I occasionally look, in a geeky sort of way, at the wind power output
figures in the vague porcine levitation sort of hope that it will in
fact be contributing something useful.

http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp_home.htm

Well good lord, the wind was forecast to be producing 2.3Gw today, but
in fact it showed a couple of dips to less than 1GW. In under an hour.
Equivalent to losing a whole conventional power station.

No doubt it was the 'wrong sort of wind' and the turbines shut
themselves down, or the waves were too high..

I wonder how much fuel we used coping with THAT slew rate.

The frequency graphs for the same time period show a huge drop (for the
grid)

Fortunately, while windy, its also very warm, so we don't really need
the power anyway.

Its always nice to see the wind associations forecasts turn out to be
50% in error. All their forecasts generally are, so nothing new there, then.

In article ,
The Natural Philosopher writes:
The Other Mike wrote:

Its always nice to see the wind associations forecasts turn out to be
50% in error. All their forecasts generally are, so nothing new there, then.

Despite the link just below the graph it's *not* the wind association
forecasting tool you are seeing. If they had a wind forecasting tool
it would be permanently stuck at 100%


:-)


However if we have more windpower, accommodating the slew rate will be
extremely hazardous. Imagine 30% PEAK capacity,.. that's bad
enough..like losing half a dozen power stations. Now consider the
ridiculous target of 30% AVERAGE from renewables..that's like switching
off up to 50% of the countries power stations in an hour..

There's already been a major blackout in continental Europe affecting
several countries, due in part to instability resulting from wind
generated supplies (but also failure to replan for increasing levels
of unreliable supplies). This came about the same time as the Danes
decided to stop their wind program, because although they could boast
that wind could generate all (or some large proportion of) their supply,
they had not managed to turn off a single conventional power station,
and they couldn't sell the excess electricity these generate because
there is absolutely no market for electricity which is only available
when the wind blows.

Wind is really stuck until there's a better viable way to store and
release large amounts of electrical energy than anyone has discovered
so far.

30% from renewables may or may not be achievable, but the figure from
unreliable sources like wind is very much lower on an island this
size. It goes up a bit if you can distribute the generation and resulting
electricity across a larger area such as all Europe, but then you have
to pay for the cost of backup power stations, and that's enormous, as
power stations are only viable investments in the first place if you
are going to run them continuously, so you have to subsidise them to
shut down when the wind blows. It's all a horrible mess which politicians
just don't even begin to understand.

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]

On Fri, 4 Feb 2011 17:04:14 +0000 (UTC), Andrew Gabriel wrote:


Wind is really stuck until there's a better viable way to store and
release large amounts of electrical energy than anyone has discovered
so far.

There's progress......

http://spedr.com/s4u9

Looks like they still have a way to go, but I think we'll be hearing more
of this outfit before too long.


--
The Wanderer

I may not always be right
But I'm never wrong!

There's progress......
http://spedr.com/s4u9

Interesting, but the physisist in me shudders at phrases like
"the cold is not recycled,", "the cold is circulated". Cold
isn't a thing, heat is a thing, cold is absense of heat.

Investigating further, the "cold" that is the byproduct of
this process isn't actually cold, it's heat! The waste is
the result of the "fuel medium" being air at -196 degrees.
All mechanical processes result in waste heat at a temperature
higher than the source, it just so happens that the "hot"
waste from this process happens to be below normal room
temperature

JGH

On Fri, 4 Feb 2011 12:28:29 -0800 (PST), jgharston wrote:

There's progress......
http://spedr.com/s4u9

Interesting, but the physisist in me shudders at phrases like

Yebbut it does seem to be written for a largely non-technical audience,
explaining for the lay person how the idea is supposed to work.

Take it from me, Gareth Brett didn't get where he is today by peddling
green bandwagon hope3s and aspirations.


--
The Wanderer

Education would be so much more effective if its purpose were to ensure
that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much
they don¢t know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.

On Fri, 04 Feb 2011 11:49:07 +0000, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:

Its always nice to see the wind associations forecasts turn out to be
50% in error. All their forecasts generally are, so nothing new there, then.

So their forecasts are just a lot of hot air then. (Sorry)