By Leeza Clark
Did Wind Turbines Kill Longannet?
Fife Conservatives have argued that may have been the case.
“In the lead up to the sad announcement that Longannet power station is to
close, much has been made of high transmission charges,” said Conservative
group leader on Fife Council, Dave Dempsey.
While these arise from Longannet’s location, far from the biggest centres
of demand down south, the Fife Conservatives are asking whether Scotland’s
large excess of theoretical generating capacity, much of it from wind
turbines, was a contributory factor.
Longannet has a massive bill to connect to the National Grid – its location
greatly disadvantages the station against others in the south of England,
due to the current trans- mission charging regime.
This means the Fife plant faces a transmission penalty of £40 million per
year, solely because of its location.
Mr Dempsey said: “The process for calculating these charges is fiendishly
complicated, but a number of things are clear.
“It costs money to generate electricity far from where it’ll be consumed.
“There’s the transmission infrastructure to maintain, power is lost during
transmission, the loss increases with distance, transmitting large amounts
requires high capacity all the way along the network, with no bottlenecks.
“The charging regime is based on times of highest demand.
“It looks at all the capacity and assumes that demand is met by every
generator operating at the same fraction of its peak.
“So, if overall there was 10% spare, each generator would be assumed to
running at 90%.
“It then works out the flows along the network and charges each generator
according to how far its electricity had to travel.
“In this theoretical situation, Scotland would be generating roughly twice
the power it needs so its electricity would need to travel the long
distances south.
“If all of Scotland’s electricity came from a string of Longannets, we
would probably accept that we had too many and that some ought to be closed
down.
“However, it’s not like that,” he said.
Mr Dempsey argued that a large part of Scotland’s generating capacity came
from wind turbines which “produce power sometimes”.
“That’s why we need other capacity – to make up the gap when the wind stops.
“So it would seem that the proliferation of turbines has served to rack up
the charges. We have an oversupply of an unreliable technology.
“Ironically, it looks as if Longannet’s demise may reduce the charges for
other Scottish sites.”
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