“It’s all about transmission,” he said.
We were on Lewis – the post show discussion after Pibroch’s performance at An Lanntair in Stornaway.
The topic of electricity generated from renewable sources was a ‘hot topic’ in the Northern Isles, Caithness, the Western Highlands and Islands and in Galloway. Wind, tidal, hydro and wave energy were to the fore in debates (less so solar in the North). Onshore wind turbines, isolated or in wind farms, were visible as we travelled to and from venues. Orkney’s pioneering approaches to tidal power was discussed.
Personally, I quite like wind turbines. I first saw one in rural France and it seemed congruent with its setting. There is a large turbine on the hill-top just behind my home and the many blades of the big Clashindarroch Windfarm can be seen from my window as I write this.
According to Scottish Government figures, Scotland is well-endowed with renewable energy potential and already, as a country of five million folk, has around 1% of installed global wind-energy capacity.
Yet the community voices we heard in post-show discussions expressed disgruntlement and disappointment about the lack of direct benefit local communities accrue from this power generation and the sense in which large scale renewable energy generation turns some areas into sacrifice zones to satisfy the energy demand of more populated areas in the South.
The comments go to the heart of issues of equity and responsibility, place and community.
Among the questions and comments recorded were:
“Are remote areas to be ‘sacrificed’ to wind farms by a system and society that sells locally generated electricity back to islanders (and highlanders) at tariffs greater than the national average?”
“Are crucial peatland carbon sinks to be sacrificed to preserve the visual amenity of more populous areas in the South?”
“Shetland & Caithness produce vast amounts of renewable energy, in the form of electricity from wind turbines, yet residents still pay higher tariffs for electricity than consumers in the South (and closer to urban centres).”
“Scottish windfarms are paid to shut down at periods of peak supply (or premium wholesale prices) in order in order to keep their energy out of the grid not to glut the market. Meanwhile, the transmission capacity is filled with fossil electricity generated farther South.”
“There is fuel poverty amidst the extractivist energy industry.”
“The energy from windfarms (and tidal arrays) in the North of Scotland is channelled into the grid at Dounreay and transmitted South bringing no benefit to communities in the Highlands.”
“The economic benefits of offshore windfarms are by-passing communities, even on the east coast route south of Dounreay.”
“There is a lot of resistance to windfarms in Cambridgeshire.”
“Windfarm developers should be forced to couple them to hydro schemes and pump water when there is a surplus.”
“In Dumfries and Galloway, lack of transmission facilities means windfarms in the region can’t produce sometimes.”
“People value visual amenities, environmental impact and the cost of electricity differently.”
“In Dumfries and Galloway, the SSEN are talking about putting pylons all over the landscape.”
As the ‘recovering environmentalist’ said, in Stornaway: it’s all about transmission.
Still a drop in a rising ocean.
Renewable electricity is still only a minor component (20%) of the 44 Gigawatts produced in the UK at present. Fossil fuels continue to dominate the electrical generation system.
Credit – Energy Dashboard (Note: Low Carbon = Nuclear)
Moreover, electricity generation capacity is unevenly distributed due to historical developments (e.g. the concentration of population around coal fields and on estuaries, predominantly in the South of the UK) and socio-political pressures (e.g. local resistance to onshore windfarms in Central and Southern England). The current distribution of the UK’s major power plants is illustrated below.
Credit : DUKES 2022
As can be seen, onshore wind and hydroelectricity plants are predominantly sited in Scotland. These figures represent installed capacity not potential and do not include offshore wind projects currently planned in the North West. The 57% of generation arising from fossil fuels is primarily – though not exclusively – based in England, and therefore closer to centres of population.
Historical demand has also driven the structure of the grid which transmits and distributes electricity from generator to end user.
Credit DUKES 2022 + Vielo
Grid – Demand
According to DUKES 2022[i], the overall balance of electrical power generation and consumption for the UK in 2022 looked like this.
Credit : DUKES 2022
Ex-oil and gas, as I confess to be, I find this a very useful visualisation. But the pie charts below offer a more summary insight:
The startling thing about this comparison is that conversion and transmission losses account for most fossil fuel based generation in the energy balance. In a magical world where conversion and transmission losses were zero (and I recognise that is magical thinking), combustion would only account for 20% of the fuel mix – reversing the current situation vis a vis renewables.
Of course, conversion and transmission losses CANNOT be zero. The one thing we NEED to learn from this climate emergency is that we can’t buck the physics. But it does beg the question, whether we are looking at the challenge from the wrong end.
Is it a question of “How do we get power to the people?” OR “How do we get people to the power?”
Balance
One comment which arose from Pibroch post-show discussions was that the grid needs a 30% baseload: and that this baseload cannot come from renewables because the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t shine all the time. The possibility of demand shedding to reflect available resources (e.g. brown outs) wasn’t really considered. We are, as a privileged society, addicted to heat and light on demand.
And the grid does have its own complex dynamics, balancing fluctuation in demand with multiple sources with differing load factors[ii]. Wind and solar are understood to fluctuate. So, currently, the mix varies as illustrated below.
Credit – Grid watch
The grey baseline is nuclear in these diagrams, the amber is combustion (actually CCGT[iii]): the blue and yellow are wind and solar.
One comment in discussions was that Scottish windfarms are paid to shut down at periods of peak renewables supply. Another was that there has been and remains insufficient scientific research into energy storage.
More generally, the long-range energy transmission architecture, designed and built around fossil fuel generation, is inadequate to accommodate the amount of renewable energy currently being generated in the North of Scotland and will not accommodate future capacity. Moreover, the UK electrical infrastructure overall will not bear the weight of the government’s (alleged) aspirations.
According to Gone with the Wind[iv], a recent report issued by the Carbon Tracker Initiative:
“The electricity grid is currently unable to transmit all the green electricity produced by wind turbines to the places where electricity is consumed. Due to the limited capacity of the cables connecting the different areas of the country, especially England and Scotland, a growing share of green electricity is being wasted while gas plants are increasingly called to compensate for this loss during so called wind congestion events.
[Their] analysis shows that, in 2022, during these wind congestion events the amount of wind generation that was curtailed was equivalent to the yearly consumption of 1 million British households. [They] found that for every unit of wind electricity that is curtailed from the grid an almost equivalent amount of gas-fired electricity is produced, resulting in a 1.3 MtonCO2e increase in CO2 emissions.
This is equivalent to 3% of the UK’s power sector emissions.
The costs of wind congestion have been rising in the past few years, accounting for £1.5 billion since January 2021 – equivalent to £77 per household. This problem got considerably worse during the 2022 energy crisis. While consumers experienced record-high electricity costs, the GB grid wasted record amounts of much-needed cheap and clean electricity because it could not effectively transfer wind generation to consumers.”[v]
This situation is made more outrageously ironic since climate change is already increasing the renewables potential. According to DUKES 2022, “the load factor for overall renewables in 2022 […] was 0.8 percentage points higher than in 2021 and the second highest since 2015. The load factors were driven by more favourable weather conditions including higher average wind speeds and longer average sun hours. Load factors also increased for hydro and solar PV.” Specifically, “In 2022 the average wind speed was 8.5 knots, 0.7 knots higher than in 2021, and there were 4.9 sun hours per day in 2022, 0.8 sun hours higher than in 2021.”
The question arising from the figures above is, would investment in storage, coupled with a rethink of transmission and demand-management, enable Scotland and the UK to step away from using fossil fuels as the ‘peak shaver’ in demand spikes?
Gone with the Wind proposes that a rethink in investment in transmission, which has flat-lined whilst investment in generation has expanded, is urgently needed. They forecast that the supply/ transmission gap will only increase in the coming years.
There are already proposals to create battery farms in the Scottish borders, closer to the source of demand spikes. But that strategy does not address the underlying question of the separation of renewable sources of supply from demand sinks sited on the basis of the fossil-capital strategies of the 19th century (i.e. near now defunct coal fields).
Pylons
We heard conflicting views within the community in Dumfries and Galloway on the value of pylons compared to cable burial for transmission systems. Burial incurs additional short terms costs compared to overhead transmission but, equally, work in areas such as Finland point to the fact that buried cabling may be significantly more resilient to extreme weather events. In the past few years, extended power outages due to extreme winds and flooding have become more common with the existing overhead infrastructure. Storm Arwen left me without power for 5 days in winter in 2021.
Investment in transmission systems also raises issues of equity and place. The implementation of new pylon-based transmission systems encounters local resistance along their proposed routes, primarily arising from loss of visual amenity for local residents and tourists[vi]. This factor (which also affects wind farm developments) is complicated by the fact that “some people regard areas [like Assynt] as scenic national assets and [take the view that] their future cannot be left in the hands of local communities who might perceive they have different interests.”[vii]
So, in addition to the question of where power should ‘go’ there are significant equity and resilience issues associated with how it gets there.
Restructuring and Relocation
It was suggested during Pibroch post-show discussions that effective electrical transmission systems and relocation of economic activities are vital.
Local generation initiatives, whether at an individual, corporate or community level, already complicate the energy generation landscape.
In Assynt, we heard that the Coigach Community Trust set up a wind turbine in March 2017. This turbine is owned and operated by the community for the benefit of the community generating clean power from a resource [the area has] in abundance. Similarly, the Assynt Crofters Association are highly dependent on their micro-hydro scheme for their financial stability.
In Italy, cooperatives are experimenting with a prosumer model, where prosumers collectively fund wind turbines in return for stably priced energy[viii]. Prosumers seek radical market decoupling: and that prosumerism may also involve radical lifeway transformation: for example, living off-grid is an extreme (and often symbolic) form of prosumerism[ix]. Such cooperatives guarantee prices but may limit choice in times of scarcity and have to implement rationing: but this conditioning of expectation may be vital – electricity was taken/ when available.[x]
The default, corporate model – as adopted in Shetland for example – assumes generated electricity is a marketable commodity injected directly into the grid and, in their case, sold back to local Shetlanders at a higher tariff than paid by mainlanders in the South.
The historical examples of fossil fuel generation – especially 19th century coal – suggests that cheap power does attract economic activity and population. Availability of cheap, locally-produced electricity can and does stimulate economic activity although concerns were expressed that cheap local energy hubs might attract bit-coin mines and data centres which create no local employment.
In extreme, but alas no-longer improbable, climate scenarios, it is likely that this island’s current demand sinks will be increasingly uninhabitable due to inundation and extreme heat in existing urban centres.
Doubling down on transmission capacity to serve Capitalocene infrastructure in the South and East of the British Isles seems, in the medium to long term, a false economy. Community based development of generating and ‘economic’ capacity in more resilient areas is surely more compatible with ‘managed retreat’ as discussed in the earlier blog Adaptation. The current mitigation strategies sustain fossil fuel lock-in (by bottlenecking renewables out of the grid) but further investment in pumping power to existing demand sinks merely postpones the inevitable restructuring and relocation whilst it protects existing capital investment in what are, in essence, stranded assets.
It is time to engage with the challenge of moving people to the power, both in the narrow energetic sense and the wider socio-political sense.
Coda
This blog has focussed on electrical power transmission.
November and December 2023 has seen torrential rain in many parts of the British Isles. I noted in a recent visit to Stirling that every shop in the centre of the town had a heap of sand-bags by the door: preparation for flooding as rain sheets off of Stirling’s steep, pedestrianised streets. This is unprecedented.
In country districts, water gushed up from stanks as the installed drainage systems failed to meet the demand placed upon them. Cars, mostly tentatively, ventured through uncertain pools at each low point in the roads. Soil spilled from field entrances or accumulated behind hedges.
Electrical transmission infrastructure is not the only infrastructure coming under unsustainable stress due to Climate Change which in turn results in an inexorable erosion of well-being and wealth in local communities.
A focus on (re) distribution of electricity, run-off, potable water, sewage, living beings and, most importantly, power is central to the challenge of climate adaptation. These are typically the remit of the state, whether at national or local level: but the nation state is no more fit for purpose than the current UK grid.
The time for prosumers has come.
[i] DUKES 2023 (publishing.service.gov.uk)
[ii] Load factors are the ratio between generation and capacity. Nuclear and fossil fuel generation typically have high load factors.
[iii] Combined Cycle Gas Turbines
[iv] Gone with the wind? – Carbon Tracker Initiative
[v] Gone with the Wind states : “Remarkably, we found that more than 95% of wind congestion events are experienced by wind farms located in Scotland, while the region hosts only 40% of GB’s wind capacity. The responsibility for this is on the grid bottleneck connecting the Scotland-England grid regions – the notorious B6 boundary.”
[vi] The proposed Pylon route across The Mearns in Aberdeenshire was recently revised in the face of local pressure.
[vii] What I heard about Climate Justice in Lochinver
[viii] Cooperatives such as e-nostra virtually disconnect prosumers from the grid (their initial capital contribution fixes their operating cost) but they may also disconnect them from the global crisis.
[ix] The installation of microhyrdo capacities and batteries can be cheaper than buying from the grid .