Another striking success for wind

[Tim Streater]

Which just now is producing 0.63% of national electricity requirements. About the same as during the last two days.

Anyone know where the country applies for a refund?

[The Natural Philosopher]

But Solar too is doing 2.7GW or so midday. The Planet is Saved! Nothing in the late evenings of course.

[T i m]

I know harry has run up a fair tab with me here for his solar FIT theft thing, you know, how much I've paid him compared with how much electricity he's allowed out onto the grid (for any of us).

I wonder if he was an only child as they can often have difficulty with the concept of sharing and 'playing fair'? ;-(

Cheers, T i m

[Tim Streater]

And as there's no prospect of power storage at anything like the required levels, this rules out wind/solar as useful methods of generating power. So perhaps we'd better not build any.

Oh.

[Tim Streater]

Why should anyone slag off coal?

[Brian Gaff]

Yes winds at the moment are very low indeed. The thing is without efficient power storage, wind is always going to be inconveniently producing when we don't want it and not when we do. Probably much the same can be said of solar as well. Its about time the genetisists got the plant based electricity generation system up and running, no shortage of weeds here whether its sunny windy quiet or raining! Brian

[Simon Mason]

How come nobody slags off coal though?

[Chris Hogg]

Did us proud for nearly 130 years!

[T i m]

And I think (and more to the point) that no one is trying to promote coal (especially these days) as anything other than 'a solution', that whist may not be 'green' (whatever that really means etc), *is* (or has been) fairly predictable in how it can be used to generate electricity.

Consuming huge amounts of energy and producing huge amounts of pollution to create an energy solution that is *never* dependable really does seem like a step backwards.

Now, if someone is able to predict a world wide electricity grid where interconnected alternative (as non of them are ever really green) energy supplies can actually and reliably power the entire worlds energy needs and when there are no other (and greener) alternatives then I don't think we should be expending such energy in the first place.

But we all know it's little to do with energy but politics and a minority of people parasiting the majority (harry), simply to line their own pockets.

Cheers, T i m

[harry]

Over 80% of what I generate is exported. I am not an only child. My brother lives in Oz.

[T i m]

Proof?

And cheaper (to the rest of us) than the *proper* power stations can generate it?

Hmmm ...

He couldn't get much further away from you could he! ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[Tim Streater]

You mean you export it to your brother in Oz?

[Vir Campestris]

Aberfan?

[Simon Mason]

[Tim Streater]

Too bad it can't produce this 7 x 24 x 365 then, isn't it. What started this thread was my reporting that wind was producing f*ck all (250MW or so) which it did for three days solid.

Actually it's worse than that: I'm told we now have 14GW of wind capacity (BICBW), so it's still not very good.

Meanwhile reliable old nuclear goes on shoving out 8GW 7 x 24 x 365, come rain or shine (or neither).

[Andy Burns]

Like or dislike wind and other green-ish energy sources, data about them is always useful, I hadn't noticed this one before, it's not a source of live data, but cleanly presented version of data from elsewhere

[The Natural Philosopher]

Well Drax is in the wrong category since half Drax now burns biomass.

Casts doubt on how up to date the data is.

[Andy Burns]

Why? It's under the category "fuelled" with a footnote that OFGEM defines this as "On large scales this is usually a mixture of coal and biomass."

[T i m]

I wouldn't be surprised as I'm sure he would wring the last penny out of us if he could.

How heavy are supercapacitors to post? ;-)

Cheers, T i m