July 2025: Wind not doing very well

Renedables are not quite dead, but the sweet smell of corruption is very noticeable.

I recently went to a talk by a David Yapp who spent 20 years in nuclear power generation and moved to hydrogen as storage for UK power generation. Overnight etc wind generators are often braked as little demand , but the wind-generator companies are still paid for not generating lecky. He would have hydrolisers dotted around the country using that "wasted " surplus capacity , breaking water into oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygen vented to the air as little commercial use and the H2 compressed as gas into converted spent oil wells etc. It would require extensions of the lecky national grid and an H2 pipeline grid ( h2 britalises ordinary town-gas/natural gas pipelines it seems). To cover a dunkelflaute of 4 days, the maximum for UK so far recorded, say allowing a month to recover the nightime H2 , before say another 4 day dunkelflaute, continuously like that as a worse case for all UK. He reckoned 1000 20 foot container size hydrolisers (off the shelf available from Germany, now) would power all UK electricity for such dunkelflautes. Only minor conversion to gas powered generatoors to accept H2 required. All existing technology.

So is a stone axe.

These are summary statements seen in a Google search.

And that is better than an Ontario capacity factor measure, which is 27% for the combined value.

Sounds like it is "working as expected" :-)

Since a renewable is not a reliable kind of "dispatch-able resource", and is merely a "tidy earner", the money you make off your amusement should, in the fullness of time, be sufficient to pay for the build.

If all you had was wind, and you put the kettle on, then 30.82% of the time, the kettle would boil. That's if you enjoy drinking statistical tea (a cup of tea which may or may not be warm).

If all you had was wind, and every home owner had a battery bank, then... you'd be building more and more windmills.

You're so good at this stuff... you even have your own Wiki article!

Then multiply that by some yearly average capacity factor. To get a statistically warmed cup of tea. That's the kind of tea statisticians like. "My tea may not be warm right now, but some day it will be warm. Some day."

Even nuclear has a capacity factor.

We ran a nuclear reactor here, for two years straight, without stopping it for anything. And that was an experiment, rather than being coincidental. Over the short term then, of two years and not forty years, that capacity factor looks pretty good. But other nukes ("lemons") are a *lot* lower. And when a nuke has to be offline for 2-3 years for a "rebuild", the capacity factor for those years looks very bad. At least occasionally during those years, the tea drinkers living near the windmills, have a warm cup of tea occasionally.

Paul

Yep. The usual LIES from renewable uK

In reality the kit is so often broken that the true value is about 20% onshore and 25% offshore.

What? The lie generators?

EDF when they took over Bristish Energy managed to row the nukes up from about 70% capacity factor to well over 90% by doing proactive maintenance when they were down for refuelling

One big problem with adding more and more wind turbines is that when a

That’s a shedload of TWh to make up from another ’green’ source. And neighbouring countries with large wind farms are in the same boat.

At a guess, the round trip would be wasteful. A lithium battery returns more of the input.

They quote 30-40% round trip efficiency.

The real benefit of hydrogen is storage. One lithium battery can only store one lithium battery's worth of energy. A hydrogen electrolysis machine can keep pumping out extra hydrogen, which can be stored, in large amounts, for long periods.

The idea of wind overcapacity plus long term hydrogen storage is about the only renewable idea for the UK that I can't dismiss from first principles. However, it probably will not be economically viable. To get enough wind power, it needs to be offshore, almost certainly floating turbines. Reliability is challenging, cost is challenging.

Secondly, hydrogen electrolysis machines are expensive, and work most efficiently at a steady output, they don't like intermittency.

In the past few years, there has been a drop-off of interest in hydrogen startups.

Lithium or even the much cheaper but heavier iron batteries, TW-h for TW-h, is far too expensive for all UK consumption storage, according to him. A drawback he did not go into detail, the hydrolisis requires pure water. But there are research plans to use seawater as the water source, but no details of the purification or whatever that would be required. I asked why not use millions of oxy-acetylene size bottles for bulk H2 storage , but again expense of the bottles and the control/valving required

It's the "storage" bit that is still pie in the sky. It's not the possibility. It's the practicality.

"Hydrogen power" has become the new "DNA innit ?" knee-jerk moron response when their fairytale of renewables is challenged.

If you want to use hydrogen to store energy safely and conveniently then add some oxygen and carbon and make methane. Or butane. Or some other hydrocarbon that we have plenty of tried and tested technology to deal with. Consider it paying for safety with efficiency.

We were discussing hydrogen in the context of wind intermittency, not hydrogen cars.

Storage seem quite possible, storage in underground salt caverns etc.

Off the top of my head, I would have put the economics of producing enough excess wind power and the economics of creating the hydrogen as more intractable. i.e. I suspect we don't have mass storage, because we don't have the hydrogen to store.

The reason renewable advocates discuss it is that there aren't any good alternatives. Wind can't be a total solution without storage. AIUI, the hydrogen hype has died down.

I think the problem is more making green hydrogen in the first place.

I suspect you are thinking of hydrogen in the context of vehicles.

So it's not actually in use yet ?

Fair enough.

No.

I've never heard this 'wind can be the total solution' thing before. Sounds pretty extreme - even the Greens acknowledge don't go that far,

You might be interested in this paper:

For example:

Quote:

The transportation and storage of hydrogen is still one of the main reasons limiting the development of hydrogen energy. (7,8)

Currently, hydrogen is mainly transported in liquid and gaseous form. Among them, hydrogen loss in gaseous transportation is smaller. For example, in the case of tube trailer transportation, the compression cost consumed is only 40% of that of liquid hydrogen transportation. (9)

Yin et al. (10) studied the current development status of hydrogen storage and transportation, they believed that traditional hydrogen storage and transportation methods are inefficient and costly. The pipeline transportation through HBNG is a necessary condition for the large-scale and widespread utilization of hydrogen energy.

After blending hydrogen gas into methane, the new mixture has a lower density compared to pure methane, this density difference results in greater leakage flow rate in HBNG pipelines. (12)

During pipeline operation, hydrogen embrittlement can occur when many materials come into contact with hydrogen, the phenomenon of hydrogen embrittlement can lead to changes in the toughness and load-bearing capacity of pipeline materials, increasing the risk of pipeline rupture. (13,14)

According to relevant statistics, pipeline failures are one of the common causes of safety incidents in hydrogen energy systems among 120 hydrogen-related accidents that occurred from 1999 to 2019. In order to avoid dangerous accidents in hydrogen energy transportation pipelines, it is essential to strengthen pipeline safety research. (15) Unquote

Yes, that is the problem, we need a total solution. I'm being honest. The Greens talk about reducing gas usage, they don't give solutions that totally replace gas. They are not honest about the problem.

The problem is that total zero carbon solutions need to produce power when it is required, current green metrics are based on renewables replacing gas power when renewables choose to produce power.

The less gas we use, the more this distinction will matter.

Yes. But then what is the total solution ? It's wind + "something reliable".

Which begs the question why not just have the "something reliable" ?

And watt for watt, nuclear wins by a country mile.

You actually want more than reliable, you want dispatchable.

No, not in use yet, green hydrogen production is miniscule

According to David Yapp (20 years in the nuclear power sector) nuclear is far from the solution. IIRC only 2 percent of UK consumption at peak demand . It has to be on continuously, day and night, contributing to the feathering and braking problem of excess wind generators overnight. The cost to accommodate 4 days of uk-wide dunkelflaute would be astronomic and still , on all the time, so having to ditch all other sources of power. Catch 22.