<story><title>Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-56530424</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wcoenen</author><text>It might work, but it&amp;#x27;s not necessarily going to be very profitable. The equipment that sits around waiting for low or negative electricity prices represents locked up capital, and ongoing maintenance and depreciation costs.&lt;p&gt;For the same reason, it&amp;#x27;s not a good idea to have bitcoin mining equipment sitting around waiting for cheap electricity. The hardware becomes obsolete very quickly, so there&amp;#x27;s only limited time to earn back the investment.</text></item><item><author>pydry</author><text>&amp;gt;There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices&lt;p&gt;It seems like an opportunity more than a crisis to me.&lt;p&gt;There are tons of potential applications for &amp;quot;free&amp;quot; electricity.&lt;p&gt;* Storage heating&amp;#x2F;cooling that&amp;#x27;s basically free&lt;p&gt;* Manufacturing carbon neutral jet fuel&lt;p&gt;* Cheaper aluminium production&lt;p&gt;It could also lead to onshoring of certain industries which previously moved to locales with access to cheap electricity. This would make supply chains more robust.&lt;p&gt;Some people are gonna get rich off this - partly &lt;i&gt;because&lt;/i&gt; more people view it as a threat than an opportunity.</text></item><item><author>martinald</author><text>Really misleading article IMO.&lt;p&gt;What this actually means is Scotland sometimes generated 200-300%+ of its demand from wind (and &amp;quot;exported&amp;quot; the rest), and sometimes low %age points and used other sources&amp;#x2F;imports. It makes it sound like Scotland is wind powered 97% of the time (only 3% more to go!), which is very different.&lt;p&gt;There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices (typically when it is sunny, windy and lower demand in the summer). Last year had more time than ever in negative, and the UK has another 10-20GW of commited offshore wind in construction.&lt;p&gt;Once this comes online, wind generation will often be over 100% of demand UK wide (right now it peaks over 50% regularly). There is approx 5GW of HVDC (with 1-2&amp;#x2F;GW a year more planned over the next while), but it won&amp;#x27;t be enough to export all of it outside the UK (and when it is windy here, it is likely to also be there, so they won&amp;#x27;t want it either).&lt;p&gt;This is going to end up with very negative prices for a lot of the time. Considering ~15% of UK supply is made up with nuclear, this is a real problem. You can&amp;#x27;t stop start nuclear like you can with gas.&lt;p&gt;So we are going to have to pay massive sums of money to wind producers to shut off production. And we are still going need masses of gas backup which is going to be used increasingly inefficiently to pick up the slack.&lt;p&gt;This may spur innovation in storage, but we are talking enormous quantities required in a very short period of time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bluGill</author><text>That depends on how often you can use the equipment. The company I work with pours cast iron in one factory - if you get a job there you work the overnight shift because that is when power is cheap. Since energy is the main cost of melting iron (it takes a lot of energy to get to get over 1100c) we are willing to let the equipment be idle and pay the workers extra to work a shift that doesn&amp;#x27;t work with the rest of the world.&lt;p&gt;Planned maintenance in that factory is worked with the power company. I&amp;#x27;m not sure if that means they are also doing maintenance on some power plant, or if that means during Christmas lights season.&lt;p&gt;If you can predict high wind times a week in advance I&amp;#x27;ll work my energy hungry production around your cheap energy prices.  The only thing I need is some sort of guarantee that those times will happen &amp;quot;often enough&amp;quot;.  I can pay employees to work 60 hour weeks some months, and other months get paid vacation, so long as over a full year I get reasonable use of my factory and there is some prediction.</text></comment>
<story><title>Equivalent of 97% of Scotland’s 2020 electricity consumption was from renewables</title><url>https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-56530424</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wcoenen</author><text>It might work, but it&amp;#x27;s not necessarily going to be very profitable. The equipment that sits around waiting for low or negative electricity prices represents locked up capital, and ongoing maintenance and depreciation costs.&lt;p&gt;For the same reason, it&amp;#x27;s not a good idea to have bitcoin mining equipment sitting around waiting for cheap electricity. The hardware becomes obsolete very quickly, so there&amp;#x27;s only limited time to earn back the investment.</text></item><item><author>pydry</author><text>&amp;gt;There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices&lt;p&gt;It seems like an opportunity more than a crisis to me.&lt;p&gt;There are tons of potential applications for &amp;quot;free&amp;quot; electricity.&lt;p&gt;* Storage heating&amp;#x2F;cooling that&amp;#x27;s basically free&lt;p&gt;* Manufacturing carbon neutral jet fuel&lt;p&gt;* Cheaper aluminium production&lt;p&gt;It could also lead to onshoring of certain industries which previously moved to locales with access to cheap electricity. This would make supply chains more robust.&lt;p&gt;Some people are gonna get rich off this - partly &lt;i&gt;because&lt;/i&gt; more people view it as a threat than an opportunity.</text></item><item><author>martinald</author><text>Really misleading article IMO.&lt;p&gt;What this actually means is Scotland sometimes generated 200-300%+ of its demand from wind (and &amp;quot;exported&amp;quot; the rest), and sometimes low %age points and used other sources&amp;#x2F;imports. It makes it sound like Scotland is wind powered 97% of the time (only 3% more to go!), which is very different.&lt;p&gt;There is an increasing crisis in the UK of negative electricity prices (typically when it is sunny, windy and lower demand in the summer). Last year had more time than ever in negative, and the UK has another 10-20GW of commited offshore wind in construction.&lt;p&gt;Once this comes online, wind generation will often be over 100% of demand UK wide (right now it peaks over 50% regularly). There is approx 5GW of HVDC (with 1-2&amp;#x2F;GW a year more planned over the next while), but it won&amp;#x27;t be enough to export all of it outside the UK (and when it is windy here, it is likely to also be there, so they won&amp;#x27;t want it either).&lt;p&gt;This is going to end up with very negative prices for a lot of the time. Considering ~15% of UK supply is made up with nuclear, this is a real problem. You can&amp;#x27;t stop start nuclear like you can with gas.&lt;p&gt;So we are going to have to pay massive sums of money to wind producers to shut off production. And we are still going need masses of gas backup which is going to be used increasingly inefficiently to pick up the slack.&lt;p&gt;This may spur innovation in storage, but we are talking enormous quantities required in a very short period of time.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pydry</author><text>I forsee periods of negative&amp;#x2F;cheap&amp;#x2F;free electricity becoming much more common. If your equipment is not used on average two days a week, the economics start to look a LOT more sensible even for more capital intensive, energy intensive applications.&lt;p&gt;At the moment pretty much every MWh generated is a substituted MWh not generated by gas and periods of negative pricing are still relatively rare.&lt;p&gt;Wind is so cheap though, that at some point, overproduction will become the norm rather than exceptional and being able to timeshift your usage could, unexpectedly, end up saving you more money than reducing your usage.&lt;p&gt;The counterintuitiveness of this and the fact that this is new territory is why I think that there&amp;#x27;s lots of profit potential.</text></comment>