Go on then. Provide a link to a comprehensive report that gives the full picture of obtaining gas from anywhere in the world and the costs of maintaining that throughout the life of the fields and pipelines transport, etc.
But I'd guess you're talking about the maintenance of a wind turbine itself versus a gas turbine.
And when Putin closes a tap we have the situation where much of the European generation is useless too...
Yes, or coal fired.
Bill
Not that it's any consolation, but the fossil industry is also "passing wealth straight into the pockets of organizations the anti-capitalists warned you about".
#Paul
No it is really quite fundamental to how useful the power delivered by them is, and what kind of reserve capacity is required to integrate them into the grid.
A turbine that could produce a reasonably predictable output for a couple of days is far easier to balance and integrate into the grid, that one which has wild fluctuations within the space of minutes - say in response to each gust of wind.
In the latter case you may need hot spinning reserve gas generation as a minimum - sitting there burning fuel and doing nothing - waiting to take up the slack - which kind of negates the stated benefit.
In fact, looking at:
"Rather than size a linear ramp rate generator (often a natural gas generator in current practice) to match fluctuations in the output power of wind farms, a more efficient solution is to match wind with an ensemble of generators and energy storage to match the Kolmogorov spectrum of wind power. Fast devices including batteries, fuel cells, or supercapacitors, with relatively low power would match the short-period fluctuations, while slower ramp rate sources would match the longer period, higher amplitude fluctuations. The capital savings from not over-building linear ramp rate matching generation by a factor of two can be large for wind at large scale"
What do you mean, no? This isn't the question you were asking. Short term variance from turbines is a totally different problem to hourly/daily changes in generation output. You just won't see short term variance (seconds/minutes) in any published national stats. If you want to understand it, you need detailed output at the turbine level or farm level.
No! You use capacitors or batteries. The other thing to note is wild fluctuations from gusts will be uncorrelated, and hence the overall volatility will decrease proportionally as the total supply increases. (i.e. variance is additive, stats 101.)
Uncorrelated due to the speed of the wind, wavelength of gusts, and the wide-spread spacing of the turbines. You will only see correlation in slow trends as a weather front moves.
The conclusion is to use batteries or super capacitors. But we all know that is the solution for short duration fluctuations, that and pumped store. We already have to deal with that due to fluctuations in demand
Yeah, the short term fluctuations are easy to handle. It is the periods of low wind over the country that are hard. We have already discussed the need for alternative generator (gas) backup.
I can't. But I'm sure the reason why wind turbines need subsidies isn't because they are cheaper to run than gas turbines.
(Of course the elephant in the room is that the gas ones don't have to pay for the cost of their emissions)
Andy
Since when did rich shipowners in the Victorian period care about their sailors?
Elsewhere in this topic we've seen numbers for how little our windfarms produce on a bad day.
Andy
Or how little in a bad week or bad month.
Hourly changes are short term in the context of what you use for infill generating capacity.
And yes, that is the question I was asking - what does the output of a turbine look like in real time.
Precisely, hence why I asked what resolution was available from the public sources.
One could, but no one current seems to.
That is one of the big lies about the cost of wind power. If you are going to pile on ever more then you really need to include all that extra infrastructure into the base cost of wind power - not ignore it as some "free" externality you can make someone else's problem.
So long as you don't get a gust from a dominant farm with a significant contribution, or even a rolling "wave" that hits successive plant in sequence.
So where does that pumped store come from? We currently have ~30 GWh or storage, but only ~3 GW of deliver capacity (and not for the full 30 GWh). With a greenies wet dream of wind, we would need 10s of TWh of storage.
Where is it viable to put storage? Hilly areas. Where are they in the UK? North West of the Tees/Exe line. Where is the peak demand? SE of it!
Just even MORE expensive and unreliable.
Pretty close to reality. There are *four* Achilles heels
- Energy density. There isn't a great deal of energy in wind or sun. so installations tend to be extremely large, and in the case of wind, use a lot of CO2 producing concrete and require a lot of CO2 intensive maintenance.
- Energy location. The energy is nowhere near large population centres, requiring the grid to cease to be a balancing mechanism and become a seriously over specified power distribution mechanism.
- Lack of short term storage. Lacking any spinning mass, the natural latency of the turbine fed grid needs to be enhanced with batteries to deal with short term overload scenarios.
- intermittency. The fluctuations in power (note: *not* the
*unpredictability* of power fluctuations - solar and tidal are no improvement here) require massive redundancy and duplication of generation equipment.Note that apart from the first issue, none of the remaining issues generate costs that the wind or solar farms have to bear themselves. They are costs imposed on the grid and supply companies, who need to massively over engineer the grid and provide and pay for backup power to be available.
It is not a matter of the ArtStudent™ mind's instant response that all these problems *can* be solved, it is ultimately the ecological, human, cash and carbon emissions cost of solving them, that renders the whole renewable solution pointless and ruinously expensive - way more expensive than even Hinkley point B nuclear.
Which as I have repeatedly said, is why the EU never mandated a low carbon solution, but a renewable one. Neatly avoiding the question of whether or not, irrespective of ones belief in climate change, a renewable solution would result in any net reduction of carbon emissions.
Yes. Insofar as Dukes report that the government uses are concerned.
Perhaps. I hadn't thought of that.
No., The issue here is that despite years of looking, the short answer is that *no one actually knows* what the data are.
What we have are two entirely different sources of a figure.
Meters, on the grid, against the capacity of the windfarms known to be so metered.
The claims of the renewable energy lobby, and the estimates - and they have to be estimates - of how much wind power is produced by wind turbines whose output is *not* metered centrally.
Like climate change, there are thermometers, and there are models.
Exactly.
Nope. As I said, until Gridwatch came along and made the National Grid data easily presentable, no one knew how much windfarms were actually producing, except the National grid, and they were not responsible for producing the figures used in planning government policy.
And then BM reports stopped publishing which wind farms were connected to meters.
Making it impossible to compare the two data claims
On the other hand, if you read the fine print of Ed Miliband's Climate Change act, you will find the Greenpeace, friends of the earth and the renewable energy foundations were instrumental in supplying data to the government. Including the clam that every watt hour of electricity generated, was watt hour of fossil fuel that wouldn't be burnt, a clear lie that is easily demonstrated once you consider the issues of intermittency.
I have been at a council planning meeting where an 'experts' solemnly declared that the capacity factor of a small local windfarm would be
40%, when a company had pulled out of an adjacent site citing lack of wind, after putting up an anemometer tower for a year.Look. I didn't start this ball rolling. The first guy who did about the time I started Gridwatch, was a guy called Stuart Young who was a technical consultant who wrote a report, saying broadly that the claims of the renewable energy lobby about how much electricity they would produce, were broadly false.
No one wanted to hear that it wouldn't work, or was being fraudulently misrepresented. Especially the Liberal Democrat run department of Energy.
The very first time I used my name on a piece of material on the internet was when I published a critique of renewable energy pointing out its limitations.
I had at that time no known connection with anything to do with renewable energy. And certainly not climate change.
I was cancelled immediately by being called a 'well known climate denier in the pay of Big Oil'
I was frankly astonished. There was no attempt made to question the logic, or the data, merely to destroy my credibility. By what I knew was a complete lie.
The last time I saw David Mackay, before his untimely death, at the time when he was chief scientific advisor to Chris Huhne's department of energy and climate change (what have they got to do with each other? Nothing) it was a his publishers party and was full of academics greens. I asked him how the government was going to solve the problem of intermittency, which he had said he had been unable to make Chris Huhne understand. And he looked around and leant over and whispered in my ear 'sixty five gigawatts of nuclear power' . Like David Kelly, he too died young. Like David Kelly, he too had awkward facts in his portfolio.
People have been claiming that wind energy was a fraud for over a decade. They are dismissed as nutters and conspiracy theorists. How convenient. For the Liberal Democrats who had won a place in coalition on te strength of renewable advocacy, and David Cameron, whose father in law was making millions out of wind power, and the conservative party, whose annual conference was sponsored by Siemens GMBH, well known purveyors of wind power.
The existence of the BM reports data was deeply awkward, so much so that BMreports and indeed the renewable energy foundation removed data on what windfarms were metered and indeed what windfarms even existed, from public access.
Politicians, like you, go straight to the ONS.
And on being presented with the fact that the National Grid meters say something different, dismiss it as a technical error.
It becomes not a matter of fact, but a matter of *who you believe* .
I don't know what is going on, but having had my head buried in this for a decade, and having lived in Africa where no one even questions the existence of deep corruption - they call it 'state capture' where public funds of the state are 'captured' and diverted via legislation into the hands of a few rich individuals who simply buy up the politicians they need with the net proceeds, I wasn't as surprised as you are to find the same thing - just far more sophisticated - rife in the EU and UK government circles.
I've met these guys, these politicians and been horrified by their sheer venality and acceptance of pork barrel politics and lying as routine business.
You simply don't believe it.
Neither did I. Till I went digging.
Do I believe that at a very deep level the renewable energy policy of the EU is broadly fraudulent, corrupt and routinely and with the collusion of the civil service, routinely misrepresents the data on the industry?
Sadly and reluctantly, yes I do. It's just the Volkswagen scandal, writ larger. Why else did I campaign so hard to get is out of the EU?
The difference between us is that you broadly trust the offices of government and the EU, whereas I trust electricity meters, and have had enough experience of government to make me instantly distrust it.
Then you are not looking either hard or deep enough
Pigs could fly, if equipped with suitable aircraft too.
>
People who are making money out of renewable energy.
Which the EU has mandated *MUST BE USED*.
Neatly sidestepping the question of whether in fact with all the bolt on extras it needs to actually make it work, it is not now 5 times more expensive than nuclear power COULD be if it wasn't being legislated
*against*.Renewable energy creates so many jobs and profits in batteries, hydrogen stores, back up generators, wind farms, wind mills, wind farm service companies, interconnection companies, solar panel installation companies, FITS ROCS, diesel generating companies, gas turbine companies, electric car companies, heat pump companies.
All these people would be out of pocket and out of a job if we simply went nuclear. Remember, the vast majority of the idiots on the left who believe anything, believe that 'creating jobs' is important. No matter how much wealth is destroyed in the process.
This is the EU model. Use legislation to create industrial demand. Make fat profits and sell it to the stupid kraut voters as 'green' and 'moral'
In teh end, yes.
I spent a couple of months amassing data before I wrote my critique on renewables. I really wanted to know what would in fact work and at what cost.
The overall holistic costs of a wind powered grid including all the bolt on extras to solve the energy density, location and intermittency problems, (extras wind power companies do not supply and do not charge form but we have to pay for) convinced me that in the end we would have no choice but to deploy nuclear or bankrupt the country.
We seem to have chosen the latter.
What is theoretically possible and what does not bankrupt the country are two different things.
Just because ArtStudents™ and LeftyCunts™ always think in terms of what is possible with someone else's money, doesn't mean that money will continue to flow after they have ruined the wealth creation potential of SomeoneElse.
Which is broadly what Liz (in whom we ) Truss, seems to be doing. Although not via nationalisation.
Today - debt to cover the immediuate pain. Tomorrow, frack baby frack In future - Nuclear power
It's not rocket science.
+1
US gas is dirt cheap. But USA has no tanker terminals or pipelines to export much of it.
The few that exist are coining it.
UK could coin it too.
They weren't turned off for no reason. Currently they are simply worn out beyond regulatory safety limits.
I think there is however no doubt that the pressure will be on EDF to extend the life as far as possible even at increased cost. As it is on Drax to keep their coal plant running.
Basically since renewables are useless in the limit and wind and sun tend to disappear across a whole continent at the same time, so interconnects don't help either, if we lose gas, we lose the grid.
Fortunately there's an El Nino or something - the one that gives us warm winters - so we may scrape through.
Fortunately, or perhaps significantly, we seem to have a totally pragmatic conservative government in place, that is likely to reject ideology in favour if winning the next election, by doing what needs to be done to keep the lights on.
Which should offset the fact that we now have a dickbrained ecoloon for a king
The problem then would have been that he would have walked into Poland. I mean, where does it end?
No, what it means is that the wind company can afford to set a strike price £25 below what it cost them to generate electricity. Which is why 'wind is cheaper than nuclear'
Since they get a subsidy ON TOP of the strike price.
And don't have to pay for all the bolt on extras that make wind power work as well as a thermal power station would.
Anyway no one has actually held wind companies to any strike price - they sign up for then on the basis that they can get out of them if prices are high enough, and it makes wind look cheaper than it really is,
To date, the government has done whatever the wind power companies have asked the, because of the EUs renewable obligation, which meant that NO MATTER WHAT THE COST WE HAD TO USE WINDMILLS.
I've talked to engineers in the power sector, and on the grid. Theirs not to question why, theirs but to implement a policy they know wont work, but being fired for telling the boss that, is my privilege. Most other people have families and mortgages.
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