Britain wastes millions a day switching off wind turbines. See how much has been wasted today, and in 2025.
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By grues-dinner 2025-10-1510:519 reply Something like 400,000 people are opposing the Norwich-Tilbury power lines to bring wind energy to where it's used. Including a Green Party MP: https://www.dissmercury.co.uk/news/24840985.green-mp-adrian-....
And you'd better believe wherever they buried the lines they'd have objections and expensive consultations about the disruption and the HoUsE VaLuEs caused by trenching, drilling and service structures. Like this objection from a village near (but not actually on) the underground stretch near Manningtree: https://holtonstmary-pc.gov.uk/assets/Documents-Parish-Counc...
This is all true, the NIMBYs are real and we must construct additional pylons... but the largest part of curtailment costs come from the UK energy sector's project mismanagement.
1. We have two undersea cable projects (EGL1&2) to provide transmission capacity between all the new windfarms in Scotland, and SE England where it's used. Both projects are years late.
2. But we keep approving and switching on more windfarms in Scotland anyway ("connect and manage" policy)
3. The bottleneck that the undersea cables aim to get around - the transmission lines between North Scotland and Northern England - are at lowered capacity because maintenance is due, and it's non-negotiable.
Basically everything will be great in 2030 when every project delivers at once, but until then, enjoy exhorbitant curtailment costs.
https://ukerc.ac.uk/news/transmission-network-unavailability...
By londons_explore 2025-10-1513:124 reply The solution to NIMBY's seems simple... "We would like to put a power line through your village. Here are the plans. We will to give every resident £400 to compensate them for the trouble, and it will only happen if at least half the residents vote yes. If the plan goes ahead, all voters will be eligible for the £400, even if you vote no.".
It turns out most people don't really care about a power line, but do like money. You won't have to offer much money to have a majority saying yes.
By hylaride 2025-10-1513:27 IMO, it should be "if village votes no, they're top of the list for brownouts/blackouts".
NIMBYism is 99% wealthier people pushing the costs (visually or literally) of modern society onto others instead of bearing it themselves.
By amiga386 2025-10-1513:46 The government were mooting "we'll give you free electricity for life if you let us build the pylons near you" in 2024
https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-government-electricity-py...
It's currently "we'll give you £250 off your bill per year, for 10 years, if you let us build the pylons near you" (the average bill is currently £880 per year)
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/households-near-new-pylon...
By pjc50 2025-10-1513:34 Yeah. I especially think this should be linked explicitly to power bills. Vote no and get a 10% increase on your bill for "supplying electricity through wishful thinking rather than pylons".
Localized ballot initiatives are basically unheard of in the UK, though. Everything is routed through central government and its press officers.
Wouldn't all the houses in the village lose way more than £400 in value?
Last I was comparing houses in a neighborhood, the houses near a powerline were consistently worth 15k-30k less (3-6% less).
By amiga386 2025-10-1513:56 Yes, but you have to factor in that you can't eat houses.
Being given money immediately for your living costs might be more attractive to you, than trying to retain value in an asset you'll only realise in 20 years time when you sell it, or perhaps not at all if you die first.
It's easy to blame project mismanagement, when it was always well known that undersea cables are much more expensive and difficult than the on-land cables that the Nimbies scuppered.
And it's unsurprising that windfarms in Scotland keep getting planned when the operator can collect these payments while switching off their turbines to reduce wear and tear.
EGL2 was proposed in 2015 and was meant to be operational by 2023. It wasn't even approved until August 2024. Construction began a month later.
EGL1 has already suffered a 16 month delay thanks to its constructors: https://www.offshore-energy.biz/supply-chain-constraints-pus...
> The partners attribute the delay to market conditions, supplier withdrawals, and a delayed final offer from an unnamed supplier, asserting they took all reasonable steps to secure the supply chain given the challenging circumstances.
We can certainly "what if" with NIMBYs pylon-blocking, but I'd still say it's mismanagement of the EGL, either by the government, Ofgem or the constructors, that have led to these delays. If these delays hadn't happened, we'd have EGL2 available today and the maintenance on old pylons would have less of an effect.
It's actually good news that there's so much interest in investing in wind farms! Scottish windfarm companies do have to bid at auction to be permitted to build, it's ultimately up to the government what bids they accept. The Tories fucked up and set too low a price, no investors were interested - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66749344 - their successors aren't making the same mistake: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly8ynegwn4o
If EGL2 took 9 years to get approval, that's the fault of the Nimbies, right?
The project was proposed in 2015 but it didn't seriously start until 2020. That's purely politics.
I'd say the lion's share of time was spent seeking planning permission, writing environmental impact documents, planning the route, building the justification for any compulsory purchases, consulting with interest parties, etc. Some of that would be NIMBYs, but I don't think there was a sustained campaign to hold back EGL2, it just took a lot of bureaucracy, and effectively "death by a thousand cuts". A project gets to be 5 years late one day at a time.
See the timeline and some of the documents here: https://www.easterngreenlink2.co.uk/project-to-date
I guess I'm using 'Nimby' in the wider sense to include all the red tape that slows down or blocks every building project in the UK. A project doesn't have to be individually targeted by Nimbies to be slowed down, they have enough regulatory quicksand to stop building wholesale. Then when you get through that, they can target your individual project.
And Nimby is politics, so I don't see a distinction between Nimby and 'purely politics'.
By amiga386 2025-10-1611:32 Perhaps I'm being pedantic, but you're not seeing the distinction because you're expanding the definition of NIMBY beyond what it means (a person who objects to developments done near them).
You used a fine phrase there, "red tape", which describes all the bureaucracy over and above localised objections to national infrastructure. NIMBYs can certainly use the red tape to hold you up, but there's also NIMBY-free red tape that holds you up anyway.
[Aside: If you want a word for "globalised" NIMBYs, those are BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything), the sorts of people who weaponise the environmental impact assessment. Some examples are https://www.vice.com/en/article/why-doesnt-america-build-thi... and https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/06/09/why-america-cant-bui... -- it seems especially galling that "environmentalists" don't want a train line that could replace 100% of air travel between LA and SF, because it might affect their specific piece of the environment, meaning that the planes just keep on flying, dumping CO2 into the atmosphere, warming the planet, and contributing to the increasingly severe weather that leads to massive destruction of their nearby environment via wildfires and such]
Under "politics" I'd include NIMBYs and red tape... and also political will. The project was proposed in 2015 and didn't really start until 2020. That's politics -- convincing the appropriate people in power that they can and should do something, and commit to funding the project, assigning the appropriate governmental bodies to begin work on it, and in this case engage the companies responsible for electricity transmission and get them to work on it too. Only then do they start planning the route, applying for planning permission, compulsory purchase, holding consultations, hearing objections, etc.
Getting the project going took 5 years, it could have been 0 years if the political will was there.
I wonder why somebody doesn’t open a datacenter in Scotland. Sounds like they have too much power… also it is a bit chilly, right?
Despite wind energy being in excess in Scotland AFIR end users are still paying very high prices due to marginal pricing used in the UK - electricity cost is set by the most expensive source of energy (even if it is 0.1% of the mix) and most of the time gas is the most expensive source. I think marginal pricing is detrimental but there is no political will to axe it.
By MagnumOpus 2025-10-1513:161 reply “Marginal pricing” is just how a market economy works.
If there weren’t marginal pricing, nobody in the private industry would build more wind farms or submarine power lines or battery capacity - which are lucrative because they produce peak-time power cheaper than imported gas — and these are the things that will drive power prices down eventually.
By bee_rider 2025-10-1513:55 It sounds like there’s some sort of rule in the UK where al of the suppliers have to charge the same price per watt (or something), and they’ve named this rule “marginal pricing”? So, it is not entirely the same as a market based pricing.
Whether it is better or not, I have no idea. One could probably see an argument for allowing renewables to price themselves below the sustainable rate for petrochemical based fuels—let them outcompete based on price. Of course that gives them less money to reinvest.
On the other hand, power grids are never entirely market based; the grid needs some dispatchable power for stability sake, and it is hard to get consumers to express their tolerance of power outages in terms of how much extra they’ll pay to keep unused plants in reserve…
By aregue 2025-10-1513:31 One solution is to have several markets. Norway also has transmission problems. The land is divided into 5 areas, each with its own price.
By rbanffy 2025-10-1512:46 What if the datacenter buys bulk energy from a single provider and only uses the grid for excess demand? Can also go the xAI route with massive batteries smoothing out power use.
By shawabawa3 2025-10-1513:023 reply The idea behind it is that everyone who supplies energy gets paid the same
E.g. it would be unfair to pay wind farms 10p/kWh and gas turbines 20p/kWh when the electricity they supply is the same and fungible
If there was enough grid storage this wouldn't be an issue, but because there isn't, there are always times where we need gas turbines to top up and those turbines won't turn on for less than it costs them, which is a lot
The upside of this is renewables are very profitable and incentivised
If that's the case, doesn't it make a huge amount of sense for the utility to tell the silk incinerator selling it 0.001% of its electricity for 40p/kwh, "Bugger off, we'll buy batteries"? Cutting its overall power costs in half for a tiny operational shift.
You don't actually need the 0.1%. There are easy ways to make it up. There AREN'T easy ways to make up 7%, though.
By pbmonster 2025-10-1514:01 Simplifying wildly: Electricity producers sell their electricity at auction. They all offer a bid (x Wh at price y), the utility accepts bids from lowest to highest until demand is filled, and then everybody gets paid the highest accepted price to fill demand. Wind and solar pretty much always bid their forecasted capacity at $0, because they have no additional costs between producing and getting curtailed.
So the silk incinerator only gets to sell electricity if demand is extremely high and the utility needs to accept even the highest bid.
Batteries would fix a lot of this, but western nations have extremely long interconnection queues (project waiting to be allowed to be connected to the grid), mostly because of stupid bureaucratic reasons.
By MagnumOpus 2025-10-1513:20 The utility will bill the 40p/kWh to its industrial customers (and residential customers on “agile” smart meter tarriffs), and the customers can decide whether they need the power even at 40p, or whether they shut down their bitcoin mine/aluminium smelter/EV charger/floodlights for those two hours.
In the longer term, price spikes like this incentivise the building of batteries - which might be marginably profitable most of the time but profit big time (and help big time) in periods of price spikes.
It is nice that is keeps renewables extra profitable, but if they could price down a bit they could just run fossil fuels out of the market entirely… so, it doesn’t seem like a great favor to them.
OTOH treating all units of energy “fairly” ignores the added value of dispatchable generation, so it doesn’t really seem fair at all.
On the gripping hand, if pricing was set by the market, customers could be incentivized to help fix the intermittence problem by making their loads dispatchable, which seems like it would be an all-around win…
By StopDisinfo910 2025-10-1514:101 reply > if they could price down a bit they could just run fossil fuels out of the market entirely
What do you propose we do when the intermittent sources don’t provide enough energy and all the other power sources have gone bankrupt?
I feel like I discussed that in the second half of my post, so I’m not sure how to respond to this question.
How would users make their demands dispatchable? The demand is the demand. The supply has to match
By bee_rider 2025-10-1516:41 It depends on the specific load, dishwashers can be configured to run when the price drops a bit, heating can be configured to allow your house to get a little colder, and if the market provides enough incentive, adding insulation will become economical.
I mean it is a big pile of interests that needs to be optimized. One option is to expose it to the market and let the supply and demand optimization process have a go at it.
By infthi 2025-10-1522:55 >it would be unfair to pay wind farms 10p/kWh and gas turbines 20p/kWh when the electricity they supply is the same and fungible It is not the same, supply from gas turbines is more flexible/predictable, this might be worth an extra premium.
What makes you think they haven't? At least half a dozen operators have more than one data centre in Scotland, and many more have one.
Are you sure?
> Despite campaigning for more data center development two years ago, not much has come to fruition in Scotland. In December of 2021, Oracle closed the Sun Microsystems data center in Linlithgow, Scotland. DataVita has opened a new data center in Glasgow in its parent company’s office development, as well as expanding its Fortis data center in August 2022. No major construction projects have been announced since the campaign began. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/scotland-continue...
Why would you open a datacenter in Scotland when the UK rules mean the electricity price is the same throughout the UK, regardless of supply and demand? This is precisely the issue that OP highlights - the UK electricity auction is at a national level, but transmission is limited and the actual supply and demand is not evenly distributed, causing huge curtailment payments to have to be made.
By vidarh 2025-10-1617:30 About the number of data centres in Scotland? Yes, I am sure. I have done business with operators of several of them.
You'd open them because of plenty of customer demand.
By amiga386 2025-10-160:58 According to an article today, there are 16 data centres in Scotland
Chilly is good. A lot of DC power is cooling.
I don’t know why Northern Canada is not full of data centers. There’s untapped hydroelectric potential up there as well as free cooling.
If Russia wasn’t a basketcase politically Siberia would be great too.
By sameesh 2025-10-1514:22 spawn more overlords!
By notTooFarGone 2025-10-1510:5719 reply Who opposes Power lines?
Never heard that this is a thing. As a foreign influence I'd be delighted to target all infrastructure proposals and bombard it with trolls.
By grues-dinner 2025-10-1511:107 reply People oppose everything.
* Lattice overhead powerlines? Eyesore (should use the new T style ones), house values, wind noise, hums, WiFi interference, cancer, access roads, hazard to planes, birds
* T-frame pylons: boring (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/13/electr...), eyesore (we prefer the lattice ones), most of the above too
* Underground: damaging to the environment, end stations are eyesores/light polluters, more construction traffic, should be HVDC not AC, house values
* Solar farms: waste of good land (golf courses are fine) noise somehow, construction, eyesore (but a 400 acre field of stinky bright yellow rapeseed is OK), house values
* Onshore Wind farms: all the birds all the time, access, eyesore, noise, dangerous, should be offshore, house value, waste of land, I heard on Facebook the CO2 takes 500 years to pay back
* Offshore wind farms: eyesores, radar hazard, all the birds, house values somehow, navigation hazard, seabed disruption
* Build an access road: destroying the countryside, dust if not surfaced, drainage, house values
* Don't build an access road: destroying roads, HGVs on local roads, house values
* Nuclear: literally all the reasons plus scary
Some of them are fair on their own, but it really adds up to a tendentious bunch of wankers at every turn who think the house they bought for 100k in 1991 and is now worth 900k is the corner of the universe.
> As a foreign influence
I'm sure these people would never take foreign cash: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c93k584nvgeo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyk1j92195o
We can see a lot of windmills from our house - probably at least 60 in a few different windfarms. They are all nearly 40km away, but I actually like seeing them.
There are others much closer, which I also rather like seeing (closest is about 2km) but you can't see them from where we live.
By grumpy-de-sre 2025-10-1512:144 reply Yeh I'm about 2km from a large wind park, it's the least obnoxious thing imaginable. Jogging through them at night with their dim red blinking strobes or watching them work overtime on a windy winter day is great and gives you a sorely needed feeling of optimism and hope for the future.
Yes directly underneath them there is some gentle swooshing noises but I think beyond 500m it's basically imperceptible. Nothing I'd call offensive, car traffic is easily 10x worse.
The young folks that I've talked to locally, overwhelming share the same perspective.
The opposition has to come from folks who cannot see the bigger picture and just view them as some kind of excessive ugly infrastructure. Not properly recognizing / or caring about the societal benefit of clean abundant energy or the future.
I kind of find it interesting that a lot of historical landscape art from northern Europe featured windmills. Nobody viewed them as a blight back then.
I live about a mile down from two large wind turbines and you can absolutely hear them, especially at night - it's a low droning noise that especially on quiet nights and in the summer when you have your windows open it actually bothers me to a point where I considered selling the house multple times already - but decided that rolling the dice on noise pollution and ending up with something even more annoying just isn't worth it.
>>Not properly recognizing / or caring about the societal benefit of clean abundant energy or the future.
I think we should devote every single spare inch of land to wind turbines and harness as much of wind energy as possible. But I won't pretend like the bloody things are not keeping me up at night when I can hear them.
By grumpy-de-sre 2025-10-1512:301 reply I'm assuming it depends a fair bit on the model of the turbine. The park near us is rather new so I'm sure they are using the latest options.
By jjkaczor 2025-10-1513:04 May also depend on the age of the people nearby - am reaching an age with some level of hearing loss and I don't hear many low frequency - or high-pitch noises much anymore (drone of insects, or mosquitoes - squeaky voices of small children, etc.), so I probably wouldn't hear the turbines as much as a person with better hearing.
>> feeling of optimism and hope for the future.
I thought I was strange for feeling this when I brought my US-raised kids back to Northern Ireland this spring. Some would have been visible from my childhood home had they been built earlier. It made me think that maybe these people can get something right for the future.
By grumpy-de-sre 2025-10-1513:33 For some more hope [1][2].
Times are tumultuous but potential exists all around us.
By UltraSane 2025-10-1518:44 There are a LOT of wind turbines in the US.
I can’t stand the fact that we put everything to committee when we’re trying to do something good, but not otherwise. I live near a highway, I can hear the cars all day, where’s my veto? I’ve lived near trains—but they were freight trains, so I didn’t get the “public transit is helpful for the little people” veto, I guess.
It’s like we can only accomplish anything as a society if if the fact that it is going to piss people off is baked in.
By grumpy-de-sre 2025-10-1512:45 I feel like a lot of our (EU) legal structures are totally inadequate for long term periods of peace. Eventually everything gets bloated and ossified and vested interests gain more and more influence/control.
Existential threats always seem to have an interesting way of unlocking progress.
Just look at how quickly Germany was able to build the north sea LNG terminals in the face of the russian gas crisis [1].
By MalcolmDwyer 2025-10-1514:08 > The young folks that I've talked to...
Meanwhile the older folks are still freaked out from when they watched "The Tripods" in the 80's and can't abide big mechanical monsters looming nearby.
By grues-dinner 2025-10-1511:221 reply I also actually really like the look of wind turbines. They seems to be just the right blend of graceful, majestic and futuristic.
The old 2-blade ones are a bit visually noisy as they look like they oscillate, but they're basically extinct now.
I am somewhat sympathetic to, in the case of wind, low-frequency noise complaints, but I strongly suspect most of them are just tacked on for good measure.
By rwyinuse 2025-10-1511:59 Yeah, I get why people don't want wind turbines right next to their house, but also in my country I see people in the countryside complaining about turbines that are literally in middle of a forest, many kilometers away. It's just pathetic, especially since we're talking about economic backwater, where tax revenue and jobs from those turbines are a significant plus.
I don't mind them in the distance. I would love if these stupid things were 40km away. The closest is like 500 meters away from my house.
They're awful.
I live in the country for the peace and quiet and dark at night.
Now with a wind farm, there is a constant background hum that reminds me of living near a highway in the city, and a swishing noise that's louder than the cicadas and other night time bugs. Also, the red blinking safety lights do actually keep me up at night, but I might just be very sensitive to light.
I fully supported and still support the wind farm, even though I knew I wouldn't be able to host a turbine (and therefore benefit at all from these things). But, I really, really, really don't like the side effects at all.
Is that NIMBYism?
By lillecarl 2025-10-1512:25 500 meters is very close, if it ACTUALLY affects you negatively I'd say your concerns are valid, but at 2km it's only going to be the skyline, which isn't your property unless you're in NYC.
By tpxl 2025-10-1512:26 > Is that NIMBYism?
No. You recognize the drawbacks and still support the project for the good of others. That's the opposite of NIMBY, it's a high level of emotional maturity.
By bee_rider 2025-10-1512:36 I live in the country near a highway, if we could ban anything louder than a cicada I’d be quite happy to save us all a lot of fossil fuels!
By Forgeties79 2025-10-1511:531 reply Saw multiple people on HN literally 2 days ago complaining about how noisy solar is. Absolutely baffling.
By Forgeties79 2025-10-1512:46 Yeah they claimed the associated hardware for it was noisy. I don’t want to link to the actual comments because that’s kind of mean spirited, I’m just pointing out that I’ve heard people complain about the noise from solar and it’s pretty wild to me. I’ve been in close proximity to pretty large arrays and in plenty of homes with them on rooftops. You don’t notice them at all. They also don’t make the air around them unbreathable
By throwaway34564 2025-10-1513:09 I have a residential solar installation, and the inverter makes some noise when the relays are switching between import and export. I'm not complaining - although it was indeed surprising
By flerchin 2025-10-1512:39 > tendentious bunch of wankers
Lovely turn of phrase. I'm going to work it into my next tech talk.
By myrmidon 2025-10-1511:36 There is no need to speculate on Reform members being on the take when they are literally pleading "guilty" in court: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj6xwy015ngo
Scum.
By ElevenLathe 2025-10-1513:321 reply I assume from context that the "house values" you and several other apparently British posters are using is what in the US we would call "home prices"? Or have I guessed wrong and it is being used more like "family values"? If the latter, what kind of values are meant?
By port11 2025-10-1518:59 It's home prices indeed AFAICT. It's fairly bloody-minded ti think house prices will go down with nearby renewables, it'd be a small blip if any at all. Give me wind turbines around and take away the cars and delivery motorcycles.
House prices are the UK's version of "the spice must flow". The whole Ponzi scheme is dependent on that market, as there isn't much else. Too big to fail.
By devnullbrain 2025-10-1512:16 Specifically, concern for house prices in a really myopic way. It's 'preferable' to hamstring the place you live in than to turn it into somewhere with a functioning economy that people want to live in.
By array_key_first 2025-10-1512:25 If it makes you feel better, it's the same in the US. Some cities self destruct in pursuit of maintaining real estate prices. Of course, once they self destruct, prices plummet. Nobody considers that part.
By vlan0 2025-10-1511:25 The problem is, and always has been, land owners and their ego.
By scrlk 2025-10-1511:18 This has been going on for decades, e.g. 275 kV and 400 kV Supergrid construction back in the 1960s:
> Supergrid planners commented that compared to the first Grid build in the 1920s and 1930s ‘we’ve been in a completely different ball game, with planning officers that want to study our proposed routes in absolute detail and then make their own suggestions’. Another engineer complained about a route near Hadrian’s wall, saying ‘It’s a good job Hadrian wasn’t around now…. He’d never get planning permission for all that’.
> What price should be put on ‘amenity’? In a sense the CEGB could never do enough. This was demonstrated one November evening in 1960 when the Chairman of the CEGB, Christopher Hinton, walked into the Royal Society of Arts to give a paper on the efforts the Board was making. In his talk Hinton outlined the basic problem of NIMBYism. The power stations and transmission lines had to go somewhere. For people in the area the benefits were nil, but the immediate and visible impact of the infrastructure was considerable. Reducing the impact on amenity cost money. Underground cabling in one area would inevitably lead to the question why not do it in other areas. Hinton was not trying to win an argument. He concluded that this was a ‘problem that cannot be removed’. No precise definition or set of rules that could be called on to resolve the intractable dilemma.
> The audience was in the mood for a fight. Mr Yapp of the National Parks Commission claimed that underground cabling was only more expensive than overhead lines because the Board hadn’t tried hard enough. He reasoned that the old London Electric Company had been told that a 2,000 volt underground cable was technically impossible. ‘So we go on… we are now told that 275 kV can hardly go underground’. Mr Yapp then fell into the volume fallacy. ‘I am reasonably certain that if only the cable was ordered in large lengths, it would be much cheaper’. This is the same muddled thinking that leads gas companies to claim that if only we properly commit to hydrogen, then the costs will fall. Hinton was one the country’s finest engineers. He pointed out that the laws of physics trumped the volume fallacy. ‘Overhead cable uses air, which is free, as an insulator’.
https://energynetworks.substack.com/p/why-dont-we-just-put-e...
By mschuster91 2025-10-1511:03 > Who opposes Power lines?
A LOT of politicians. Here in Germany, SüdLink got massively delayed and 8 billion euros more expensive because the back-then regional governor and edgelord Seehofer, who later rose to federal Interior Minister, caved to NIMBYs and insisted on burying the cables which is now feared to negatively impact the farmland soil [2].
> As a foreign influence I'd be delighted to target all infrastructure proposals and bombard it with trolls.
That already happens. Germany's far-right AfD, that regularly protests against everything related to the adaptation of the electricity grid, has had a multitude of scandals involving Russian influence.
[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/streit-um-stromtrassen-k...
[2] https://www.wochenblatt-dlv.de/feld-stall/betriebsfuehrung/e...
In Norway, power cables have been a top-tier political issue for years. They make electricity more expensive locally, since the surplus power can be exported instead of needing to be dumped for 0 or negative cost.
By postexitus 2025-10-1511:54 Even without new physical cables - very recently Nordic power markets switch to Flow Based Market Coupling (FBMC) - which basically takes physical properties of the existing lines (coupling points) in grid balancing operations, which allowed some underused lines to be used more (practically) - which made electricity cheaper in some locations, and more expensive in others (because cheaper electricity flew from that region to more expensive ones). It is akin to blocking train lines to a holiday resort because poorer people will be able to access it.
Heard lots of grumbling from an acquaintance in Germany that a big issue is, I quote, "Bavarians not wanting either overground nor underground power lines that would bring power from north to south, so at best we sell wind power from north to west and the south of germany buys nuclear from france" ;)
It's a huge issue, see the depressing web page on Südlink. Massively delayed, much more expensive, and less efficient because it has to be underground. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suedlink
Germany, like the UK, has dynamic national electricity pricing, which makes no sense when the interconnections are not powerful enough to actually make it a single electricity market.
Germany is very weird in a certain way of total belief in power of free market.
So you see, the market was supposed to correct that.
But profit laid with cheap gas turbines to backstop wind and buying from france ;)
It's not a real free market, though, if you ignore transmission. Since transmission is a scarce resource it needs to be part of the market to send the signal to build more of it (or more battery storage, or better located production). The national auctions obscure the actual resource shortage and therefore the market can't work.
By p_l 2025-10-1518:48 sshhhh, you're breaking the perfect invisible hand of market Germany wants to dogmatically push in EU grid
The mandatory EDI platform to interact on German market is also a bit annoying, though it's in details theory is theoretically /s solid
By sandos 2025-10-1512:04 Dynamic pricing is often touted as the solution, since it will encourage both transmission and building generation where its needed the most.
By bargainbin 2025-10-1511:081 reply It’s so prevalent there’s a dedicated term for people who oppose it: NIMBY.
By tialaramex 2025-10-1513:48 And at its extreme BANANA: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone
It's frustratingly hard to get friends and neighbours to understand when they're part of the problem, that their "special" situation isn't special after all.
By gambiting 2025-10-1512:22 Oh there was this whole famous case with construction of HS2(Britain's high speed rail project) - a farmer was offered £2M(!!!) compensation for the project requiring that a single pylon was going to be constructed on his land. Outrageous, right? But get this - he successfully sued the government saying 2M is not enough, and an independent expert valued his losses due the presence of the pylon at twice that if I remember correctly - the government(the taxpayers) had to pay.
Power lines I don't get as a NIMBY concern. The other things I can see the argument. I bought a house partially because it has direct access to a pole mounted transformer.
I've had a lot of issues with last mile power delivery in residential areas that rely on buried lines and pad mounted transformers. If a transformer on a pole blows up, it can be replaced within 4 hours. Buried lines and pad mounted transformers can easily take 8+ hours due to the excavation requirement. I've had outages that lasted over 24 hours because of buried infrastructure issues. It's nice that it's all hidden until it breaks.
By tstrimple 2025-10-1617:28 I guess it depends on what the common failure mode is. During the 2020 derecho our neighborhood with buried lines was without power for roughly four hours and it's the only time our power has gone out for any significant time in the 10 years I've been here. It wasn't even our buried lines that had the problem, but the lines serving them. Places in the city with poled power delivery were down for up to two weeks. There have been multiple times where houses surrounding us are out of power but ours just keeps chugging along.
By OJFord 2025-10-1512:46 Mine's buried; was dug up and replaced overnight a few years ago. If it's slow I think that's just under-resourcing and scheduling rather than it actually taking that long to deal with the specific circumstance.
By OJFord 2025-10-1512:40 People that like the look of the countryside without ugly infrastructure sprawling across it.
https://dorset-nl.org.uk/project/undergrounding/
I'm not involved or anything, but I certainly agree aesthetically. In visiting Canada it often strikes me that what ought to be beautiful landscape looks more like an industrial estate.
By elric 2025-10-1511:26 Same shit is happening in Belgium. We need extra transmission lines to connect the offsore wind turbines to the rest of the grid, and to improve grid stability in general, but NIMBYs have been campaigning against this for years.
By boringg 2025-10-1513:03 Power lines that cut over your property? I can buy that - thats a nuisance. I'm not saying I would I am saying that as a rural property owner that would be annoying.
By hshdhdhehd 2025-10-1512:221 reply Me. If it literally in my back yard. It's a tradegy of the commons game theory thing. I benefit from the power but please rig it somewhere else.
We have a similar situation in Italy with garbage.
Nobody wants new waste dumps anywhere near (tens of miles) of their own houses, and each time there's an insane amount of blockades and protests.
Bureaucracy gets very messy because towns and provinces and regions (equivalent to less federated us states, more or less) and the central government start having legal disputes over those things that drag decades.
By hshdhdhehd 2025-10-1512:34 Long term a waste dump (landfill) can be good. Cap it off and it becomes park land or sports field.
I would, overhead powerlines are not something you want near any houses for various reasons. Underground is fine.
By grues-dinner 2025-10-1512:42 Norwich-Tilbury doesn't go near many houses at all, and certainly not 400,000 peoples' houses. Check out the route: https://norwichtotilburymap.nationalgrid.com
By gadders 2025-10-1511:40 Who do you think campaigns against power stations?
By mapt 2025-10-1512:56 Always has been.
By 1718627440 2025-10-1512:17 Do you want to have power lines instead of a garden?
I mean just read the link and they're objecting to a 120m-wide trench being dug through their countryside. Which is easy enough to sympathise with.
By grues-dinner 2025-10-1511:51 The consultation area is 120m wide, not necessarily the trenching. The working width is often far less than that: https://www.nationalgrid.com/document/340431/download
In this drawing, you can see the area in the map and it is not 120m wide along the trench: https://www.nationalgrid.com/document/357086/download. For scale, the grid squares are 1000m.
A 400kV trench construction swathe also includes the soil storage areas - subsoil and topsoil are separated for return afterwards, as well as clearance to the fencing (https://www.nationalgrid.com/document/357086/download).
Why do trenches need to be dug across the countryside? Put them alongside existing roads and rail lines. Same with above-ground power lines. It might make them a bit longer, but the ‘eyesore’ is already there, and we can avoid making new ones.
(Re rail lines — if you build power lines over existing rail lines you could also electrify the rail route at the same time, and get rid of the diesel locomotives).
By grues-dinner 2025-10-1513:11 To be fair to the National Grid there - a 400kV power line is substantial: it has to have phase separations and be buried deep enough, plus space for reactive compensation from being buried.
Roads also go to places with buildings and have junctions, plumbing, foundations and are generally hard to dig past. But there are places where they do follow motorways: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:M6_motorway,_northbo... (also canals).
Rail lines go though towns by design, and as you see from comments even here, the one thing people really hate the thought of is power lines near houses.
By ripley12 2025-10-1513:27 120m would be an absolutely insane width for a trench. It seems more likely that you’ve misinterpreted that.
By VoodooJuJu 2025-10-1511:51 [dead]
By lozenge 2025-10-1512:34 It all links back to preventing renewable energy and maintaining our dependence on fossil fuel imports from autocratic nations and "big enough to lobby" O&G industry. The locals and their dislike of power lines are just convenient pawns.
By Oarch 2025-10-1511:43 Bit of context, the gov announced a series of "anti-blocker" amendments to the planning bill last night, which is theoretically designed to address issues on large infrastructure schemes like this.
By lumost 2025-10-1512:53 I do wonder how much nymbyism is influenced by most individuals carrying 5-10 years earnings in their home. Such a potential liability might make one awfully concerned about liabilities.
By justincormack 2025-10-1512:411 reply The Green Party around there picked up a lot of ex Conservative votes and oppose the nuclear plant at Sizewell and pylons for renewables. Its a weird alliance.
By port11 2025-10-1519:03 Eh, it explains their performance EU-wide: combine the worst of both worlds.
I've mostly voted Green all my life but for the last 5 or so years I remain satisfied at their losses, as they're somehow unable to understand why people are moving away.
(My comment's a little bitter, but I do hope they figure this one out.)
I wonder if paying the boring company to make a tunnel for the cables would be cost effective and avoid complaints. I believe that they can bore tunnels without digging along the path on the surface.
By grues-dinner 2025-10-1513:52 Horizontal drilling is already part of the plan in many places - Elon Musk isn't the first person to think of it. It still costs loads to do it per mile - by the looks of it you'd have six bores with three cables each (or one or two much larger bores). And a deep, concrete-sheathed cable is a huge pain to maintain compared to cables around 1-3m underground.
Which is not to say they don't use TBMs - they do, but it costs a lot - this is a 200+ million project to put 3km of cables underground: https://www.nationalgrid.com/media-centre/press-releases/tun...
By jansper39 2025-10-1513:10 I live close to the route that this will be built and regularly get cheap/free energy from my energy provider, partially because I live close to the wind generation in question.
People in the area will have to deal with the construction of new power lines for years, then live with having to look at them after that - at the cost of more expensive energy for the benefit of those not in the area.
I'm not hugely opposed but I can see why people would be. Equally while I know burying the lines is likely more costly and damaging, the public doesn't appear to have even been consulted with different options. It seems the only option on the table is to accept the plan as it is.
By boringg 2025-10-1513:02 Wait Green Party MP - that has to be the height of idiocracy.
By pancakemouse 2025-10-1513:08 > And you'd better believe wherever they buried the lines they'd have objections and expensive consultations about the disruption and the HoUsE VaLuEs caused by trenching, drilling and service structures.
But those are temporary disruptions. Overground lines are permanent.
The reason utilities and the Grid prefers overground is: it's cheaper. It's not better. It's cheaper.
Don't blame NIMBYs for that.
I wonder how practical it would be to build a system that would let home appliances cheaply overuse energy when there is a peak in wind or solar production. For example:
* Let heat-pumps heat homes to say 23C instead of 20C
* Let freezers decrease the temperature to say -30C instead of -18C
* Let electric water heaters heat water to say 70C instead of 50C, such water can then be mixed with more cold water
Such overuse would then reduce energy consumption when the production peak is over (heat pumps could stop working for some time until the temperature decreases from 23 to 20, etc.)
By radu_floricica 2025-10-1511:062 reply You don't "build" such a system. You change the metering to follow supply, and everything else will follow naturally.
You'll have enthusiasts that'll do homebrew systems to take advantage of the economy, then you'll have companies catering to their (tbh, hobby), then you'll have products that are actually useful, then you'll see mass adoption. Like in everything else.
Trying to plan a huge strategy from the onset feels (and is!) daunting. Just make sure the price fits the reality, and savings will follow naturally.
> You change the metering to follow supply, and everything else will follow naturally.
Tell me your wonderland where this has happened . . .
There are whole countries with wireless meters. There must be papers showing how much effect it has on consumer consumption? Ignore one-off examples, I'm interested in population level effects and statistics.
There's a program called Hilo [1] in Québec where it's using the Hydro-Québec Rate Flex D [2] to automatically stop the heating during peak demand.
> With Rate Flex D, you can save quite a bit of money, since most of the time in winter, you’ll be charged less than the base rate, except during occasional peak demand events, when you’ll be charged more than the base rate.
[1] https://www.hiloenergie.com/en-ca/ [2] https://www.hydroquebec.com/residential/customer-space/rates...
By robocat 2025-10-1512:54 "Ripple control" is vintage technology - hourly usage meters are not necessary.
Everyone imagines that consumers would change their behaviour if they were given price information. In my experience, I've yet to see any good data showing that on average consumers save electricity due to smart meters.
In New Zealand, I think the power companies design their consumer products to be unhelpful (what's the equivalent term here for dark patterns in marketing?). I believe few consumers watch their instant usage or review their hourly usage. Personally I changed away from a plan that used spot prices (after seeing the debacle from snow in Texas, and realising the rewards were low and that judging/managing the risks was hard).
By fooker 2025-10-1515:24 > Tell me your wonderland where this has happened
Plenty of grids had started paying consumers for excess solar generation exactly in this manner.
By AstralStorm 2025-10-1511:112 reply Yeah right. Because building a freezer that goes to -30 C is as cheap as going to -18 C. It's much beefier hardware with a lot more insulation.
Likewise a heat pump can only boost so much.
This, like other environment related changes never happen by market forces. Not once. And small tweaks even on large scale produce small effects, insufficient for our needs.
By shawabawa3 2025-10-1513:15 Most normal home freezers have a way of setting temperature, e.g. mine can go from -16 to -24
So maybe -30 is difficult but it wouldn't be that hard to have the existing temperature range on new models be dynamic based on electricity pricing
By fooker 2025-10-1515:27 > Because building a freezer that goes to -30 C is as cheap as going to -18 C.
For small sizes, yes it is.
But also, capex vs opex. Even if it's twice the cost, you only pay it once.
Already kind of in place. I’m on the Octpus agile tariff that gives different electricity tariffs every 30 minutes - with 24 hour notice if tomorrow’s prices.
Whenever electricity prices go negative I have automations to force-charge my solar batteries from the grid, turn on hot water heaters in my hot water tank (normally heated by gas etc. ).
By cameronh90 2025-10-1511:26 I do similar, but without the batteries.
I just have Home Assistant turn on everything: dehumidifiers, heaters, lights, set the freezer thermostat to -25c.
So far I've earnt about 10p, but the real saving comes from having a little bit of thermal inertia to carry through to when prices are higher.
By ragebol 2025-10-1511:20 To add, so called 'dynamic energy contracts' are getting more and more popular, at least in my native Netherlands. The European day-ahead electricity market switched to 15-minute price blocks this month, to more accurately follow the supply and demand.
The market for power imbalance was already on 15 minute blocks.
I'm using a HomeWizard smart plug [0] to enable my electric boiler to only run during the cheapest hours of the day
By corint 2025-10-1515:11 You might find the crossover for hot water heating is higher than 0p; your boiler is likely only around 70% efficient. So at 6p/therm for gas, you'd break even with resistive electric heating at around the 10p/kWh mark.
You should absolutely re-run these numbers to be sure, but you might find you can use electric heating far more often than you might currently be doing.
By ratherbefuddled 2025-10-1511:122 reply Having just had solar and a battery fitted by Octopus I'm interested - would you mind sharing what you use for automation here please?
Sure, I use Home Assistant running in a little raspberry pie in the lift.
There is an Octopus Integration that exposes current prices (and much else) to HomeAssistant.
There is another Integration that works with my solar panels and another that works with my batteries and can change mode (self use, force charge, force discharge etc.)
So from there it’s really just a question of setting up some if-then automations to turn on smart switches, charge the batteries if prices go negative.
You can also gradually add more nuanced automations like turning on water heaters if the panels are generating more than 1kW and the batteries are over 90% charged.
I’m not a programmer, it’s all fairly easy to do.
By ratherbefuddled 2025-10-161:10 Thank you, that's really useful.
Not op but may I suggest looking at Home Assistant, Octopus Energy Addin and Predbat: https://springfall2008.github.io/batpred/energy-rates/
By ratherbefuddled 2025-10-161:11 Thanks very much.
The only thing you would have to do to make this happen is to change electricity pricing from a fixed rate to a dynamic rate based on actual market conditions, along with a standardized way of accessing current pricing. This would drive consumers to shift their behaviors to take advantage of cheap prices, and smart appliances could access the price feed to make decisions like the ones you mention. Another simple one is washing machines, dryers and dishwasher offering to delay their start time to coincide with the cheapest energy price within X hours.
The issue is that most consumers don't like unpredictable prices. You can make a crude approximation by having 2-3 fixed rates for different times of day, but that leaves a lot of potential on the table
By k33l0r 2025-10-1511:09 Electricity contracts with 1-hour pricing are already pretty popular at least in Finland, even for consumers. I myself have one.
Plus large parts of Europe are currently transitioning to more granular 15-minute pricing: https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/trading/transition-to-15-mi...
You can still get fixed tariff electricity contracts but you'll end up paying a bit extra in return for greater predictability…
By bombcar 2025-10-1511:29 > The issue is that most consumers don't like unpredictable prices.
The key is to not take this away; make it so that those who want predictability can get it (but they end pay more for the privilege) but those who want to try to "game the system" can (and incidentally help with the overproduction problem).
Done well, things like Powerwalls, thermal mass storage, etc could absorb quite a bit of load during peak production times, reducing load at inopportune times.
By littlestymaar 2025-10-1511:192 reply Even if such a system was set up, it would take years before the appliances where all updated to take advantage of it.
And in the meantime it would be very unpopular for people who can't just afford to renew their otherwise fully functional appliances.
By wongarsu 2025-10-1511:33 For your old appliances you still pay the same on average. A fixed price contract isn't cheaper, it just smooths prices into a long-term average. And many of the changes can be done manually. On your old dishwasher or washing machine you decide when they start, and most of them even already have buttons to start with a fixed-time delay. Instead of starting them at the end of day you can just start them when the wind is strong or the sun is shining, or watch the price feed. You even get to feel smart for saving money
I agree on the popularity, but you'd absolutely see an effect even without anyone buying new appliances
By cameronh90 2025-10-1511:341 reply Years isn't that long.
The aim is net zero by 2050, lifespan of a fridge-freezer is about 10 years. Even assuming designing a system and putting it in place took 5 years, that's still enough time to have most appliances on it by 2040.
Given the current energy prices, it probably even makes sense to replace appliances sooner than their normal lifetime. My fridge-freezer is only 5 years old, but if it broke today and cost more than ~£150 to repair, I'd end up saving money by replacing it.
By littlestymaar 2025-10-1512:19 Each year is a significant fraction of a government mandate though.
they are installing now smart meters with sim cards in Greece, and of course everyone started complaining, shaming the gov, claiming corruption, etc...
General population doesn't understand that fixed pricing includes an extra cost which is the risk that the electricity provider has to account for. That risk has a calculable price, which is passed down to the consumers. But because it's baked in the flat rate, nobody complains.
Smart/dynamic pricing actually benefits the consumer.
> Smart/dynamic pricing actually benefits the consumer.
No it doesn't. The customer has low risk appetite and would rather pay a premium for predictability.
By Alex-Programs 2025-10-1512:34 Clearly the consumer should automatically trade futures as a hedge!
By bombcar 2025-10-1511:31 It does, but people are really bad at understanding it.
It's like how there's a substantial portion of the population that counts the best commute time ever as their commute time, and are perpetually late. "How can it take 30 minutes to get to work, one time it was only 15!" - ignoring the reality of traffic, subway delays, etc.
By mynti 2025-10-1510:57 This will probably take a little longer for private use, but the industrial sector is already doing this. Cooling chambers being cooled down further during cheap electricity prices (or sunshine when they have their own solar) or storing heat/"cool" underground
By eigenman 2025-10-1511:10 When I was working with NREL back in 2017, they were thinking about coordinating water heater electricity use with a “smart grid.” Each device attached to the smart grid would measure the electricity spot price and would “store” energy to minimize cost. At the time the goal was to reduce peak load on the grid, but the same ingredients to maximize power use from intermittent power sources.
For example, see https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/82315.pdf
You have to get the energy to the appliances though, and there is the bottleneck.
It does looks like it will make some sort of sense for compute workloads to move around to be at locations near surplus energy generation. As someone else mentioned bitcoin mining (with the benefit of heat generation) could also be used, but if this practice becomes widespread the attachment of bitcoin pricing to what is in effect negative local energy prices may prove to be a structural problem with it.
I really don’t think that that’s the bottleneck. Peak demand is much higher than average demand. There is a lot of leeway in moving around domestic demand
This literally is the bottleneck which wastes the energy and is so stupidly expensive in the case of Britain (and Germany).
The issue is lots of renewable generation far from places where it is used and not enough transmission capability.
This is called curtailment and is really, really bad. Energy providers need to pay the windfarms for the energy that they (the grid operators) fail to transmit to where it is needed, and they have to pay backup generation (usually gas) at the place with the load.
It’s an issue right now because we lack the ability to steer demand. Connect a few million electric cars and heat pumps to the grid and allow the grid operators to talk to them and the issue is much less severe.
No. Steering demand will not work. Unless by steering demand you suggest forcibly moving millions of people to Scotland.
You have an intermittent power source (wind), far removed from where the energy is needed, and you do not have sufficient electric transmission capacity.
Heat pumps or EVs far removed from the source of generation will not do you any good. You need load where the energy is produced or you need more transmission capacity.
The situation GB has is that there is load, and there is enough renewable generation on the grid to meet that load, however they do not have the capability to bring the electricty to where the load is. You can lessen the demand, but the generation would not get less through that. The only benefit of that would be that you wouldn't have to spin up gas plants, but the same amount of wind energy would still be lost.
By shawabawa3 2025-10-1513:24 There are multiple issues, transmission is one, but supply+demand being out of sync is another
E.g peak solar is around 2pm, peak demand is around 7pm
Grid storage (including EVs and smart heat pumps) absolutely help with this second problem
By mschuster91 2025-10-1511:002 reply With flexible rate agreements, that's already possible, and some DIYers already are doing this - the problem is the interfacing. Heat pumps (and central heating systems in general) are notorious for being walled gardens, most freezers run on analog technology (i.e. a bi-metal strip acting as a thermostat).
By 3D30497420 2025-10-1511:04 I'm in the market for a heat-pump based system and I'm 100% worried about lock-in/walled gardens.
Take Google, which should have plenty of money and systems to provide long-term support, is regularly axing older products. (Of course, Google has a history of such actions, but they don't have to EOL products that should have long life-spans. Plenty of company won't really have a choice if they are facing bankruptcy, etc.)
By sl-1 2025-10-1511:13 You are correct. Some devices expose local API's, most have walled garden cloud API's
Before buying a device, it is a good idea to check if there are open source adapters for it for Home Assistant, those usually show if it can be controlled easily and preferably without cloud.
By zyber 2025-10-1510:59 For heatpumps/heating in general - we have a after market-product here that you can install in your old "dumb" central heating system - you connect it between the outside thermometer and your boiler/pump/what have you. It then fiddles with the outside temperature readings as to trick the pump to run harder/easier depending on the electricity price (and thus in extension, towards peak production). I used it in my previous house and it worked well! (no affiliation except as a former customer, but the product in question _I used_ is called ngenic tune [0])
By fulafel 2025-10-1511:25 It's practical enough that this is how it works now in many (most?) parts of Europe at least. Electricity at the wholesale level is priced hourly or quarter-hourly and households often elect to have a correspondingly hourly priced eletricity contract & program their appliances/ev charging/whatnot to follow the price.
See eg https://www.euronews.com/business/2025/02/20/fixed-vs-variab...
By deanc 2025-10-1511:52 We have this system in Finland and whilst I was sceptical at first, it works much better. Electricity prices are published about 24h in advance for 15m intervals (was 60m up until 2 weeks ago). You can therefore time your usage dependent on demand on the grid (which is correlated to production of course).
We've saved 100s of euros annually on our electric bill by limiting sauna, washing machine + dishwasher to low-cost hours. Sometimes it's impossible and it's days at a higher rate - but for a 2 person household it's costing us 15-20e a month (+ additional transmission costs)
By blitzar 2025-10-1513:19 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_teleswitch
> This includes switching between 'peak' and 'off-peak' meter registers as well as controlling the supply to dedicated off-peak loads such as night storage heating
1980's technology, recently switched off, I presume for internet based alternatives. The exact same principle applies, beats batteries as hot water tanks and storage heaters already exist.
By GuB-42 2025-10-1522:53 Smart thermostats and water heaters can to that to some extent. Heat or cool the room a little more and run the water heater when electricity is cheap, so that they don't have to run when it is expensive. Of course, electricity price matches supply and demand.
Other options could be delayed start for large appliances like washing machines and charging electric vehicles. EVs have even been proposed as a distributed battery system to smooth out electricity use.
This is called demand/response: https://www.openadr.org/
A lot of thermostats support it
By didacusc 2025-10-1511:17 Is there a list of supported thermostats? Would be very interested in implementing this ahead of the winter.
By ta1243 2025-10-1511:19 Already works, you tie in your battery storage to lower costs. That already works.
The problem here is
1) the excess power is not near the demand
2) the cost of electricity near the excess power is no lower than where there's no excess
3) nimbys prevent the extra interconnects being built which equalise power availability and power demand
By boringg 2025-10-1513:06 Already have thermostats that move based on signals from the utilities. There were some early pioneers in this stuff over 10 years ago in the bay area. They also aggregated the power to bid it, but I imagine they could aggregate to buy as well.
By sourdoughness 2025-10-1511:05 We have a low-tech version of something like this in South Australia: we pay the wholesale rate for electricity, which updates at 5 minute intervals. During the day when there’s oversupply of wind and solar, the rate is super low or even negative, which we take advantage of to charge an EV (and we’ll be adding a home battery soon).
The power company can integrate with car chargers and battery controllers to control all of this automatically, though we don’t bother - just check the app for the cheapest/greenest times and schedule the car to charge then.
It’s allowed us to switch to an EV without even really noticing any extra power cost for charging it.
By Cthulhu_ 2025-10-1512:16 Personally, homes and freezers should have a consistent temperature; if there's ways to store the excess heat / cold somehow that'd be neat. But for homes, the best ways to store excess energy would be batteries and electric cars, or worst case sink heat into underground storage.
The electric water heaters are a good idea, but you'd need the space for extra storage. There's existing heat exchanger systems with e.g. rooftop / sunlight water heating systems, if excess cheap energy could be used to also heat that storage you'd have something.
By DannyBee 2025-10-1511:31 It would be much more effective to even out things , and trivial (engineering wise) to stop wasting the outputs of all these heat pumps by effective integration. Ie dump heat removed by ac or freezer into hot water heating, etc
I'm always highly amused when people have heated pools next to large outdoor ac units. They could probably dump all the heat from house into it the entire summer and not have a meaningful effect on the temperature
My parents had a off-peak hot water system when I was growing up. The insulated tank would fill and heat up during off-peak hours (i.e. late at night), and merely keep it warm during the rest of the day.
The downside was that once the hot water was gone, we had to wait until the next day for more. The last person to shower occasionally got a cold shower.
On-demand systems win here.
Good water heaters are key. Mine is 200 liters and I've experienced cold water exactly once in three decades: One day 3 guests took hour-long showers each. Normally a family of five will never experience cold water.
The one I'm getting now has two coils, one to quickly heat water at the top half, the second to heat from the bottom - they're never on at the same time. Internal heat around 75 C, mixed to cooler on the way out, and it can keep hot water for 2 weeks if disconnected from power.
By triceratops 2025-10-1517:331 reply > 3 guests took hour-long showers each
WTF showering for one hour? That's a great way to quickly become persona non grata in my house.
By Tor3 2025-10-166:36 Yeah.. I'm more of the "4 minutes" type myself, so I kind of didn't foresee that.
By pjc50 2025-10-1513:40 This is already happening with electric car charging. However, part of the reason this can't apply here is that the UK doesn't have regional pricing. For this to work you'd need to vary people's prices depending on which pylon they're connected to.
By owenversteeg 2025-10-1511:26 A lot of thermostats already do that. Unfortunately these programs are not terribly popular. People see that the temperature is off and complain. Look up people talking about Nest Energy Shift (different but somewhat similar idea), most comments are quite negative.
By sl-1 2025-10-1511:12 I work for a company that does exactly that (for heating systems, especially heat pumps). If anyone is interested: https://www.kapacity.io/
By arichard123 2025-10-1514:44 I'm on the octopus agile tariff that has 30 minute pricing and an API to query it. Prices for tomorrow published at 4pm today. So the pricing bit is sorted. Just need to make the devices understand it now.
By Hikikomori 2025-10-1511:03 You can get price into home assistant and control any kind of device that it supports it, or hack it on your own.
By jcattle 2025-10-1511:35 This is not the issue discussed here. The generated power can not be transmitted to where it is used.
The UK has notoriously long build times for new power lines which heavily contributes to this problem. I think the FT said a new connection for a big user or power supplier often takes ten years, with planning alone now reaching 4.5 years and half of all new connections getting sued, which is insane considering the productivity loss and how it’s a already known problem. Sadly the government seems dar more interested in forcing digital ids.
By petercooper 2025-10-1510:531 reply Tell me about it. I live in a region of the country which has had a very active "no pylons" campaign running for several years now with no resolution in either direction yet. The latest proposal is to bury the lines instead which results in far longer build times, destruction of land, and inconvenience for everyone along the route, and they don't seem to like that idea either.
Same issue in Germany. And people obviously started resisting the buried lines too. They don't want pylons, but digging 2m deep trenches to put cables in is also too much disruption because now you can't plant trees on those corridors, the ground is disturbed, worries about the heat from the cables, electromagnetic fields, property values. Of course those are the same regions that are also strictly against building wind turbines in the area
By 1718627440 2025-10-1512:20 I don't know why we bother. Just don't ship electricity to them.
By ChocolateGod 2025-10-1510:58 The UKs level of bureaucracy makes Brussels look like a breeze.
For any new project it seems we have have years discussing whether we should have a discussion about whether to start a new project.
By raverbashing 2025-10-1510:504 reply NIMBYs dragging things down as usual
They would probably object to battery installation next to the generators as well
By petercooper 2025-10-1510:591 reply They do. A "battery farm" in my area was recently vetoed by the council despite being approved by planning. However, the government has just overridden the council so it's back on.. for now.
I think a big problem with the UK is how many "layers" there are for such a small country and how each layer has its own processes of appeal. So you have to get past the local residents, past the planners, past the local council, past the county council, and past the government (not to mention the local MP, if they decide to get involved!) before anything happens when, historically, a more top down approach would be taken to get things going quickly.
By cameronh90 2025-10-1511:142 reply Also each of those layers have a bunch of sub-layers. Look at any large planning application and you'll find hundreds of pages of consultations with various stakeholders who have no incentive to support it.
The NHS, police, fire service, etc. usually raise objections to everything because, obviously, any development makes their jobs more difficult. It serves little purpose besides fodder for the NIMBYs.
"NHS, police, fire service, etc. usually raise objections to everything"
I've never seen any of those organisations raising objections - I don't think they are even consulted on the planning applications I have seen? Planning applications for housing developments usually have a huge number of objections from nearby residents but the few organisations consulted seem to usually say that they've reviewed the plans and they look sensible.
Edit: I was looking at a local residential planning application hoping it would pass as it would replace some disused farm buildings that are currently a bit of an eyesore.
By cameronh90 2025-10-1511:52 I live in inner London so maybe it's a regional thing, but developments here usually include consultations from more organisations than I knew existed. Here's a recent one from near me: https://anewcentreforlewisham.com/planning/
I forget which of the various huge documents contains the local organisational consultations, but one of them does. The planning application itself (DC/24/137871) contains 340 documents. News quotes, for example, Greenwich council:
> While the scheme would appear as part of a tall building cluster, it risks harming the open character of Blackheath and the setting of heritage assets. The report requests additional winter views to fully assess visibility and potential harm.
(bit of an odd objection considering you can see Canary Wharf from there and there's a heavy traffic road running through the middle of it...)
I'm not suggesting that, for example, things like NHS concerns that there aren't enough local hospital beds or whatever aren't important, but I guess my view is that they shouldn't really be part of an individual planning decision.
By jvvw 2025-10-1511:57 I've definitely seen an NHS comment on a planning application near here along the lines of 'for this number of new houses we need this amount of money to increase GP provision'. I guess it feeds into Section 106 stuff?
By physicsguy 2025-10-1513:31 There are a huge number of statutory consultees who are asked - they don't have to respond. It is an enormous list. Just as an example any and all of these can be statutory consultees depending on site location:
Environment Agency, Natural England, Forestry Commission, Canal and River Trust, Historic England, The Gardens Trust, Health and Safety Executive, Office for Nuclear Regulation, Highways Authority, Parish Councils, Rail Infrastructure Managers, Coal Authority, Sport England, Theatres Trust, Water and sewerage undertakers, Local Planning Authorities, National Parks Authorities, Greater London Authority
A recent battery planning application got objections from the fire service on the grounds that its location might be difficult to reach (narrow lane) if it catches fire. Which is actually a reasonable objection? Fire codes are a thing for a reason.
Not heard of NHS objections and the police can get stuffed as they have very weird ideas about public order and whose responsibility it is.
By arethuza 2025-10-1513:53 One of the other comments noted that a lot of organisations may be asked - but they don't have to respond. I was looking at the actual submitted documents for planning applications...
Mind you - the responses I did see seemed pretty sensible - water & sewers, drainage, roads etc.
By jamessb 2025-10-1511:57 The comments I've seen from police are normally specific suggestions that designs be amended to follow the Secured by Design [1] guidelines, rather than blanket objections to building something.
Yup.
> A solar farm that could have powered “all the households in Witney” has been refused permission by West Oxfordshire District Council. The application, by Ampyr Solar Europe, was for a site at Curbridge, south of Witney. The planning committee focused on the risk of a fire from the proposed battery storage, which they said could contaminate the water supply at a nearby wedding venue.
> Cllr Nick Leverton (Con, Carterton South) said: “Most of you will have seen on the motorway the sight of an electric car burning away… there are too many incidents where it was just a small chance and it becomes a big chance. I’ll remind you of Aberfan in 1966; 144 people died, 116 of them children.” The chair of the meeting, Cllr Michael Brooker (Lab, Witney South), is himself a firefighter and replied “I’ve never been to an EV fire. I’ve been to plenty of ICE vehicle fires.”
> Cllr Andrew Lyon (Lab, Witney Central) said “Water is the stuff of life… what do they do if they wake up in the morning and can’t turn the tap on?” Meanwhile, Cllr Adrian Walsh (Con, Ducklington) said “Month after month as a committee we get bombarded with these solar farm applications, and we don’t appear to have any strategy as to where they should be located.”
> The council’s officers had recommended that the application be approved, but 9 councillors voted against, 1 for, and 3 abstained.
These people are absolute buffoons.
>>West Oxfordshire District Council
Are these the same people who refused to let Clarkson open a pub because - and I quote - "it would be too popular"?
By yrro 2025-10-1716:29 No, that was allegedly Cotswold District Council, who refute Clarkeson's portrayal of events:
> A spokesperson for Cotswold District Council said: "We absolutely refute that any of the officers or councillors involved in working with Jeremy to realise his vision for the Coach and Horses had 'absolutely nothing positive to say' or were awkward."
> They added: "There were in fact several positive meetings between Jeremy and his team, and willing officers and councillors at Cotswold District Council.
> "These discussions explored how challenges to renovating this pub could be overcome, as part of the pre-application stage of this project. A planning application was never submitted.
> "Upon deciding not to pursue purchase of the pub, Jeremy sent an email via his planning agent thanking the council for being 'so open and supportive', and for trying to find solutions to some of the hurdles needed to overcome renovation of the pub. He stated that 'the march of time and the feasibility of getting this done within a window that works for television' had been the project's undoing."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp3ql38yk11o
Clarkeson is an entertainer whose goal is to tell a compelling story; often one that bears little resemblance to the truth.
By formerly_proven 2025-10-1511:06 It of course makes sense when you consider that statistically NIMBYs are mostly the property-owning class, which are mostly boomers.
By actionfromafar 2025-10-1510:561 reply Everyone knows battery installations radiate 5G vaccines. Subscribe to my Kennedy-adjacent newsletter.
By mchr3k 2025-10-1512:51 The UK government are trying to address this known issue through the Planning and Infrastructure Bill. You can find some info on this here - https://open.substack.com/pub/samdumitriu/p/the-planning-and...
By gambiting 2025-10-1512:32 Tbf the government just passed anti-blocking legislation that is meant to address exactly this - for national infrastructure projects you won't be able to sue the government over it directly anymore. Whether that's good or bad.....time will tell.
