Martin Brown wrote:
On 29/11/2011 16:54, charles wrote:
In ,
Martin wrote:
On 29/11/2011 16:45, Tim Watts wrote:
dennis@home wrote:

The alternative is to invade Greenland and steal the
geothermal.

Would any notice?

You would be better off invading Iceland if you want geothermal power.

Invading Greenland will just get you loads of retreating glacier ice.

might help then forthcoming water shortage.

Water is only short in the SE. Plenty of it here up north.

The whole of Kielder reservoir and various smaller ones built to cool
the steel furnaces on Teesside are now full almost year round.

Who knows if they ever restart the furnaces they might use a trickle.



Moving back to real power generation, there's some interesting things
emerging,. We got the GREATEST wind power when the wind was 'just
right': with gales sweeping across the whole country, the output is
ragged and not much over 3GW in total,. which strongly suggests
windmills or whole farms are being feathered through strong wind periods.

Needless to say this puts a high frequency high amplitude ripple on the
grid which the poor old hydro is struggling to contain - frequency
variation is much larger than normal. As is total hydro and pumped..must
be cats and dogs in Scotland and N Wales. Plenty of water for the little
hydro schemes.

Also it seems N European farms are finally spinning up, as we are now
back to pulling power off them as well. That's pulled back the gas oupt
to compensate. But I would imagine a lot of that is spinning reserve in
case the wind power collapses either due to too much, or a net fall in wind.

And it looks like Torness is back up - nuclear has been creeping back to
six and a bit gigs.

Coal is being flatlined at just under 22GW, it seems that they are
determined to make the most of their 'allowed hours of use' So we are
burning coal in preference to gas, thus increasing emissions. I love all
this climate change legislation. All it does is increase emissions..


Overall demand is brutal - over 50GW at this evening's peak. Does NOT
bode well if we get a cold snap and no wind...

Hard to tell whether the French interconnector is up to snuff..they
haven't needed to saturate it today as presumably European windmills are
finally actually generating something.

But it was clipping at 1.5GW last week. Its supposed to be 2GW....

Moyle is still down, and I cant see ocean going cable layers having much
success in the Irish Sea right now.. Still they probably have enough
wind right now to at least boil a kettle, if not the stew....