So with all that abundant wind energy t'other day ...

[geoff]

Are there any figures for how many windmills were actually were working and not shut down, and what percentage of full output was actually being delivered to the grid?

[Bob Minchin]

The figures I saw showed about 1.5GW being generated out of a total capacity in the region of 3GW. This was on TNP site Compared with the wind experienced in the NE a week or so ago when the full 3GW was being generated.

Bob

[Dave Liquorice]

at the weekly and monthly graphs. Roughly the 24th to 31st was good for wind, running at about 3GW. When it got really windy that dropped to about 1.5GW...

[ARWadsworth]

harry has stored all the excess wind and will later release it through his arse via uk.d-i-y.

[The Natural Philosopher]

At a wet finger guess Id say all the Scottish wind farms were down and a few English ones. There was supposed to be 4GW of capacity and we had as low as 1.3Gw and if they couldn't strut their stuff in a full gale when can they?

>

[The Natural Philosopher]

Metered is now 4GW alledgedly

[The Natural Philosopher]

+1

He really is a national arsette isn't he?

[Brian Gaff]

Yes, gusting wind is not that easy to utilise as being transient it would need some other technology that could respond faster. Brian

[geoff]

But. wouldn't that be in danger of blowing all the PV panels off his roof

[Pete Shew]

When the wind speed is within the design limits for generation.

I haven't designed a wind turbine, but like everything else there are engineering and financial compromises with a good solution that gives the best results (most kWH per year) in the most usual conditions with survivability in all expected conditions.

Similar to the reason that we ground to a halt in the snow last year - the conditions were so unlikely that spending money to be prepared would usually be a waste, and if the money was spent and nothing happened then TPTB would have been accused of profligacy.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Severe gales are not once in a hundred year events. In fact they are several times a winter events in my experience SOMEWHERE in the uK

darn sarth it was merely a gale..but force 10-11 winds or even hurricane strength gusts are simply not that rare in the UK.

The promnlem of wind turbine engineering is the extreme example of everything that is wrong with renewable energy.

Payback is ion average power but everything has to be sized 5 times bigger for peak power when it happens, and for 10 times larger when there is a a storm and the things need to be shut down.

Hence they are ten times overrated, and hence much more expensive, than the average power they produce would indicate they need to be.

And even that is often not enough....

[The Other Mike]

One Drax on paper, or about 0.001 in the real world, with a dispatchable availability of zero, at 20x the cost.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Cant disagree with much of that.

[Nightjar]

On 11/12/2011 17:33, The Natural Philosopher wrote: ...

The number of days with gale force winds vary from 24 days per annum in the Scilly Islands to 2-3 in the most sheltered parts of the Midlands. Unfortunately, the Met Office do not give figures for the west coast of Scotland. We also, of course, have a average of around 50 tornadoes each year*, the second highest rate per unit land area in the world, after the Netherlands.

• Although there were 105 in one day on 23rd November 1981

Colin Bignell

[Pete Shew]

I'm not saying that wind turbines are a good solution to our power demands[1], just that I would not expect one that is designed to produce the most output per pound over a year be able to produce power in all conditions. Engineering them to produce output on the several times a winter severe gales would increase the pound so reduce the kWH/£ delivered per annum.

Pete

[1] I am waiting for fusion, but in the meantime believe that nuclear fission is our greenest option for base line power [2]. I am unsure how to handle daily fluctuations, but with a good base supply CCGT is probably the best we've got at the moment. [2] Perhaps we could raise the base close to peak and use the excess to freeze the Arctic ocean to increase the albedo.

[F]