Electricity generated by a wind turbine

[The Natural Philosopher]

Gas is free. The wind is free.

Uranium is free, and coal is free.

The cost is all in the human effort of getting it turned into reliable electricity.

Neither do the wind ones.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Since the day they discovered they need them in good health and fit enough to run a ship.

They belong in a museum too.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Or indeed a bad year

[zall]

But it wasn't crucial to turn the most recently turned off off when they turned them off.

Bullshit.

That king gets no say on anything now except which toilet seat he gets to crap on and what title he gets.

[zall]

No chance, NATO wouldn't allow that.

[zall]

They never did, there were always plenty more where they came from.

[Chris Hogg]

OOI (I=ignorance!). Would it be possible to have very large spinning motor-generators in some form? A sort of very short term mechanical battery driven by the grid with control gear that switched the device from motor to generator in fractions of a second as the grid voltage fluctuated short term, thus performing the function of spinning mass in traditional generators?

[Tim Streater]

I think Pancho is planning to dam one of the Welsh Valleys, and relocate its inhabitants to the Outer Hebrides, or perhaps Rockall.

[Robin]

On 09/09/2022 02:43, The Natural Philosopher wrote: <snip>

I don't see that it is a simple matter of meters on the grid vs unmetered. Power not metered as part of the BM may nevertheless be metered and those metered figures returned to BEIS - e.g. metered FITs or autogenerators who want to see the return on their investment.

<snip>>

It would help to see the comparison of BM vs Energy Trends for wind over time given the way the proportion of capacity with major producers has grown over time.

<snip>

You are making assumptions there which may or may not be justified. But in my experience there's a big difference between fudging and fiddling. Fudging is routine. Fiddling ain't - especially in the GSS.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Yes, it would. But traditionally this is done by having some normal generators spinning but not generating very much.

They could have used rotary convertors on windmills, that would have achieved the same effect, but those are more expensive than semiconductor inverters, Batteries are even more expensive, but wind farms dont have to pay for them

[The Natural Philosopher]

I calculated that pumping *out* Loch Ness to a depth of 1000 feet might be enough to power the country for a few weeks

Except its in the wrong place. Need huge turbines and long transmission lines

[Tim Lamb]

We seem to have reached some enthusiasm to go nuclear!

Not a total solution without some form of energy storage or managing electricity load to match output of connected generation.

Car battery charging overnight, economy 7 type load shifting, factory night work etc.

More pumped storage does not seem feasible and local battery storage not yet significant. Interconnectors can't cater for stationary low pressure systems..

I think we are not going to switch off gas powered turbines any time soon!

>

[charles]

Pumping it out would use power not provide power

[Robin]

I assumed he meant "when you let the water back in...". With pumped storage all things are relative - hence eg ideas for using abandoned open cast mines.

[charles]

Trouble with pumped storage is that you need surplus energy to charge it up. I suppose there might be times when there's a lot of wind..

[Robin]

Yes. Hydro seems to be widely seen as a good way of coping with the intermittency of wind : efficient (~90%) and established (unlike fancy new batteries etc).

Yet another example of how it pays to be Norwegian.

[John Rumm]

That is true of pumped storage generally. It is a net user of energy, not a generator. But it does allow time shifting delivery of power for balancing or economic reasons.

[Dave Plowman (News]

Not that they cost more to build/install?

The elephant in the room today is having to rely on imports to fuel our energy needs.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Rubbish. you manage load by managing generation capacity. As we did with coal Not having uncertain renewable energy takes one huge variable out of the mix.

You dont *need* storage. It becomes a pure cost-benefit decision. As was said of Dinorwig 'it saved us a more expensive extra nuclear power station'.

The HVDC link to Norway with its massive hydro is similar, that probably saves us a power station as well

You simply lower the price of off peak until its all being used up

Yes they can. Norway is rain limited in its hydro. We can run Norway off surplus nuclear when demand is low, saving their rainwater for times of peak demand

We do it every day.

The main thing is to throw unreliable intermittent renewables off the grid so that we don't have to pay for a solution that doesn't work to a problem that doesn't exist, that creates huge problems for the grid

We can't store electricity at grid scale. But we can have stores of uranium, water, oil, gas and coal.

Which we used to cater for peak demand is a cost benefit decision, provided politicians stay out of it.

[The Natural Philosopher]

But letting the sea back in would generate power.