Mvandenbergh

Yes, this is a concern with some older inverter designs. They use phase-locked loops which are meant to lock to the grid frequency but if you and your neighbours on the feeder are generating and consuming a roughly equal amount of energy and the feeder loses its connection to the wider grid, the loops can lock to each other and form a stable island. How long this would last in practice is not really known, it would probably be rare for it to happen at all and even rarer to stay stable for more than a few minutes but it has been demonstrated so it could have become an issue. Newer inverter have specific anti-islanding protection to detect situations like this and disconnect if it happens.

(the specific case of very little consumption but panels and inverters going full tilt doesn't work as this would lead to the frequency rapidly increasing, exceeding inverter set points and the local grid collapsing with all the inverter tripping off. The danger scenario is closely matched load and generation, like a real grid)

My reason for assuming that they would have made the same choices or in any case a broadly equivalent one is the fact that the BNetzA, the BMWE, and political stakeholders knew from the beginning of the renewable buildout that the combination of current grid connection arrangements, network tariffs, energy markets, and subsidies would lead to this situation and they went ahead anyway. [The BNetzA regulates the networks and the BMWE is the relevant ministry in the German context]

They did so for political and ideological reasons that I think are pretty clear to anyone who follows European politics.

Had those same political stakeholders had more direct executive control of a single national electricity system, they would have done the same thing and for the same reasons.

Yes, of course a vertically integrated system optimising for efficiency would never have made these choices but the same political decision makers who shut down Germany's nuclear fleet would never have permitted such an integrated system to operate in such an efficient way if it meant not building wind assets.

We can see the impact of a different political direction in the French electricity system, which despite being structurally similar to the decision making of the German system is in practice much more centrally directed and which despite absurd attempts to sabotage it from within France and within the EC continues to operate in a much more optimal way.

It doesn't do this through formal centralisation and integration but by the careful design of grid codes and subsidy regimes to avoid these absurdities.

I know how re-dispatch works.

The issue is that the physical reality of the network and the location of generators and loads is fixed at time of [re-]dispatch. Regardless of how you reconfigure the dispatch mechanism, there is energy that cannot be moved through the network from the wind in the North to the load centres in the South. The only way to avoid that physical reality is to either massively increase the N-S transmission capacity or to put generation capacity closer to load.

Once these generators have been placed where they are and pending extremely challenging network expansion being realised, it will always be the case that some party or set of parties bears the cost of the constraint.

If you moved the ownership and control of the transmission network and all generators into a single operator that was responsible for optimising its operation in near-real-time and that bore all the costs within a single accounting perimeter, it would do more or less what the the existing market based mechanism does: turn off the wind generators and instruct the thermal plants in the South to run instead.

Yes, it's true that in that case there would not be a "market price" paid to wind turbines that actually cannot run, nor would there be a higher re-dispatch price paid to the thermal generator. However the total system cost would still be the same. Even though the wind turbines would "lose" money because they can't run and the thermal plant wouldn't receive its market price for relieving the congestion.

Of course you could argue that this efficient single operator simply wouldn't have built the wind assets in the first place in a location where they often couldn't run but that assumes that the same policy makers who created the current outcome wouldn't have engineered the exact same outcome through the direct control they presumably would have had of the integrated operator. I will note that many American utilities actually are vertically integrated like this (banned in the EU under the Third Energy Package) and they build in the exact same pattern and bear the constraint costs internally.

Not all markets, and not even all European markets, assume a single trading zone (i.e. a copper plate network). Re-dispatch costs are high because policy choices have created a physical reality that drives high constraints.

That could have been prevented by simply not permitting connections in certain parts of the network. Yes, theoretically it could also have been prevented by forcing generators to directly bear re-dispatch costs which would have led developers to build a different set of generating assets. This would have been a different set of market mechanisms.

However, if generation decisions had been made centrally, they would have been made by the same system operators, regulators, and governments that mandated the construction of the current system and they would have therefore built the same system more or less. Do you really think that if e.g. Germany or the GB network had been centrally planned by their respective government mandated regulators and system operators, they wouldn't have put all those windfarms exactly where the market-led model we actually have has put them?

The Idirans were right all along.

It's fine but a proposal to do something without the political will to make any of the difficult compromises required to achieve them is meaningless.

I mean, ok, fine guys but this is just more empty gestures from a club of empty heads in the GroenLinks/PvdA clown-car.

I don't recall that they were against (in fact they were in favour) of the removal of the 30% tax rules intended to attract expats in, among other things, tech businesses. I don't recall that they've ever done or said anything to make the country a more attractive place to start or grow a business of any kind, let alone the kind of venture capital funded technology startups that would allow us to move a substantial fraction of our tech consumption to homegrown alternatives.

Maybe they're at least in favour of permitting for data centres so that we can at least host our own services... oh wait, they don't want those either.

Which of those references are obscure?

>And while they are shutting down coal, they still have a huge former coal plant that is now burning biomass in London. That's a single plant that powers most of London.

Do you mean Drax? That's nowhere near London.

>And those subsidies exist because of fossil fuel industry lobbying and very willing politicians

Why would the fossil fuel industry lobby in favour of wood-chip biomass?

Which damage?

The electricity system has done most of its decarbonising under either the coalition or Conservative governments, they used quite a lot of the machinery (the CfDs, capacity market, etc) setup at the end of the last Labour government but it has been the subsequent governments that have chose the annual budgets for the auctions as well as setting up the carbon budget system.

There have been only two things that I would regard as material mistakes in this time:

First, not adjusting the max strike price for offshore wind in AR5.

Second, changing the planning rules to make it very hard to build onshore wind.

Everything else, including things like the offshore bootstraps / HND which are now receiving FID (like EGL2 which was just approved), the upcoming decision on zonal pricing, and most of all the massive buildout of solar and offshore wind generation and battery storage has happened under previous governments.

It's arguably the only area of policy which has gone quite well over the last decade, so I'm intrigued which damage you have in mind.

The timelines for encyclopaedia article contributions, editing and publishing are such that I highly doubt that an encyclopaedia bought in 2024 has much if any LLM generated content.

I wouldn't want to make that bet for an encyclopaedia published in 2027 though.

Part of the problem is that heat pumps aren't really well suited to a use case where you frequently have to bring a house up to temp in the way you're describing. If you have a big overnight set-back and then the heating comes on in the morning, that will require much more heat output than constantly putting out enough heat to maintain temperature.

In a well insulated property, the greater efficiency from operating at low output temperatures outweighs the additional heat loss from no / a low overnight set-back. In a poorly insulated property, the optimum set-back is higher and the efficiency at that optimum point is also much lower because the heat pump has to operate at higher temperature in order to ramp up the temperature.

I don't know if they are available in North America, but in the UK we have hybrid systems available that use heat pumps for 80% of the annual heat load and gas for peaking / ramping. OpenTherm gas boilers can be retrofitted to be controlled in this way so you only add the heat pump. An air source heat pump driving a hydronic / radiator system in this climate can serve 80% of the annual load with a unit sized at 55% of peak heat load. Different climates will have slightly different numbers but it shows the power of a hybrid system as you save a lot on HP capex and also maintain redundancy.

The advantage of this system is that the failure-mode of an incorrectly sized system is an efficiency penalty rather than not being warm enough, the same as an incorrectly commissioned or sized gas system. (Most gas systems are not optimally sized or configured and are delivering 5% to 10% less efficiency than they could).

I don't know if these systems are available in ducted air configuration for the US market though.

London as well, or at least broke even. (Although of course this is complicated to assess and contested).

Same reason, all infrastructure was either already there or usable after (the Olympic stadium was sold to a football team).

Generally the larger a city is, the better able it is to host an event like this for obvious reasons.

I think this is a dumb idea, but come on, all prosecutions are retroactive.