That is why the country needs smart metering. Reliable nuclear coal and gas fired electricity for those that want it. Intermittent unrelaible wind for the unwashed greens.
I'd still advocate branding them on the forehead and smart tagging them with identification though. If they try and take avantage of anything powered by conventional generation and they'd be arrested on the spot and deported to Rockall.
So no internet, no post, no rail, nothing but locally sourced food, no pesticides, no fertilisers, no healthcare. Drive them back to living in caves and ultimately Darwin would ensure they and their offspring live the 'Green Dream' ubntil they croak and cease to exist. Leaving the planet free for the rest of us.
The provisioned connection capacity from wind farms into the national grid that is operationally metered is 7136MW. There is other wind generation that is embedded in the distribution networks but the extent and the output of this generation is not monitored or reported via a credible mechanism.
The total of all wind turbines connected via the national grid and declared as available is more or less 6000MW at the moment rising to 6500MW by the year end
Those are all figures you can rely on
At 0.3GW the 5000* turbines (renewables UK figure) are producing less than half what one of the six units at Drax can produce reliably round the clock.
So where the actual output is 0.3GW the shortfall due to the intermittency of wind, poor reliability and delays in getting the poxy things built is between
5700 and 6836 MW, or in other terms around a Drax, a Fiddlers Ferry and a Rugeley, or around 4 billions quids worth of capital required to bridge that shortfall (finger in the air estimate based on the market cap of Drax and cost of recently constructed gas generation)
With an average domestic load of 400W that shortfall is equivalent to somewhere between 14.25 and 17 million households. With 26.4 million households in the UK (ONS 2012 figures) , then, ignoring all commercial and industrial load we would have the lights on in only 35% of them without the wonder of coal, nuclear and gas.
P.S. renewables UK are currently claiming 6374MW onshore and 3653MW offshore, a total of 10027MW total capacity pointing to an embedded generation total of around 2.9GW
Because to do otherwise would turn towns and cities into a shithole like the USA or India with tangled spaghetti down every street.
Undergrounding just the existing national grid transmission infrastructure (22,000 pylons out of the 88,000 in the UK, and 4500 route miles of overhead line) could cost somewhere upwards of 100 billion quid and cause massive disruption for many decades. And remember that is just the transmission pylons, not those used for distribution. Add on at least as much again for those as the cable is a bit cheaper.
So that is a 200 billion quid capital spend, or 8000 quid per household, financed over 40 years. At 5% that is 450 quid per annum extra on electricity bills. The vast majority would not see this as an acceptable cost.
420 route miles of the transmission network, around 10% of the UK transmsission network is underground, mainly for engineering reasons, and a small number for environmental reasons.
But undergrounding everything at 10 x the cost of overhead for zero gain? It's ridiculous. 450 quid per annum forever on something that is not needed is pissing money away because a few eco activists can't stand the thought of something being built like a pylon and an overhead line that is both elegant and essential to modern life.
So if you or anyone else wants to live somewhere with no pylons in the countryside then emigrate.
Where would you like to go today. Rockall or North Korea?
It's not generally portable equipment but part of the protection monitoring and control kit at the substation.
They have fault recorders on each circuit that are constantly recording until triggered by a fault, in the past they were confined to transmission circuits rather than distribution circuits and threw out a few feet of paper on a trip, now they dump the trace to non volatile memory and thence to a a PC locally or remotely.
They measure voltage and current during a fault until the breaker operates and isolates the fault (a max of 4 cycles from the time of the fault being detected at 400kV, slightly slower as the voltage level drops)
With a bit of maths built into the box that looks at the magnitude and the phase shifts they can determine the distance to the fault and the type of fault (phase to phase or phase to earth) Measure from both ends during the fault with a comms link and you can get a very accurate indication of the fault location. Maybe down to an individual span at 400kV
In the past couple of decades the technology has moved from a dedicated discrete box into one or two black boxes that do all the control measurement and protection functions.
"The minimum clearance to ground for a 400,000 volt line is 7.6m and for a
275,000 volt line is 7.0m. "
Those are absolute minimums, with a fully loaded (hot) line. Over roads, structures and where anyone might reasonably go with a vehicle like a combine etc then the clearance is greater. If a line crosses a road then A 2m tall person stood on the roof of a double decker bus with their arm pointing upwards won't ever come closer than the safety distance to the conductor.
Under National Grid rules the closest permitted approach to 400kV the "Safety distance" is 3.1m
4.5m bus height
2.5m person + extended arm
3.1m safety distance
So around 10.1m over roads. But there are times when it looks a lot lower than that, it isn't!
So not a bad "educated by eye guesstimate" IMHO. B-)
I think a lot of people get fooled by the unwritten rule that if something looks "small" up a structure it's at least double if not treble the size you thought it was when you get up close.
Fit a board across the bottom of the arc horns in the picture I linked to and you'd have a comfortable swing for 4 people sitting back to back.
But apparently it's acceptable to produce less tangled spaghetti outside the towns.
How much would be saved each year fixing collapsed pylons and broken cabling, usually done at the worst time of the year and in the middle of the night after storms, so presumably a lot of overtime is being paid? How much revenue is lost each year through unscheduled disconnections caused by bad weather?
But, AIUI, it wouldn't be for zero gain, as you'd end up with a more reliable system requiring less maintenance.
Well, that wouldn't apply here. Scotland is a net exporter of electricity, so you lot darn sarth'd be the worse of for it.
I'd be more inclined to brand on the forehead those such as yourself who mindlessly spew out socially abusive stereotypes to save themselves from the awful bovver of actually thinking.
I suspect that very few of the "storm damage" outages apply to pylons. Mostly the faults are on the local distribution carried at 33kV and 11kV on wooden poles which are far more vulnerable to damage from falling trees, etc. Putting all distribution underground would be an even bigger project than just pylon carried circuits.
I can see the pylons around here just as easily than the turbines.
What, IIRC, sociologists would call "a value judgement", what I would call an opinion expressed as though it were fact. Either way it doesn't really contribute usefully to a discussion about eyesores on the landscape.
I think there's about 500MW of hydro when it rains. Torness is a gigawatt and a smidgeon. Hunterston B is similar so that's aboyr 2.7GW of reasonably reliable power Longannet is a great power station, 2.4GW.
taking Scotland up to 5.1GW of reliable power. No wonder they export.
but if the nukes go thats knocked almost 50% off the baseload. If scotland went independent it would have to import at whatever England charged, and would not be able to export except at market rates. Subsiding the wind turbines when they couldn't generate the income would cripple scotland economically.
But only deserved really, for a country that thinks the full independence is possible and what it wants.
Currently there is 1094MW Scotland to England export, that is 100MW less than the output of Torness (where both reactors are on load)
Come partition and the SNP ban on Nukes then the lights will be going out North of the Border.
But you have a choice. Be part of the UK or be saddled with the Euro as your currency with someone who makes George Osborne look intellectual as your esteemed leader. The queues for people wanting to emigrate from Jockland to North Korea will stretch all the way from Auchtermuchty to the Irn-Bru factory.
Because pylons are grey, static and mostly well spaced out in a line on sheltered low ground.
Windmills are generally bigger(*), white, waving three big arms about and grouped together on exposed high ground.
(*) The *hub* height for a 2 MW windmill is higher than the tallest, standard pylon by at least 10 to 20 m. You then have to add the 50 odd m blade length. Note that that blade length is the *same* as the total height of the *largest* standard pylon.
Just to illustrate:
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Yes, that pylon is the same pixel length as the distance hub center to blade tip.
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Not the biggest, nor the smallest 2 MW wind turbine. Chosen has it has a rotor diameter of 100 m. B-)
Note that the wingspan of an Airbus A380-800 is not quite 80 m. A Boeing 747-8 Intercontinental (the largest "Jumbo Jet") is a mere
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