All the windmills in the UK are not supplying enough electricity to charge one I phone in every house in the country

[The Other Mike]

Surprised it's that high, what's the lowest (valid) system demand you've seen sinch gridwatch started?

[Tim Streater]

So you have to pay twice, then.

[The Natural Philosopher]

morecambe bays not that high a tide

[The Natural Philosopher]

about 22GW I think. Apart from odd gotchas that are obvious failures upstream.

Hmm I have some 900M that have to be errors and a 13 likewise,..but two

18GW.. MIGHT be possible. Hmm. That was very early on in the project - might well be software errors then. There's embedded wind in there as well of course effectively reducing demand so on a breezy day that might be 2-3GW

mysql> select timestamp, demand from day where demand < 21500;

+---------------------+--------+ | timestamp | demand | +---------------------+--------+ | 2011-06-08 09:25:02 | 18928 | | 2011-06-08 09:30:02 | 18949 | | 2011-08-07 04:45:01 | 21448 | | 2011-08-07 04:50:02 | 21377 | | 2011-08-07 04:55:01 | 21379 | | 2011-08-07 05:00:04 | 21386 | | 2011-08-07 05:05:03 | 21376 | | 2011-08-07 05:10:02 | 21410 | | 2012-04-20 10:20:01 | 984 | | 2012-04-20 10:25:16 | 969 | | 2012-04-20 10:30:02 | 969 | | 2012-04-20 10:35:36 | 969 | | 2012-04-20 10:40:02 | 969 | | 2012-04-20 10:45:11 | 969 | | 2012-04-20 10:50:01 | 951 | | 2012-04-20 10:55:01 | 895 | | 2012-05-15 04:20:02 | 13003 | | 2012-05-31 05:15:09 | 9766 | +---------------------+--------+

The 21s look right tho. August holidays low work, low power. Xmas day is always 5-10GW less than days nearby,.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Staggering figure ion the DT today or was it somewhere else - that we need to spend £150bn on renewable energy generation to achieve 30% renewable grid and lord knows how much on grid - for that you could build 50 GW of nuclear power and have an all nuclear zero carbon country with shitloads left to export as well, and not need any more pylons

[The Other Mike]

Rather than a random lump of rock choose a lump of a heavy element like uranium...

[Jethro_uk]

Maybe people should investigate ways of using renewables which don't involve converting the energy to electricity ? Couple of ideas would be to drive pumps to lift water up to storage tanks (as suggested below - assuming the water companies currently do this using pumps not gravity). Or to pump up the high pressure gas grid, which is currently done by a bank of RB211s which consume more gas than Liverpool.

Or drive machinery for milling flour .....

[charles]

if you don't convert the energy to electrcity, you need the renewable source at the point of use. I suupose I could use a small windmill to power my coffee grinder. ;-)

[The Natural Philosopher]

depend on how long you are prepared to store the ground coffee..

[Weatherlawyer]

Just exactly how many mobiles in use would need recharging at:

01:36:31 on Tuesday, 26 June 2012?

[The Other Mike]

If we all used phones from 10 year ago about 15%

For a modern and 'improved' smartphone. 100%

[The Natural Philosopher]

whoosh...

[newshound]

That sounds like rather a fine DIY project. For that matter you could have a set of shafts and pulleys across the ceiling like a good old fashioned factory, to drive the food mixer, tin opener, fridge....

I used to have an extremely manic and energetic collie cross, it was always one of my fantasies to build a sort of giant hampster wheel in the back garden to try to wear it out.

:-)

[tony sayer]

Theres some 0f they just past Duxford airfield going south towards Ickleton. Wouldn't believe they are there. They have an anti phase sound cancelling system suppose they borrow some Gas as from the pipelines!...

[tony sayer]

If you get a reasonable excuse to go to the science museum at all grandchildren on a day out etc. Go down to the basement and there prolly still is there a demo of the energy to light a 20 or 30 watt light bulb by turning a crank handle.

Unless your very fit you won't be doing it that long its an excellent demo of what power is all about;!...

[Dave Liquorice]

Then wander over to the Ofcom site and count how many cell sites there are. Then consider the number of UPS's and gensets that would be required to maintain the mobile networks. The capital and on going costs of all that kit to the commercial operators. It just ain't going to happen for the public networks. Airwave may well be different.

[Jethro_uk]

I was trying to be ironic :(

The more nukes the better as far as I am concerned. Bring them on. And why not look at Thorium too - if we're not interesting in making bombs.

[Jethro_uk]

Which makes it all the more amazing that a human brain can use about 20W all on it's own ....

[Jethro_uk]

Yes, they're powered by inline gas so can run (in theory) till the gas runs out. Last I knew there were 14 compressor stations across the UK, usually with 2 engines. Designed to pack the grid to 75bar. You could buy the gas after 6pm (when it was cheapest) and pressurised the grid to run during the day. There was quite a bit of software involved in matching demand, supply, and contract data, to deliver the most cost-efficient spread of gas purchasing possible.

Apparently, at 75bar, the gas can throw a flame 400m !

[tony sayer]

Dave, check you mail later you'll see a pix of a small 3G base station the enclosed batts will keep it going for a day or so. This is a small roadside one.