Wind Farms

[dingledong]

At least someone’s pulled their finger out and the first new nuclear station is to be built (by the bloody french!).

I’ll be dead before it comes on line.

Only the good die young Tony you'll still be here:icon12:

 

[Besoeker]

At least someone’s pulled their finger out and the first new nuclear station is to be built (by the bloody french!).

I’ll be dead before it comes on line.

Quite.
No, I'm not wishing you dead. Honest, guv!

Our electricity supply capacity is stretched to say the least. About 19% was from nuclear reactors. If memory serves, all but two of the reactors will be closed within a decade. By 2023.

It would seem that the general public, the electorate, has, or is perceived to have, a negative view about nuclear power. I have read that Thatcher was pro but then Chernobyl happened.

Nuclear was never going to be a vote winner. People seem to have an irrational fear about it and the gestation period from approval to getting a new station on line is much longer than a government term in office so it has never been likely to get on to an election manifesto.

Mention Fukushima and it's the nuclear power plant that continues to get the attention. Not the real disaster of the 20,000 deaths resulting from the tsunami and totally unrelated to the nuclear power plant.

Perspective is sometimes totally lacking.
But media sells what sells. The voracious appetite for the steamy, sordid, and the sensational. Nigella Lawson's weight loss took front page on the Daily Wail yesterday. I don't blame them. Their business is to sell newspapers so they will print what sells newspapers.

So, new nuclear has been given the green light. Whether it will be on line soon enough to avert a shortfall in our electrical supply is debatable.

The irony is that we have continued to import from France, 70% nuclear powered, usually at the full capacity of the HVDC cross channel link.

But this topic was about wind power.
People object to wind turbines for all sorts of reasons. Ugly bird slayers. Perception on the one point and nonsense on the other.

I have no real objection to them on either of those counts - or any other for that matter. They are harvesting a natural resource. Currently (05:00) providing about 9% of our electrical consumption.

But the limitation is variability. The same applies to solar. Nothing from either on a calm, dark night. They are on availability sources. We have on demand expectations. Flick that switch and we expect that light to come on.

We can't make the wind constant or the sun shine 24/7.
I quite like the idea of using renewable resources instead of fossils.
But I think we are quite some way off being able to do so.

To be able to cope with the variability, we need storage capacity at utility scale.
We don't have that.

 

[Fin170]

Quite.
The irony is that we have continued to import from France, 70% nuclear powered, usually at the full capacity of the HVDC cross channel link.

French National Grid status

84% at the moment, I've seen it at 110% before



Supply variability and over generation is a stupid but expensive problem to have. Taking the German example, plenty of sun in the day but low demand means paying the subsidy to the generator and then paying heavy industry to fire up kilns etc to get rid of it. Then it gets dark and you don't have the capacity for demand and have to buy electricity from the French

 

[driverman]

From what i know on this subject, which is very little. Germany have banned nuclear power completely in their country due to safety concerns etc. But like us they are happy to import it also from France.

 

[Gavin A]

At least someone’s pulled their finger out and the first new nuclear station is to be built (by the bloody french!).

I’ll be dead before it comes on line.

mainly chinese actually.

 

[Gavin A]

I'll just point out to the nuke heads on here that renewables produced 17% of UK electricity demand this year, which is now in the same ball park as nuclear has been averaging in the UK, and will be well ahead of nuclear in 5 years time.

And largescale solar is being moved onto the same contracts for difference funding scheme as nuclear from April 2015, so will be being funded at the same rate as new nuclear from next year, but actually capable of delivering capacity within weeks / months of contracts being signed rather than 10-15 years down the line.

 

[Lucien Nunes]

One word. Fusion.

 

[trev]

I've posted this elsewhere
Lockheed Martin Unveils Compact Fusion Reactor Which 'Could Provide Limitless Clean Energy'
If it happens then it solves all energy needs for a hell of a long time. I don't believe some of the claims made in the comments section about this company called Industrial Heat managing it with cold fusion, surely that news would have been all over the place.

 

[Lucien Nunes]

I was thinking about real ones though Trev. We've been pursuing that dream for half a century, I could get a Krispy Kreme doughnut and wave it at the media but that doesn't make it a working Tokamak. Be patient, it'll be here in 25 years...

 

[trev]

6 Years if Lockheed Martin are to be believed Lucien. If it takes 25 years I might be dust by that time, When it happens it's going to change everything, I'd like to see it happen

 

[Guest111]

An interesting point that was made to me from someone in the know was that when a certain windspeed is reached they have to shut off the wind turbines due to the fact that they cannot produce a suitable lubricant for the bearings etc,apparently they have tried lots but none can stand the extreme stresses and this leads to turbine failure which in some cases is quite spectacular.

 

[trev]

It has to be "the right kind of wind" is what I was once told. I almost cried when I thought about how much money is pumped into these idiotic things.

 

[Guest111]

It has to be "the right kind of wind" is what I was once told. I almost cried when I thought about how much money is pumped into these idiotic things.

Aye it makes me wonder why we live in this country,everything is wrong,wrong wind for turbines,wrong rain causing floods,even wrong type of snow affecting train travel,then of course there's the leaves.lol

 

[Bobster]

An interesting point that was made to me from someone in the know was that when a certain windspeed is reached they have to shut off the wind turbines due to the fact that they cannot produce a suitable lubricant for the bearings etc,apparently they have tried lots but none can stand the extreme stresses and this leads to turbine failure which in some cases is quite spectacular.

That's not the only reason, the g-force on the tips of the blades is monumental.

 

[Besoeker]

I'll just point out to the nuke heads on here that renewables produced 17% of UK electricity demand this year, which is now in the same ball park as nuclear has been averaging in the UK, and will be well ahead of nuclear in 5 years time.

And largescale solar is being moved onto the same contracts for difference funding scheme as nuclear from April 2015, so will be being funded at the same rate as new nuclear from next year, but actually capable of delivering capacity within weeks / months of contracts being signed rather than 10-15 years down the line.

This entirely misses one fundamental point. Variability.

Here is a graph I produced:

It is based on twelve hours of unbroken overhead insolation - something you might get in some regions of the tropics. In other words, ideal conditions.
The variability is obvious. If you tack on the end of it the other twelve hours where you get no insolation you can see the picture.
The theoretical maximum over 24 hours is about 30% of rated capacity but practically, it is often below 20%.
We need storage.
That's why hydro works - all that water behind the dam is stored energy.
In fact, Hydro is the only utility scale renewable we have at the moment.
Check Itaipu or The Three Gorges dams.

 

[Fin170]

A few hours energy generation is nice, meanwhile in India...

N-reactor in Rajasthan sets world record

Poor result after Canada going for 894 days though, lol

 

[Gavin A]

This entirely misses one fundamental point. Variability.

Here is a graph I produced:

It is based on twelve hours of unbroken overhead insolation - something you might get in some regions of the tropics. In other words, ideal conditions.
The variability is obvious. If you tack on the end of it the other twelve hours where you get no insolation you can see the picture.
The theoretical maximum over 24 hours is about 30% of rated capacity but practically, it is often below 20%.
We need storage.
That's why hydro works - all that water behind the dam is stored energy.
In fact, Hydro is the only utility scale renewable we have at the moment.
Check Itaipu or The Three Gorges dams.

would you like to have a think about what the biggest engineering project ever in the UK was, at least up til the channel tunnel and cross rail? and why it was needed?
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[PEG]

This entirely misses one fundamental point. Variability.

Here is a graph I produced:

It is based on twelve hours of unbroken overhead insolation - something you might get in some regions of the tropics. In other words, ideal conditions.
The variability is obvious. If you tack on the end of it the other twelve hours where you get no insolation you can see the picture.
The theoretical maximum over 24 hours is about 30% of rated capacity but practically, it is often below 20%.
We need storage.
That's why hydro works - all that water behind the dam is stored energy.
In fact, Hydro is the only utility scale renewable we have at the moment.
Check Itaipu or The Three Gorges dams.

And,ironically,if i collected up all the broken pieces of roof tile and slate,from the yee-har PV installs around here,the pile would look exactly like that graph! Only we are not all paying for that graph...which is nice :bobby:

 

[Gavin A]

or why France had to reinvent its entire heating system to switch a large proportion of the country to night storage heaters, and even then ended up having to use a 2GW interconnector to the UK to make use of the capacity from the project mentioned in the previous post?

 

[Gavin A]

I'll let Wikipedia explain it to you, as I really can't be arsed having such an illinformed debate, it really annoys me that people who ought to know something about electricity can fall for such daily mail / torygraph level nonsense while at the same time supporting a technology that would require at least as much storage capacity as renewables, and is currently on track to cost north of £80 billion just to clean up the existing sites, with costs rising every year - the only DECC budget that has gone up massively during this government being the nuclear decommissioning budget.

The project – begun in 1974 and costing £425 million[SUP][4][/SUP] and taking ten years to complete – was the largest civil engineering contract ever awarded by the UK government at the time. The work was undertaken by an Alfred McAlpine / Brand / Zschokke consortium.[SUP][5][/SUP] 12,000,000 tonnes (12,000,000 long tons; 13,000,000 short tons) of rock had to be moved from inside the mountain, creating tunnels wide enough for two lorries to pass comfortably, and an enormous cavern 51 metres (167 ft) tall, 180 metres (590 ft) long, and 23 metres (75 ft) wide[SUP][6][/SUP] known as "the concert hall". This has also given rise to the station's alternative name of Electric Mountain. The power station is connected to the National Grid substation at Pentir by 400 kV cables that are buried for approximately 10 kilometres (6 mi), rather than using transmission towers or pylons to transmit the electricity across an area of outstanding natural beauty.

The original purpose of the scheme was to deal with the difficulty that the National Grid would have had if the large numbers of nuclear power stations then planned had been built. Nuclear power stations must be run at close to full output all of the time so storage capacity was needed for excess power generated at times of low demand.

The Dinorwig Power Station (/dɨˈnɔrwɪɡ/; Welsh: [dɪˈnɔrwɪɡ]) is a 1,728 megawatts (2,317,000 hp) pumped-storage hydroelectric scheme, near Dinorwig, Llanberis in Snowdonia national park in Gwynedd, north Wales. It comprises 16 kilometres (9.9 mi) of tunnels, 1 million tons of concrete, 200,000 tons of cement and 4,500 tons of steel.