the generally reckoned carbon gains from a turbine are 6:1 - but that is based on ever watt hour displacing 1:1 at least gas.. it doesn't work like that tho as you point out.
In reality there are little or no gains from wind and the more you have the less gains there are.
if TPTB actually cared about emissions they would be building nukes, not windmills.
Course it doesn't help when the green"peace" hooligans get welcomed home as conquering heroes.
No one says they "can't" generate. They simply do not regularly generate to the levels claimed when they are installed. And of course no wind or too much wind and they don't generate at all. It is very unlikely even in the current weather that all windmills will be experiencing the same wind levels across the UK. E.G. our max wind speed last night was 55 mph but mostly sat around 10-20
But what was it producing compared to it's nominal maximum capacity?
Some energy companies are reportedly downrating their larger turbines in order to get the higher FIT rate given to smaller units. This is because they are falling so far short of their expected output
and how much fuel wasn't it saving?
enny fule can make watts by throwing money at wind turbines.
The question is, is it value for money? Does it in the end reduce emissions? Does it enhance energy security?
No, no, and no.
Which just goes to show that in this lunatic system, generating electricity isn't really an objective, but maximising subsidy is.
The generating companies are in business to make money. They will adapt their business model to maximise that, within the constraints of legislation and regulation.
Adrian
Precisely so. People's ire should be directed at those in the Houses of Parliament, not the power companies.
and any and all attempts to minimise consumption and so ££ bills, are o verwhelmed by their "need" to maintain & increase profits, by increasing pr ices.... or is that just me being cynical?
Jim K
The original paper by chance shows a 2% better result for the period examined but the statistics on a small sample are well within the noise.
If you count the appalling statistics that the original paper used as "evidence". The greenwash blog postings have become ever more divorced from reality as this story has propagated away from Austin Texas.
Worth going back to the horse's mouth...
Is a reasonable dissection of these lemmings jumping off cliffs from the original authors of the paper that started this lunacy.
The thing it does say is that from a payback perspective if you live at a hot low latitude where aircon in late afternoon affects the dynamic electricity pricing then it may be cost effective to point the array westwards (*and* also alter the slope angle). I reckon based on their numbers pointing it WSW to SW should optimise returns.
The trouble is saying they should face south doesn't take weather into account. If you frequently get early morning mist/fog you may well be better off facing West where the mist/fog will have burnt off. You really need to fit a tracker if you want the most output.
PS, just to start a debate, as panels produce less as they get hot should they be water cooled by spraying water on them?
Have a play at
It could even be lower than that given that about 1 in 10 of them are typically dead in the water at any one time and a particularly bad installation near me it is more like 2 out of 3 dead most days.
Part of the problem is that when the wind does blow power generated scales as the cube of the windspeed up to some limit when they are forced to feather the blades for their own protection. Unless they are installed in pretty windy locations their capacity is somewhat wasted. The catch is that the best places often lack grid infrastructure to carry the generated electricity away to where it is needed. Result is you can have wind farms paid *not* to feed their power to the grid!
The FIT system *is* crazy and being milked for all it is worth to farm the grants to make money rather than the wind to make electricity.
I have just noticed something else *VERY* odd about their graphs. The houses with West facing solar panels seem to use more electricity overall than the ones with South facing panels. eg.
Midnight 1.5kW vs 2kW
8pm 2.5kW vs 3.2kWThis suggests that the study is extremely badly executed with unmatched samples and its conclusions such as they are completely invalid.
Incidentally if the west facing PV was doing what they claimed then it would move the cross over point from 16:30 to a later time. If anything it looks to me like it moves earlier! So I reckon most of their claims are complete and utter bollocks.
Perhaps SW or maybe even WSW to allow for local morning fog but the original article also fails to mention that in doing this you also have to make the elevation angle lower to optimise the pointing.
There are some hybrid ones that have a heat exchanger on the back of the solar panel to make hot water. So far their complexity and weight has made them less appealing since there is only so much hot water you can use. I have seen bright cold UK winters days generate an impressive amount of power considering the low elevation of the sun - quite close to the theoretical limit allowed by the geometry. By comparison their efficiency is much worse when the array is baking at 70C in mid summer.
In very hot climates just having a second skin over the roof with an air gap in between slows heat ingress noticeably. Even more so if the back side of the array has a mirror finish.
On 26/12/2013 16:50, harryagain wrote: ...
If your aim is to maximise subsidy, rather than to produce the maximum output when it is likely to be needed most, then 35 degrees is a good compromise angle for fixed panels for much of the UK. It is not the optimum angle, which varies from day to day and upon actual location; 35 degrees is near enough the optimum angle for May and July in Brighton or for June in Aberdeen. For December, the optimum angle is around 80 degrees in Aberdeen and 74 degrees in Brighton.
Colin Bignell
Most people put them on the roof so have no option as to inclination/azimuth. Surprisingly in the UK worse possible option (Eor W facing and vertical) gives a reduction of around 50% if there are no other adverse factors.
The OP was from Texas ISTR so the azimuth would have less importance than with us up North On the equator, the panels would simply be horizontal.
I would have thought that North facing would be the worst possible option in the UK. However, assuming the panels are facing somewhere between SE and SW, then vertical would give near best output in mid winter in Aberdeen. It is only bad if the aim is maximising FIT income.
That is only optimal at the equinoxes. At other times, the optimal angle varies from +24 to -24 degrees.
Colin Bignell
Which rather suggests that optimal would actually be a system that allows variable angle.
The optimal solution is a two-axis tracking system. Compared to that, in the UK, the annual energy that can be collected by a fixed panel is up to 70%. Changing the angle twice a year will collect an additional 4% but more changes only bring marginal benefits: about a further 0.5% for changing four times a year. All figures are approximate.
Colin Bignell
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