We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day Having spent £13,000 on installing a wind turbine at his home, John Large is disappointed at the return on his investment, which amounts to 9p a week.
At this rate, it is calculated, it will take 2,768 years for the electricity generated by the turbine to pay for itself, by which time he will be past caring about global warming.
The wind turbine was installed at the engineer’s home in Woolwich, southeast London, four weeks ago and has so far generated four kilowatts of electricity. An average household needs 23kw every day to power its lights and appliances.
Mr Large said that his difficulties highlighted the problems faced by consumers who wanted to buy wind turbines to save money and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
– from the Times today (hat tip Bishop Hill)
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Outstanding. Someone should tell Dave the Chameleon that his windmill will never provide enough power for his hydroponic garden.
“Having spent £13,000 on installing a wind turbine at his home..”
He is an engineer?? WTF?
Presumably they mean KWh?
If it had generated 4KW on average, that would be enough for several houses.
Or even kWh?
£13,000 and, not just resigned, he’s “undaunted”. Maybe I’m a little bit beginning to understand the problem you guys are facing with the failure of the electorate to get upset about having been “sold a pup” by your government programs which, you must admit, are “a little bit ambitious”.
This bloke sounds like a smug gestureist type to me.
He desperately want’s to be Green, but is in denial to the fact that his toy is never going to work.
There is an article in the American Spectator, that comprehensively trashes wind power.
No I still cant do the links 🙁
The company I work for produced a glossy document that told us of the energy saving it makes from its green activities. The unit mentioned was kW/h. At the rate of deceleration in energy use in the brochure the company must now be more important as a power station than as an insurance company.
I watched the documentary movie “who killed the electric war” last night. It occurred to me that Richard Branson would do wonders for the environment by financing an electric car. GM, Toyota etc are not the vehicles, pun intended, to develop electric cars, they have too much invested in the petrol/diesel world.
sorry that should have read electric car not electric war.
I feel sorry for the guy.
That said, the American Spectator article does not totally trash windpower, it does make the point that it is ridiculour to count on it for more than 20% of a nations electric power. That’s a useful contribution, but certainly not the green salvation that the UK government seems to think it is.
Our big energy problem is not electricity, we can build nuclear plants or eventually space based solar power systems for that. Liquid fuel for transport is the problem and as long as we depend on places like Iran, Iraq, Saudi, Nigeria, Venezula etc. for oil we are in deep kim chee.
The answer is partly ethanol made from sun blessed sugarcane and corn, and partly methanol made from nasty old coal. Guess which one the politicos want to talk about?
“An engineer is someone who can build and/or run for £1 what any fool can do for £10.” At least, that what I was told at university when studing to becomg an engineer. Conclusion: John Large is not an engineer but a fool. (We already know which Cameron is.)
The actual, real, objective facts about wind energy have been known for some time:
http://www.countryguardian.net/halkema-windenergyfactfiction.pdf
In a nutshell, it is a complete and utter waste of time, money and effort. It is intrinsically impossible for it ever to make an ounce of difference to national energy needs.
The government and anyone else who thinks wind energy is worth a light have beecn conned; they have let their scientific/engineering ignorance show.
I see the same article in today’s Times tells us that:
“Researchers in Germany estimated last year that there is enough sunlight in the world’s deserts to supply all the global energy requirements 1,000 times over if harnessed. They calculated that investment in solar power North Africa could supply two-third’s of Europe’s energy consumption by 2050.”
Really?
(1) Have they worked out the transmission line losses involved in getting power from thousands upon thousands of solar farms in North Africa to northwestern Europe?
(2) Can they explain to us why this would be a more secure source of energy than gas from Russia or oil from the Middle East… including North Africa?
(3) Have they worked out even a first, back-of-the-envelope estimate of the cost of the (a) many square miles of solar panels and (b) bogglingly complex and extensive power collection and transmission system involved?
(4) And what would we use for electrical power at night, which happens at roughly the same time in North Africa and northwestern Europe?
Apart from that, this sounds like a wonderful idea… just like wind power once did, in fact.
There is a much more serious issue here than the mere fact that John Large was sold a pup by green slime.
The issue is that the imbecile that the Times has for an environment correspondent clearly doesn’t have the slightest idea what he is talking about.
I have been reading (and ranting about) this individual’s reportage in the Times ever since his deranged outpourings first appeared.
Someone who can’t tell the difference between a kilowatt and a kilowatt-hour is utterly incompetent and should be sacked.
Not that I’m holding out any hope.
tranio, I don’t know if you heard but Branson made a splash last week offering up US$25 million for anyone who could scrub at least a billion tons of carbon dioxide from the skies every year.
That’s 40 tons per dollar… That would have to be pretty efficient, and I don’t think we’re anywhere near that level of technology yet. Maybe Branson doesn’t want to have to pay that $25 million, but would rather just look good for having offered it. I’m pretty sure Branson is better than that though.
-Ryan
http://openpolitik.com
“The answer is partly ethanol made from sun blessed sugarcane and corn”
No, I don’t think that’s the answer. Spending energy to make a fairly inefficient fuel out of plants doesn’t result in much saving. Especially since the vast quantity of land required for the plants doesn’t really exist. Ethanol is mostly about subsidising farmers by finding a use for huge quantities of maize that no-one actually wants.
Wind power works fine in all sorts of situations. Look at all those windpumps scattered across the American midwest. I don’t think they were installed to impress the neighbours.
We’ve spent decades perfecting the art of converting expanding steam into electricity. It will take a while for us to get as good at generating it any other way.
Did yer just hear that?
I did. It was Nikola Tesla turning developing high angular momentum in his grave.
I remember seeing A A Gill the Sunday Times food critic on Question Time saying that he thought it “bonkers” that a country like the UK could really on windmills for power. Well, I’ll betya that Mr Gill couldn’t differentiate a sine function but he’s a shrewd enough individual to have smelled the green rat.
Please for the love of everything that counts can we just bite the nuclear bullet? There is no real alternative (apart from clean coal which is probably not really an option anymore – thank you Maggie!) OK, a lot of people don’t want a nuke station built down the road from them but somehow I suspect that even more people don’t want to be lighting Hurricane Lamps.
I spent seven years learning about physics (including a fair bit about nuclear physics) and it really winds me up that so many people I meet regard nuclear physics as pure evil despite the fact that it provides them with 20-odd-% of their electricity and might just save their lives from cancer. I have had enough of people who shil for the anti-science camp while adjusting their iPods.
By the way, these anti-science folk tend to go mental when they learn that the ultimate force powering their beloved wind-turbines or solar cells is actually nuclear fusion just like in bombs.
It’s an interesting topic from an engineering point of view.
The windpower paper makes a few good points, but spoils it by the obsessive continual ranting on the unreliability of the supply. I was actually quite impressed by production factors of 20%+, I was expecting something more like 5%. While it increases the capital cost considerably (and you can lose about 20% of the energy in conversion), the technical problem can be solved fairly easily with flow batteries and similar energy storage techniques.
The big problem is that it is lots of small units distributed widely, rather than a fewer bigger units that can be located where you need the power, which makes it more expensive.
Regarding transporting energy from North Africa into Europe, the energy losses depend entirely on how thick you make the cable, and how high a voltage you run it at. The 500kV Inga-Shaba powerline runs 1,700 km across Zaire, and engineers are talking about developing 800kV lines for which (I am told) the trade-off point between capital and power loss is about 5% transmission losses, so I’d say it was at least technically possible to run an economic HVDC line across the Straits of Gibraltar and into Europe. Capital costs I suspect would be horrendous, and North Africa is not even as stable as the Middle East, but I don’t think you’ll get any terminal objections from the engineers.
With current technology, renewable energy is simply far more expensive than oil-based. Last time I looked it was by about an order of magnitude, although the price was coming down. (Lomborg TSE, fig 72.) You either wait until oil prices go up for some reason, or you subsidise it, or you wait until technology catches up and brings the price of renewables down to parity – at which point we will switch over to renewable automatically and without any of this fuss. (Lomborg figures this will be about 2050.)
Arguably pumping money into the industry makes more available for R&D and market ingenuity, which could get us there faster; but this is a market distortion. While wind is currently cheaper than solar, it has poorer long-term prospects; so all the subsidies are just distracting people from the better solutions. You can’t plan technological progress. Energy companies are already well-motivated to find alternatives to dictatocorruptocrat oil, so it’s a problem that will eventually solve itself.
Yes, but…
Generally, you see windpumps and windmill power generation in areas with strong and consistent winds. The American midwest certainly counts. However, the gentleman in the original story certainly wasn’t blessed to live in the midwest and may not even live in an area flat enough to have those sorts of winds.
Good intentions put up windmills. However, it takes a certain amount of smarts to use the correct tool for the job, and often the windmill is simply not the correct tool.
Xcel energy offers a program called WindSource. People who pay a certain surcharge can have all of their power sourced by windmill rather than by coal. I forget the exact amount of the surcharge, but my house is completely supplied through that program and it’s at most an extra ten or twelve bucks a month.
None of this solves the problem of this guy needing about 2700 years for his windmill to pay for itself. Maybe he should have asked Dave Cameron to just build a nuclear plant and let a bunch of retired RN submarine crewmen operate it. That’s what I would have done, anyway.
RAB: I type in the links manually (never really got the hang of those buttons myself):
<a href=”http://the_url_of_the_page”>The bit of text you want to appear in purple</a>
Easy. 🙂
The typing in http: gibberish
is exactly what I’m trying to avoid.
Cant I just highlight and drag or something!
You are talking to a person so lazy, by the way,
as to make Andy Capp look like Alan Sugar!
I suspect this wind thingy required far more emissions to build and truck to his house than it will ever save in “clean” power generation.
Now if he had a nuclear reactor put in his back yard, it may actually do something, but somehow I doubt he’d be up for that…
RAB,
The way I do it is as follows:
Type what you want to say;
Type <a href=””> before the text you want to highlight. (You can keep this in a separate file for cut and paste if you like.)
Type </a> after the text.
Open the page you want to link to in a separate tab or window, copy the url from the header bar, and paste between the quotes.
You only really need to remember the href thingy. Everything else is easy!
J
Sorry, Ethanol does not take more energy to make than it produces. the Pimental study that purported to show this was a mess. It was dubunked in Science magazine a while back. If the same method was used, one could show that just about any energy source except for maybe Saudi oil does the same.
You are somewhat right about not having enough farmland, that why we also need methanol.
Farmers and agribusiness are going to get subsidized no matter what happens to ethanol. I’d rather them get a bit more and the oil overlords get a bit, or a lot less.
Taylor,
Ethanol, and indeed any fuel, always takes more energy to produce than it contains by the second law of thermodynamics. This even applies to the oil in the ground – having been produced by a large quantity sunlight millions of years ago.
I think what you mean is that the overhead associated with the manufacture and distribution is not more than it contains. This is probably true in at least some circumstances. Nevertheless, photosynthesis is an inefficient process anyway, using only about 5% of the sunlight’s energy; harvesting, processing, and distribution reduce that still further, and then burning the stuff is similarly inefficient, again being limited by thermodynamics. By comparison, photovoltaics are about 15% efficient, and converts it straight to usable electricity.
This also means more virgin wilderness torn up for agriculture, more water-table-draining irrigation, more fertilisers, and so on which are all environmentalist bugbears. We have to grow food using plants because we can’t live on electricity, but Gaia has fallen behind somewhat compared to what we have come to expect from technology.
(I have heard it suggested that this is because plants evolved photosynthesis optimised for much higher CO2 levels, which have since fallen. We need to get them up again to repair the damage done to nature by CO2 loss…)
RAB,
Can ya please quit whaling on HTML. It’s really very logical and quite simple. George Stephenson might have invented the C19th and Nikola Tesla might have invented the C20th but the C21st was invented by Tim Berners-Lee.
HTML is a a good old-fashioned mark-up language and is therefore very similar to the Latex I learned at university.
Now a bunch of folk round here stand up for Web 2.0 and stuff like XML but good old fashioned HTML does the trick for me.Yes, horrors I still sometimes use tables for layout despite also knowing CSS. Having said that I’m a little old-fashioned and still use Fortran-77.
Jeez Guys thanks for all the advice.
I’ll try to do better in future!
Nick M. You’re having a laff aint cha?
By the time I work my way through all the words in that post I dont understand
Well I’ll be on the Sanatogen ,leave alone the Fortran77.
Whatever that is.
The windpower paper makes a few good points, but spoils it by the obsessive continual ranting on the unreliability of the supply
Actually, it’s that unreliabilty that kills wind power dead as a source of electrical generation for the grid. Since it can fluctuation without warning and at random from (say) 50% to 0%, even for a large number of wind farms linked together, security of supply means you need to have some other power generation technology (nuclear? oil? coal?) sitting there on stand-by all the year round.
So why bother with the wind farm in the first place? All it does is double the capital cost per KWh.
Windmills in the American mid-west, Australia, etc., had (have) the primary function of pumping water from a well. As long as the stuff is stored in a tank, reliable wind is not necessary. And even on the praries, etc., constant wind just does not happen.
“At bottom, wind is still a medieval technology.”………
http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=11028
As a rule of thumb……. Leftism IS medieval !!!!
Enjoy,
Shaun.
Pa
Good points and the second law of thermodynamics is one of my all time favorites; especially when appiled to space sex.
The point about ethanol is that like all fuel,s it’s costs are associated with a combination of factors both geopolitical and technological. Today, and in the near future, the technological costs of ethanol (and Methanol) outweigh the geopolitical costs of oil.
Forgive me if I got the wrong end of the stick, but I thought this site was for “social individualists, classical liberals, libertarians” etc. How come, when it comes to energy, everyone has their own magic bullet to push and their own bete noire to beat? Picking technological winners and losers is the stuff of central planning. It has no place in a liberal philosophy. If your preferred technology is really the best option, it will emerge successfully from an unbiased market wherever it is the most appropriate solution. There should be no preferences for technologies in those markets, only preferences for outcomes (ends), which some technologies (means) will deliver most effectively in some circumstances and other technologies will deliver most effectively in others.
Wind, nuclear, ethanol, methanol, carbon sequestration, space solar stations – these are not “good” or “bad” options, as though we have to choose one or the other. They have different strengths, weaknesses, and costs that vary according to circumstance and that will change over time. We can only discover the role they will play, not predict or manage their contribution.
For example, solar photovoltaic is by far the most expensive form of electricity generation available in the market today, even taking generous account of any carbon benefit. But that doesn’t make it “bad” or a solution that should be ruled out. In remote, off-grid areas in many undeveloped parts of the world, it may be the most economic form of generation and worth what is needed to pay for it, simply due to the lack of alternatives and the benefits that can be gained from some electrical power. As costs come down, it may be that its applicability will broaden. But anyone who says they know that will be the case is fooling themselves.
I am no wind apologist. Until we sold the business a few weeks ago to capitalise on the “green bubble”, I was MD of a company that produced over 300 GWh of renewable electricity annually from landfill gas. I’ve been immersed in the competing hype from the various lobbies for years and am heartily sick of the over-statements of the wind lobby, not to mention the nuclear lobby, and the more rabid parts of the green lobby generally. But it is ridiculous to dismiss wind completely, particularly on the basis of this really bad article (I’ve explained why it’s such a load of codswallop over at pickinglosers.com).
In some circumstances, it is now possible to generate electricity from wind more cheaply than it is possible to generate it from fossil fuels, even without a value for the carbon-benefit. Are we going to rule out wind completely, or are we going to say that it, like every other technology should receive what is due to it, pay what it owes, and then leave it up to the market and individuals to choose what to deliver? We’ll need an enormous correction in government policy to remove the huge number of distortions they have introduced to the energy market, just like we need to remove their micro-managing distortions in so many other areas, but is there anyone who can justify why picking technological winners is a better option than internalising externalities and leaving the rest to the market?
Brune Prior:
I’m afraid it’s your discussion of the difference between KW and KWh over at pickinglosers.com which is a load of codswallop.
‘KW’ is an amount of energy.
‘KWh’ is an amount of energy generated or consumed in one hour.
Therefore ’23 kW every day’ would NOT equate to 552 kWh, but rather 0.958 KWh, and for you to take that to mean Proven’s turbine producing ‘no more than 5,000 kWh in a year’ is to make a meaningless statement. Their turbine may produce 5,000 KWh, which would come to 43.8 GWh, or (more likely) you really meant to say 5,000 KW per year, which is to say 0.571 KWh.
In the first case some 2,500 or so of these devices could supply the entire UK electrical needs. Clearly this is utter nonsense.
In the second case, given grid electricity costs of 10p/KW, 5,000 KW per year will save you about £500–provided that is based on the windmill operating at full capacity all year round. However, recent research has shown that windmills built in unsuitable locations (which we can assume Mr Large’s house must be) actual average output efficiency over a year is more like 10%, due to the vagaries of the wind. Therefore the best the man can hope to save off his electricity bill is about £50 per year. More than he claims, but still absurdly little for his £13,000 investment.
JEM:
Try sticking to what you know about (at least I hope this isn’t your speciality, or I dread to think what levels of ignorance you stoop to in your less favoured subjects).
A kW is a unit of power.
A kWh is a unit of energy.
There’s plenty of other people in this comment list who had made this observation before me. This isn’t controversial. And if you’re going to argue about this, at least get the case right. Upper-case K stands for Kelvin. Lower-case k stands for kilo.
There is no such thing as a price of 10p/kW, unless you have negotiated a capacity price (and that would be a pretty poor capacity payment). Otherwise, if you are selling the output of engines, it is 10p/kWh. If you produce 5,000 kWh at that price, they are worth £500. This isn’t rocket science.
Your analysis, on the other hand, isn’t any form of science, let alone rocket science. “5,000 KW per year” is illiterate in so many ways, I can’t begin to list them. The rest of what follows simply heaps ignorance on misunderstanding.
The stupid thing is that we agree that this is a rotten investment on Mr Large’s part. I don’t see why you feel the need to make spurious arguments against an assessment whose conclusions do not disagree with your own.
I do know about this, I have been selling millions of kWh for years. What’s your experience?
JEM,
“security of supply means you need to have some other power generation technology (nuclear? oil? coal?) sitting there on stand-by all the year round.”
No. Like I said, you use flow batteries to smooth the supply. These are really high capacity batteries (hundreds of MWh) that you charge up when the wind is blowing, discharge into the grid when it isn’t, and that give you a few days warning if the wind stops for an extended period that let’s you start up something else. There are other storage technologies too, and I’m not qualified to work through all the economics as to whether it is a cost-effective approach, but from a technical engineering perspective I’d say a solution exists.
Bruno,
Welcome to the running argument that is Samizdata! You are quite right that we shouldn’t be dismissing engineering solutions – what we were trying to dismiss was the market distortions imposed by tax-funded subsidies that were set up for political reasons. We tend to figure that if you need subsidies to do something then there’s probably something wrong with the idea, and confirmation bias does the rest. If you can make money from wind without subsidies, then go for it!
Pa,
Thanks for the welcome.
Yes, that’s the point (about distorted incentives) that I was making too. The problem with the article and many of the comments here is that they want to say “this technology good, that technology bad”. Mr Large’s problems, if we can decipher them from an incomprehensible article, are an illustration that Mr Large’s installation is bad, not wind generally. I am not arguing the opposite case – that because the article got it wrong, wind is necessarily good. I am simply arguing that the criticisms should be measured and not sweeping.
I agree completely about not skewing the market with subsidies etc (don’t forget regulations, taxes, grants, and “market mechanisms” like EU-ETS and the RO that deliver an entirely arbitrary value for carbon to some beneficiaries and not others). That is the whole theme of pickinglosers. But I would make one proviso – that there should be a rational mechanism for pricing carbon equally across all sources and sinks – internalising the externalities, as the economists would say. We don’t have that at the moment (we have a whole mess of conflicting irrational carbon values in some areas and no value at all in othes), but we should not confuse a call for a carbon price with a call for subsidy.
With regard to flow batteries – and ironically JEM and I may agree on this – the problem is that wind does not blow on a regular cycle. The electricity storage technologies available today are most practical when combined with regular swings of supply and demand. So, for instance, a baseload generation technology like nuclear may be combined practically with a storage technology like pumped-storage hydro to convert flat output to more closely match the reasonably predictable pattern of daily demand. But the energy from wind, which may be running continuously for days, or barely running at all for weeks (often at times of higher demand, such as when high-pressure weather systems produce calm cold days in winter or calm hot days in summer) is very much more difficult to store.
To take some hypothetical simplified examples:
If you have a 1 MW engine that produces continuously, but demand is 1.4 MW for 8 hours a day and 0.6 MW for the rest of the day, a storage facility with an energy capacity of around 4 MWh and a cycle efficiency of around 60% (as would typically be the case with pumped storage, flow batteries may be somewhat better) would be sufficient to balance demand and supply.
If you have a 1 MW wind turbine and you want to be able to convert its variable output into something that more closely matches demand (or at least baseload), knowing that its load factor in the South-East may be 25% and that the variability does not occur to a regular pattern, you have a very much more complex problem. If you go for a simplistic solution of trying to convert 1 MW 25% of the time to a lesser amount 100% of the time (ignoring for the timebeing demand variations), you cannot simply install storage to take 75% of the output when it is running and release it when it is not. To start with, losses in the storage cycle would mean that you would have to go for around 150 kW of continuous output. The variability in the wind would mean that, in practice, even this could not be achieved without a lot of storage.
If you put in that hypothetical 4 MWh storage facility (with 60% efficiency) referred to above and designed the system to charge it with any power over the 150 kW that was calculated as the hypothetical continuous capability of the installation, you would charge the storage facility in under 8 hours on a windy day running the turbine at full capacity. In more moderate conditions, it could take many times longer to charge – which the weather may not acquiesce in providing. And when the wind blows strongly for more than 8 hours continuously, you would not be able to store up any additional energy for the calm periods to follow – you would have to export the full output from the turbine, which undermines the plan to convert the output from a variable pattern unrelated to demand, to something more closely approaching baseload.
From a full charge, the storage facility could deliver that 150 kW for just over a day when the wind wasn’t blowing. But the wind will often be too low to produce that 150 kW for longer than 27 hours. Past that point, the system is unable to supply baseload.
So if you want to be able to manage longer periods of strong and light winds, which are the reality of the weather systems in the UK, you need more storage capacity. To be able to absorb a day of continuous strong winds and supply three and a third days of calm conditions, you will need three times as much capacity. Now admittedly, one of the advantages of flow batteries is that three times as much storage is not three times as expensive, as you simply increase the size of the tanks for the electrolyte, so long as you do not want to increase the rate of release of the energy. But more storage is still a significant additional cost, and all the time you are storing more energy, your are losing more in the conversion back and forth.
Of course, the weather systems are not even that reliable, so even then you will not be selling electricity with a reliability that is useful to electricity suppliers who have to match demand to supply precisely. They will be putting in standby fossil capacity (probably oil) for those times when the storage runs out when the wind still isn’t blowing, and they will be designing/contracting their other baseload supplies to spin down somewhat when they have to absorb the full output of the turbine after the storage facility has charged fully.
This is why, in practice, the wind-farm operators are not going to use flow batteries to smooth their output significantly, but only to tweak it. If you look at one of the first examples of this application – VRB Power Systems’ sale of a storage system for Sorne Hill windfarm in Ireland, they are supplying 12 MWh of storage for a 32 MW windfarm with another 6.9 MW of turbines on the way. At the high efficiencies promised by VRB at full throughput, 10% of the output of the windfarm would fill up the storage in 4 hours. When the windfarm is becalmed, that storage would run down in under 20 minutes if they tried to use it to maintain the output from the site at the nominal capacity, or just over 3 hours if they set themselves the more modest target of exporting at least 10% of their capacity. This isn’t a technology to turn intermittent wind into something predictable. It is a technology to make minor adustments to the profile of the variable output.
I’m afraid I haven’t explained this very well, but the long and the short of it is that there is no technology available today that can turn intermittent wind into baseload or load-following output. It will continue to rely on standing/spinning reserve of fossil-fired generation. That does not rule wind out where the power it produces is cheaper (taking into account capital as well as running costs, the costs of standby generation, and the value of avoided carbon emissions) than fossil-fired power. But, as I suspect we will both agree, that should be the basis on which wind (and all other forms of generation) should be judged, and not according to some arbitrary notions of “goodness” or “badness” of one technology or another.
In those circumstances, I expect that some wind would still be developed and operated, but nowhere near as much as the wind lobby would have us believe. But that’s just a guess – I am agnostic as to the actual outcome, so long as the eventual balance of technologies is discovered in a free market (incorporating fair carbon values), and not according to skewed incentives based on subjective technology preferences.
Bruno Prior:
(“at least get the case right” At last! The ultimate nit-picker!)
You may have sold “millions of kWh” for years, but you still don’t know what you’re talking about.
A KW is a unit of power or energy (the distinction does not matter here) while a KWh is a unit of power or energy over time.
That’s why when you say ‘…23kw every day (is wrong) …the figure should be 23 kWh’ you are quite wrong, as you are trying to divide your energy or power over time twice>/i>, an elementary schoolboy error.
’23kWh per day’ is as I said, and continue to say, just plain rubbish; it’s like saying ‘a car travelled at 23 mph per day’. It may have travelled 23 miles in a day, or it may have travelled 23 miles in an hour, but what YOU would be claiming for that car is just meaningless twaddle.
On the other had, ‘5,000 KW per year’ does make sense (even if not to you) as it can be translated directly into 0.571 kWh, for example. I defy you to do that sort of translation (correctly) with ’23 kWh per day’.
If you know about this, how come you speak such rubbish about it?
I spent 30 years as an engineering project manager in the energy business. I know of what I talk.
Meanwhile I suggest you stick to what you know, which is not this.
Pa Annoyed:
Like I said, you use flow batteries to smooth the supply….
The trouble is that storing electricity is fabulously expensive. Your suggestion(s) are not new, and certainly not cheap. Those who have done the costings know that it’s actually very much cheaper to install standby alternative generating capacity than to try to store meaningful amounts of power.
Which leads right back to, why bother with something so inherently unreliable as wind power in the first place?
What annoys me about wind turbines is we are in the process of subsidising this scam so Mr and Mrs Bandwagon can deface the landscape with yet more fugly goods from B&Q and Homebase.
IIRC £250m has been earmarked for subsidies in “renewables” by the UK. It is such an utter crying shame, no, an absolute SCANDAL that Prof Richard Bussard is only asking for £100m to prove his Fusion reactor yet we spend money on supporting uneconomic yet trendy tokenistic guff.
As this thread seems to concentrate people who may know something about the subject…
Who can recommend some reading to me on off-grid power? I’m not even sure where to begin with costs, methods…all I know is basic electronic principles and basic wiring, that I get over 300 days of sunlight a year and that I have a case of the ass with our local government-sponsored monopoly.
Xcel: Proving libertarians right when they talk about governments! Proving Lefties right when they talk about corporations!
JEM:
Listen, Big Chief Talking Bollocks, how about you and me sit down and smoke a pipe?
I bring a peace offering: you don’t like wind power; here’s a story to warm the cockles of your heart. A set of wind turbines in Japan so bad that they were actually importing more than they were exporting. Their installers were so embarrassed that they never ran, that they imported power to make them spin so that they looked like they were working! OK, so they were installed by academic engineers rather than businessmen, but hey, anyone can make a mistake.
See, we agree basically that wind power is overhyped. From what I can see, there are two differences between us:
1. The definitions of kW and kWh. OK, you’re the academically-trained engineer. Name the text- or reference-book you prefer, and tell us what it says about these units. If it says that kW is a measure of energy, I’ll happily concede. If it says it’s a measure of power, then you can do the same. The distinction does matter. Power and energy are not the same thing. Power is energy over time, or conversely energy is power times time. By the way, a kWh is a kilowatt-hour, not a kilowatt per hour. In other words, it’s the power multiplied by the time for which the power was delivered, not “power or energy over time” as you would have it. That’s why a kWh is different in kind to a mph. A mph/h is a rate of acceleration, but a kWh/h is simply a kW, i.e. the rate of delivery of the energy, otherwise known as power. But let’s see what your reference text says.
2. You think we should rule out wind full stop, whereas I am happy to leave it to the market, providing the market is not distorted by irrational government intervention. Frankly, neither you nor I are likely to be running the country any time soon, so this is a rather hypothetical argument. In that unlikely event, the practical result of one policy versus the other is not likely to be great – I doubt in a genuine free market that we would be building much wind. I wouldn’t rule out that which could genuinely compete, but if you want to pre-judge the market, that’s up to you.
If you’re talking about what is the cheapest, most efficient approach, then a moment’s glance at the current market will tell you that this is fossil fuel and you put up with the geopolitical issues as just an additional expense. If wind power, or any other renewable was generally cheaper than oil, they’d be using it already.
I agree that using flow batteries (or hydro, or anything else) to provide enough capacity to smooth the flow out would make it massively expensive with today’s technology. Whether it will be the same in twenty or forty years time, (or more importantly with costs spread over twenty years of incremental infrastructure development,) is another matter. If you ask how much our current national power infrastructure costed, I suspect that would be quite a big number too. My point was that we have technical solutions to the problems, meaning it isn’t technologically impossible; that they are not economic yet is obvious from the fact they’re not used very much. I’m pleased to hear that there are situations where they are now becoming economic, and will watch developments with interest. On the other hand, I’m far less impressed with the proposals mentioned for a Carbon tax, but that’s a whole other argument… 😉
JEM, I agree with Bruno. You’ve got your kW and kWh all mixed up, and accusing people of schoolboy errors doesn’t make you look good even when you’re right. (That goes both ways.) Power is the rate of change of energy, so power in Watts (or Joules per second) is like speed, and you have to multiply by the number of hours to get energy in Watt-hours (or units of 3600 Joules) which is analogous to distance. If you’re still sure you’re right, make me go through it slowly so my error becomes apparent to me.
TimC:
£250m is the tip of the iceberg. Between budgets for various grant-schemes, the Renewables Obligation, exemption from the Climate-Change Levy, and the benefit from the impact of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme on wholesale electricity prices, taxpayers/consumers are prospectively going to contribute several billion pounds to renewable electricity upto 2020.
Renewable heat, on the other hand (which, with energy-efficiency, is the most important and easiest thing we can develop if we want to cut down our carbon footprint and don’t want to be dependent on Russian gas) gets very little – a few million pounds of grants. And renewable transport fuels are just beginning to be supported (through the far-from-perfect Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation), but to a minimal level, and against the perpetual sniping of the oil companies.
It is very important in this debate, to remember that electricity, which is what people are generally thinking of when they are talking about renewable or nuclear energy, makes up only one-third of UK energy consumption, with roughly equal shares to heat and transport. Attention tends to be focused too strongly on electricity.
As for nuclear, it is fair to point out (though I don’t use this as an argument to hold back funding on something like fusion) that it has had more government-funding for research and development over the years than renewables could ever dream of. All the same, fusion probably represents a worthwhile punt – my bet is that they won’t find a way of making it economic, but given the benefits if they succeed, it’s worth a crack. But the costs are rather higher than £100m. The UK is signed up, as part of Europe, to contributing to the international ITER project, which is budgeted at £6.7 billion (how much do you want to bet it will run over?), half of which will be provided by Europe. If the UK takes a proportional share of the European half, we will be contributing a lot more than £100m to fusion research. And whilst I generally believe that competition is important in all fields, including research, and that it is much better driven by customer pull than by government push, there is an argument that something as big, complex and expensive as fusion needs international cooperation to be affordable and manageable.
JEM,
You are wrong, dead wrong, totally at sea and Bruno is quite right. You really have to get your idea of energy and power sorted out before you comment on this subject. I am speaking as a professional electrical engineer.
John Rippengal
C Eng MIET
Bruno
I believe that ITER is a particle physics reseach program intended to look for the secrets of matter. I seriously doubt it will make any near or mid term contribution towards fusion power.
Nuclear power has been subsidized for years by the military for use in submarines and aircraft carriers. The civilain side gets (or got) its subsidies due to this connection. In the US the nuclear industry has been paying a special tax that was supposed to go towards the building of a waste storage facility. The facility was supposed to be finished in 1986 (I believe). Nowadays the goverment still collects the tax and the industry has to pay for on site storage . It looks to me as if the nuclear industry in america is taxed rather than supported- the sign of a successful capitalist venture.
Sunfish,
This is a place I’ve done business with for RV based power. They are marketed towards people who want to park out in the unwired boonies for long periods of time and not run the generator.
They spend as much time talking about how to lower usage as on generating power without engines and they are very budget conscious. Since RVs and cabins have the same basic energy demands, they should be quite usefull. Their book on RV solar electric is pretty good, kind of old but not much has changed except efficiencies and capacities.
Bruno:
Sorry, I was otherwise engaged.
(1) Yes, we do both agree wind power is not a sensible way to use resources.
(2) Nevertheless:
In SI units:
1 joule = work done to produce 1 watt for 1 second, or 2.7778 × 10^−7 kilo-watt-hours (kWH)
Thus kWH is a unit of work or energy expended (although not strictly an SI unit) to produce 1 kW for 1 hour; similarly, ‘1 kWD’ or ‘kilo-watt-day’ might be the work done to produce 1 kW for 1 day (which = 24 kWHs) or ‘1 kWY’ or ‘kilo-watt-year’ might be the work done to produce 1 kW for 1 year (which = 365 x 24 = 8760 kWHs)
But your invention, the ‘kilo-watt-hour-day’, which would be, I suppose, the ‘kWHD’, is intrinsically meaningless. The very fact that you suppose such a monstrosity could exist places a very large question mark over you knowledge of this field.
John Rippengal:
Are you, as a ‘professional electrical engineer’, seriously tying to tell us you believe in the ‘kilo-watt-hour-day’?
Taylor:
You may well be right about ITER. I don’t know much about it, only what I read in the media. But according to The Times article I linked to, it is “A multinational programme to develop nuclear fusion”. And “The Department of Trade and Industry said: ‘The UK supports Iter as the next step towards practical fusion power.'”
I don’t know much about subsidies for nuclear in the US (although claims that the US government was offering subsidies of £13.7bn to investors were widely reported last year), but in the UK our nuclear power programme has largely been paid for by the state. That, of course, does not say that it would necessarily have been uneconomic had it been a market activity, and says nothing about its current economics. Similarly, the current economics of fission says very little about the potential economics of fusion. It seems appropriate to leave the question of new fission to the market, but chances are, fusion is sufficiently complex and financially risky that even our energy giants would not pursue it, regardless of the potential benefits if it succeeded. I could be persuaded either way whether that means government should fund research or we should just leave it alone.
JEM:
I’m not going to carry on with the debate about units. Neither I nor John mentioned a kilowatt-hour-day. It seems to me that the series of posts speak for themselves, for those few who might be interested in this, and that trying to reason with you is pointless.
Bruno
The nuclear waste fund currently holds more than $28 billion and is growing at a rate of 1 billion a year. The subsidies and tax breaks for investors, will probably not offset the taxes for a very long time to come. What I suppose the government is trying to do is to make it a bit easier to build a new nuclear plant. Offsetting the green anti-nuke opposition which has brought the industry to its knees.
In the UK I suppose the industry was and is supported by the government. But in the pre Thatcher days it was a nationalized industry so the subsidies then were just a matter of HMG taking a few shillings from ojne pocket and putting them in another.
Sunfish Solar power, check out Canadian company Carmanah, http://www.carmanah.com They produced over 500 kw of grid tie solar power last year, probably even more of off grid power. They sell all over the world, London Transport is a customer for their solar powered LED light systems. Their website lists many of their sales successes.
Bruno et al. I am not talking about ITER, which is a massively expensive “Cathederal”. Prof Bussard has mentioned that one of his biggest problems is that people hear of what he does and automatically veer off to ITER and think that is the answer or to ask the ITER people if what he is doing is the answer (NIH is a decode of their reply).
You can see a very illuminating and entertaining video here(Link), taken when he gave a talk at Google HQ. He chap is 80 odd, yet sharp as they come and a great dry sense of humour.
“There’s no end is sight that we see in the tokamak
world, giant machine, no predictability; it’s all
empirical. One of my friends, Dr. Nicholas Krall, a
consultant to us, probably one of the top three theorists
in the world, said some years ago, “We spent $15
billion dollars studying tokamaks and what we know
about them is they’re no damn good.”
[audience laughter]
— Dr. Robert Bussard
Bruno Prior: “I’m not going to carry on with the debate about units.”
Perhaps not. Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I have the distinct impression you’ve revised your “The answer is blowing in the wind” in “Picking Losers” since yesterday.
BTW, since you’re into picking nits, it’s ‘an mph’, not ‘a mph’.
And to say an “mph/h is a rate of acceleration…” is more than a little misleading. Try ‘mphph’ or ‘m/h/h’ or ‘mph^2’ or ‘m/h^2’; ‘mph/h’ looks more than a bit like a plain unadorned ‘mile’.
JEM,
You appear to be a complete moron.
Who mentioned the KWh-day except you?
Bruno prior has been correct in his statement of units all along.
You are the only one misinterpretting the kWh a kW per hour.
Look, your first entry on this thread was as follows:
“‘KW’ is an amount of energy.
‘KWh’ is an amount of energy generated or consumed in one hour.”
Both of these are wrong. A kW is a POWER rating – energy divided by time, i.e. the speed with which energy can be delivered. It is an instantaneous measure, a rate.
Your definition of kWh is confused. Yes, it is a measure of energy delivered and yes, it is indeed equivalent to a power of 1kW for one hour, but it is NOT the amount of energy delivered in one hour alone. It is, as the units suggest, a power in kW MULTIPLIED – not divided – by the time in hours for which that power was delivered.
Thus, 1kWh would be the amount of energy delivered by something rated at a power of 1kW running for one hour, or a power of 2kW delivered for 30 mins, or 0.5kW for 2 hours.
Your confusion with units continues:
‘mph/h’ looks more than a bit like a plain unadorned ‘mile’.
Whilst your suggestions would all work, this last assertion is just shite. “Miles per hour, per hour” is indeed an acceleration to anyone who has O-level physics: it’s the rate of change of speed.
Now, the kWh/day thing, just to clear this up. Bruno is absolutely correct.
You say:
“’23kWh per day’ is as I said, and continue to say, just plain rubbish; it’s like saying ‘a car travelled at 23 mph per day’ …”
Only if you assume (incorrectly) that the hour in kWh is DIVIDING the kW, as it is miles PER hour. Bruno is correct to point out that this comparison is ridiculous.
“On the other had, ‘5,000 KW per year’ does make sense (even if not to you) as it can be translated directly into 0.571 kWh, for example. “
No it can’t. 5000kW/year is – as you can see from your own definitions above is 5000 Joules per second per year. It is a rate of change of power.
“I defy you to do that sort of translation (correctly) with ’23 kWh per day’.
Except no-one (except you) is trying to translate 23kWh/day straight back into kWh.
It is also notable that when you quote your definitions, you choose to go the wrong way (i.e. from joules to kWh). Anyone generally conversant with these units would go the other way: 1 kWh is 1000 J/s multiplied (not divided) by 3600 s = 3.6MJ
It is staggering that you even give the definition then fail to understand it.
Brian,
Can we assume that JEM is just trolling and ignore him now?
C
JEM:
I posted the entry at pickinglosers.com early in the morning of 18 Jan, and then having slept on it, I added a few more paragraphs to the end later that morning. I did not change any of the existing text, nor have I made any further changes since the morning of the 18th. So yes, you are wrong (and not for the first time).
I agree, in the context of this discussion, that the third paragraph could be improved. I was trying to explain the concept in a way that someone not familiar with the terms could relate to the physical process, but I would now change the word “potential” to something more like “the rate of work”. But to be fair to you, I have deliberately left it untouched. Perhaps you are only reading it properly for the first time.
Anyone can make a mistake. What really surprises me is that (a) you persist with flogging this dead horse, and (b) you “spent 30 years as an engineering project manager in the energy business”. Which energy business was that?
TimC:
I’ve started watching that video, but it’s rather long, so I’ll have to put it off to my spare time. I’m sure it doesn’t need comment – as I’ve said, I can see the logic of a high-stakes gamble on fusion research, and if there’s a credible (and cheaper) alternative to the ITER project, a bit of competition is always healthy (albeit, not to the bank-balances of the taxpayers who would be expected to pay for the research). Having said that, at £100m, Dr Bussard’s requirements are within the scope of one of the energy majors to finance if the result would be an economic and almost infinite source of energy. Why can he not get private funding? (Perhaps it’s explained in the video – I admit I ought to watch it before asking such questions.)
Who mentioned the KWh-day except you?
Bruno. Then (apparently) removed it from his “Picking Losers” overnight. Somewhere along the way I mistakenly referred to this as ‘KWh per day’.
—-
Your confusion with units continues: ‘mph/h’ looks more than a bit like a plain unadorned ‘mile’.
Whilst your suggestions would all work, this last assertion is just shite. “Miles per hour, per hour” is indeed an acceleration to anyone who has O-level physics: it’s the rate of change of speed.
But I never said ‘mph/h’ was wrong, just that it looked wrong at first glance. So it is your assertion that I said ‘mph/h’ was wrong that is ‘just shite’.
—
I say: “On the other had, ‘5,000 KW per year’ does make sense..’
Yes sorry, this was my typo. That should have said ‘On the other had, ‘5,000 KW-year’ does make sense’. I refer to ‘KWY’ in a later post.
—
It is also notable that when you quote your definitions, you choose to go the wrong way (i.e. from joules to kWh). Anyone generally conversant with these units would go the other way: 1 kWh is 1000 J/s multiplied (not divided) by 3600 s = 3.6MJ
So you don’t accept that 1 joule = work done to produce 1 watt for 1 second, or 2.7778 × 10^−7 kilo-watt-hours (kWH)?
(There is no ‘wrong way’ or ‘right way’ in this.)
Sunfish,
i’m not sure if this is exactly what you want but has a run through of various different ways of powering your home and how to do it
(Link)
Bruno:
I accept what you say about “Picking Losers”. I was relying upon my apparently faulty memory.
Most of this disagreement comes down to my careless use of (eg.) ‘KWH per day’, when meaning ‘KWH-day’– which of course would indeed be meaningless.
Bruno (and all). The video is, IMHO, well worth the time and bandwidth.
Yes, a private company could pick it up, but I return to my belief that it is the State’s duty to ensure energy security and health of the population, so it is a worthy task in my view. When compared with other money pits, it is negligible. A state developed version is better than a monopoly held by a single private organisation – all that woudl do would be to keep energy prices artificially at their “pain threashold” and create a monster who woudl probably have the resources to start a war with a country that refused to pay license fees…
TimC,
Now you’re into a BIG debate about the role of the state. 😉
Would it be more dangerous for a single company to have a monopoly, or for a single country? Is fear of monopoly power in something so important a reason to only develop fusion by international cooperation between governments? I don’t agree with this line of thinking, but it seems to be the logical conclusion of such a fear.
Preservation of a monopoly on fusion power would depend either on maintaining the confidentiality of any IP (or know-how, which I’ll treat as inclusive in IP for now), or governments protecting any publicly-available, commercially-sensitive IP. I doubt the latter option would be afforded to a private business that tried to abuse its monopoly of fusion power. So it would be a question of whether a company could maintain the secrecy of the IP necessary to develop (and “overcharge” for) fusion power in a commercial setting, and whether other governments or organisations wouldn’t be able to develop competing technologies through their own research.
I doubt whether such a monopoly could be preserved for long. But I’d still go with the international cooperation, not from fear of monopoly, but mainly because I don’t believe they’ll crack fusion (if at all) without tens or possibly hundreds of billions of dollars of investment, which is too much for any one economy or business to stand, particularly if I am right that the chances are slim of maintaining a monopoly grip on the technology post-development.
As for the broader point that it is the “State’s duty to ensure energy security and health of the population”, we need to define some terms. With regard to health, I take it you mean that it is the State’s duty to prevent material and avoidable harm knowingly being caused to the health of any individual by any other individual or organisation, other than in a very limited set of circumstances. If so, I agree. It is, of course, impossible for the State literally to “ensure [the] health of the population” – we are all going to die sooner or later, but I’m sure that’s not what you meant – I just raise it as it is relevant to the question of energy security.
It is useful bracketing energy security and health together, as you do, because the latter illustrates the former. Just as it is impossible for the State to prevent accidental harm occurring to its citizens, so it is impossible for the State to guarantee that energy supplies will be plentifully available to its citizens. Energy is a world market with resources spread across many nations. Certain types of energy are a finite resource, and other less limited types may not be available at prices that people today would consider acceptable. Much of this is outside the control of any government. But what governments can and should do is act to prevent coercion, or the knowing infliction of preventable harm on its citizens.
The priority of the State, in that regard, must be defence (of nation, property, and person). In the case of energy, defence of nation and property should include defence of that nation’s resources (which does not imply rights of access to anyone else’s resources). But most nations do not have adequate (or commercially-utilisable) resources to meet all their needs. In that case, it is necessary to trade in order to be able to obtain from other nations those things that, due to comparative advantage, can be imported more efficiently than can be produced at home. So the next priority of the State should be to provide the optimal conditions for efficient, competitive production and trade, both internally and externally. After all, you can’t buy if you can’t sell, and vice versa (apparently neverending trade deficits notwithstanding). By and large, that means keeping government intervention and costs to a minimum.
Beyond that, there’s not much the State can do. You can’t (or at least shouldn’t) force other countries to sell you their resources (though you can try, but let’s not go there…).
You can try to make sure you use your native and imported resources as efficiently as possible, but efficiency is only a virtue where the resource is scarce, so price signals should act as a sufficient incentive to efficiency (which is back to government not intervening, in this case to suppress price signals, as occurred during the troubles in California, or nowadays in the UK for domestic heating).
You can try to make sure that your suppliers are as diverse as possible, so you are not vulnerable to trouble with any one supplier. The market should also deliver diversity in theory, but there are arguments why it may not do so, so the government may want to mandate a degree of diversity, providing it does not introduce such rigid and arbitrary rules that the inflexibility costs outweigh the diversity benefits.
And you might want to make sure the market has the right incentives to invest in sufficient storage/excess capacity to ride out sudden interruptions in supply or spikes in the price of a particular fuel-source.
What does not work, for all but the luckiest, resource-rich nations, is trying to make the nation self-sufficient (or autarkic). Britain tried doing it in the twentieth-century, and we have never been less energy-secure than when we were dependent for our electricity on one source (British coal) controlled by one group of people (the miners). Since the fuels for our electricity production became more diverse, our supplies have been far more reliable. Unfortunately, we remain dependent on one fuel for our heat (gas) and transport (oil), albeit with a number of sources for each type of fuel.
Bruno P is right, JEM is wrong. kW = power required to move point of application of force of 1000 newtons through 1 meter in one second = 10^3 kg m^2 s^-3. kWh = energy expended (work done) in moving point of application of force of 3.6 × 10^3 newtons through 1000 meters = 3.6 × 10^6 kg m^2 s^-2. OK, finis: David has spoken.
One question I have: if we have large legacy technology power stations (e.g. coal-fired) running on standby, how long does it take to ramp them up to full power output to compensate for a drop-off in the variable output of wind turbines? I don’t know much about large-scale power generation, but I imagine the process of bringing a gigawatt-scale station up to operating speed and matching its output to the grid is a non-trivial and time-consuming operation.
This is right on the border of my knowledge, so forgive any mistakes, but as I understand it, there are various types of reserve, differentiated in the balancing market by the speed with which they are able to react. There is already a need to react quickly to reasonably substantial imbalances in supply and demand, partly because any power station may drop out, not just wind turbines (though obviously wind turbines are an order of magnitude less reliable than most conventional generation) and partly because people’s and organisations’ consumption is not entirely predictable (though it’s a black art at which the suppliers and National Grid are pretty good).
For rapid adjustment, I believe they would not bring up a whole power station, but have what is known as spinning reserve, where the turbines are already running but can bring up their load pretty rapidly. I believe the other technology that can react very quickly is pumped storage hydro.
But the point which I guess you are hinting at – that this issue becomes more significant the more wind (or other intermittent power such as wave) we have – is absolutely right. It is one of the main reasons why almost everyone accepts that there is a limit to the proportion of our capacity that the system could stand from intermittents. The wind lobby claim that figure is around 20%, others would say rather less. I’d guess we’re never going to find out.
An important point to remember is that the limit is on capacity, not output, which means that the maximum contribution wind could make to our total electricity consumption is much lower than the capacity limit, because of wind’s low load factor. If we got to 20% wind by capacity, it would only be contributing around 12% to our annual supplies. And if most of that were in remote locations, which is likely given the nature of the resource, the contribution to final consumption will be even lower, given that transmission and distribution losses will be higher than the current average of 15%.
One thing to point out on the other side of the argument, however, is that in the short-term, wind is not that unpredictable. At a week out it is pretty uncertain, and a month or year ahead it is almost completely unpredictable. But at an hour or two forward, weather forecasting is sufficiently sophisticated nowadays to provide a pretty good indication of what is likely to be coming. It would be possible to manage the network to take this into account, but it would introduce additional infrastructure and management requirements, which are an additional cost.
Then again, there is probably a need to move to a more managed network anyway, if other things which people see as less controversially desirable than wind, such as distributed generation and demand management, are to take off. This is complicated stuff.
Wind is a much higher proportion of capacity in Germany than in the UK, so it is worth looking to Germany (and Spain and Denmark) for lessons about the significance of this issue. Eon Netz, who operate (some/all?) of the German network produce an annual report on the impact of wind power on the network, the most recent of which (2005) you can download from here.
There was some suggestion that wind was at least partially to blame for the power outage across a good part of the European network last November. This appears not to have been the case (at least directly), but it is clear that expanding wind capacity is increasing the complexity of managing the network.
Latest info on the UK’s growth prospects
‘Bruno P is right, JEM is wrong.’
Dead right.
Reading this blog has been like watching Jade Goody.
The “kWh per day” is a nice unit of power, because it connects to the way people’s bills are expressed, and it leads to quantities that are typically simple small numbers like 10 or 20 kWh/d. (For example, “my electricity usage is 4 kWh/d”.)
The average Brit consumes 120 kWh/d in total (including all forms of energy).
I’m writing a book on sustainable energy, available free on my website.
(Link)
If any other Jade Goodys with 30y of energy industry experience need educating about kW and kWh, this book might be a useful place to point them to.
David MacKay (Prof.)
I may be 5+ years too late, but I would like to point out to Bruno Prior that there never was a VRFB installed at Sorne Hill. There was no battery ever produced. What actually happened at Sorne Hill (now owned and operated by Bord Gais Energy) was – in 2007, there was a feasibility study published which examined the economics of installing a flow battery. While the economic case for the system was very compelling, the technology was not ready for deployment at that point in time.