"Colin Blackburn" wrote in message
...
News wrote:
I wrote:
Doubling the number of turbines without considering how you are going to
use them is a false economy.


But could work out cheaper depending on how you use them.

I didn't say it couldn't be.

You also
redundancy, which in an isolated location is desirable.

Redundancy comes at a price if it isn't needed. Our redundancy is having
the fall back of two diesel generators and some solar PV panels.
Redundancy needn't mean unnecessary duplication. Wind turbines need
masts, planning permission, building mount points, charge
controllers,...duplicating all this isn't straightforward. Also, the
chances are if a storm is powerful enough to damage one turbine there's
a good chance it will damage both.

Best not to have
batteries. At the mo', expensive and don't last long - although battery
technology is coming on brilliantly.

If you are in an isolated location and you are using the turbine for
electricity as well as heat then you need batteries (or some sort of
pumped water storage system.) Yes batteries are expensive but used
correctly they'll last 10 years or more

Couple the windmill directly to the immersion of a thermal store, then
all
the wind energy is transformed to heat energy, which is stored in the
thermal store.

Yes, but when the thermal store hits its max the turbines are then doing
nothing. That was my initial point.

You size the thermal store to suit. Large enough so a windmill would not
full heat it. The maxium heat store temeperaure copul be 90 degree C. That
will take a lot of wind to heat up a large thermal store. Even over summer I
doubt if a widnmill would full charge a correctly sized thermal store A
windmill giving 1kW will take a time to heat a large thermal store. With
stored water the hot water rises to the top. This means you always have a
tap of hot water from the top and lots of cold water below for storage. A
thermal store may have solar panels heating it.

Having two turbines heat the water
twice as quickly is of no use if you don't use the heat quickly.

You store the heat. A 1kW turbine is really not that big.

A second system such as direct solar water heating would make more sense
here.


The windmill works in winter as well, while solar panels may be ineffective
for days on end in winter and only work for a few hours on sunny winter
days.

When you use an intermediate battery you loose quite a bit
of energy. Then this is used for low temperature UFH and DHW.

You lose energy in all processes. It's managing energy use and loss that
makes the difference.

You loose far more with an intermediate battery between the generator and
the element, than using a directly heated thermal store.


Colin