Bishop Hill One turbine per kettle?
Aug 25, 2013 Energy: wind The Telegraph is on top form today, looking at the detailed wind power data and finding some horrific results:
The Telegraph examined a snapshot of RWE’s own figures on Thursday afternoon last week. One wind farm Trysglwyn, which is in Anglesey in Wales, was producing a total of 6 kilowatts (KW) - just enough to boil two kettles each with 3KW of power.
The wind farm has 14 turbines and a theoretical capacity of 5.6 megawatts (MW). In other words, the wind farm was producing just 0.001 per cent of its maximum capacity.
And, even worse, some windfarms were withdrawing power from the grid:
According to RWE’s own data, three wind farms on Thursday afternoon appeared to be taking electricity from the National Grid rather than supplying it.
That the political establishment has imposed this kind of corruption on the country will not go unnoticed forever. It will haunt the big three political parties for generations.
Reader Comments (73)
” This is all pie in the sky because wind never actually delivers when it is needed. 90% of the time it falls even below imported French "nuclear power".”
However the really big problem with large-scale wind power is the very rare occasions when it really produces 100% of rated power or close to it. Admittedly this only happens for a few hours every few years, but when it happens it means big, big trouble.
If, for example, 20 % of power on an annual basis is to be produced by wind power this means that the nameplate effect of wind power must be 100 % or more of the average power requirements of the country. This means that the grid must be able to handle nearly twice as much power as normal, produced in unpredictable places, and with no obvious way to get rid of it. Probably the only practical solution will be to cut off the feed-in from the wind generators, but their well-connected owners are unlikely to like that idea.
TTY.
I regularly see renewables propagandists saying that we need wind and solar provide 40%(they actually say that we CAN get 40%).
But if the typical reality is 25% of faceplate output, then we would surely need five times faceplate installed. This would mean that we needed wind and solar with a faceplate output of 200%(!!!) of the total overall national power requirement.
How much would this cost!? (Even without the gas/nuclear/whatever back-up).
Green MP Caroline Lucas does advocate this level of effort: "we will need to mobilise on a scale not seen since the war." but in general politicians realise quite how difficult that is to sell to the electorate. Most prefer to concentrate on technological solutions (as I discussed in a blog post last year).
Wind Farm operators are now paid NOT to produce electricity on an almost daily basis with £2,000,000 being topped on 17 August:
http://www.ref.org.uk/constraints/
The rush for wind is becoming a dangerous experiment. DECC policy may enrich vested interests at our expense but it is doomed to failure because it excludes basic electrical power engineering. Unfortunately I think Prof. David Mackay’s excellent book “Sustainable energy without the Hot Air” is partly to blame. His book is based on good physics but it completely ignores the actual resources, costs and engineering that would be needed. He was honest enough to show that only country sized deployments of renewables could possibly meet demand, but these then would disrupt farming and the countryside. The trouble is that the green lobby actually took him seriously, and he was made chief scientist at DECC. Plans continue fo massively increas wind poer by 2050. The basic problem for all renewables is simple old fashioned load balancing.
A decarbonized future in the UK without a large nuclear base load is nonsense. In the short term only fossil fuels can dispatch sufficient power to handle the random intermitancy of wind power. Gas is the only resource which can be held in reserve to quickly meet peak demand. Wind is randomly intermittant and if it were to reach more than ~10% peak capacity would threaten the grid with complete collapse as its output fluctuates so wildly.
Fine we are told - all we need to do is to develop energy storage for renewables to iron out the intermittency. Note that this energy storage problem has already existed for 50 years. The UK builds twice the number of power stations that it actually needs simply to insure that the lights never go out on the coldest day in winter. We would already be saving billions if there was any simple solution to energy storage, but unfortunately there isn’t. The scale of the problem for large wind deployment is an order of magnitude worse.
Toad - yes,amazing stats. Fewer cars then, too. Amazing.
Michel
The resistance to voluntarily wearing of seat belts despite media campaigns RoSPA Seat Belt Campaign by then revered personalities led to legislation and compulsion. Engineers at Volvo also deserve a lot of credit for safer cars. Once safety became a criteria for a large section of the purchasing community then there was no going back.
Basically what you are saying is, "when the wind isn't blowing, the turbines don't turn". Brilliant! I'll make sure to come here for other insights into technology.
Clive B; your point about wind destabilising the grid has been demonstrated a couple of times in Germany from what I have read...and their situation is getting worse.
Another complication which does not get any air-time is the fact that the grid only has visibility - and thus control - of approx 2/3 of the installed wind capacity. The rest is "embedded" and is treated as negative demand. So, when the wind drops, the grid has to handle an apparent surge in demand as well as a reduction in the known wind output.
E. Martin; in this case RWE is a large German power and utilities company. They own a chunk of our power system (as RWE nPower, I think). They also owned Thames Water for a few years.
"Probably the only practical solution will be to cut off the feed-in from the wind generators, but their well-connected owners are unlikely to like that idea." --tty
In that case, the fine print already in force probably says they get paid as if they provided full power to the grid.
Aug 25, 2013 at 2:58 PM | Mike Jackson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Trashmore
(a pun on Mt Rushmore, I assume)
Aug 25, 2013 at 10:20 AM | Turning Tide
The idea would be to plot the location of these imbeciles commenting at The Guardian and build the wind 'farms' around their concentrations ... we'd have the best of both worlds.
Aug 25, 2013 at 9:18 PM | Clive Best
Yes, Prof. David Mackay's book is excellent. And I don't think it's quite fair to say "it completely ignores the actual resources, costs and engineering that would be needed." As you say, he shows how realistically renewables could contribute only a small share of our energy needs. And he provides interesting detail on options for energy storage. The most promising, he suggests, are pumped storage and overnight storage in electric cars. Although he's not optimistic about the former, he's cautiously enthusiastic about the latter. Unfortunately, he bases his numbers on a national fleet of 30 million electric cars. So far as I can see, he's silent on the practicality of that "solution".
Perhaps the most incisive commentary on renewables is found in this rather soppy article by James Hansen. An extract:
He comments how politicians, once in office, come to realiseI suggest that Professor Colin McInnes probably provides the best commentary on this dilemma in his entertaining article, "News from the State of Euphoria".
@Streetcred : Aug 26, 2013 at 7:49 AM... "The idea would be to plot the location of these imbeciles commenting at The Guardian and build the wind 'farms' around their concentrations ... we'd have the best of both worlds."
I doubt that there's enough room in Islington! :-)
Billy Liar
Thanks for that link. That's probably one of the biggest land reclamation projects in the western hemisphere.
The idea of using landfill to create an improved environment is not new. I remember in the 40s/50s a wooded valley near us which had been ill-managed for as long as my grandparents could remember was used for rubbish disposal and then turned into a linear park which was a massive improvement on what had been there previously.
Re: 1001
> Basically what you are saying is, "when the wind isn't blowing, the turbines don't turn"
Now write to your politician about that because they seem to be unable to grasp the concept that their wind factories can not be relied upon for power generation.
Has any correlation been undertaken between wind speed and temperature . Often when the temperature is below freezing there is no wind. Also there are certain conditions when it a few degrees above freezing and it is foggy when there is no wind. Therefore are there certain conditions when demand is highest due to the cold weather and wind speed is very low or even zero?
And blocking highs in the middle of winter often mean that there is nothing coming out of the windmills in the UK, Ireland, Northern France, the Low Countries, North-West Germany, Denmark, Southern Scandinavia ...
But hey, the experts (aka rent-seekers) will tell you that "the wind is always blowing somewhere". Agreed, but I'm afraid gales in the South Atlantic aren't a great deal of help in Scunthorpe.
Just passed a wind farm near Huntingdon (which I hadn't seen before)...
Two of the turbines idling round - the rest stationary...
Output therefore b*gger all...
The only windmill farm I see with any frequency is the one just east of Corpus Christi, Texas near Corpus Christi bay.
It is built on farm and ranch land, but is in sight of the city itself. The wind is famous for its steadiness and I believe this is one of the largest windmill farms in Texas.
But ERCOT, the Texas electricity regulating body, has found windmill power unreliable, only delivering a small fraction of the factory spec for the windmill in question.
And Texas is the leading wind power producer in the country, yet even this only exists because:
· Before the wind started blowing heavily on Feb. 9, the electricity that was soon to be replaced by wind power was being supplied by gas turbines.
· Once the wind began blowing, the gas turbines had to stop generating electricity to accommodate wind electricity. (An electrical grid cannot handle at any one moment more generation than is needed to meet demand.)
· Owners and operators of gas turbines that were displaced by wind lost money from forgone sales. Owners and operators of coal- and nuclear-fired generation were likely also harmed, perhaps not because they were displaced on the grid, but because wind likely drove down prices.
· The reason the wind turbines can force the gas turbines off of the grid is because the wind operators get subsidies from taxpayers. Therefore, they can offer electricity at a lower price than the gas operators.
· This is not a case of the free market at work. In fact, because of the subsidies, wind operators can actually pay companies to take wind from them and still make a marginal profit—nothing free market about that.
· Some gas turbines have to keep running on idle to be ready for when the wind stops blowing, to meet consumer demand. These gas turbines don’t run for free—somebody has to pay for the gas turbines held in reserve.
http://www.masterresource.org/2013/03/setting-the-record-straight-on-renewable-energy-subsidies/
so of course windmill promoters are typically deeply involved in politics, It is politicians and bureaucrats, with their ability to rig the deal in favor of wind, or solar or ethanol, who are the inevitable true customers of 'renewable' energy promoters.
There seems to be some interest in performance figures.
Ontario provides a pretty interesting resource on realtime consumption here...
http://ieso.com/
Billions of dollars later and wind seldom gets even close to 1% of demand.
You should also note that gas fired capacity is close to 10,000 MW, but it generally runs at around one third of that.
Ontario pays the gas suppliers based on capacity (not what they actually produce) so they are always paid as if they are running at full capacity. Insane but true. Ontario's answer to guaranteed backup.
This has turned into a disaster.
I'd like to point out that two data points that are very low don't give a reliable indication of a wind farm's overall impact. Everyone knows winds are intermittent, so wind farms won't be producing energy all the time. Overall, they are a good thing. In order to make them better, we need to introduce more energy-storage facilities so that surplus from high winds, sunny days, etc. can be stored for other times.