Solar Cost

[Harry Bloomfield]

Andrew Gabriel formulated on Saturday :

That (or most of it) was also on R4 last week.

[The Natural Philosopher]

EU directive on alternative energy that forces suppliers to buy it at a premium.

incraesed electricity bills. I.e. from us.

Right, so you've been told. Now f*ck off.

Thats because only about £20 of electricity is generated by windmills, thank god.

Oh f*ck off and go to live in Denmark.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Do the calculations, It's a frigging disaster anyway you spin it.

If it were easy and cheap, we would already be doing it.

[Harry Bloomfield]

Rod pretended :

The only place pumped storage is viable, is in mountaneous areas. I put one in, in south Wales. The water was pumped the hill on off-peak lecky, then ran turbines during peak demand. The water just ran between two large reservoirs, rather than going to waste.

[Andrew Gabriel]

The grid isn't a buffer (the only buffer there is the inertia of the generating plant armatures). You can draw energy from the grid, store it, and send it back later. You only get 60% of it back though. With Wind electricity already being something like

3-4 times the price of the bulk sources, if you have to store it by taking it from the grid and losing 40%, then it's gone up to 6 times the price (without even taking into account the cost of the storage). The direct pumped idea probably isn't viable either, but it might be able to achieve better than 60% efficiency.

You also need to consider the impact on other generating plant. When a power station is costed, it is assumed it will be running pretty continuously except for maintenance. If you now have to factor in periods of hot standby (spinning ready to supply power when the wind drops), you just added periods of much overhead with no income. So now the cost of power from that plant will have to increase significantly to cover this new overhead. This also has to be factored in as cost of Wind power. Currently, no one will build any power stations on the assumption they will work only when the wind isn't blowing.

[Andrew Gabriel]

Oh, any idea what programme and/or time?

[Harry Bloomfield]

Andrew Gabriel laid this down on his screen :

Not really. My guess would be around lunch time and Wednesday or Thursday and included an interview with one of the Danish experts. Possibly one of their generation network controllers. It mentioned 20%, but the 20 was all down to how it was calculated. It also gave the (large) difference between the on shore and much more efficient off-shore wind generation.

[David Hansen]

On Sat, 25 Oct 2008 14:04:37 +0100 someone who may be The Natural Philosopher wrote this:-

I note that you have failed to name it.

Yawn. Nice try. Do keep it up.

[andrew]

Apart from the conversion to electricity and then running an electric pump isn't this effectively what Dinorwig is in a position to do anyway?

I've actually been interested in the idea you suggest for a small farm in Hampshire which sits on a hanger with a small stream at the bottom, with the reservoir at the top and a cheap turbine at the bottom the head would be 40m. 30kWhr/day still requires pumping 300 tonnes of water per day average with no conversion losses and I guess the store would need to be several times this for continuity.

Once the motive power has no marginal cost then we only need be concerned with capital amd O+M costs, eliminate the electrical bits from the storage side and the costs may be lower so even though those water pumping wind turbines are less efficient than high speed turbines it may work if electricity prices go up a lot or a private supplier had access to those rocs.

The other thing is flow of the stream micro hydro seems to have very high capital costs but integrated with a pumped reservoir a system with next to no moving parts looks feasible.

AJH

[andrew]

That's one way of using the statistics. In fact the cost of the rocs is spread over all the non renewable supplies and paid to the renewable supplies according to how much renewables were produced. As the bulk of supplies are overwhelmingly non renewable the cost appears to be spread thinly amongst them and spread more thickly on the small amount of renewable energy supplied.

AJH

[David Hansen]

On 25 Oct 2008 13:12:34 GMT someone who may be [e-mail] (Andrew Gabriel) wrote this:-

Not a long term buffer.

It is a short term buffer, though if the shock to the system is great enough (for example the failure of a large power station or transmission line) then this affects the frequency. These shocks can be automatically detected and generation added to or removed from the system.

You appear to be close to repeating a fallacy which is thoroughly debunked, but still trotted out by the antis. That fallacy is that for every watt of wind output there must be a watt of fossil fuel output on standby, just in case the wind suddenly stops. The fallacy is comprehensively debunked in

and despite much huffing and puffing nobody has made a convincing criticism of that report yet.

There will be a small amount of additional backup with large amounts of wind, all outlined in the report. I doubt if anyone will build new power stations to provide this backup, far better to utilise existing plant which has been taken out of regular use.

For example the third largest coal fired power station in Europe (according to Wikipedia, so it must be true:-) is at Longannet. It has four units. Three of these have been/are being modified to reduce acid rain emissions and the same three units are proposed to be fitted with even more of this sort of thing, so the place can continue running from 2015 to at least 2030 without falling foul of the EU. The fourth unit will not be modified, but will remain as a backup unit.

The two time periods which matter with wind generation are an hour ahead of real time and a few days before real time. Wind forecasting an hour ahead of real time is already extremely accurate, a few days before real time wind forecasting less accurate but still good. The fourth unit at Longannet could be offered to the market with a few days notice.

[tony sayer]

Not in bloody East Anglia we won't;!...

[The Natural Philosopher]

You are right. You only need about 5/6 of watt of backup.

However quibbling over details is bollocks, as usual.

[Andy Dingley]

Just about the worst way to do it, short of buying one of those B&Q things.

Read some of Piggott's many books, pamphlets or web things. Look at the disk-brake alternator designs. These have far better slow-speed and better speed-range performance in general.

[Dave Liquorice]

Dinorwic doesn't exist then? Or any of the other pumped storage stations? They take power from the grid to fill the upper storage, that power cmes from "the grid" not a particular source supplying the grid.

[Dave Liquorice]

You don't have just one FFS! There are many places with cascaded reserviours that it wouldn't cost that much (in the grand scheme of things) to fit turbine/pumps to. There are also any number reservours that are always letting water down to keep the river levels below them up. They don't have turbines in that outflow...

There is no one solution. This single solution mindset, be that wind, nukes, or cow farts needs to be stomped on and serious joined up thinking must take place.

[dennis]

Its easy..

borrow a van.. drive around until you find a house with solar panels.. steal them.

[Rod]

Sorry - I thought it obvious that I was using "reservoir" as a sort of collective for "the set of reservoirs required to make a sizable difference (to the UK)". Obviously it wasn't. :-(

I do agree that locally there might well be opportunities. But, unfortunately, for most of us 'personal' pumped storage does not appear to be a viable option.

My personal 'really tiny thing that might help' is to ensure that queues for petrol stations roll downhill towards the pumps. :-)

[The Natural Philosopher]

Do read what is said.

They are neither easy nor cheap.

Dinorwig is a measly 1.7 GW output.

It cost £450M in 1974, and was the largest single engineering project ever undertaken in the UK

It can run for precisely 5 hours. at an overall 80% efficiency.

So thats about 10% of the cost of actually supplying the energy it can backup. For just 5 hours.

There are few other sites usable.

To backup a power source for 24 hours would increase the cost of that power source approximately 50%.

To back up - say - 50% of the grid, for 24 hours, would cost - if suitable good sites could be found, around 100 sites of comparable size.

Say, at todays prices, about £100bn

For that you could build around 50 GW of nuclear power stations. And afford to let them run idle.

Thus nearly doubling the grid capacity.

If you think that doubling the grid gerenarion capacity for the same price as allowing 30% of it to be windmills, (and still not being ale to cope with more than a day of low winds), at the same price is not a cost effective solution, your name must be Alastair darling. Or Dr Drivel.

[The Natural Philosopher]

That was done on some undergrund lines IIRC. Stations are at local highpoints, and the trains run down out of them and up to the next one.