On the basis that any wind turbine is only any use when it is turning, and needs some sort of generating back-up for when it isn't, I am not too sure that they are a totally good idea. However this makes me think that they really aren't!
tinyurl.com/6l2353j
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Tide power is certainly more predictable and reliable. Until electricity can be stored cheaply in huge quantities wind is not a good system.
Is this question prompted by the power company being paid millions to shut down wind power production during the remnants of hurricane Katia?
Last edited by: Old Navy on Sun 18 Sep 11 at 09:55
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Yes it was ON. Tail of hurricane crossing UK a week ago SFAIK
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Agreed - good articles in the Eye on these - for instance during the cold weather last winter when we needed electricity more, wind turbines weren't working due to no wind. Complete green nonsense - more nuclear is what's needed.
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Nuclear is the logical answer, With a little of the alternatives to keep the Greenies happy. They will soon change their green ideas when the lights (or i thingies) start going out.
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One of things I've wondered about with my "meadow" if we end up here long term, would be some sort of geo-thermic pump for the heating and maybe a small wind-turbine for the electric, already looked into solar - which is also feasible.
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Perhaps one answer for the UK's energy requirement could be for consumers to install electric heating thereby reducing our dependence on imported gas (oil in my case)
www.dealec.co.uk/acatalog/why_electric_heating.html
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The link makes a good case, lack of boilers, maintenance and fumes etc, but I can't quite see how, if electricity is being generated and used, dependence on imported oil/gas will be reduced or am I being "Mr Slow-on-Sunday morning"?
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>>but I can't quite see how, if electricity is being generated and used, dependence on imported oil/gas will be reduced or am I being "Mr Slow-on-Sunday morning"?<<
Well, my thinking was that if more people used this type of heating www.dealec.co.uk/acatalog/stiebel_eltron_heating.html
that would take care of the over capacity for one thing and it would do away with our old 'boiling kettle' type central heating systems as well,
Of course - the price per kwh would have to come down too :)
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>> >>but I can't quite see how, if electricity is being generated and used, dependence on
>> imported oil/gas will be reduced or am I being "Mr Slow-on-Sunday morning"?<<
>>
>> Well, my thinking was that if more people used this type of heating www.dealec.co.uk/acatalog/stiebel_eltron_heating.html
>>
>> that would take care of the over capacity for one thing and it would do
>> away with our old 'boiling kettle' type central heating systems as well,
>>
>> Of course - the price per kwh would have to come down too :)
>>
Those are just over priced storage heaters. They've never ever been anything other than completely useless which is why everyone has a boiler and radiators. They come on when you want and go off when you want and they don't stop producing heat after a few hours.
High efficiency electric heaters are good for smaller spaces and low heat loss buildings like flats and such like. Storage heaters are useless everywhere apart from very basic background heating if you don't want it to be any good at keeping the place warm. Everywhere I've been with storage heaters is just cold. You need another source of heat in each room which makes them completely pointless.
Gas per kw/h is still a fraction of electricity hence it is far more sensible to use it for high demand activities like heating.
Tidal power is one of the more sensible solutions. Some bloke in Scotland came up with a good solution. No one here was interested. Think he's sold the idea to the Chinese or another foreign superpower.
Green energy is all about bagging as much in subsidies and screwing the consumer with ridiculously high energy prices. Nuclear isn't much good as the waste is too dangerous. Ground source heat pumps are a better idea and can use existing wet radiators for background heating at least. Then you could always top up their efforts with another heat source.
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>>Nuclear isn't much good as the waste is too dangerous.
Hear Hear, I can't think of a worse idea, than nuclear power.
1/ the nuclear plants are high risk. (ask residents of Long Island, chernobyl, Windscale, Japan etc.....
2/ cooling water, Transporting the rods, waste, etc, all risky.
3/ What will happen in the future?
Burying the waste in deep holes is a great idea :-( but NOBODY knows long term, what that practice will do to our planet.
Remember, 'experts' once thought asbestos was fantastic...
Last edited by: swiss tony on Sun 18 Sep 11 at 12:25
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>> Agreed - good articles in the Eye on these - for instance during the cold
>> weather last winter when we needed electricity more, wind turbines weren't working due to no
>> wind. Complete green nonsense - more nuclear is what's needed.
>>
Nuclear won't get built anywhere in the world unless the state funds and insures them. The total cost (including downtime and clean-up costs) of even a minor accident is too great for any commercial company to be able to raise/secure funds to build them.
The decommissioning costs are completely unknown and at present every nuclear plant anywhere in the world is leaving a legacy for future generations to take care of the costs. Compared to our state pensions crisis where our grandchildren are expected to pay for our pensions, the nuclear bill is likely to be far far worse. However, the same is true of the way we are burning our oil and coal without any regard for the future generations.
Who then who cares, we live for today. Tomorrow can take of itself. Tough if you are born in the future.
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It's all just mucking about, trying to meet EU targets, until such time that fusion becomes available. Fusion gets the lion's share of research money at the moment, which is good.
Short term, I'm not sure whether we should do more renewables or more nuclear.
It's so difficult to get a handle on whether wind is a good idea, because both sides of the argument give wildly different estimates of real power output and real costs.
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I think we're on our own here - forget EU targets, this is a critical thing, they plainly can't make anything work - any fool could see (Even Gordon Brown) that the Euro wasn't going to work, they're fiddling whilst Rome burns. We need big Nukes -
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"It's so difficult to get a handle on whether wind is a good idea, because both sides of the argument give wildly different estimates of real power output and real costs.'
Some time ago the BBC published this nifty little calculator.
news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/uk/06/electricity_calc/html/1.stm
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Folly.
Costly (green taxes add 18% to your energy bills) and inefficient insofar as they need back-up of proper generating stations for windless times.
Wave power seems a better possibility, but the real answer is more nuclear stations.
We could then sell nuclear generated power to the Frogs instead of buying it from them! :=)
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>> Folly.
You can find all the factual information you need from this anti-wind-power group:
www.windbyte.co.uk/windpower.html
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>> "It's so difficult to get a handle on whether wind is a good idea, because
>> both sides of the argument give wildly different estimates of real power output and real
>> costs.'
>>
>> Some time ago the BBC published this nifty little calculator.
>>
>> news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/uk/06/electricity_calc/html/1.stm
Thanks. I think it still suffers from the same problem that the underlying data is just a number of wildly varying opinions.
Anyway, I chose to close everything down and buy the electricity from abroad.
I've reallocated the workers to the defence industry or army, and re-purposed the uranium to build more nukes, just in case one of our suppliers bumps its prices up and we need to invade.
Last edited by: SteelSpark on Sun 18 Sep 11 at 11:47
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I've gone totally green and am building 9,255 wind turbines, mainly in Surrey.
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>> It's all just mucking about, trying to meet EU targets, until such time that fusion
>> becomes available. Fusion gets the lion's share of research money at the moment, which is
>> good.
I'd love to think we could harness the same process that makes the sun burn, but I think we will probably have destroyed ourselves by then from overpopulation and lack of resources, either that or from an impending natural event like Yellowstone supervolcano.
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>> >> It's all just mucking about, trying to meet EU targets, until such time that
>> fusion
>> >> becomes available. Fusion gets the lion's share of research money at the moment, which
>> is
>> >> good.
>>
>> I'd love to think we could harness the same process that makes the sun burn,
>> but I think we will probably have destroyed ourselves by then from overpopulation and lack
>> of resources, either that or from an impending natural event like Yellowstone supervolcano.
I certainly can't comment with any expertise, but what I read on it suggests that progress is now being made, with most of the excitement in the area of laser confinement. Whether the large about of research funding is confirmation of real progress, I don't know.
Still many years from a working station, of course.
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>> On the basis that any wind turbine is only any use when it is turning,
>> and needs some sort of generating back-up for when it isn't, I am not too
>> sure that they are a totally good idea. However this makes me think that they
>> really aren't!
>>
>> tinyurl.com/6l2353j
>>
The story you linked to is not really a criticism of wind power.
It is a criticism of the way the UK power industry is run.
Generating companies bid on a daily basis to provide power to the grid. The Nationa Grid company has to forecast demand and guarantee to take supply from the suppliers at prices set in an auction. If the NG company has bought too much capacity, it then needs to tell some suppliers to shut down and again uses an auction to find the cheapest generator to turn off. In this case, one of those suppliers was the wind farm mentioned in the story.
This is how the bidding system works:
www.bmreports.com/bwx_reporting.htm
www.bmreports.com/bwx_home.htm
"wind turbine is only any use when it is turning" - just as any other power station is useless when it is not running. You can rely on wind power:
www.bwea.com/energy/rely.html
For other facts about wind power - costs, load factors, operating range, etc. see
www.bwea.com/ref/faq.html
Incidentally, the Crystal Rig II wind farm might have shut down automatically without any payment if NG had allowed the wind to run its course: "At very high wind speeds, i.e. gale force winds, (25 metres/second, 50+ miles/hour) wind turbines shut down. For more information, see the BWEA factsheet on wind energy technology."
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"wind turbine is only any use when it is turning" - just as any other power station is useless when it is not running. You can rely on wind power.
The one thing you can be sure of is that you can NOT rely on wind power, if there is no wind there is no power! If you need power in a hurry there are a few pumped storage facilities in Wales and a thermal power station can be brought from standby to production in some time, I don't know what the delay/lag is but they don't rely on the wind returning. Multi unit stations like Drax must be able to turn on a standby generator fairly quickly surely! I do not have a background in power generation so I don't know how long it might take
Last edited by: Meldrew on Sun 18 Sep 11 at 12:20
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>> The one thing you can be sure of is that you can NOT rely on
>> wind power, if there is no wind there is no power! If you need power
>> in a hurry there are a few pumped storage facilities in Wales and a thermal
>> power station can be brought from standby to production in some time, I don't know
>> what the delay/lag is but they don't rely on the wind returning. Multi unit stations
>> like Drax must be able to turn on a standby generator fairly quickly surely! I
>> do not have a background in power generation so I don't know how long it
>> might take
I don't think that it is as bad as you might think. Given the spread of wind farms across the UK, the variability is actually quite low. Add onto that the availability of pumped storage (including adding more if required), then the risk of a massive, sustained, drop in supply is unlikely. A couple of things from Wikipedia.
"[Graham Sinden] analysed over 30 years of hourly wind speed data from 66 sites spread out over the United Kingdom...There were no hours in the data set where wind speed was below the cut-in wind speed of a modern wind turbine throughout the United Kingdom, and low wind speed events affecting more than 90 per cent of the United Kingdom had an average recurrent rate of only one hour per year."
"Three reports on the wind variability in the UK issued in 2009, generally agree that variability of the wind does not make the grid unmanageable; and the additional costs, which are modest, can be quantified"
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In reply to teabelly, I think something like this would be a good idea ~ www.dealec.co.uk/acatalog/buy_onice_electric_radiators_online.html but only in a highly insulated thermally efficient home – even plain old night storage heaters work well in such conditions but of course requiring an additional form of heating in the evening,
With all the £billions spent on bombing the Middle East back to the stone age – that money could have been more wisely spent (IMO) on building much-needed new homes throughout GB, and I would go even further – start demolishing some of these older incredibly energy inefficient properties, thereby giving a boost to the building industry as well.
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>> and I would go even further – start demolishing some of these older
>> incredibly energy inefficient properties, thereby giving a boost to the building industry as well.
It would help if new housing areas were well thought out by forward thinking architects working in conjunction with the building industry to produce good looking homes that had super efficient insulation and geothermal heating, also incorporating energy saving devices that were able to be updated in situ as and when necessary, and all for a reasonable price, but maybe that's asking too much.
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Would they be vastly more efficient and long lived than a boggo oil filled radiator at a fraction of the price?? I suspect not.
Older properties can easily be made energy efficient with increased breathable roof insulation and battening and dry lining the walls. This is at a fraction of the environmental impact of knocking them down and rebuilding some pathetic rabbit hutch with bedrooms barely bigger than a double bed.
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I've gorn for one of these teabelly, just to heat one room only before I launch my oil boiler later in the day ~
"Enviro Sensitive" Oil Free Heaters www.dealec.co.uk/acatalog/dimplex_ofrc_oil_free_radiators.html
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>>I've gorn for one of these teabelly,
I've got a couple of oil filled radiators which are virtually the same as that, and they are kept solely for emergencies. They work very well indeed, although they can be rather unstable on a carpeted floor, and they can pong a bit.
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This is at a fraction of the environmental impact of
>> knocking them down and rebuilding some pathetic rabbit hutch with bedrooms barely bigger than a
>> double bed.
And a garden the size of a postage stamp :)
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>> I don't think that it is as bad as you might think. Given the spread
>> of wind farms across the UK, the variability is actually quite low.
People seem to be overly worried about lack of wind in this area of the world - given that most of the wind turbines are based out at sea where it is windy for the majority of the time, and that the UK is one of the windiest places in the world, we might as well make use of it, just as the hotter regions can make use of solar power. I agree that we need more nuclear and that wind power should only be part of the solution.
If solar becomes more efficient, it makes more sense to use homes as energy suppliers, all linked to the grid instead of relying on a centralised system that could be open to attack or suffer major failure in some way.
Last edited by: corax on Sun 18 Sep 11 at 13:53
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I have solar power tommorrow on my roof if it wasn't for the cost.
Some incentive from the Governement wouldn't do any harm.Unless there is I don't know.
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There is. You can get yourself onto something called a feed in tariff
Generation tariff – Earn money from Solar electricity that solar pv panels generate and is used by your home current rate 43.3p per kWh
Export tariff – Earn money from unused electricity that has been generated and fed back into the national grid an additional 3p per kWh
Home Energy supplier protection - Reduce energy bills by up to 50% and protect your household from inflating energy supplier prices
Smart Investment - 8-12% Return on investment, 25 year government guaranteed tax free income, total annual average saving of around £1,170
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Eh, you haven't stated how much Dutchie would have to 'invest'.
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It depends how many panels you fit, who puts them up 4 you ie "How long is a piece of string?" Whatever the outlay is the %age return is almost in double figures which is good and anybody who wants to give it a whirl needs to contact a local supplier and ask for a free survey/quote.
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I thought for a decent sized system, one would be looking at laying out about 10 - £12k Meldrew?
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I haven't looked into it and don't plan to as I shall not live long enough to the benefit from the claimed long term benefits. Every case will be different.Anyone can look at this
price-guide-solar-panels.co.uk/?gclid=COOUtp6kp6sCFcRtfAodiDZe1g
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Good informative site Meldrew, thanks!
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>>I thought for a decent sized system, one would be looking at laying out about 10 - £12k Meldrew?
In fact, it very much depends on the size of system, quality of the panels and the inverter and the installation team used.
You can get a 2KW system on your roof for £7K, but if you have the space then a 4KW system is the most that you can do and receive the current 43.3p FIT rate.
This could set you back £10-£15K, but is considered the best bet investment wise. Better quality=greater efficiency and long term reliability which helps protect your investment.
Look to see it paying for itself in 7-8 years and from then on its indexed linked, tax free profit. You might need to replace the inverter at some point but the panels are now looking good for at least 30 years with very little maintenance.
Here's the plug (if that's ok?). Anyone interested who lives in Herts, Beds, Bucks can contact me for a free survey and quote!
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In my case PeteW, my roof faces East or West, so would I be right in thinking I could have the panels installed on my small paddock/large (2 hours to mow) lawn?
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I had a mower like that once dog
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I had a Westwood up in Warleggan PUR.P, but I remember the retired chap 'over the way' going up and down, up and down, on his ride on ... he died of a heart attack, so although a ride on would make life a lot easier for me,
it might just make it a tad shorter as well :)
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Just reading the comments.Our roof faces South West so it would be ok.
But say on a 15000 pound spend and waiting 7maybe 8 years for a return.I'm to inpatient to wait that long.Why not a initual outlay from the governement for the cost,would make more sense or not?
Didn't they have a scheme in Germany?I don't trust politicians what after 7-8 years, they change their minds regarding this index linked tax free profit?
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"People seem to be overly worried about lack of wind in this area of the world - given that most of the wind turbines are based out at sea where it is windy for the majority of the time, and that the UK is one of the windiest places in the world"
Yes, except that our coldest times, and the times when we need most energy, are when we have an anti-cyclone (high pressure system) over the UK in winter. This is also when there is no wind. Thus, we will always need back-up in the form of conventional power stations, for these times and these conventional stations need to be kept running at all times - they can't be switched on and off at a moment's notice. Hence, for all the (very expensive) wind farms we need conventional power to back them up. So, why build the wind farms?
Except that they make the Prime Minister's father in law, and Nick Clegg's wife (she works for a wind power company) very rich.
Anyway, why do we need the damned things to cut down on "carbon" emissions when no-one else in the world is doing it - it will make no difference whatsoever to (non-existant) "global warming".
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We are hoping to have a factory build her making windmils.I did say hoping it will create work for the so many unemployed young people here.
Siemens is the big player the council has pledged 5 million towards the cost.But like so many things our infrastructure could be a lot better.One major road system in and out the town which if there is a major accident cripples the town.
I hope Siemens isn't stringing the council along there are a few more offers from Denmark and Germany.We missed out having Nissan here years ago.
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Some interesting information here. It would seem that for wind supplying up to 10% of the electricity supply the variability of the supply due to variation in the wind speed is not a problem.
Assuming the article is correct it would therefore seem a sensible idea to use this resource for at least 10% of our supply. A broad spectrum of power production seems the best way to guarantee our electricity supply for the future .
www.bwea.com/ref/stop.html
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Good article Norwich.In my thinking every house sun panels on the roof.Even a small windmill in the garden or a larger one to supply a area .The problem is wouldn't that make us independant from the grid.That would upset a few shareholders.There isn't the will by governements or is there.?
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I can see 19 wind turbines from the bedroom window, they look quite graceful in the fen landscape. Don't think they produce that much power though.
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Apparently one 1.8 MW wind turbine at a reasonable site produces around over 4,7 million units of electricity each year, which is enough to meet the annual needs of over 1,000 households.
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www.pyrosolar.nl/html/kleine_windmolens.html
Lots of pictures of small windmills also some the most up to dat one's with no blades.
Sorry the article is in Dutch they also have a website.
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Wind Turbines - Folly or Saving the World? - Old Navy
