The boss of Octopus was on the radio this morning.
Much of our energy needs are going to be solved by building yet more wind turbines. When it was pointed out that sometimes the wind doesn't blow his response was that the UK is a very windy place and we can export the wind generated surplus when it does blow. He conveniently failed to mention how this all worked when the wind doesn't blow.
Another problem is in winter storms when the wind blows too fast for wind turbines to operate safely. A big problem is that power output scales as wind speed cubed which means that you end up with a lot of installed peak power but a relatively pathetic yield from it.
The unstated assumption is that you export your "free energy" using a bidirectional link, bank the money, then when you have no wind, you import energy over the bidirectional link and use that money you put in the bank for the purpose.
Suffice to say, there are a lot of assumptions that go into such a model, that simply aren't true.
One of the key points in this, in less diplomatic language, is "you cannot rely on foreigners to keep your ass warm" :-) They'll let you down at the worst possible moment. That's not how you engineer a system.
Consequently, you may be exporting your bonus power across the link, but it you ask for some power back some day, they're under no obligation to feed it to you. You can sit in the dark then, comforted in the knowledge that a bank somewhere, has the money from a power sale in it.
Somebody has to make reliable power, if you expect reliable power.
You can't fake it.
Maybe it means keeping a 22kW generator in your back garden, and a big tank of fuel. That could be your reliable power.
That's why a well-run grid, has double the capacity it needs, and the power sources do not "failure correlate" with one another. Look at Texas if you need an example. They had enough capacity, but they were not ready for an air temperature of less than 0C. The grid functionally collapsed because certain key components were not "winterized". This also caused havok and extra expenses for people in other states, not associated with the bad planning involved.
Paul
Amen to that. AIUI Denmark often has surplus energy, because they have a lot of wind generators, and they sell it to their neighbours, notably Sweden. But it's a buyers' market as Denmark can do nothing else with the power, so they have to sell it cheap. But when there's no wind, and Denmark is desperate for power, it becomes a sellers' market and Denmark has to buy back at a much higher price than the got for it when they sold it.
Exactly.
We've been on the short end of that stick, here.
At one time, we were short of power, practically every day, at 8AM.
Our "neighbour" used to charge us 100x the going rate, for that power.
The impact of that pricing was notable enough, to see on the power bill at the end of the month.
We fixed that, by using time-of-day billing, to shift the load around enough, so additional generating capacity was not needed. But, you only get to do that once. My power at 2PM is probably 3x what it costs at 6AM. That causes me to do laundry after the sun goes down :-)
You can't count on a neighbour. Not in any practical sense. A spot price is a spot price. Could be infinity.
Paul
The national weather forecast this evening on the BBC was predicting a 'blocking high' over the UK and parts of northern Europe, with quiet settled weather in the run-up to Xmas. It'll be interesting to see how much wind generation there is. The fact that it's mild ATM may be the saving grace.
There is another factor to consider which I heard mentioned a few days ago. Its about changing local climate using windmills, so downwind of a wind farm the airflow has been changed, much as it is by tall buildings, causing vortexes and dead zones. They seem to think its best to put windmills at sea for this reason. In the end, I guess whatever you do to extract power from the planet you are going to have an effect, and one just has to accept that fact or go back to living in caves. Brian
I think not just for that reason. Wind blows more steadily out at sea, and there aren't houses etc nearby to be disturbed by the continuous low frequency and sub-audible sounds that they make. But they are more expensive to construct, and suffer greater corrosion problems due to the salty environment which is likely to shorten their working lives.
The bigger the diameter of the windmill, the further apart they have to be positioned to avoid co-interference of adjacent down-wind turbulence. This image, of the Horns wind farm off Denmark, shows the problem. It's just possible to make out the ghosts of the down-wind turbines within the vapour trails from the leading turbines and the turbulence pattern causing them.
There seem to be some who have the latter as an objective!
If new turbine green "encouragements" and constraint payments were immediately ceased the problem would soon come to an end.
Of course you know the biggest advantage of offshore windfarms?
The birds that they kill float away, and don't pile up on the ground underneath where someone might make a connection.
Andy
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