Windfarms paid to shut down

[The Natural Philosopher]

You assume wrong.

[The Natural Philosopher]

No, they can pump water from a lower lake to an upper one.

[Huge]

You misread my comment, which I admit was slightly ambiguous.

I assume that more have not been built because of the lack of suitable sites and the cost of building them.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Ah. the dreaded omission of a comma!

You meant, I take it:

"I assume not, because of geography and cost".

[Huge]

Precisely.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Guy Dawson saying something like:

This has been addressed. There's no shortage of potential lakes on the West Coast of Wales and Scotland. There's also no shortage of whining NIMBYs.

[Tim Streater]

What's wrong with whining NIMBYs? In a country the size of ours, with the population - and hence infrastructure requirements - that we have, almost any large project is going to upset people. Far better then to reduce the requirement as much as possible by building more nukes.

We could also reduce the population. If we got it down to 30 million we'd have the same density as France and NIMBY problems would reduce considerably.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Bullshit.

And look at the cost of storing - say - two weeks of even the existing windpower we have on tap (or not). A mere GW.

I estimate for the same price we could build an all nuclear grid and have spare change left over.

There's also no shortage of whining

Mostly in the wind lobby.

Who consist almost entirely of urban voters who have already exported all their waste and power generation to the countryside, as well as their food generation, and now want to further pollute it with useless Hoo sticks.

Once London (or any other town/suburbia/whatever) becomes self sufficient in energy, food production, and waste disposal and water usage, Londoners can comment about nimby's. Until then they can shut the f*ck up.

By contrast my county is self sufficient in balance on all those things.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Tim Streater saying something like:

I can hear the NIMBYs now, whining about nukes. Fwiw, I love nukes, especially if we get a thorium programme going, but I'm not obsessional about them, unlike some.

We could feed the NIMBYs to the thorium reactors.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

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:

Really? Do tell. I'm waiting with unbated breath.

[geoff]

In message , Grimly Curmudgeon writes

What, a pressurised councillor reactor?

[Roger Chapman]

TNP would appear to be right, at least with respect to the west coast of Wales. The only potentially reasonably site I could see (adjacent high and low lakes with a decent head between them) is Llyn Cau plus Tal-y-llyn Lake on the South side of Cadair Idris. That would give a head of about 1250 feet which is some 400 feet less than they get at Dinorwyg. There is a shortage of low level lakes along the coast and many of the best dam sites in the hills are already occupied by reservoirs.

[The Natural Philosopher]

You simply have no idea how much space it takes to store more than a few hours of a couple of power stations do you?

[The Natural Philosopher]

I calculated if we could flood the whole of loch ness to a depth of 1000 feet - assuming the mountains round it are 1000 feet tall - it would run the country for about a week in winter.

[andrew]

Also both reservoirs need to be essentially devoid of fish and the turbines need to be a 20m lower than the reservoirs to combat cavitation. The river was diverted around the lower lake at Dinorwig.

As energy storage is height*mass*gravity as you trade height for mass the equipment size (and cost) rises proportionally.

Dinorwig works because the loads are predictable and the supply from baseload fairly contant, so they can count on buying cheap power in the early hours to fulfil a peak (and higher wholesale rate than average) load in the following evening. From what I remember of my tour the capital cost of the installation per delivered kWhr was less than a conventional power station ( but presumably more than a comparable hydro electric scheme?)

non schedulable renewables won't fit this bill so provision for them is likely to be more expensive.

BTW I thought a pumped storage scheme was being built near Edinburgh.

AJH

[Nick Leverton]

Loch Ness is already flooded to 750 feet, which gives you a head start ...

Nick

[Roger Chapman]

I don't know about that but ISTR that at least one of the existing Scottish hydro schemes has the capability to be used for pumped storage.

[John MacLeod]

It would be a "monstrous" problem :-)

-- John MacLeod

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

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:

Get real and stop knee-jerking every time wind is mentioned.

has an answer. Go and argue with them, you patronising tosser.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Yes. A friends father worked on it way back when. I forget the name. Its a couple of hundred megawatts IIRC.

Pumped storage is great, but its already fully utilised load balancing.

There really isn't the space for more, and it adds to the overall cost of the solution, both in cash terms and in waste of materials, and in connecting wires.

Its pretty disruptive on the environment, as are wind turbines, and indeed all renewables. How could they not be? They are pulling energy

*from* the environment, pretty low grade energy so pretty vast structures are needed.