OT Penny Finally Beginning To Drop

[charles]

which is why Denmark, for example, only generates electricity from wind ;-)

[Ian Jackson]

In message , charles writes

Isn't there a canal?

[charles]

yes, but sea water doesn't flow uphill.

[dennis]

They are against it because it puts costs up in an effort to fight a non existent battle that couldn't be won if it did exist.

The government goes along with it for other reasons than the AGW con.

AFAICS if you want to make money invest in renewables but don't tell me its to save the planet.

And you should be investing in insulation and saving before you go into generation.

[Huge]

And technically not possible anyway.

[Huge]

I imagine it would mightily piss off the users if it started flowing backwards.

[Davey]

Not to mention Nessie.....

[Davey]

But it's backwards, the other sources have to be used to top up wind power when it isn't functioning, and they need to be running at some level all the time. Maybe the new supercomputer at the Met Office will allow the winds to be accurately forecast. Maybe not.

[Ian Jackson]

In message , charles writes

That's why you use the wind power to drive the pumps (bi-directional turbines, which of course, when reversed, generate).

[whisky-dave]

only 30% wind according to this, 50% by 2020

[Tim Streater]

Wind only makes sense if you could use it in such a way that its variable availability was not an issue. So, putting energy into storage, frick zample.

Batteries you can forget for the time being, and perhaps for ever.

What else could usefully be done? Pumped storage? Not to any meaningful degree unless you feel like flooding (say) a number of Welsh valleys. Generation of H2 or hydrocarbons? What's the efficiency of these sorts of schemes?

Note: the above applies AFAIK to any of the renewable sources: the basic issue is that if you *have* to use the energy as it's generated, then you are always building two power stations to get the output of one.

[Tim Streater]

Probably what they can do now is adequate for that purpose. The issue is not whether it can be forecast, but its variability.

[Bill]

I was working out in East Anglia about 20 years ago on some radio telemetry kit that monitored water pumping stations and at one I commented that the second pump wasn't in use. Apparently, even though we were about 10 miles inland from the sea, if they ran both pumps they took enough fresh water from the rather small river that eventually they brought in salt water. Ooooops!

>

[Bill]

In message , Andrew Gabriel writes

Thank you, I stand, or rather at the mo' sit, corrected.

My own personal solution would be nuclear, but some people don't seem to like that too much.

[Adrian]

Pure and simple political bias.

[michael adams]

Redundancy is often built into water pumping systems so as to allow continuous operation in the event of breakdown, and allow off-line maintanance to be carried out.

Ask a silly question etc etc.

michael adams

...

[Andrew Gabriel]

Nuclear should own most of the base load - the load which is there 24x7. It can't handle daily cycles.

Coal can deal with daily cycles, providing you don't turn it right off (so it has to have some of the base load too, to keep it ready for the next day). It may be that the remaining (presumably more modern) coal fired stations can be more responsive than coal as a whole used to be.

Gas can be quite responsive to changes during the day.

Hydro and stored water resoviors are most responsive of all, and can be up to power in well under a minute in some cases (Dinorwig).

Wind would become more useful if a viable technology for large scale storage of energy was to appear, but even then, it would probably be much more effective to increase nuclear above base load and have that storing the excess for when it's needed at a higher load time of day.

[critcher]

to say nothing of the damage caused when shut down and startup procedures are used too regularly.

[Another Dave]

Where's The Natural Philosopher? He hasn't posted for quite a while.

Another Dave

[Bill]

In message , michael adams writes

That was one of my thoughts, but it wasn't the answer in this case.

It had taken a while and been a long hot summer, so maybe the calculations for a normal "summer" would have allowed both to run. Fortunately their local automated monitoring had picked up on it fairly early on. Plus the radio linked telemetry had reported it!

[For the benefit of the techy types here.]

Quite surprising considering one of the things that I found was 6" tails on the coax connected to the aerial connector on the cabinet, not good at any time, even worse at UHF