On Sun, 2 Mar 2008 11:04:23 -0000 someone who may be "Mary Fisher" wrote this:-
it is interesting that those who ask for ever more detailed figures from others are often not too hot on backing up their strongly expressed opinions.
Ah yes, I'd forgotten about that.
Mackies. Yumm :-)
Mary
'Tis always thus for those with no experience.
Mary
"The Mackie family wanted to generate their own electricity from the wind because they see it as a sustainable, free and abundant source of energy.
More innumeracy.
Then again maybe not 100% innumerate, maybe only the marketing.
"Individual capacity: 850 kW Installed capacity: 0.85 MW Annual exported output: 858 MWh "
I wasn't aware that there was a need for further generating capacity in the Scottish Highlands. Nothing to do with collecting subsidies then ?
330 miles in a refrigerated trailer to West Yorkshire where we already have several farms making ice cream out of milk produced in excess of their milk quota." I bet you didn?t know you could get green ice-cream! "
It's not green by the time it gets to West Yorkshire. Whatever happened to buying local produce ?
It would be so typical of green losers to jump in their "large car" and drive to Booths Supermarket in Ilkley or Harrogate to buy it.
It would be melted by the time you got it home on a motor scooter expecially if you had to bugger about with a photo voltaic battery charger before you got it going and when you got home.
DG
1/. Its not the 1930's 2/. The average load factor o IUS nuclear sets was 90%. They don't have conveyor belts..
The average load factor of windfarms is 16%.
These are facts. not 'wouldhavebeens/couldbesf we speent the money etc etc.
I can see how your inability to do maths makes these sort of facts constantly open to challenge, but please accept that for the rest of us, despite all the blatherings about 'cost benefit not being the only issue' for most of us cost benefit rules power station technology, and its easy enough to factor in a CO2 as a cost if thats the way you want it.
Do that, and as I have said time and time again, there is only one answer, And its not windmills.
....
Water power is very predictable and, in the absence of anything better, the poor efficiency had to be accepted.
There seems to be no particular reason to do so. The past 12 months seems to support what the Russians have been saying all along - that solar activity is a far stronger driver of climate change than anything man can come up with. Much reduced solar activity has seen global temperatures drop by at least 0.65C, the biggest recorded change in either direction in a 12 month period, while the ice caps have almost recovered to the point they were before people decided they were shrinking. The problem is that the Russians are also predicting a significant period of global cooling in the near future, which is potentially far more damaging than having global warming continue.
Colin Bignell
He who asserts must prove.
Just show us your working out Dynamo.
DG
That's my point - nobody can prove, just suggest tendency. One of the biggest problems relates to the ethical dimension. Some people just discount it, others don't. Doesn't make either right or wrong because there is no absolute.
Rob
The message from David Hansen contains these words:
That was a really deceitful bit of editing. The full paragraph was:
"And not so long ago two turbines self destructed. The conveyer belt was no doubt quickly repaired. Not so the turbines."
A temporary hole for a few days in contrast to a permanent hole left by the demise of the wind turbines but you are blind to that and would rather no one else thought about it either.
So? Since when has 8% been a large proportion?
I said practical, not impossible, but even those charged with toeing the government line say (Section 3.7):
"It is generally considered that up to 20% wind capacity penetration is possible on a large electricity network without posing any serious technical or practical problems. Indeed, there is no absolute technical limit to UK wind capacity ? instead the issue is an economic one, with higher penetrations leading to increased unit costs."
Which is actually where I got 'practical' from in the first place.
With sufficient back-up 100% cover is possible for some of the time but that would require installed wind turbine capacity 3 or 4 times that required for more reliable generation.
There is also something rather odd about the sd-c's view of European onshore wind energy resources. The map used is of a political rather than a geographical area and the area in question is that of the EU between 1986 and 1995. And also all those big mountain ranges in France, Spain, Germany, Italy and Greece somehow don't seem to get any more wind than their lowland surroundings. How odd.
Yawn. Highlighting your intellectual shortcomings is no abuse however personal you may feel it is.
Kyle of Lochalsh is in the middle of nowhere. Linking it to the national grid was probably a political decision rather than an economic one.
Full of ifs, buts, controversy, etc. not to mention acres of waffle.
When the wind stops, the electricity stops *and* they even have to be 'turned off' in 'high winds' - so an expensive waste of time wouldn't you say?
True, problems will occur that will shut down a single power station - they even close for maintenance and some are even 'mothballed' in the summer months - but the electricity can still be generated from other stations. Remember, when the wind stops, the whole windfarm stops generating *AND* that loss *CANNOT' be replaced by other windfarms from different parts of the country - or even another country.
But there are more o
Agreed, but to get to this reliabilty from windfarms, then you would physically have to have huge windfarms on every exposed place in this country *AND* offshore - and that would still not be enough to power the whole country reliably.
Ignoring this simple fact
Lies, damn lies and statistics that can even make 2 + 2 appear to add up to
5 - and that's what many resort to just to to make an impossible scenario appear possible!Not a foolish statement as the technology stands today - wind is factually incapable of supplying sufficient electrical energy to run both industry and domestic needs 24 hours a day, seven days a week and 52 weeks a year without the help of power stations that are coal/gas/oil or nuclear powered - even taking into consideration hydro-electric power generation.
If that were possible, it is unlikely that this government would noe even be considering building new nuclear stations - let alone drawing up the constructions plans and putting systems (changing the planning laws) into place to legally prevent the tree huggers from being able to voice their objections!
Never mind, the real fact is that 'global warming/cooling" had been taking place for millions of years before life and the 'human' race ever evolved on this planet (and even as humans were evolving) and will continue to do so even if man resorts to living in caves again and eating and clothing himself from whatever he can hunt and kill on that particular hot or cold day.
To stop weather pattern changes is just like the legendary king Canute standing on the seashore and telling the tide to get back - impossible - whatever we insignificant, ignorant. capitalistic and blood-thirsty humans try to do.
Old mother nature wants her revenge on the human race, and she will get her way - either through weather changes or plain and simple hunger (biofuel production will start that off), disease and pestilence!
And *SHE* *WILL* ultimately get her way - as she did with the dinosaurs - no matter what man does! Dig out the old animal skins for clothes, sharpen the wooden spears and learn how to hunt and live without electricity, computers, the corner shop, cars and to keep the old cave warm using animal skins for a door and bits of wood for a fire to cook on - or shiver and eat raw meat! :-)
Am I really making light of the subject - or will it happen? I wonder........ BRG
Where there muck there's brass eh?
But the other 'rub' is that it's *NOT* a constant source of power - even if you cover your small holding with the damn things!
Not "satisfactory" Mary, there are recorded instances of factories using water power having to close in times of drought - and that's why they *ALL* converted to steam-power and then progressed to electricity or simply went bankrupt!
Could you live without the textiles to produce your clothes, the manufacturing systems that are used to produce the bulk of the food you eat and all the medicines you use when you are ill - and that's just the basics - what about life's little luxuries, the ability to sit at your computer and converse with the world at large, or the fridge and the freezer in the corner, or the car that you use to nip out for an evenings socialising - or just to pop out and mechanically milk the odd cow or two? (For the single minded here, I mean cattle and nowt else)! :-)
BRG
I estimated 100,000 turbines minimum, to power the country. Including transport etc. One every 2km in every direction.
Oh actually it IS. its almost impossible for the whole country to be becalmed..but the COST of the excess infrastructure capacity to get that nice force 9 gale in the Orkeys down to a becalmed London..so you can in effect run the WHOLE country off a bit of the island that justs happens to have wind is absurdly uneconomic. Ditto solar power, at night..
If you read the govt paper, its really fairly anti nuclear..it certainly goes no further than 'we see no alternative to SOME nuclear power'. It also completely misses the BEV as a way to reduce fossil fuel consumption. Its not even their radar yet.
More to the point, its why the sailing ship vanished in a generation.
The AVERAGE speeds were only about 16% of their fastest speeds. Just like windmills.
They were unreliable as far as schedules went in the extreme. And massively labour intesnive.
Basically why not go back to camping without the airbed, the matches, the clothes, the boots, the tent, the cooking utensils, or the packaged food. Oh, and no knifes or meatl objects allowed at all. Banging flints together Mary..how are you at that?
Ray Mears essentially. Worse in fact. He generally has decent clothes and a knife at least.
BBC2's Working Lunch recently had a series of pieces from Portugal. They are combining wind and hydro: when there is excess wind energy they pump water up into storage areas and run it through the generators at peak times.
On Sun, 02 Mar 2008 15:12:09 +0000 someone who may be The Natural Philosopher wrote this:-
I note that you are no longer arguing about the advantages of linking generating plant together.
In the 1930s:-)
Indeed, but US coal fired plants no doubt have.
As usual this assertion is not referenced. The UKERC report I have referred to gives the average capacity factor of British wind farms as 27%-30%, paragraph 2.3.2. The figure is from the Digest of UK Energy Statistics 2005.
Excellent, more abuse. Do keep it up.
I have to say, that your post have,over he last three months, managed to make me aware the fact that windmills are an expensive waste of time. And that most of their supporters are manifestly innumerate.
Being somewhat uncommitted before, you can congratulate yourself on a job well done.
Keep spouting more nonsense: then we can consign windmills to history where they belong.
You can't even get that right. Think alliteration, not southern attempts to be folksy.
I didn't suggest that constant power was produced by windmills.
No, I noticed that error, it should have been 'satisfactorily'.
You have an odd idea of my life :-)
Mary
That is,even when the windfarm is producing its twice as expensive electricity, at full power, the cost of the infrastructure to enable all that power to get to where its actually needed, makes it infeasible with large scale adoption of windfarms, that one could do 'the whole job' with anything like a 28% load factor at anything approaching sane costs.
Windmills are entirely driven by politics, not by cost benefit.
Their impact on global CO2 emmissions is negligible.
To make an impact of any real value would involve the country in costs and order of magnitude more than any other technology.
Windmills are not a solution to real world problems of zero carbon power generations.They are and expensive politically driven distracttion, and are ugly, and potentially dangerous, to boot.
On Sun, 2 Mar 2008 20:44:09 GMT someone who may be Roger wrote this:-
Incorrect.
It was indeed.
It took much longer than that to fix the coal conveyor. It is a rather large piece of engineering and it is not on the ground.
However, they did start it burning gas as a temporary fix. Unlike most coal plants Longannet can burn gas
Wind turbines can be rebuilt, or a new one put in their place, so the hole need not be permanent. Such replacements could be relatively rapid, limited by the speed of rebuilding the tower, but at the moment that is difficult due to the shortage of turbine building capacity.
Plant failures happen with all forms of generation. For example
includes the following
"BE, which runs eight nuclear and one coal-fired power station, has seen its output hit as plants at Hartlepool and Heysham have been out of action since late last year due to wire corrosion problems within boiler units.
"The firm's plants at Hunterston B in Ayrshire and Hinkley Point B were also hit by problems. Although they returned to service in May, output is still being affected by load restrictions."
You may note that when the coal conveyor broke at Longannet the nuclear station at Hunterston B was closed for repairs and it still wasn't operating at full output a year later when the Scotsman article was written. It is still not operating at full output
Anyway, you failed to answer the point I made. The sudden disappearance of 240MW from the system leaves a big hole in the supply. Such failures are a feature of having a small number of large plants. In contrast the sudden failure of say two 2MW wind turbines leaves a rather smaller hole of up to 4MW.
Fortunately such big holes in supply can be plugged by the small reaction time of hydro stations. They can keep things going for long enough to wind up other forms of generation.
Excellent, personal abuse. Do keep it up.
Excellent, another mind reader. Let me give you a piece of advice. Don't give up the day job and take up mind reading for a living.
It is that from zero a decade ago. This year it will probably overtake hydro (12% at the moment).
So, you agree that there would be no practical problems, but there would be financial ones.
Excellent, more personal abuse. Do keep it up.
The Hydro Board said differently. I think I'll believe them as they were more likely to know.
Ah, proof by assertion again.
Meanwhile I have yet to see any convincing criticism of that report. All I have seen has been a few assertions.
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