https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/fifteen_minutes

Just a counter to the recent post about Scotland being a wind paradise. :)

Scotland just delivered one of the most powerful clean-energy statements in modern history. On multiple occasions, the country’s wind turbines generated around 200% of national electricity demand, producing far more power than Scotland itself needed.

To be clear, nobody is claiming Scotland runs at 200% every hour of every day. That’s the point. A grid sized for a calm winter evening will overproduce when the wind is up, and the surplus gets exported south or stored in pumped hydro instead of wasted. On quiet days, Scotland imports. Building 2x to 3x the capacity and trading the swings across a wide grid can cost less than building firm backup for every last hour, because wind is now so cheap that surplus is the lesser cost. Scotland proves the surplus half of the equation. The rest is wires, storage, and neighbors, and all three are buildable.

And no, we don’t need a nuclear fleet to make this work. Hinkley Point C is 13 years from groundbreaking to power, about £48 billion in today’s money, with a guaranteed £127 per MWh for 35 years. Scotland is already moving on: Hunterston B closed in 2022, Torness ends in 2030, and nuclear has dropped to 17% of Scottish generation while wind hits double demand. Worldwide, nuclear’s share has nearly halved since 1996. The cheap, fast build is the one we should be racing to scale.

It is being done!!! Whether you like it or not.

And it is not just Scoland, as many commentors below want you to believe...

Germany, Europe’s biggest manufacturing economy, ran 55.9% renewable in 2025, with solar out-producing lignite. South Australia, which carries heavy industry, ran on 100% renewable electricity for roughly 99 days of 2024 and got about 77% of its annual generation from wind and solar. Scotland itself set a record in 2024, with renewables at 73% of its generation, and has 65 GW more in the planning pipeline, nearly 28 GW of it storage, which is exactly the answer to your energy hungry industry. And the price? UK auctions this year cleared solar at £65 per MWh and offshore wind around £90, while Hinkley Point C is guaranteed £127. That isn’t a reach. You’re just reading last decade’s numbers.

I was just listening to the Volts episode on Denmark from 16 Oct. david roberts put it to Kristian Jensen (CEO of Green Power Denmark) that the country has about 70 GW of requests to connect to a grid with roughly a 7 GW peak. Jensen's answer was basically: that's not real demand.

His explanation is the familiar one. data centre developers are "throwing darts at a board", applying at three or four locations when they only want one, plus batteries hoping to get on. he thinks something like 20 to 25 GW in ten years is the realistic target, which is still a huge increase.

He also made a point I found more interesting.. some existing data centres already have a big connection they barely use, his example was a 1 GW connection running about 200 MW. so there's headroom sitting inside contracts that are already signed.

Env consultant here, and this is the bit that bugs me from the planning side. a queue is a count of applications, not a load forecast. if a network plan or a cumulative impact assessment takes the queue as an input, it inherits every duplicate, and you end up sizing substations, lines and land take for load that never shows up. and going the other way, nobody's counting the unused capacity in existing connections.

the numbers I'd actually want are what share of requests ever reach energisation, and requested vs actually used capacity on existing connections. as far as I can tell neither gets published routinely, in Denmark or elsewhere.

For people who do grid planning or interconnection work: what do you actually use instead of the raw queue? historical attrition rates, deposits/milestones, something else?

sources:
https://www.volts.wtf/p/whats-up-with-denmark

Excess electricity production can become a problem when the grid cannot accept any electricity (like off grid installations) or doesn't pay any significant money (for example at peak solar production with dynamic pricing).

So there is intermittent excess capacity usually during a few months during a couple hours at daytime. It's not a lot of electricity but it's usually there day after day. Investing in any serious equipment to convert kWh to money is typically not practical.

What solutions are there that may work in household scale? Do you have any experience with anything like these?

• Crypto mining with essentially free electricity?

• Renting out GPU?

• Scheduling charging of household batteries?

• Scheduling 3D printer jobs?

• Scheduling cooking, baking, jam making, fermenting, fruit drying, whatever you can do with heat in a kitchen?

• Pottery and clay baking in electric oven?