Great Britain threw away 5GW of available wind power during Storm Dave and replaced it using gas 🔥 That's one and a half Sizewell C-sized nuclear power stations, or four Dogger Bank A-sized wind farms. Or to put it another way, it's a shit load of power. Why throw it away? Because our straw isn't big enough… Constraints on the electricity transmission network between Scotland and England (as well as further north in Scotland) mean that we can't move enough energy across the border without overloading the system. Imagine a cup constantly filling with water, if your straw is too thin then you won't be able to drink enough water before the cup overflows. In our case the straw is the electricity grid at the border, and the water is the energy generated by the wind farms in Scotland. Any overflowing water would be bad news for the grid so we do everything we can to avoid it. The result is that we pay generators in Scotland to reduce their output so the cup doesn't overflow. Wind farms are usually picked for this because they are the cheapest to switch off and can provide the volumes of energy needed to resolve the constraints. However, the electricity is still needed in the south (it's still thirsty) so what happens next is that we replace that lost wind energy at the last minute with electricity generated via (usually) gas. This is not only a waste of low-carbon energy, it's also expensive. You can see this play out on my map and in the attached visual: 🚦 Traffic-coloured lines show boundary constraints 🟡 Yellow rings show wind farms that were turned off 🔴 Red rings show gas plants that were turned on I'll post a link to the map in the thread.
