Could you talk a bit about your work on renewables and the UK power grid?

I’m a Senior Power Systems Engineer. I work with energy developers seeking to build solar generators or wind farms, especially in the UK. I do a lot of digital modelling, looking at different situations, and seeing what would happen in various scenarios. My main job involves enabling companies who are developing renewable energy plants to maximise efficiency in generating and transmitting energy to customers.

The power grid is a very dynamic system, yet the UK’s capacity for new renewable energy connections is quite low. You can think of the power grid like a series of pipes that the power flows through like water. The thing is, at every single moment, the demand must exactly match the generation, because there is minimal storage. Whereas the plumbing system stores water as well as transports it, the power system does not. So, every single moment, generators are responding to changes in demand. These are easier to predict over an aggregate country, and much harder to predict over a household, because the generator is completely blind as to whether or not you turn on your lights at any given moment. But it can look at the average time people turn on their lights, and react according to that prediction.
In most countries, we distinguish between transmission and distribution. Generally, it’s based on voltage. Think of high voltage power lines, long distances, a lot of energy – that’s transmission. Distribution is getting energy from the transmission grid to your house. In some countries the distribution operator also sells the energy to households. Whereas in other countries that task is performed by independent companies. Which is why, for example, in Ireland, you can buy your energy from whichever company, but it’s coming from the same lines.

We have this challenge that’s been growing in recent years, with very aggressive renewable energy targets that have been set in most of Europe. You end up facing a really big challenge, which is demand response matching: this gets harder when you add distance and variability. What I mean by that is you can put a natural gas power plant in the centre of London, and it can serve London immediately. You have an adjustable knob on it and you can say exactly how much power you want to output at any second to match the demand in London. Whereas when you want to serve London via wind or via solar, you lose two critical things. First, you lose this adjustable knob, because you don’t control when the sun is out and you don’t control when the wind is blowing, and that might not line up with when people are using power. You also lose the choice of location, so now you might have to transmit over a long distance. There aren’t giant wind farms and there aren’t giant solar farms in the centre of London. There are a few rooftop ones, but they are not serving the vast majority of the demand.

We might see, for example, that there are wind farms in Scotland, and their power is being sent down to England. Now, when you’re sending it over long distances, suddenly it matters a lot that you don’t have enough capacity on your lines. If you think of them as pipes, they can’t hold any more water, and you can’t transmit any more power on that line. So your options are to build new lines, to build closer power plants, or use that old natural gas plant that we already have in the centre of London.

The general public are very resistant to new power lines. What ends up happening is that a lot of those windfarms in Scotland, when there isn’t enough room on the power lines, end up getting shut off: because there simply isn’t enough space on the lines to take that power where it needs to go. So even though there is loads of excess energy, it’s not where the customers are, and it’s not when the customers need it. This is a huge problem that has fundamentally shifted the power grid infrastructure in the last ten-twenty years.

If you are a wind or solar developer, and you get shut off, you’re usually not gonna get paid for energy that does not get sold to a customer. This is what we call curtailment, and it’s pretty massive. And the visibility on that, for renewable energy developers, is pretty low. So one of the things that I often look at is strategic placement of new generators to avoid as much curtailment as possible. I simulate the grid under different conditions to estimate how much they would get curtailed, and then they can make their business decisions off of that.

Day-to-day, what does your job involve?

We get a lot of very varied inquiries from developers, asking can I do this, can I do that. And we don’t always have a set up for that process. So I do a lot of the key development of the new processes. Whereas some of my fellow engineers would be running studies and simulations – I do a lot of work to automate the steps of those studies. So I have to do a lot of research, and a lot of data exploration and manipulation. Most of what we do is based on publicly available data. The UK publishes almost all of their power grid data (some countries publish nothing), so there’s a huge amount of data out there, and I spend a lot of time working with it. That means some excel use, but mainly I do python automation.¹

I develop python scripts that run these power system studies, with interfaces designed for an experienced engineer to utilise. The scripts include data interpretation to bring together disparate data sources and set up a model to simulate power flow. Then, after running the simulations, they clean up the results and process them into digestible reports and charts that our customers can understand, since most of our customers are not engineers themselves, but sales teams and decision makers for developers.

I work in the office three days a week, and then from home for two. That’s kind of the standard. And that’s what I wanted, because my previous job was fully remote, and I was a bit miserable. I am around co-workers a lot, although it’s not super collaborative. There are moments of collaboration, and all of our code gets reviewed by each other. It’s a very small company, so it’s very tight-knit, and we do an impressive amount for the size of our company. We run 150-ish reports a year for renewable developers in the UK.

What other factors do you have to consider in setting up something like a solar plant?

We consider a lot of things. Something that’s quite UK-specific is the ‘queue’. Under previous UK law - this has recently changed but we’re still dealing with the relics of it - you could submit a speculative application to connect to the grid even if you had no intention of building a power plant. Even if you didn’t have planning permission, you could just submit as many speculative applications as you wanted. What that resulted in is what we call the ‘queue’ – a ranked list, first-come-first-serve.

So, if you applied ten years ago to build a 100 megawatt solar farm in England, then you are high on the list, and we would have to consider everyone after you as being curtailed, because you won’t be, right? So if there wasn’t enough room on the power lines, you would get priority. The problem is that over many years, hundreds (if not thousands) of completely speculative applications for projects that will never be built have clogged up the queue. So now developers are told there is no room, because of people in line ahead of you. Many don’t actually intend to build their projects, or can’t build these. Some are genuine. A lot of the time they will apply for four different projects, with the intention of only building one. They want to see which one has the best finances, the best whatever, before they build it. But those three other projects stay in the queue.

Measures have been introduced to check developers are making steps towards their projects, and to remove projects that aren’t going forward. But there is still a lot of legacy stuff clogging it, and preventing development, because the distribution and transmission operators tell the renewable developers that there’s no room and that they can’t build. But they might actually want to, whereas the people in line ahead of them aren’t going to.

What are the main renewables in the UK and Ireland?

Definitely wind and solar. In the UK, you would see solar more common in England, and wind more common north of England. It’s as simple as that for the most part. In Ireland, it’s more wind. Each country has its own profile, its own characteristics, and its own unique problems. Germany, for example, has a problem very similar to the UK, where they have all their wind power in the north, and high demand for electricity consumption in the south. So you have the same transmission constraint issue.

Solar has its own problem: it turns off really fast. You could have 100 gigawatts of solar producing energy in your country, but the sun sets quite fast. In that time, how do you ramp up? Because demand doesn’t actually fall when the sun goes down. In most situations it goes up, because people are turning on their lights, going home, etc. In California, we call it the ‘duck curve’: a curve that expresses the disparity between when solar goes offline, and when demand is needed.

It’s a huge problem, because if there’s no storage in the system, and generators have to match demand every single millisecond of every day, then what happens is you have to ramp up your fossil fuel generators, or your batteries (if you have batteries, which most places don’t) so fast. Sometimes it goes beyond the physical capability of the generator. This is a huge issue, and causes a lot of power quality issues, instability, and outages.

There are troubles everywhere. Renewables is a quickly changing space. Previously, it was stagnant for so long. Imagine if the national plumbing network suddenly had a different option besides water, and you had to manage that. It’s crazy. It’s a huge shift, but it’s definitely doable. Researchers have proven this time and time again. It’s a matter of prioritisation and government resources. And not just in renewables, but also power lines: which is difficult, because there is huge resistance to them. People want to bury them underground. But that costs ten times as much. And if you’re pulling power lines from Scotland to London, ten times as much is a lot more for 1,000km than it is for 10km. Really, there isn’t an alternative way to move the energy, because London needs power. And you can’t build a giant wind farm, or a solar farm, in London city. There isn’t space for it. You can only build it outside of it. So you still need to get the power in, via whatever line you can manage.

It’s not easy to build new infrastructure. Building overhead lines is so much easier, and faster, but people don’t like them. In my opinion, the Conservative Party sometimes push for lines to be undergrounded, partly because they know that it will drive up the cost of renewable energy, and make it look like a worse idea. They’ll say - look how expensive this renewable transition is. But they’ll also be agitating for underground lines. There’s a way to make this cheaper, but they don’t like it.
With the decline of fossil-fuel plants, there are campaigns around ‘just transition’, keeping current workforces employed in renewable energy. There are tensions around this, transitioning without devastating communities reliant upon existing energy industries.

How do you see these tensions playing out as renewables grow?

I think it is going to be very difficult. Especially because, although the skills are transferable, it’s not the same type of job. Working in an oil refinery you have hundreds, if not thousands, of employees, who are coming to the same place every day. Whereas renewable energy, once constructed, employs remarkably few people. A massive solar farm might employ ten people a year: to come and clean it, to maintain it, to take care of the metres. But the bulk job would be the building. This would be a very different type of work than what workers in these industries are maybe used to, which in most cases would be a stable, one-location job. Instead, you’d be trucking around the country, and having a different job every six months.

So, it’s a huge shift in the worker culture. I don’t know about the union status of it, cause again that’s more like the workers on the ground building, maintaining and operating all that stuff. It’s definitely a challenge, and there needs to be options for people leaving that space, something that should be addressed by governments pushing this transition forwards. These things need to be built, and we need workers to build them. But after they are built, those jobs dry up. There should be greater efforts to work on not just transitioning people from gas to wind, but also out of the industry. Because it will shrink.

There’s a lot of daily maintenance that goes into managing fossil fuel generators, so the employee count is pretty significant. In my opinion, I don’t see the entire thing going away. Oil refineries, for example, also make plastics, they make a lot of the stuff we use in our daily lives. And even if we were to stop burning oil, or coal, or natural gas, we’re not giving up plastics. We’re not making great strides in that direction, currently.

Is there a trade-union that represents workers in your specific workplace or wider sector?

I’m not in one, and I don’t know if there is one that would represent my sector. But, it doesn’t mean I’m not up for it. I think it’s important for long term security. Our company is small now, but it could grow. And if it were to grow, there would be a greater disconnect between the employees and the CEO, who can’t personally know everyone forever if it were to grow. So I feel it would be a long term protection against potential problems, and better to start it now so it’s there when you need it, even if we don’t need that now. As far as the rest of the industry goes, I’m not sure if there is a union. I’ve never looked it up, but I really should! Part of it, I think, is that I’m from the US, and trade-unions aren’t exactly ingrained in our culture. I’ve never been approached by anyone about a trade-union, or offered to join a trade-union. So I don’t know if any place I’ve ever worked has had one.

Considering your current work on the UK power grid, is there anything in particular that marks the industry as standing out more than other countries?

It’s pretty typical, although there’s this massive burden being placed upon Scotland: bearing the brunt of hosting and transmitting power to England. I think that is fascinating given the historical context of the relationship between these countries. A lot of Scottish people might not feel that great about building loads of transmission lines over their land, and lots of wind power on their land, to go sell to England, right? It’s not really surprising that there would be a big resistance there. It is interesting how the natural environment kind of reinforces this historic contention. Wind power exists in Scotland, less so in England, so there is naturally a desire to use it for England. Otherwise, the dynamic of a load-heavy capital city that needs loads of power is not special. Paris is a huge load centre. Almost every country will have a huge load centre that has loads of power lines coming out of it to pull power from elsewhere.

So what we’re seeing is the UK just trying to get power from anywhere. They are building lines anywhere they can, because they need power so bad, and they don’t really have enough. The UK also has this peculiar phenomenon which isn’t present in the rest of Europe. As I mentioned before, the generators and the load have to match at all times. And at 5pm sharp there’s a huge spike in demand across the UK and Ireland that is really hard for generators to match. This is from people switching on their kettles.

Interestingly, Northern Ireland is completely run by the Irish operator. It’s not really connected to or run by the UK at all. It’s not in any of the UK datasets. It’s completely left out. There are two or three HVDC (High Voltage Direct Current) links that connect Ireland to the UK. You could think of these as power without a frequency. So it’s not a wave, it’s a line. That means the grids aren’t synchronised together. It’s just a one-way flow of power. Those links connect the countries and, unsurprisingly, Ireland does a lot of power exporting to the UK.

During my masters, I modelled the European power grid as a whole, in high resolution. It was an intersectional kind of study, with law and international relations. I looked at the way renewable energy and grid efficiency can be improved by international cooperation - managing the grid together, rather than managing it as individual countries, which is predominately how it is currently managed. Efficiency is dramatically improved. The carbon emissions that are expected from an internationally managed grid are also far lower than our current system. The less carbon emissions, the less inefficiency. All of it.

This is mainly because of traverse flows. So, renewable solar energy in Spain could help Germany when their supply of wind is low. That is one example of collaboration that could improve the efficiency of the grid. If it currently happens, it’s more or less by coincidence than by intention. The problem is that a lot of countries manage their cross-border flows in ways that can prevent that cooperation. You have countries turning down generators to respect cross-boundary limits. If those were adjusted more as a whole, rather than as a country, efficiency can be improved.

If you look at the open infrastructure map - - you can see a lot of stuff isn’t really cross-border. Lots of power lines are very distinctly broken at borders. You shouldn’t be able to see borders on this map, but you definitely can, showing the way the grid is managed is quite local.

What are the most important things you’ve learned about the structure of the energy industry, and what can we expect in coming years with the growth of renewables?

I think people don’t know how it works, and lack of awareness causes a lot of problems. Especially when its policymakers writing about a system they don’t understand. People in the sector then have to deal with that: whatever kind of nonsense has been put forward. For example, saying we would like to have 100% renewables by 2050. I personally think that’s a great goal, but the practicality of it is a whole different question. The people who actually operate the grid are becoming more and more stressed, because it’s getting harder with renewable energy to run it.

There’s not really any discussion on what flexibility we’re okay with. For example, power outages are seen as an absolute no, for good reason. People have medicines that have to be refrigerated, people have respirators at home in some situations. There’s all kinds of reasons people shouldn’t be losing power. But there isn’t really any discussion on how prepared we are for a real outage. How prepared as a society are we for climate change causing these things to happen? Because if there was a giant power outage, people would blame renewables, not the policymakers who made it nearly impossible for the operators to run the grid.

I’m all for the energy transition. But we do have to discuss what we are willing to sacrifice. Are we willing to deal with a 1-5% lack of power, and with seasonal variability? If the answer is no, then we’re putting ourselves in a pretty tight knot.

Are situations like mass power outages likely to accompany the transition to renewable power?

Absolutely. They already are. If you look at California, the power system is an absolute disaster. One major power company, PG&E, was found to be responsible for wildfires that destroyed cities. And so when the conditions for wildfires were very high, such as high temperatures and high winds, that power company opted to turn off their power for loads of customers. So a huge blackout ensued for extended periods, because that company was like - the risk of wildfires is too high, we’re turning off our power. Then they can’t be held liable for any wildfires that start. That was (understandably) not well received.

California is an incredibly interesting international case study on power grids. Another is the Texas power outage, which occurred during a snowstorm in February 2021. Renewable energy was blamed. Wind turbines shut off during the storms, and people were without power. But that wasn’t because of the wind turbines: that was just a media presentation of what happened. The actual situation goes back to how the Texas power grid is set up. Texas has its own power grid, which avoids federal regulations for grids spanning multiple states. They have their own regulations, which have different standards, which cause their grid to be less stable, and it’s more likely to fail - which it has, and will again.

Climate change is affecting places that are insecure to start with. This is all just giving us a window into the future. We can expect that in ten-to-twenty years time, many places will have devastating outages. I can’t say that with 100% certainty, but this is my perspective. We need to be prepared and understand that partly these things are going to happen if we want to transition. We should be aware of and manage those risks ahead of time rather than acting surprised when they happen.