Until it gets sent back again or used in place of a local fossil plant.
Hang on, there's enough interlink to send 50% of the wind power over, but that's not enough to provide any backup?
Hang on, you just said it saves no carbon, which implies the Swedes have a surplus of hydro, rather than a shortage. I suspect the latter, but that would render your earlier comment about it not saving carbon in Sweden wrong. But you carry on with your internal contradictions if it makes you happy.
Their expense? They get some nice cheap electricity from Denmark. You really reckon they'll complain?
And it's not the energy vanishing into thin air you claim it is either.
company) for just =A329, an AC clamp around the electricity in my house is sent to web browser. I guess I have knocked off 10 to 20% of elect bill just seeing wastage. It's also good when I'm away from home and can spot what's happening in my house, e.g. daughter getting up. Kitchen activity, e.g. kettle on, oven, dishwasher. If my Mum had one I would know Mum was safe and active at home.
Highly recommended (I have no association with the company) Lyn
Well by and large yes, the swedes will take as much subsidised windpower below the cost of their hydro as they can. Not all Danish wind goes there though. Some goes to germany as well. Where it also doesn't earn Demark any carbon credits.
That's a moot point. Because they have lots, but in dry years the dams may empty. That is not something they want, so in dry yearsas they take the danish windpower when they can. In wet years I think the study I cited says in much nicer ways, the swedes tell them to piss off unless they want to sell it so cheap its basically free. Because in a sense. if the swedes have the hydro, maintenance apart it IS free. Why pay to displacee it?
I suspect the latter, but
No, there is no contradictio.
Whichever way it works, the swedes wont be using much fossil. If its a wet year they wont buy any windpower If its a dry year they will buy danish windpower rather than risk the dams emptying.
In any case they have some nuclear as well IIRC, so worst case I suppose in a really dry year they might have to fire up an old coal plant a couple of weeks before the dams emptied, which would run nice and efficiently, as solid extra baseload, if the wind wasn't there from Denmark. Which they would have to do anyway because they cant rely on the fact that the wind from denmark WILL be there. With all that hydro they can balance their baseload and known dam levels very efficiently,. Wind just complicates things, but if its cheap, and it looks like a dry year, well why not. Gives them a little bit extra in hand on the dams. Still use the same amount of fuel though. Just increase safety margins a bit I reckon.
Of course. Are you really that stupid? Swedish electricity is hydro and nuclear and cheap. They dont NEED damnish wind power. Why should they build something at their expese that only helps Denmark?
Why indeed should the UK government fund massive intervconnects to scottish windfarms that only benefit scottish landowners, and cost the UK taxpayer more in terms of overall electricity and do nothing to reduce English carbon consumption, since the backup wont be done in Scotland.
Oh yes it is. If 50% of the energy is exported, and only 10% goes into the Danish grid, that's 40% that is literally thrown away because its produced when no one wants it. Well I am not sure those percents are percentages of the same total, but yes, danish windfarms are often switched off(IIRC they still get PAID) because no one wants the bloody power.
And if it is exported and merely ends up in a sudden storm overfilling the hydro well that's a waste as well.
And that's before we look at the waste of power pumping puped storage. That's 25% of the power wasted right there.
Then we can look at the power wasted pushing all that electricity up the interconects to Sweden and then all the way back again when the wind drops again.
Waste. Waste of power, waste of grid network, waste of time, waste of money, waste of space.
"Hence, although Germany?s promotion of renewable energies is commonly portrayed in the media as setting a ?shining example in providing a harvest for the world? (The Guardian 2007), we would instead regard the country?s experience as a cautionary tale of massively expensive environmental and energy policy that is devoid of economic and environmental benefits. As other European governments emulate Germany by ramping up their promotion of renewables, policy makers should scrutinize the logic of supporting energy sources that cannot compete on the market in the absence of government assistance."
RUHR ECONOMIC PAPERS #156 Manuel Frondel Nolan Ritter Christoph M. Schmidt Colin Vance
Economic Impacts from the Promotion of Renewable Energy Technologies The German Experience All rights reserved. Bochum, Dortmund, Duisburg, Essen, Germany, 2009 ISSN 1864-4872 (online) ? ISBN 978-3-86788-173-9
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember The Natural Philosopher saying something like:
Why, do you think it's original? Been done, and lots are doing it.
I have an even simpler way: I can tell the kettle's on, because there's a big switch on the back of the kettle and I've just pressed it.
My electrics aren't sentient. They don't get the urge to "do a bit of wasting" in the middle of the night and turn some fan heaters on for a laugh. I hardly waste anything - I turn stuff on when I want it on, then I turn it off afterwards. I know what the rough power is of every appliance and I can tell you what the house load is at any time by thinking about it, not by spending money to get yet another lump of short-lived Chinese plastic and heavy metals.
If you grok this stuff, you don't need a podule to tell you that kettles use more than toothbrushes.
I have an even simpler way: I can tell the kettle's on, because there's a big switch on the back of the kettle and I've just pressed it.
My electrics aren't sentient. They don't get the urge to "do a bit of wasting" in the middle of the night and turn some fan heaters on for a laugh. I hardly waste anything - I turn stuff on when I want it on, then I turn it off afterwards. I know what the rough power is of every appliance and I can tell you what the house load is at any time by thinking about it, not by spending money to get yet another lump of short-lived Chinese plastic and heavy metals.
If you grok this stuff, you don't need a podule to tell you that kettles use more than toothbrushes.
If you're a chav, you don't care anyway.
So who needs the podule?
My sentiments to a tee. Appliances have a rating plate and you take a choice with most things - if you want a cup of tea then you boil the kettle and it costs money - but so does everything else. What annoys me are the "stand-by" fanatics who seem to think that small electronic items cost a lot to keep on standby - but than again, I perhaps only have my TV on standby for the odd half hour in a day - when I might leave the room to make a drink - otherwise it gets turned off.
I agree with all that - but if you run electric heating, it isn't quite so obvious how much that extra +1C on the thermostat or an extra inch of water in the bath is spinning the meter (unless you enjoy running outside in the dark regularly with a torch to look).
For the price, it's definately a pretty good product on paper. But if you don't want such a product, of course it will be worthless...
One thing though - the rating plates on electronics (especially computers) mean bugger all. It's just a max load - and with a PC in particular, the actual load can vary wildly depending on what you do...
This is of some interest to those of us who run mini server farms at home ;->
Possibly professional services. Scandinavia has a more equal society than the rest of Europe, so salaries of the highly qualified [1] are not the huge multiples that you see elsewhere. Consequently, I would guess that if you did need to hire the time of such a person it is competitively priced (but never having the need, I don't actually know).
tim
[1] I sub-let one of my residencies from a hospital consultant whilst he was temporarily overseas. He earnt no more than an average wage.
Well I would actually run this in conjunction with MRTG/SNMP and graph the output to a web page, like I do for my router.
formatting link
Then I could try various strategies like seeing where my dominant power is being taken: For example I have quite an old chest freezer that is falling apart. If I knew its average draw full of what its full of, I could calculate the payback time of a new energy efficient one. This is actually a calculation I want to do. Its hard to say when its off or on, because it cycles of course. But a clamp on its power wire if that clamp could go down to the sort of 50-60W level might be instructive. A weeks log would be enough to do the calculation on whether a new freezer is a no brainer, a waste of money, or somewhat in between.
The same goes for some of my older 24x7 computer kit. Its not highly compute intensive..maybe a really low power motherboard new in a new case/PSU would pay in reduced energy consumption inside a year. No brainer?
I really don't know.
If you like a complete audit of the equipment here, spreadsheeted up would allow a very quick cost benefit analysis to be done.
Electricity is not my largest overhead, but after heating oil and wood, together, it's my second largest. I think I am running at £900 a year give or take. Not sure.
EON say I am using 6.4% more this year than last. Why? Not sure. More low energy bulbs this year haha!
These are all questions worth answering. 10% off my bill is 90 quid. Its worth it. My guess is that I could save up to 30% 270 quid. That's worth a meter and a few hours of code, and setting it all up.
I did this a while ago. My servers draw between 15W (or so) and 35W each
- there are five of them. Most replaced PII or PIII machines drawing about 85W (it varied). Think, at the time, I calculated about a 3 year payback on the 35W ones - better on the 15W one. Then electricity charges soared...so I think I've now paid them all back.
They're mini-ITX boards, and they're not pushed at all - I could have gone for something even slower (but not a lot less power). It's conveninet when I'm doing maintenance to have something that goes a little faster, after all.
Do you need to get lower spec PSU's or are SMPS units efficient at much lower than rated power? I.e. can I use an old case/PSU and see less power drawn
I have an old rackmount case and PSU I would like to keep, what it needs is a bit more CPU than its current pentium 450 or whatever, and a tad more RAM that 512Mbyte might be useful. And SATA drives and 100Mbps ethernet is all I want.
I'm using mini-ITX PSUs which are smaller, lower rated power. I could go the next stage on teh smaller machines, and use an external 'brick' (a la laptop) driving a small DC-DC converter within the case...
Also, if it were not 100% duty cycle I'd be using laptop drives. The 15W machine boots from a CF card and there is no hard disk at all. What little logging it does is over NFS to another machine.
The ITX motherboards all do 100Mb/s ethernet of course. CPUs can be fairly weak, but I'm mainly using 1GHz VIA C3 CPUs, and most of the machines (bar one) have 512MB RAM which is ample (even for the 15W machine which has a large RAM disk).
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