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Re:GB National Grid Status by tialaramex on Friday December 09, 2022 @03:54PM (#33926358)
Loads of on-shore wind is likewise not metered. If you own a hill top farm, especially if you have industrial electricity loads (e.g. milking cows, lighting barns full of hens) it makes loads of sense to buy a modest turbine and install it on a suitable rise, it won't pay for itself over night but it's very competitive with other farm investments and not correlated. If electricity prices go up the turbine is better value, regardless of whether people are paying higher farm gate prices or your yields increased.

I think the estimate is that maybe as much as 5GW of UK wind nameplate capacity is unmetered, so it's a minority of wind power, but it's a big minority.

Re:GB National Grid Status by Panzer04 on Friday December 09, 2022 @04:01PM (#33926424)
That seems very large - I can’t imagine plain farm owners could reach that kind of wind capacity, are you sure that’s accurate?
Re:GB National Grid Status by tialaramex on Saturday December 10, 2022 @05:58AM (#33931590)
No, I'm not sure it's accurate because it's guessed by looking at suppressed demand.

There's no central register of unmetered power generation, the assumption used is that if on a windy day mysteriously we're buying 25GW from the grid across the country, while on a similar but calm day it was 30GW that suggests 5GW of electricity is not being purchased when it's windy, implying 5GW of unmetered electricity supply from wind.

And there are presumably other embedded systems making up some of that 5GW estimate. Farms just seem obvious because 1) I've seen farms with wind turbines 2) They're industrial scale electricity users, often occupying terrain very suitable for a wind turbine