On 10 January, the Western Link HVDC suffered a fresh unplanned outage. This consequently prompted Ofgem to investigate National Grid Electricity Transmission and Scottish Power Transmission over the cable’s delivery and operation. Coinciding with this outage was record-high levels of wind generation in Great Britain. This generation from transmission connected wind topped 6.3TWh.
However, 2.2GW of the Western Link HVDC capacity is unavailable. As a result, to protect system integration, National Grid constrained significant volumes of wind output.
This Chart of the week discusses the relationship between the link availability and the behaviour of wind in the Balancing Mechanism.