Business · Energy
A small country bets its grid on the wind, and the wind holds
Four winters in, the lights have not gone out once. The engineers are relieved. The economists are still arguing about who pays for the calm days.
Four winters in, the lights have not gone out once. The engineers are relieved. The economists are still arguing about who pays for the calm days.
The control room in Esbjerg has a wall of screens and, on the day we visited, a chart that ought to be impossible: seventy-one per cent of the national grid, running on weather.
The problem was never the wind
Turbines are the easy part, and have been for a decade. The hard part is the fifteen days a year when the North Sea goes still, and the grid needs a plan that does not begin with the word “hopefully”.
The plan, in the end, was interconnectors, a great deal of Norwegian water held behind a dam, and a market that pays generously for the boredom of being available.
The bill for the calm days
That last item is what the argument is about. Capacity payments are a subsidy to plants that mostly do not run, and every year somebody proposes cutting them. Every year the operators explain, patiently, what happens the first winter after they do.
What the neighbours are copying
Three countries have now written the same market design into law, and none of them have the dam.