As gales sweep the UK, 2/3rds of wind farms shut down..

...or at least that is the ONLY conclusion I can draw from the dramatic drop from over 3GW on Tuesday night to just over a GW at 9 a.m. this morning (Wednesday).

Unless they were told to shut it, Id say all of the scottish farms were feathered, and only the English ones functioned at all.

This occurred just as the morning demand peaked - it looks like they actually had the CCGT ready for that and pushed them up faster, but its one of the fastest drops in wind output I have seen - about 750MW and hour.

They lurched back into life as the storm passed..getting back to nearly

2.5GW by the afternoon/evening peak.

I wonder how much gas we wasted trying to balance that little lot.

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher
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Bill

Reply to
Bill Wright

it gets worse. I checked the data source site, where more is recorded and the difference between what the wind output was PREDICTED to be and what they managed to get out was a whopping 2.4GW.

So the forecast was out by a couple of nuclear power stations....

..so much for 'we don't need spinning reserve with wind, we can predict the weather..'

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Its the gusting they seem not to be able to cope with. its amazing how a thing so simple is hard to optimise for the real conditions. Brian

Reply to
Brian Gaff

That really is piss poor as the high winds for Scotland/Northern England were forecast well, aka days, in advance. The drop in wind output as the storm hit was very dramatic.

Reply to
Dave Liquorice

You sure you mean Tues nite to Weds morning? Graphs are showing that as Mon nite down to 1gig Tues morning on the weekly chart. Today's daily chart is showing steady increase from 2g to 3g between 14.00 yesterday and now.

Not that this invalidates your basic point :-)

Reply to
Tim Streater

Sorry. Stepped into a Time warp. You are of course correct.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

The optimum conditions for all wind turbines seems be a windspeed of between 9.999 and 10.001mph... at the period of lowest system demand.

Reply to
The Other Mike

actually they run fairly well at medium high windspeeds - generally in the 25-50mph range.

Gusts should NOT be a problem as there is inertia in them - it strains the gear boxes if they have them, yes.

But sustained high winds are..

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

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