Wind Farms

[Churchill]

LOL. I see you your 35 year old accident and raise you all the people killed in the two Gulf Wars.

I see your two Gulf wars and raise you all the people killed by Spanish flu after the Great War.

[VectraMan]

Some formula 1 cars are using flywheels as part of the recently reintroduced KERS, but only historical data is available:

I imagine what F1 use will be the state of the art in both volume, mass and energy density. And will only have to last one or two races I expect. The other KERS alternative allowed is capacitors, but I haven't read up on that yet.

Williams experimented with flywheel based KERS, but never actually ran it for real. All the systems that were actually used (including this year) are based on batteries.

Flywheels seem ridiculously low-tech to me, although perhaps less so than pushing a boulder uphill. It's the sort of thing that people think is a good idea in theory, but you just know will never happen.

If only someone could come up with a kind of heater that would store heat from cheap overnight electricity and release it in the day... No wait. I had those years ago in a flat, and they were crap.

[BlasterBates]

Yes I had one of those, flat heated by an electric storage heater

That's all there was, one electric storage heater.

It was like that zero-carbon classroom, uninhabitable in Winter.

[minestrone]

In the year 2007 the percentage of primary energy derived from major sources was as follows:[2]
Oil: 38.0%
Natural gas: 37.7%
Coal: 16.7%
Nuclear power: 5.8%
Renewable: 1.8%.

I will quote wikipedia (as I am lazy) on the output of Hunterston B. "and is capable of supplying the electricity needs of over 1 million homes" Torness does roughly the same and with a population 6 million you can see where the 55% figure comes from, it is not 5.8% up here.

[Mich the Tester]

We have some big wind farms in Holland and they're quite succesful, especially those located in polders close to the sea; I think it's really about finding (and having) the right locations to build them.

[VectraMan]

We have some big wind farms in Holland and they're quite succesful, especially those located in polders close to the sea; I think it's really about finding (and having) the right locations to build them.

Whenever I've driven through that flat featureless part of Belgium along the coast I've thought that it'd make an ideal giant wind farm. It's not like it's going to spoil the scenery.

[Mich the Tester]

Whenever I've driven through that flat featureless part of Belgium along the coast I've thought that it'd make an ideal giant wind farm. It's not like it's going to spoil the scenery.

True; same goes for Flevoland (the newest polder) and large chunks of Friesland.

[doodab]

Flywheels seem ridiculously low-tech to me, although perhaps less so than pushing a boulder uphill. It's the sort of thing that people think is a good idea in theory, but you just know will never happen.

They are apparently catching on as UPS in datacentres, so it would appear to be much more "a matter of time" than "never going to happen".

Flywheel Technology

Flywheel UPS - Flywheel Clean Energy Storage Systems - Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) - Technology

I believe at least some of the current technology is descended from stuff developed from nuclear submarines in the US (seawolf rings a bell, I think there was also a le Mans car called the Chrysler Patriot which never actually worked)

And don't forget that every reciprocating internal combustion engine has one