Ping TNP re: gridwatch

[Chris J Dixon]

There are a number of installations near me where this is demonstrably not the case.

Chris

[tony sayer]

In article , harryagain scribeth thus

It bloody well doesn't. When it hits my car underneath our cherry tree!.

Mind you its mainly Pigeon shit which as is known is the hardest known substance to mankind;!!..

Once set...

[Tim Streater]

I really don't know where harry gets his funny ideas from. In our case it's seagull shit, and once that has set, or dried, it takes quite some effort to remove. Certainly the windscreen wipers plus screenwash doesn't do it, I need to use a scraper.

[Bill Wright]

Like gardeners.

Bill

[Bill Wright]

There seems to be a critical mass. Certain areas of roof below aerials are a deathtrap because of birdshit and the moss it attracts. Next door

-- nothing!

Bill

[harryagain]

Your car isn'tmade from self cleaning glass as PV panels are.

[Vir Campestris]

Nor, apparently, are those panels I saw on Sunday.

Andy

[John Stumbles]

With all due respect[1] to wind & PV, I suspect their variability is only a major problem in our current fledgling steps towards a carbon-free world where we're basically just trying to replace fossil fuels for supplying our present electricity demands. We're still burning up fossil fuels as though there's no tomorrow[2] for transport, space heating, agriculture etc and in order to decarbonise those we'll need to generate vastly more leccy, much of which we'll have to convert into chemical energy[3] which is naturally much easier to store and therefore more accommodating of fluctuating energy supplies. It's hard, here in the UK, to conceive of a scenario where it makes more sense to build hundreds of thousands of wind gennies, mostly in deep waters, than hundreds of nukes, but you never know particularly for sunshine-rich regions such as equatorial deserts where concentrating solar may be competitive.

[1] not a lot [2] irony intended [3] although with MSRs e.g. LFTRs we may be able to go straight to chemical energy without pushing electrons around to do it

[polygonum]

A bit of haematite and some sun and you've got non-carbon chemical energy. Simple, isn't it...

[Tim Streater]

Errm, not sure about moving Wind to the big boys chart. It tends to suppress how variable it is. Put it with just nuclear, perhaps?

[The Natural Philosopher]

then where does coal and gas go?

[Tim Streater]

You may be pleased to know that Andrew Neil has picked up on gridwatch (if you didn't already know). I tweeted to him earlier that our 12GW of wind is managing to produce 0.5GW and he's sent his own tweet out to that effect (he does that anyway from time to time). All useful pressure.

Could I suggest that the capacities of the different energy sources be noted somewhere on the gridwatch site (e.g. in the tooltips)?

[Tim Watts]

Well done that man!

[Brian Gaff]

Yes well of course this will happen as its not windy everywhere at the same time of course. Brian

[The Natural Philosopher]

could do.

I'll think abaht it

[The Natural Philosopher]

actually often it is, and often, as is the case right now, it *isn't* windy, at all, anywhere, and everywhere.

[Chris Hogg]

I'm sure you know Euan Mearns blog, but in case others haven't, this page in particular is relevant

The data is from Bach. For those who don't know him, Bach is a Danish engineer with his feet very firmly on the ground when it comes to 'green' issues.

[philipuk]

Is it even worth it any more? New cars are much much more reliable than the lemons of yesteryear. Also ever since the insurance co's took over the breakdown firms what they actually cover has decreased year on year.

Philip

[Tim Streater]

[The Natural Philosopher]

And the relevance of this to this thread is?