Power. Renewable power.

Britain is about to drown in renewable energy in a few short years thanks to ambitious plans by the government to bring the share of low-carbon energy generation to 95% of the total by 2030. A lot of this energy could end up unused unless the same people envisioning miles and miles of wind turbines and solar panels don’t start envisioning batteries as well. Welcome to Curtailmentworld.

“For more than half the time in 2030 the UK's renewable and nuclear backed energy system will be producing more energy from renewables and nuclear than it uses,” Chris Matson, partner at consultancy LCP, told The Times last week. “Simply wasting this generation would harm both consumers and investors so a whole system approach is essential to minimise the cost of delivering net zero.”

According to LCP, excess power generation could be taking place for 53% of the time in 2030 if the planned buildout of wind and solar capacity materialises. In other words, if future UK governments stick to the incumbents’ plans, in 2030, the country’s wind and solar farms will be producing energy that will be wasted more than half the time they actually produce energy, which, it’s always worth recalling, is a lot less than 24/7.

The few figures mentioned in The Times report paint a pretty horrible picture for all those who, like me, cannot abide wastefulness. According to LCP, curtailment was performed on wind farms on 75% of days in 2020. This translated into the waste of more than 3.6 terrawatts of electricity that year, which, according to the Daily Mail, could have powered a million households for a full year. The reason for the curtailment: grid constraints. Shocking, right?

By a completely random coincidence, U.S. utilities are sounding the alarm on possible blackouts as unusually high temperatures lead to a spike in demand in parts of the country but the generation capacity is insufficient to meet this demand. All this while in California alone, the rate of solar power curtailment spiked to almost 600,000 MWh as of last month, according to CAISO, from 200,000 MWh in May 2020.

“The risk of electricity shortages is rising throughout the U.S. as traditional power plants are being retired more quickly than they can be replaced by renewable energy and battery storage,” the Wall Street Journal wrote last week, noting warnings of rolling blackouts coming from not only California this year. Battery storage is being built, the report added, but nowhere near fast enough.

Let’s repeat that in simpler terms. Utilities in the U.S. are retiring coal- and gas-fired power plants more quickly than they are adding wind and solar generation capacity, which, combined with the inherent intermittency of wind and solar power generation, is creating a deepening gap between supply and demand. This gap, by the way, is going to become deeper as a federal government investigation into Chinese goods tariff evasion in the solar panel industry prompts developers to delay gigawatts in new capacity.

If you think the U.S. government is the only example of such brilliant obtuseness, think again. Wind and solar developers in Britain are currently facing delays of up to a full decade to connect their new farms to the grid, the Financial Times reported this weekend. Why, you might ask, or then again, you might not because the answer is pretty obvious: grid constraints.

Here’s a quote from the FT report: “National Grid [the top grid operator in the country] says it has historically had 40-50 applications for connections a year but that this has risen to about 400 as renewables suppliers have proliferated. This is in addition to significant volumes of applications coming via the six regional distributors.”

Going from 40-50 to 400 is certainly a substantial increase that, I imagine, no power utility could cope with in a hurry. What makes the situation even more fascinating is, of course, the cost of the upgrade that needs to be performed on Britain’s — or any other country’s — grid. Nobody really knows exactly how much this is going to cost in total although the FT report mentions a price tag of up to 12 million pounds per substation.

Such a price tag would make smaller renewable projects non-viable, the report went on to say, adding the renewable energy industry had warned — I loved this — that it would pretty literally pass any additional costs to their customers. Because of this cost pass-on, the industry is calling for shorter connection deadlines to avoid having end-customers pay higher bills for longer. Touching. And completely unrelated, I’m sure, to the latest trends in raw materials.

The grid problem seems to be a constant companion of the energy transition. Last year, I did a feature on the U.S grid for Oilprice and learned some amazing things such as the sheer size of this grid: “200,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and 5.5 million miles of local distribution lines, linking thousands of generating plants to factories, homes and businesses,” per Westhaven Power, a utility from California.

In its current form, this grid simply cannot support the massive shift from fossil fuel, basedload-providing power plants to highly distributed, inconstant wind and solar installations. The Wall Street Journal again reported last month that U.S. power utilities were bracing up for investments of some $140 billion this year alone on grid upgrades and emission reduction. I’ve no idea why the two are being bunched together but there it is. Guess what this would do to people’s bills.

Let’s summarise, shall we? California is warning there will be power outages this summer while it literally throws away 600,000 MWh because they are produced at a time when there is no demand for them. Britain, thanks to gas and nuclear, is not yet threatened by outages but is wasting hundreds of millions of pounds in the form of curtailed wind and solar output, while utility bills are soaring. Grid operators on both sides of the Atlantic are struggling to reconcile a centralised grid with an increasingly decentralised generation capacity. This will be one expensive reconciliation.

Theoretically, as far as I can understand, upgrading the grid needs just materials and time. Practically, this means a lot of materials and a lot of time. The prices of these materials are in the stratosphere because we apparently live in the Supplychainocalypse but even if copper sold for 2 cents per tonne, the upgrade would still be a massive undertaking, which, I would expect, would also increase losses along the way. Electricity losses, that is.

Unless I’m gravely mistaken and utterly hopeless with electrons, the longer electricity travels from point A to point B, the higher the losses along the way. And I’m not gravely mistaken because I checked with the Energy Information Administration, which told me the U.S. loses as much as 5% of all electricity transmitted and distributed across the grid every year. And that’s the old, kind-of-centralised grid, that now has to grow a lot of new “tentacles” to accommodate all the renewable energy installations. It might be cheaper to just break it down into small regional mini-grids, I suspect.

The problem is, of course, not unique for Britain and the United States. All grids subjected to a fast buildout of distributed generation capacity suffer the same challenges. Wind power curtailment in China was a big topic a few years ago, when they were wasting massive amounts of wind power because of lack of grid capacity.

To solve that, China took to building so-called supergrids. Another fascinating experiment in the world of energy transition, experts warned that the supergrid could become vulnerable to cascade blackouts, i.e. blackouts spreading across much wider regions than they would in a more fragmentary grid.

The level of complexity that the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables involves is so high, I suspect most of us cannot comprehend all of it. I certainly can’t but I keep trying because I like 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzles. Sadly, it appears that the individuals in charge of the transitions don’t like jugsaw puzzles at all.

P.S. Meanwhile in Europe: European Gas Prices Rise as Lower Renewable Output Boosts Demand