{"id":28200,"date":"2017-11-22T07:15:55","date_gmt":"2017-11-22T12:15:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=28200"},"modified":"2017-11-22T07:15:55","modified_gmt":"2017-11-22T12:15:55","slug":"helm-and-the-death-of-uk-wind-and-solar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=28200","title":{"rendered":"Helm and the death of UK wind and solar"},"content":{"rendered":"

Helm and the death of UK wind and solar<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n

\"\"In his recent post on the Helm Review<\/a> Euan Mearns predicted that Helm\u2019s recommendation that \u201cintermittent producers need to bear the cost of converting intermittent to firm capacity\u201d will, if adopted, \u201csound the death knell for new wind and solar projects in the UK\u201d. This post presents ball-park estimates of the economic impacts of Helm\u2019s recommendation for two cases \u2013 wind-plus-storage and wind-plus-CCGT. The wind-plus-storage case is uneconomic at any reasonable carbon price and the wind-plus CCGT case is at best marginally competitive with alternative generation sources. These results suggest that Euan\u2019s prediction is probably correct for wind and probably for solar too, although I did not review any solar cases.<\/p>\n

First a brief disclaimer on Helm\u2019s \u201cfirm capacity\u201d recommendation. It can be interpreted to mean that intermittent producers would have to convert their output into 100% dispatchable form before it can be sent to the grid, and for the purposes of analytical simplicity I have assumed here that this interpretation is the correct one. However, Helm\u2019s recommendation refers not to \u201cfirm capacity\u201d but to \u201cequivalent firm capacity\u201d, which according to Helm:<\/p>\n

\u2026. focuses on the de-rated capacity value to the system of the different forms of generation. As the cost of addressing intermittency falls with DSR and storage, so the de-rating factors lessen.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In three pages of explanation (beginning on page 192 of his review) Helm fails to make it clear how these de-rated capacity factors are to be calculated, and because I don\u2019t know how to calculate them either I have ignored the potential impacts of a de-rating approach.<\/p>\n

Estimating wind generation<\/strong><\/p>\n

Rather than attempt a market-wide study I structured this review around a hypothetical 1GW offshore wind farm in the North Sea, the annual generation from which I assumed would be proportional to the generation achieved by Danish offshore wind farms in 2016 (hourly data from P-F Bach<\/a>). I then performed the following operations:<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Helm and the death of UK wind and solar In his recent post on the Helm Review Euan Mearns predicted that Helm\u2019s recommendation that \u201cintermittent producers need to bear the cost of converting intermittent to firm capacity\u201d will, if adopted, \u201csound the death knell for new wind and solar projects in the UK\u201d. This post […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[11260,11990,1564,820,2080,884],"class_list":["post-28200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-energy-matters","tag-roger-andrews","tag-solar-energy","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-wind-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28200"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28201,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28200\/revisions\/28201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}