Someone shared their new website on here earlier (for some reason I can't find that thread - if someone has it, please post a link here). The site itself is https://www.windtable.co.uk/, and if you go to the map tab, you can get a picture of curtailment at different wind farms. No surprises that the most curtailment happens in wind-rich, connection-to-the-rest-of-us-poor Scotland. The UK is currently spending around £1 billion annually on curtailment.
Journalists tasked with undermining the energy transition will obviously write about people's 'fury' at this necessary support for the fledgling wind sector, and of course, none of us would want it to be necessary. The site above shows that one of Scotland's largest offshore farms - Seagreen - has an eye-watering curtailment % of 64%. This is a gigawatt scale project that should be delivering around 35-40% of that annually. Instead, it's just 16%. The amount of gas we have to burn because there isn't the circuitry or storage to use those electrons is quite significant.
We all know that the grid has to change. This image from https://www.offshorewindscotland.org.uk/ shows detail about those changes. In particular, the 4 Eastern Green Link Scotland/England interconnectors will hugely improve the bottlenecks for current and future projects. The first two of these (EGL2 and EGL1) are either under construction or about to get underway - both expected to be live in 2029. EGL2 costs around £4 billion alone. Not ideal that we didn't start these sooner, but hopefully we'll see a big improvement before the end of the decade.
