Re: Windmills in Winter ...

In article , Arfa Daily scribeth thus

Yes testing me new binoculars last nite not found wanting either:)...

Now tell us what we don't know;(...

The ones I can see from here are stationary. The temperature here is -4 at the moment. I've just had a scan round with the binoculars but the turbines on the moors are behind mist. I could see the top of Emley Moor mast though, sticking out into the sunshine and seeming unconnected to the earth.

Bill

No change there then.

right now we are really pushing it

no wind, obviously no solar, pumped and hydro flat out, gas coal and nuclear flat out, wood burners flat out imports flat out and still can't get the frequency up to 50Hz..

And we are only pulling 52GW..

And is there going to be anything left in Dinorwig for Corrie? (Supposed to be a big story tonight I hear...)

should think they will be nearly empty by now

They are tapering off fast now but so is the peak load.

Thank god the reservoirs on the stock hydro were full after all that rain - they are flat out coining it - use it or lose it.

That'll be why there's all this push for fracking, then?

yup. In Germany they strip mine high sulfur lignite.

Here we will have to frack gas to pretend that the money we wasted on renewable energy wasn't actually wasted.

In message , Harry Bloomfield writes

Or perhaps a little diesel engine :-)

I wouldn't joke about it.. they probably do have them as standby power for when the grid goes down. You can't leave them without power as the weather will destroy them.

Down to 45 now :) and just over 50Hz.

Must be OK though, the OCGT isn't showing anything.

Our local windfarm was doing f-all this morning when I went past, and the wind has now dropped... Shame because yesterday for the first time I saw them all running at once. There's usually at least one down.

Andy

We wouldn't be that lucky.

I wonder how much power a stationary turbine or one feathered because theh wind is too strong consumes?

If they are serious about wind and tidal and wave etc, they need to invest in a form of efficient energy storage. After all y you could not run your car without a battery, at least not very well, and yet they seem to think that a country can be run that way. Brian

I posted a link to gridwatch on Facebook yesterday. One of my colleagues was mightlity upset, saying "you'll be complaining about solar power on a dull day next"....!

While we run a generating system mainly based on fossil fuels, any contribution from renewables reduces the demand on those conventional power stations and reduces the fuel they use overall.

Cat belling.

If we knew of an efficient cheap safe small way to store energy we would already have deployed it en masse to cope with existing grid demand fluctuations, let alone those additional fluctuations imposed by intermittent renewable energy..

It just so happens that the best way to store energy is coal (for powers stations) hydrocarbon fuel (for mobile applications) or in the atomic nucleus.

Nothing mechanical, chemical, electrical or heat based can rival these for simplicity, weight, safety and size.

They hope that they can keep the myth of renewable energy alive long enough to make obscene amounts of money out of it before it gets thrown out by any nation that has the sense to realise what a total crock of s*it it all is.

a myth.

Its a bit like saying that carrying a mast and sail on your car will reduce overall fuel consumption.

Sometimes it will. Often it will raise the fuel consumption dragging all that clutter around.

In short the requirement to overall generate less electricity is offset by the extra amounts of fuel needed to start up and heat up gas turbines repeatedly, all of which is lost when they switch off.

I have a contact with a gas turbine company reseraching this: His conclusion after analysing 3 years of wind data and electricity generated by wind, is that with the older style turbines the addition of wind power almost certainly results in *increased* fuel burn.

Of course, being a man trying to sell fast start turbines into the industry, he would say that, but he is selling to pretty intelligent engineers.

I usually summarise this by saying that in terms of saving fuel, wind turbines are (almost) completely useless.

Thankfully it's still short-sleeve order out there