It was an interesting day for Grid today – little wind or solar and some big units tripped. More than £1000 a MWh for some stations.

We got in the Daily Mail when a similar situation made us a lot of money in a very few hours last year. Yesterday was also a profitable one. Swings and roundabouts though, we’re likely to have a few weeks in the summer when none of our units generate anything.

I’m sure the politicians will be ringing their hands, but the market they designed work very well for consumers for a long time, and the UK is still cheap compared to some European countries, just not what it was.

A while back I was told my employer (a long with other large national bodies/companies) would be paid to fire up their dormant emergency diesel generators during exceptional high demand.

Is this still a thing? Presumably its the last resort backup as they’d be expensive to run, and I’ve only once heard the generator running in my local building once without there being an actual power cut…

Lurks

A while back I was told my employer (a long with other large national bodies/companies) would be paid to fire up their dormant emergency diesel generators during exceptional high demand.

Is this still a thing? Presumably its the last resort backup as they’d be expensive to run, and I’ve only once heard the generator running in my local building once without there being an actual power cut…Emergency back-up generators don’t generally have the mechanism required to synchronise them with the grid, so it’s unlikely. If you heard it running when not an actual emergency, it was probably just a test run.

If they are a large consumer of energy they are more likely to be getting a ‘demand side’ contract, which pays them to reduce consumption when the grid is getting dangerously short.

Ah, that’ll be what it is tthew. We are one of the biggest consumers of electricity so makes perfect sense.

I don’t think it was a test run as the power guys are normally onsite when that happens. (only once in about seven years that I’ve heard it running by itself, and it was very early in the morning)

Emergency back-up generators don’t generally have the mechanism required to synchronise them with the grid, so it’s unlikely. If you heard it running when not an actual emergency, it was probably just a test run.

The one at a water treatment plant I did some interning at about 20 years ago certainly did. It wasn’t used often for this purpose, but it had the capability.

I was told it was a pretty good deal, presumably there was a standby payment as just being able to do it covered a significant amount (all?) of the annual maintenance costs.

Emergency back-up generators don’t generally have the mechanism required to synchronise them with the grid, so it’s unlikely. If you heard it running when not an actual emergency, it was probably just a test run.

Some do, some don’t. Most big ones do and I always recommended to customers that if they had a generator then having that capability was a good thing.
Also distinguish between synchronisation capability for short term parallel and changeover and parallel running capability. The former is very common the latter reasonable common. Either can be used to reduce the load on the grid.

Record day for solar in the UK on Friday. More than 8GW meeting about a quarter of the demand.

tthew – SMR’s aren’t approved for use yet, the plan is seemingly to concentrate on them once the current Gen III reactors have all completed their GDA’s (Generic Design Assessments). Obviously the timetable is going to slip seeing as we now have a fourth design to get through (the Chinese HPR1000 only just got started in January and the Hitachi ABWR GDA is due for completion in December) but I imagine they will get started when the ABWR is done and they have a team free.

They do raise a lot of questions though, especially if they could be slotted into existing conventional plant.

Thanks Squirrelking, that’s interesting.

shifter – Member 
Record day for solar in the UK on Friday. More than 8GW meeting about a quarter of the demand.

At 1pm, just under a quarter but slightly more than Nuclear at that time. Gas still generating the most.

Can be many reasons though. Nuclear production down for some reason would increase other’s shares. Though of course it was particularly sunny.

Torness 1 was off for planned maintenance, that’s about 610MW less and Heysham 2 was at low load re-fuelling (so varying between 150 and 450MW presuming they do load cycling between channels). Amazingly both Dungeness units were running, at full load no less.

https://www.edfenergy.com/energy/power-station/daily-statuses

You made me Chuckle Deadkenny – of those many reasons the main ones are: there’s a lot of it and it was very sunny. Regardless of other MEL downs, 8 gig is impressive.
Sunny smiley 🙂

Nice.

Yesterday >50% generated by renewables.