Wind power today.is..not what they forecast!

[The Natural Philosopher]

I occasionally look, in a geeky sort of way, at the wind power output figures in the vague porcine levitation sort of hope that it will in fact be contributing something useful.

good lord, the wind was forecast to be producing 2.3Gw today, but in fact it showed a couple of dips to less than 1GW. In under an hour. Equivalent to losing a whole conventional power station.

No doubt it was the 'wrong sort of wind' and the turbines shut themselves down, or the waves were too high..

I wonder how much fuel we used coping with THAT slew rate.

The frequency graphs for the same time period show a huge drop (for the grid)

Fortunately, while windy, its also very warm, so we don't really need the power anyway.

Its always nice to see the wind associations forecasts turn out to be

50% in error. All their forecasts generally are, so nothing new there, then.

[The Other Mike]

With the current installed capacity of wind generation it isn't an operational problem as long as there is some reserve, either by the interconnector to France or spinning reserve, or pumped storage. Of course it costs us, the consumers an arm and a leg to subsidise these white heaps of shit that ruin the landscape. An *instantaneous* loss of 1.3GW of any generation on the UK Grid isn't a problem at all, either at one site or spread across multiple sites. The wind turbines didn't all stop at once and so the impact on the system frequency was minimal. It is however a planning headache and one that really ought to go away. Wind turbines, are a very dangerous threat to the stability of the grid system, more so in the UK than in Europe.

Can't see that, nor was there any system warning indicating a shortfall in generation, so that the 'huge drop' can't have been of any real significance, you can see a spike in system prices from settlement period 35-37 yesterday, roughly 3 x but GBP100/MWh is not unusual at around those times.

The system frequency extremes in the past three days were 49.72Hz @

1659 yesterday and 50.24Hz at 1132 yesterday The normal operational limits are 49.5Hz - 50.5Hz.

Depends on the leakage due to draughts, having said that the predicted demand peak today is about 2600MW down on yesterday, but industrial demand is always lower on a Friday so it's not just the weather.

Despite the link just below the graph it's *not* the wind association forecasting tool you are seeing. If they had a wind forecasting tool it would be permanently stuck at 100%

[The Natural Philosopher]

:-)

However if we have more windpower, accommodating the slew rate will be extremely hazardous. Imagine 30% PEAK capacity,.. that's bad enough..like losing half a dozen power stations. Now consider the ridiculous target of 30% AVERAGE from renewables..that's like switching off up to 50% of the countries power stations in an hour..

[Andrew Gabriel]

There's already been a major blackout in continental Europe affecting several countries, due in part to instability resulting from wind generated supplies (but also failure to replan for increasing levels of unreliable supplies). This came about the same time as the Danes decided to stop their wind program, because although they could boast that wind could generate all (or some large proportion of) their supply, they had not managed to turn off a single conventional power station, and they couldn't sell the excess electricity these generate because there is absolutely no market for electricity which is only available when the wind blows.

Wind is really stuck until there's a better viable way to store and release large amounts of electrical energy than anyone has discovered so far.

30% from renewables may or may not be achievable, but the figure from unreliable sources like wind is very much lower on an island this size. It goes up a bit if you can distribute the generation and resulting electricity across a larger area such as all Europe, but then you have to pay for the cost of backup power stations, and that's enormous, as power stations are only viable investments in the first place if you are going to run them continuously, so you have to subsidise them to shut down when the wind blows. It's all a horrible mess which politicians just don't even begin to understand.

[Huge]

I think the answer was in the question, there.

[The Wanderer]

There's progress......

like they still have a way to go, but I think we'll be hearing more of this outfit before too long.

[jgharston]

"the cold is not recycled,", "the cold is circulated". Cold isn't a thing, heat is a thing, cold is absense of heat.

Investigating further, the "cold" that is the byproduct of this process isn't actually cold, it's heat! The waste is the result of the "fuel medium" being air at -196 degrees. All mechanical processes result in waste heat at a temperature higher than the source, it just so happens that the "hot" waste from this process happens to be below normal room temperature ;)

JGH

[The Wanderer]

Yebbut it does seem to be written for a largely non-technical audience, explaining for the lay person how the idea is supposed to work.

Take it from me, Gareth Brett didn't get where he is today by peddling green bandwagon hope3s and aspirations.

[Jack]

So their forecasts are just a lot of hot air then. (Sorry)