Man at B&Q wrote:
On Mar 6, 7:26 pm, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
The windfarm proponents will counter this by saying that that is fine,
because when its flat calm in Feltham, its a gale in Galashiels..

And skip the most fundamental points: that a gale in Galashiels is all
very well, but the power needs to get down to Feltham.

Why?

The grid is already designed to cope with local outages in generating
capacity. there's no need for wholesale upgrade.

It is *no way* designed to take 60% of the countrysides power needs from
one end to the other. Yes it can route round one lost power station, not
half the countries capacity.


We all accept that if Wind Power is used there needs to be plenty of
backup capacity in the system.

The power from Galashiels is used locally. Feltham gets its power from
somewhere, but certainly not all the way from Galashiels.


If the south east is becalmed, it needs to.

It's the same principle that you can buy your electricity from any of
a number of suppliers but the power you actually use is always
generated "locally".


The problem here is we aren;t talking bull**** marketing: we are talking
realities.

If we cannot use teh wind in one part of the country to cover the lack
of wind in another, there is little point in building it.

It is preceisely this issue 'but the wind is always blowing somewhere in
the ~UK" that windies use to cover 'but sometimes the wind doesn't blow'
arguments.

Basically either you:-

- transport the energy, (large expensive grid)
- store the energy (very large, very expensive reservoirs up hills)
- have enough backup capacity to cover the TOTAL NEEDS of any area
...(basically working well below par efficiency wise,and costing as much
as if you didn't bother with the windmills at all).

Large baseband coal and oil steam turbine stations can be made damned
efficient..but the price you pay is they cant be spun up and down quickly.

For backup you need gas turbines..nowhere near as efficient.

Result. No net carbon gains.

MBQ