The Times today reports that the cost to consumers of paying wind farms and other power plants to switch off because there is not enough capacity on the National Grid is set to increase by £1 billion to £3.2 billion over the coming year, according to the National Energy System Operator (NESO).

And the National Grid is fragile…

The story follows an analysis in Saturday’s paper of the growing fragility of the Grid, illustrated by the ‘unusual way’ the electricity system behaved in the heatwave on 23 June:

‘The frequency on the grid, a crucial marker of stability, fell repeatedly below its normal operational range, spending 48 minutes outside it. It was the tipping point for engineers at the National Energy System Operator (Neso), who said that for years they had warned the body responsible for keeping Britain’s lights on that renewable energy was making the system increasingly difficult to operate. It led them to share a confidential 82-page report with The Times that had been produced by the energy consultancy Cornwall Insight in April. The assessment warned that the green transformation of the electricity system was making it harder to calculate the amount of electricity it must procure and instruct to keep supply and demand matched in real time.’

NESO’s job is becoming more challenging as Britain pursues net zero — transitioning from a simple old-fashioned system centred around small numbers of large fossil fuel and nuclear power stations, to a modern, greener but ever more complex system.

It includes large volumes of weather-dependent solar and wind generation, including thousands of small-scale renewables and batteries, as well as a growing number of giant subsea cables to the Continent that can switch between importing or exporting power at short notice. Unlike traditional power stations, many new small generators and bat­teries do not engage directly with NESO, meaning their output has to be inferred rather than directly observed. These changes all mean NESO has ‘reduced visibility of the capacity which is supplying and taking power from the GB network’, Cornwall said. 

Cornwall also notes that the number of power plants that do not engage with NESO has ‘increased substantially in the last decade, making the amount of generation in the market significantly less visible for Neso’. It estimated the uncertainty could reach 7.7 gigawatts by the end of the decade — the equivalent of two nuclear power stations.

View The Times report here: Secret report that exposed the fragility of our electricity system

The implications for Glen Lednock and Glentarken

Recent reforms by NESO mean that in order to provide some strategic rationale to energy policy, connections for proposed onshore wind farms in Scotland will be seriously limited – at least for the next ten years. This means that, even if approved, neither Glen Lednock nor Glentarken would get a connection before 2035.

Into the bargain, both planning applications are still being reviewed by the Scottish Government’s Energy Consent Unit.   Following a recent landmark legal case, the developers now must justify why they omitted the wind farm grid connections from the scope of their environmental impact assessments, and the issue of potentially significant cumulative impacts arising between the wind farms and their grid connections can no longer be avoided.  

The tide may well be turning for Low Carbon and SSE…