Six Scottish wind farms paid to shut down because they were pushing too much power into the grid.

Six wind farms were given six-figure payments to switch off their turbines because the Scottish grid network could not absorb all the energy being produced, it has emerged.

Research by the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF) found energy companies were paid a total of £900,000 for stopping the turbines for several hours between April 5 and 6 this year.

The REF said some of the payments were as high as 20 times the value of the electricity which would have been generated if the turbines kept running.

The National Grid makes constraint payments to power stations that agree to stop generating in order to stabilise the network.

It happens when the grid system or a section of the system is unable to absorb all the electricity being generated, and some generators that are contracted to generate are asked to stand down.

http://breakingnews.heraldscotland.com/breaking-news/?mode=article&site=hs&id=N0215511304251519691A

Paid to shut down for awhile, interesting.

In 1991 the DOE did a study of our wind resources. They found that three states, South Dakota, Kansas, and Texas, had enough wind resource to power the entire US, including factoring in growth, through the year 2030. And this was using 1991 wind tech. Things have advance tremendously since then.

But this just goes to show you that we can indeed switch to wind and solar, and they can carry the load.

cost/difficulty of transmission/storage.

the entire nation. The argument saying we cant produce enough is fully paid for by the oil, gas and coal industries. It is simply false.

The "problem" is that there are a LOT of privately owned (probably used to be municipal/state-owned) for BIG profit companies who run the power delivery facilities. They don't want prices to go down for consumers and they surely don't want to lose control over availability or pricing of power..

and if they had access to unlimited sources of wind generated power, what on earth would they do with all that coal they buy, and what would the rail companies ship around on all those trains? :evilgrin:

and how would power execs get all those juice bonuses?

and who would be buying legislators if the mega-profits stopped flowing in from US..

largely logistical, in doing so.

Furthermore, not all wind turbines have to be located in the states I mentioned. That was simply an example of the vast untapped potential we have. Furthermore, in addition to the big wind turbine farms, we can fit out individual houses and other buildings with windbelts, which generate power in windspeeds as low as four mph.

The potential and ability is there, the only problems left at this point are social, political and corporate.

Solving storage will go very far in bringing renewables on board.

Hydrogen, Vehicle to Grid, Pumped Hydro, all these and others have promise.

:P

Where there's a will, there's a way

right there on site at the windfarm, then use the hydrogen that's saved to generate electricity to balance load at peak times.

AND pumped storage, which we use here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity

I've wondered if we could make use of the holes the coal companies have created with mountaintop removal (because we know they aren't going to either fill them in or be required to do so.) At least some good could come from that once the practice is shut down...

and we're still talking about promise? The electric trolleys from 100 years ago worked beautifully.

There are growing niches for storage technologies to flourish as renewable penetration grows, but that is hardly the same thing as storage being an obstacle to increasing renewable penetration.

What is a cleaner more benign way to generate electric besides solar.

rec

and that's how many farmers survived was by "handout" payments if thats what you call it.....

Followed by natural gas.

than wind ones.

Cuz that's a lot of payment to shut them down

because the grid can't handle the power?

"Government must rethink the scale and pace of wind power development before the costs of managing it become intolerable and the scale of the waste scandalous."

Could this be a clever way of attacking clean energy? There must have been a better solution than having to pay them 20 times the amount they would have produced.

more coal/gas/nuclear plants naow! :sarcasm:

The grid we fed in to could only handle so much juice on - although there was a rumor there as well that some of the shutdowns were done to protect the investments of some people - make too much over X period and you paid more in taxes, each windmill - thanks to tax breaks - was partially funded by investors.

Main issue though, is still storage - and you can shut down y% of windmills and relieve the load without having to shut the whole farm down.

We need more stimulus funding to help us catch up on green power.

Much rather have the green power problems than tap water catching fire from toxic chemicals used to force oil out of shale.

:rofl: