing economics is not conservative, it’s socialism.” Rishi Sunak. “If we’re not for sound money, what is the point of the Conservative party?” Norway’s $1.3 trillion SWF is an exemplary example of ‘sound’ economics. The UK’s National Debt is over £2.3 trillion of unsound borrowing, due to our 'low-tax' (irresponsibly) small state mentality. Low tax on O&G and foreign multinationals + tax relief on investments and match funded grants for R&D that is perceived to be ‘commercial’ - these are the unsound Tory doctrines that have destroyed the UK's economic prosperity.

"For every £100 Norway collects in tax on barrels of North Sea oil, the UK collects £8.” Is that a fact?!

“What is the point of the Conservative party?” Its only purpose is to privatise profits and socialise all the costs. When the potential costs of Research & Innovation give them hysterics, they cut public R&I investment and load the bills for new infrastructure onto the consumer through an immoral twist of innovative financial engineering (CfD). Economic ‘growth’ in Tory doctrine is financial chicanery (PFI - PPI) and the transfer of wealth from a less well off majority to a very fortunate few.

wwwdottheguardiandotcom/science/2021/mar/31/uk-scientists-funding-cuts-grants-foreign-aid

“It’s no good talking the talk if you don’t walk the walk as well, and we ask the government to walk that walk” said Sir Paul Nurse. “I am sure the government will see sense over this. If they can’t see sense, they have no right to govern.”

No further comment required, except. . .

Edit: I forgot the key part. The infamous ’10-Point Plan’ is notable for the absence of the word ‘storage’. No definitions exist on which legislation could be drafted - to distinguish between electricity (negative reserve) and energy (positive reserve) storage - and Parliament is never going to pass a Bill to correct the multiple errors of European electricity ‘market’ liberalisation:-
wwwdotcarbonbriefdotorg/in-depth-qa-how-does-the-uks-energy-white-paper-aim-to-tackle-climate-change/
See how long it takes you to find this meaningless entry in the White Paper.

Energy storage: The paper commits to legislating to define electricity storage in law, “removing another barrier to flexibility”.

How can one persuade the next Chancellor, Prime Minister and their fanatical entourage that the power industry crisis is a direct consequence of an ill-fated (neoliberal) market theory?! The (Cameron) crap hits the (HAWT) fans earlier than feared, due to their brainless love affair with gas-fired (peaker plant) generation. The consumer cannot afford to pay the price - of the Capacity Market, or the Balancing Market, or the flexibility ‘market’, or any other charges imposed by an 'unregulated' private monopoly:-
wwwdotcurrent-newsdotcodotuk/news/urgency-of-proposed-bsuos-charges-deferral-approved-by-ofgem

Scroll down to the next article and weep!!

“Energy crisis 'beyond what this industry can deal with' as suppliers push for greater government intervention.”

But under their ‘design’ for a monopoly infrastructure ‘intervention’ National Grid calls for £54bn to be squandered on making the crisis infinitely worse. . .
wwwdotnationalgridesodotcom/future-energy/the-pathway-2030-holistic-network-design

Under an innovative, combined (vertically integrated) Marine Energies industry infrastructure, GWh of RE generation from Before-Generator Energy Storage guarantees that the “supplier and generator BSUoS charges” will eventually fall to zer0.

“Ofgem granted an electricity interconnector licence to Scandinavian consortium NorthConnect. The developers plan to build a £1.3bn power cable between Boddam in Aberdeenshire and Eidfjord in Norway. The project aims to link hydro power from Norway with wind energy from Scotland. It is scheduled to start operating from 2022. NorthConnect have said that the cable will have a capacity of 1.4GW - about 25% of Scottish peak demand.”
wwwdotbbcdotcodotuk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-36597451

In October, the 1,400 MW interconnector between Britain and Norway, known as the North Sea Link, began commercial operations. The €1.6 billion project is a joint venture between National Grid and Norwegian system operator Statnett. Unlike the other markets with which Britain is linked, Norway and GB have low weather correlation, and Norway’s extensive hydro network is seen as contributing to Britain’s security of supply. Indeed, interconnector imports are now seen as a core component of British capacity margins, as outlined in NG ESO’s winter outlook. However, at the very end of December, the Norwegian government decided to cancel the proposed 1,400 MW North Connect interconnector between the UK and Norway. The project had become mired in controversy after suggestions that the additional interconnection could raise Norwegian power prices by NOK 0.01-0.03 /kWh.

https://watt-logicdotcom/2022/02/01/can-norway-be-the-battery-of-europe/
NG ESO couldn't care less that their HND will in reality add to UK power prices too ... discuss!

You can't get cheaper or more reliable than a converter platform (never mind 4 of 'em) that's not there.
https://renewsdotbiz/79144/hitachi-wins-hornsea-3-transmission-job-from-orsted/

Stop generating HVAC in offshore HAWTs, thus ending the transmission of HVDC to shore. You know it makes sense, because it prevents the so-called 'investment' of £54bn in CapEx on the HND.

My comment here nine days ago fell foul of the 'spam' filter, so I repost the first part:-

“With strike prices so far below the levels seen in the open market and with high gas prices now expected to persist for years, the projects secured in this week’s auction are due to pay back considerable sums to consumers.”

There is a chasm between the strike price and the retail price at your meter. The real price of RE must include National Grid’s profit margins from its 'investments' in HVDC (Western Link etc.), its BSUoS charges, the Capacity Market fiasco, the eye-watering constraint payments and the 30 years of network maladministration since Parliament put the abominable Electricity Act 1989 on the statute books.

“European governments (especially UK) deserve credit for sticking with wind tech long enough to push it to scale.”

On the contrary, the EU, the UK and the global wind industry deserve censure for installing the wrong (HAWT) design offshore 30 years ago (Denmark/Ørsted). Without integral energy storage, none of it was fit-for-purpose and it never will be.

Ørsted landed the contract for the world’s biggest offshore wind project, at Hornsea Three, 100 miles (160km) off the east Yorkshire coast. It is hoped the project will produce enough renewable electricity to power 3.2m UK homes.

No wind farms should ever have been built further than 10 miles offshore and HVDC cables are an extravagant waste of money, energy and naturally limited precious resources. It is now costing a fortune to even begin to address these fundamental errors in RE system design.

https://energypostdoteu/denmark-approves-artificial-island-to-site-10gw-offshore-wind-hub/
Denmark plans to spend €29bn to ‘integrate’ 3GW of wind power with electricity storage - the State taking a majority share. Their crazy Energy Island scheme fails to harvest any tidal or wave energy! It’s hard to imagine a more absurd concept than using electric pumps to store potential energy with water! The Dutch have the acronym IOPAC for their barmy scheme!
wwwdotdnvgldotcom/services/large-scale-electricity-storage-7272

All Marine RE must be harvested and ‘mechanically’ stored in order to eliminate intermittency and so deliver a flexible supply to the grid, perfectly matched to the day’s demand profile. We'll never attain low-cost, 100% green electricity while wind/wave and tidal power are separate industries, all generating HVAC at source. That's an insane power network structure. Whole-system vertical integration from RE harvest to (non-smart) meter is the prerequisite - period.

It appears that nobody understands - least of all the wind industry - that the “strike price” is only paid when a turbine is actually working within its 'rated wind speed'?! Outside of that range it earns nothing. An 8MW turbine is no better in that respect than a 2MW one and 16MW turbines no better than 8MW.
https://renewsdotbiz/78626/industry-must-eschew-push-for-bigger-turbines/

Floating HAWTs are just a more expensive way of repeating the same mistakes. . .

Then again, if any RE has to be curtailed, its electricity generating potential goes to waste and the only revenue the generator gets is from constraint payments. Ergo, scrap constraint payments, which are heading towards £1bn/year - then the industry has to create innovative design or go bust.

The last thing we need is another 'new' government repeating the maladministration of the past four decades, which caused the UK's economic decline, relative to a sensible democracy like Norway.

The 'writing on the wall' is hidden away in the dusty corridors of power, where government funding for the Advanced Research and Invention Agency is widely considered to be a 'bad' investment!!!!!!

Given inflation the price for a MWH of off-shore is likely to be north of £50/MWh by the time it is built. The low cost of a MWH of RES elec is, at the moment masked by the current marginal pricing system. This needs to be reformed if the full benefits of RES are to be enjoyed by UK serfs. Sadly, reform does not seem to be on offer from the current UK-non-gov'. Should it ever occur, the best way would be to split the market into fossil dispatchable, nuke dispatchable and RES. The REs would be, to all intents and purposes fixed price (as implied by CfDs) and a blanded wholesale price arrived at based on volumes from the three "markets".

I have to disagree Mike, especially now that gas has priced itself out of the 'market' on which the theories of the EMRs and the 'Dash for Gas' were based. The dispatchability of CCGT and OCGT are a burden on the consumer, due to the fiasco of the Capacity Market. The non-market solution was for the government to have taken over gas-fired generation - the private sector never saw a good profit in it. . .

Strictly speaking, nuclear is not dispatchable - it is too inflexible. Hinkley Pointless C, funded by the discredited CfD boondoggle, will keep our bills high for decades to come.

The IMechE spelt out the home truth, advising the government in its 2014 report ... "ENERGY STORAGE: THE MISSING LINK IN THE UK’S ENERGY COMMITMENTS" Recommendation 2.

Government must recognise that energy storage cannot be incentivised by conventional market mechanisms.

The RAEng set out the most intelligent solution to the UK's transition to RE in 2009. i.e. The Aberthaw-Minehead Tidal Barrage = 25TWh/year, the same as Hinkley, but with energy storage tidal, wave and wind power can all become flexible supply, which would supersede the ludicrous DSR provision of electricity storage such as batteries.

The RAEng's recommendation was excluded from the Severn Consultation by the DECC:-

4.3. “The government believes that the private sector is best placed to design, build and operate a Severn tidal scheme. Government’s role would be to set the conditions in which a scheme could come forward. Do you agree?”

No smart politician, economist or engineer could agree with such a crass proposition. An intelligent infrastructure plan would design barrages for their secondary role in flood prevention, given the rise in sea level. The Severn Barrage was located in the wrong place to serve that vital function.

I am uncertain with what you are disagreeing. The need for
market reform?

At the moment the market is based on marginal pricing. This does not price
generation at cost, but rather prices all generation at the last MW to clear/balance
the system. The symmetric CfD which the UK operates for RES is unaffected by
this in terms of price setting, but neither does the current market model allow
low-cost RES to impact on wholesale prices formation either in a consistent
fashion or in the way it should.

Splitting the market is probably the half-way-house with perhaps basket pricing
as the end point. The trajectory of the Uk and other countries (e.g. Germany)
is to have very large quantities of RES connected to the system. This will on a
regular basis produce large surpluses of electricity (in the case of Germany
circa 1TWh per day regularly). Electrolysers are the most scalable solution to
absorb this excess, absent some miracle with batteries.

I am neutral wrt nuclear, Pointless is a waste of money but will probably be
built. You might find it difficult for barrages to compete with off-shore wind –
but by all means try.

They can attempt to reform the market 'til the cows come home - it'll never work, at least not at a price anyone can afford. The only viable pathway to 100% RE is through many TWh/year of energy storage, but it has to be located 'Before-Generator'. You can read all about it in my Disqus archive. . .

HAWTs have to be superseded by floating 5-VAWT WECs which have no HVAC generators. All Marine Energies will have to pump the energy they capture into air/water accumulators, so that hydroelectric generators operate in response to demand. That is to say - the wind, wave and tidal power harvested at night, when nuclear can't be turned off, becomes a flexible RE supply that will meet peak demand and provide all the grid balancing services that National Grid charges (BSUoS) an arm and a leg for, under the broken pseudo market set up.

1GW of conventional offshore wind costs £3bn. The 'market-led' government ideology says we need another 40GW, on top of the 10GW we already have. Are they nuts?! Yes, evidently. BEIS launched the Offshore Transmission Network Review (OTNR) in July 2020 and gave National Grid the job of coming up with network reform. They reckon we need to spend £54bn on hundreds of miles of HVDC interconnectors etc. If combined Marine Energies are built with integral BGES, a total installed capacity of 20GW is better and cheaper than the HAWT convention, which would cost £60bn. The Offshore Transmission Network we already have would be scrapped, as the HAWTs reach their end-of life.

Together with the £54bn that won't be spent, that's a saving of £114bn!!!

Great to see this significant addition to the UK generating capacity.

The annual production (5.22GW) from the 11GW name plate representing some 17% of UK demand (past 12 months):
- reduces cost of electricity by 12% (compared to current gas prices)
- reduces average carbon cost of electricity from 180 to just a bit over 100 g/KWh (the figure will depend on the growth in the electricity market)
All in all, significant achievements

I hope all of the easily predictable wrinkles will be addressed in advance:
- the transmission infrastructure will be reinforced in advance of this development
- grid stability will be maintained
- closed loop hydro is in the plan to offset curtailment and minimise use of FF generation

National Grid ESO's report is more correctly named 'Holistic' Network 'Disintegration' since it proposes spending £54bn where £1bn could do a better job. The "Impact of Intermittency" study in 2009 identified the system deficiencies, but NG was given carte blanche by the Electricity Act 1989 and subsequent EMR to carry on regardless, in dereliction of its duties to the British people. Vertical integration, from RE harvest to meter, is the only rational structure for any future power network 'whole-system' design - period.

Once the pre-approved projects are built, Carbon Brief estimates they will generate 42TWh of electricity per year, enough to meet around 13% of current UK demand.

How can it meet any demand when it’s not generated at the right (peak) time?!

“no warranty can be or is made as to the accuracy and completeness of the information contained within”

It can be guaranteed that National Grid ESO’s 162-page report is the mother of all GIGO. That much is crystal clear, from the third ‘Key Message’ of the ‘Executive Summary’:-

“The HND requires significant investment in our existing onshore system to transport electricity to where it will be used.”

No ‘investment’ whatever is required for the transmission of electricity to where it will be used. That is a mind-boggling false premise. The only requirement for running a 100% RE network efficiently is to "transport electricity" WHEN there's the demand for it to be used!!! i.e. Whole-system balance by means of the flexible generation of electricity from an amalgamated Marine Energies industry.

The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy were given the vital new engineering designs required for this on 28 September 2020, in response to their 'Call for Evidence' on Marine Energies. NB: That was just two months after they launched their 'Offshore Transmission Network Review' (OTNR) in July 2020.

National Grid's incompetent HND report took two years to decide that they'd charge £54bn to make the wrong changes to the transmission network. The only viable 'whole-system' solution is Before-Generator Energy Storage, because it eliminates intermittency. National Grid knew that in 2009.