Thanks for the Wind Farms

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PDQ Mobile
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Re: Thanks for the Wind Farms

Post by PDQ Mobile »

Wind now making 20% (7.6GW) of the UK's measured demand of 33.78GW.
Twenty percent!

It's one hellofa big spark!
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gaz
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Re: Thanks for the Wind Farms

Post by gaz »

[XAP]Bob wrote:We have a good national grid.

Sometimes it misbehaves :wink: .
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Abradable Chin
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Re: Thanks for the Wind Farms

Post by Abradable Chin »

I've found a Telegraph article: Wind farms paid 1m a week to switch off.

I'm none the wiser after reading it. Is it that the grid can't cope locally with the power, or that there isn't a demand for the power? It does mention that only 3% of potential wind power was declined in 2014.
irc
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Re: Thanks for the Wind Farms

Post by irc »

[XAP]Bob wrote:Extra cabling? We have a good national grid. It's national, and that's key.


The grid wasn't capable of handling wind power and needed upgraded. One example the near 1Bn spent on the new Beauly-Denny powerline from lowland Scotland to the highlands.

The industry regulator, Ofgem, says the cost of construction currently stands at just over £820m.A spokesman said: "Britain's electricity networks need to be upgraded to connect increasing amounts of low carbon generation.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-35146301


Various other upgrades in Scotland will cost another billion or so.

Electricity projects costing more than £1bn have been planned for Scotland, on top of the newly approved Beauly to Denny transmission line upgrade.Power lines in the Highlands, Moray and Aberdeenshire, along with underwater cables from Shetland and the Western Isles, have been put forward. A third sub-sea cable has been proposed to take power from wind farms in Argyll to Hunterston in North Ayrshire.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/hig ... 364773.stm

And another 1Bn to upgrade transmission capacity between Scotland and England

https://www.ft.com/content/d365028e-589 ... 144feabdc0

It certainly was not just a case of building wind farms and plugging them into an existing national grid.
irc
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Re: Thanks for the Wind Farms

Post by irc »

Abradable Chin wrote:I've found a Telegraph article: Wind farms paid 1m a week to switch off.

I'm none the wiser after reading it. Is it that the grid can't cope locally with the power, or that there isn't a demand for the power? It does mention that only 3% of potential wind power was declined in 2014.



Grid capacity. Wind power is mainly in Scotland. Demand mainly in England At peak wind generation the grid can't cope. Hence 3Bn being spent upgrading grid within Scotland and adding another Scotland - England link.

All you need to know about wind constraint payments is at http://euanmearns.com/uk-wind-constraint-payments/

Here we have acceptance of £90 million being spent in a single year to pay heavily subsidised companies to not do what they are established to do and that is to provide low carbon electricity to the British people. This is Orwellian (or Soviet) economics of the worst kind. In 2015, £90 million pounds was transferred from the pockets of the poor to the pockets of the rich in order to sustain an unsustainable electricity production mirage.
kwackers
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Re: Thanks for the Wind Farms

Post by kwackers »

I think it's shocking we're spending £3 billion on upgrading the grid when we could just carry on burning coal for no extra cost...

And all that money paid to turn off windmills when they're not used - £90 million!

How much is Hinkley again? How much will it cost to decommission? Who pays for that? How much are our current nuclear stations costing to decommission?
How much of that money we guarantee for the power it generates will benefit the poor - particularly against diminishing costs of renewable vs rising costs of nuclear?

I think it's brilliant the way the naysayers conveniently ignore the costs of the current system. When you're prepared to do that everything looks expensive.
irc
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Re: Thanks for the Wind Farms

Post by irc »

kwackers wrote:I think it's brilliant the way the naysayers conveniently ignore the costs of the current system. When you're prepared to do that everything looks expensive.


I'm not ignoring them I think Hinkley is the wrong type of nuclear at the wrong price. I'm criticising wind costs because they are both substantial and wholly additional to gas/coal/nuclear. Since wind needs 100% backup the cost comparison should be between gas/coal/nuclear and gas/coal/nuclear + wind/solar. Which do you think will cost more? One set of power stations or two?
kwackers
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Re: Thanks for the Wind Farms

Post by kwackers »

irc wrote:
kwackers wrote:I think it's brilliant the way the naysayers conveniently ignore the costs of the current system. When you're prepared to do that everything looks expensive.


I'm not ignoring them I think Hinkley is the wrong type of nuclear at the wrong price. I'm criticising wind costs because they are both substantial and wholly additional to gas/coal/nuclear. Since wind needs 100% backup the cost comparison should be between gas/coal/nuclear and gas/coal/nuclear + wind/solar. Which do you think will cost more? One set of power stations or two?

Our gas/coal/nuclear power stations are all coming to the ends of their lives anyway.

Nearly every problem can be fixed with a properly designed global distribution network. Having power stations that can 'fill' in is fine - but they need to be power stations that can be brought online quickly and taken offline quickly otherwise there isn't a point.

The costs of wind power aren't substantial, not in the general scheme of things. Were spending hundreds of billions to decommission our current power stations - that's HUNDREDS of BILLIONS. And that's just their decommission costs, doesn't include building new ones, doesn't include the costs of air pollution (which is substantial), the costs of rising CO2 or a whole multitude of other hidden costs.
IMO it's fairly simple, you create renewable systems and you make them work and the reason you'll make them work is necessity. It's not beyond our wit to do it and there are potential solutions already and if it turns out that the 'real' solution is to use less power then that's the route we'll have to take.

But first you have to take the right steps. Until we do then it'll simply be business as usual - and that's working out just fine...
PDQ Mobile
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Re: Thanks for the Wind Farms

Post by PDQ Mobile »

I guess some of us feel the wind will blow as fossil fuels start to get more and more expensive.
Just as I write wind is making 24.94% of measured demand.
A quarter of all our electricity! Clean and renewable. Some might argue, for offshore at least, rather lovely.
It is actually making more at the moment than Gas Turbine generation- the usual big supplier.
They are making 7.42 and 6.75 GW respectively.
In many ways it is an extraordinary figure and a collosal amount of power.
I know it's windy but seemingly not so windy that the wind turbines have to be shut down!
There has been a sustained roughly 20% of generation since the onset of this more unsettled weather.
It must be saving quite a bit of carbon emmissions and fuel costs.
Psamathe
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Re: Thanks for the Wind Farms

Post by Psamathe »

irc wrote:..I'm criticising wind costs because they are both substantial and wholly additional to gas/coal/nuclear. Since wind needs 100% backup...

Except you keep ignoring storage. If you build some storage you no longer need the 100% backup you keep maintaining in necessary.

Ian
Psamathe
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Re: Thanks for the Wind Farms

Post by Psamathe »

kwackers wrote:...Were spending hundreds of billions to decommission our current power stations - that's HUNDREDS of BILLIONS....

And the taxpayer has underwritten the costs of decommissioning Hinckley. True that EDF have to pay some but those costs are capped and the taxpayer is liable for costs above that cap! (and does anybody believe that decommissioning costs will be as predicted by a Government leaning over backwards to persuade EDF to build the plant ...).
“The reality in terms of decommissioning is that it always costs more than people say,” said Dr Paul Dorfman, of the Energy Institute at University College London.


Current estimated from the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority for the cleanup of our existing nuclear plants is now more than double the cost that was estimated 10 years ago.

Ian
Jdsk
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Re: Thanks for the Wind Farms

Post by Jdsk »

NB date.

"ScotWind offshore wind leasing delivers major boost to Scotland’s net zero aspirations":
https://www.crownestatescotland.com/new ... spirations

Jonathan
ANTONISH
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Re: Thanks for the Wind Farms

Post by ANTONISH »

PDQ Mobile wrote: 24 Dec 2016, 10:23pm I guess some of us feel the wind will blow as fossil fuels start to get more and more expensive.
Just as I write wind is making 24.94% of measured demand.
A quarter of all our electricity! Clean and renewable. Some might argue, for offshore at least, rather lovely.
It is actually making more at the moment than Gas Turbine generation- the usual big supplier.
They are making 7.42 and 6.75 GW respectively.
In many ways it is an extraordinary figure and a collosal amount of power.
I know it's windy but seemingly not so windy that the wind turbines have to be shut down!
There has been a sustained roughly 20% of generation since the onset of this more unsettled weather.
It must be saving quite a bit of carbon emmissions and fuel costs.
Where I am at the moment it's cold with light winds - that can be a drawback for wind generation.
I am unaware of any substantial storage scheme - e.g something that could match the Dinorwic scheme but maintain the output for several days.
Gas turbines can be flashed up quickly and I suspect will be in use for some time (it's not energy storage as such)
Of course we could have a couple of coal fired stations ticking over but let's just watch the Chinese doing that instead.
Jdsk
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Re: Thanks for the Wind Farms

Post by Jdsk »

ANTONISH wrote: 18 Jan 2022, 11:27am
PDQ Mobile wrote: 24 Dec 2016, 10:23pm I guess some of us feel the wind will blow as fossil fuels start to get more and more expensive.
Just as I write wind is making 24.94% of measured demand.
A quarter of all our electricity! Clean and renewable. Some might argue, for offshore at least, rather lovely.
It is actually making more at the moment than Gas Turbine generation- the usual big supplier.
They are making 7.42 and 6.75 GW respectively.
In many ways it is an extraordinary figure and a collosal amount of power.
I know it's windy but seemingly not so windy that the wind turbines have to be shut down!
There has been a sustained roughly 20% of generation since the onset of this more unsettled weather.
It must be saving quite a bit of carbon emmissions and fuel costs.
I am unaware of any substantial storage scheme - e.g something that could match the Dinorwic scheme but maintain the output for several days.
This is a very well-known problem.

Lots of storage is now appearing: we have a battery system at our local electricity station, part of a combined project to install a large EV charging system at a Park and Ride operation.

And interconnection and load-balancing address the same problem of intermittent supply from some renewables but in a different way. These are developing rapidly... including Morocco to the UK.

Jonathan
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al_yrpal
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Re: Thanks for the Wind Farms

Post by al_yrpal »

The I Mech E were suggesting compressed air but that seems to have been dropped

Al
Reuse, recycle, thus do your bit to save the planet.... Get stuff at auctions, Dump, Charity Shops, Facebook Marketplace, Ebay, Car Boots. Choose an Old House, and a Banger ..... And cycle as often as you can......
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