Eclipse risks national grids

Loose? Loose? What are you talking about?

Reply to
Tim Streater
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Never gets dark in Germany? No clouds?

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

So 38 GW x 24 x 365 = ~332 TWh of capacity...

and about a tenth of the installed capacity... which shows how pointless it is talking about "installed PV capacity".

Reply to
John Rumm

Drivel. Wouldn't be worth it.

My solar PV did not shut down. Power output was down about 75% of what might be expected at max covered solar disc. Energy lost maybe one Kwh on 4 Kw array. So 16 Kwh today rather than 17Kwh

Probably all to do with diffuse light.

Reply to
harryagain

Perfect visibilty in W Midlands.

Reply to
harryagain

oh come on. Its gets dark every night

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

about 60.

so, it will get even lower

add clouds to an eclipse and you get nothing. You've often said that clouds don't matter.

Reply to
charles

Unlikely.

Reply to
john james

No it is not, the band of total eclipse sweeps across europe.

Reply to
john james

If you are in a supersonic jet flying along the eclipse track. At a stationary point on the Earth the total eclipse lasts about 2 minutes.

BBC plan to extend their eclipse by flying with the track but their plane is nowhere near fast enough. ISTR way back the Concorde was fast enough that it could make a decent fist of it. Three flew along the eclipse track in 1999 but didn't give passengers a good view.

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They did a lot better than the folk on the ground in Cornwall.

Or the original experiment in 1973 that inspired the later public eclipse ride offerings (which were hampered by the tiny windows).

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But it would never have been anything like peak summer output which is what the shock horror panic story was comparing it with plus about 50% of additional capacity apparently "installed" in the last 9 months.

Clouds or the eclipse in Germany will have about the same effect.

Reply to
Martin Brown

AIUI a CCGT is a gas turbine, with the exhaust heating a steam boiler.

It takes time to get the boiler hot, and during that time the efficiency is down.

Andy

Reply to
Vir Campestris

In article ,

There were lots of complaints from people on the Concord flights. Most of them didn't think they got as good a view as they were expecting, due to lack of space to all look out of the windows, or be able to see in the right direction.

I was on Alderney for that one (where there was totality). It was overcast, but somehow, it managed to clear around the sun about 15 mins before we started heading into totality. It was more stunning than I had imagined. A strange patterm was cast across those clouds which remained in much of the rest of the sky, something which apparently hadn't been seen before. We were on Fort Albert which had no services of any type, except you could see a couple of telephone wires had been run along the ground all the way to the top of the fort, where they terminated on IDSN sockets screwed to a wooden stake hammered into the ground. I later saw that Patrick Moore was seated there with a crew, doing the BBC's live reporting during the eclipse.

Reply to
Andrew Gabriel

Mid-morning, not early morning.

Reply to
Tim Streater

I went to France. Trying to see it with 10,000,000 other klods in Cornwall seemed like a completely dopey idea to me.

Reply to
Tim Streater

Totality is up the Atlantic across the Faroes and on to Salavard IIRC. I don't think totality touches mainland Europe at all.

Mean while there will be a partial elcipse visible from most fo Europe. Here will get about 95% of the Sun obscured at maximum, it will get fairly dark, I think about as dark as it gets an hour after sunset.

The partial eclipse here 11 August 1999 was about 85% and the affects very noticeable:

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You wouldn't have noticed 29 March 2006:

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Glorious morning today, projection system tested and functional so like the Aurora the other night it'll be cloudy tommorow morning. I wonder what the timelapse Raspberry Pi will make of it? Sods Law means it will crash, despite running for weeks on end normally... It also doesn't store "dark" frames, it considers "dark" to be the light level at about 1830 to 1900. hum, perhaps I ought to turn that off.

Reply to
Dave Liquorice

The umbra (totality) is small but the penumbra isn't.

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Most of Europe will see 60% obscuration or greater and more or less at the same time. We are due about 95% maximum.

Reply to
Dave Liquorice

Which isn't any worse than heavy cloud for most of europe.

And nowhere near as bad as at night, which the grid has to handle every single night.

Here will get about 95% of the Sun obscured at maximum, it

Which the grid handles very effectively twice every day.

Reply to
john james

Quite so. It boils down to the time it takes to get them up to full power compared with the drop-off in renewable supply, and the loss of efficiency in the interim period while the boilers get up to temperature. I don't have a feel for those numbers or whether they're significant in the grand scheme of things. I imagine that a lot of the time the drop-off in solar can be predicted reasonably in advance (we know at what time the sun sets, for example, and within reason when a weather front is due), but short-term variation due to variable cloud cover would be almost impossible to compensate for. Tidal would be similarly predictable, but wind and wave power? I don't know. More difficult, I guess.

Reply to
Chris Hogg

The predict5ability doesn't help. In the end the energy poured into a steam plant to get it hot and up to pressure is simp0ly lost every time you turn it off again.

Predictability of tidal and solar is another green herring...

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

I find that hard to believe, personally. Brian

Reply to
Brian Gaff

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