The plan to smother Wales with Windmills

[wim121]

Given a choice between the following, which would you personally choose?

1) Nuclear Powerstation 200 yards from your house
2) Windmill 200 yards from your house
3) Brownouts/electricity supply for only x hours each day.


If you don't choose option 1, you're just another NIMBY (refer to your own quote). I know what I'd choose, but then again, I already live on the more pragmatic european mainland.

I would choose option 1.

- I want power 24/7.
- Windmills are fugly, cause noise pollution through AM, etc.





I don't understand your point, or lack of it?

[scooterscot]

Wind turbine performance supply and demand is not written about because it physically cannot supply the demand patterns required by our National Grid. It cannot fit as the base load provider nor the guaranteed peak power provider, nor for the sake of efficiencies of base load power stations, a turndown provider.

The technology is there waiting to be used, the Britain of the future needs to lead the way and we're simply not got the interest to develop this knowhow. Energy surplus to requirements can be stored, either gravitationally, chemically or kinetically.

Let me give you an example of pumped storage I mentioned earlier: Ffestiniog. It is not a net supplier of electricity, it simply uses cheap National Grid off peak (night) electricity to pump the water up its reservoir and then in the afternoon when peak demand is highest, it sells its power on the spot market. It is profitable not because it's a net generator of power, because of the differential of energy market prices over time.

And if wind power is used to pump the water back up the mountain, then what is it? That would be cheaper than cheap.

I don't care for the whole Co2 argument one bit and the excuse of creating taxes to support it infuriates me. However I do believe as a civilisation we should look towards minimising with a view to eradicating our impact on nature.

To me, if you use our wealth to inflate and subsidise an energy source that is incompatible with the way the real world operates, food prices, clothes, schools, commodities, hospitals, fuel, business, transport, heating... just about every single thing that we use, the spiralling energy costs will drag us down into poverty.

See above. We need to develop storage solutions.I don't see why our decisions we make now should impact future generations, to me that seems selfish.

One of the greatest things of the 21st century was the prevalence of cheaper energy to enable the growth of business and to encourage prosperity.

Well the 21st century has just begun and look what we have to show for it. Massive debt with an economy utterly dependant on services. If that's the growth and prosperity to which we aspire the worst is yet to come.

What the eco-religion of deception is doing, is making energy an unviable commodity and thus reducing us virtually back to the pre-industrial times of rationing and privilege.

Solved with storage.

E.ON Netz notable conclusions is that wind energy cannot replace conventional power stations to any significant degree, despite the huge amounts of taxpayer’s subsidies.

Is this like Rupert Murdoch telling me BBC cannot survive on it's own?

I think the choice that is being said here is embrace the religious prophet of doom and be driven into poverty and starvation, or allow the future historians to point to this embarrassing episode of our evolution whereby the majority allowed the ignorant minority to take us to the brink of chaos…

… until hopefully sanity restores our normal goal of enterprise and raising the global standards of living via reducing the cost and increasing the availability of energy to everyone around our world.

I blame the media. The debasing of science and engineering in the UK is truly dismal. Little wonder we make anything let alone have a desire to be inventive. Yes maybe only 14 Concordes ever went into service but my what an achievement. I long for that technological leadership to return. However our government seems happy enough to allow the corrupt financial cartel that is our banking system to discover new ways to screw people over, at home and abroad.

[scooterscot]

Wind turbines frequently throw blades that need replacing.

Please. Frequency as in a volcano erupts once every 1000 years?

The coils in the generators burn out and need replacing periodically. They arent maintenance free at all.

Have you actually worked on a wind turbine generator or are you just pulling this from the glorious internet?

The only time I've witnessed such an event was through poor maintainer negligence, the design was absolute.

[scooterscot]

The entire wind turbine only lasts about 20 years.

What happens after 20 years? The bearings degrade into fragments.

I'm sure SKF would have sheet fit, you better tell them quick, the share price will collapse when this news gets out.

[TimberWolf]

What happens after 20 years? The bearings degrade into fragments.

I'm sure SKF would have sheet fit, you better tell them quick, the share price will collapse when this news gets out.

No, the entire unit needs to be replaced. IIRC this includes the foundations too.

[scooterscot]

No, the entire unit needs to be replaced. IIRC this includes the foundations too.

What have you been reading...

[TimberWolf]

What have you been reading...

I looked at this some years back, a quick Google will throw up similar life spans.

[scooterscot]

I looked at this some years back, a quick Google will throw up similar life spans.

Tools down boys, google says it won't work. tut, awe that's a shame.

[TimberWolf]

Tools down boys, google says it won't work. tut, awe that's a shame.

Why don't you look it up yourself instead of making silly comments?

[hyperD]

Hi scooterscot, many thanks for your replies – it is a pleasure to engage in a bit of CUK wiffwaff - just a few comments in return with a dash of top spin:

And if wind power is used to pump the water back up the mountain, then what is it? That would be cheaper than cheap.

A good and valid point. As I said earlier, Ffestiniog makes a profit from providing more expensive peaking power to the Grid at very short notice and utilising cheaper low demand power from the Grid, at night, to pump the water back up the reservoir.

The problem is, we are not Scandanavia and do not have the geographical luxury of being able to build multiple Ffestiniogs.

Also, the Ffestiniog business model is simple and constant - it's not inadvertently influenced by meteorological conditions.

If you then decide that a windfarm should be built to supply the off peak power to pump the water back up to the reservoir, it immediately highlights two economic and practical concerns:

1. Who's going to stump up the additional capex, on top of the original Ffestiniog capex, for this and what's the ROI? Will Ffestiniog stump up? I doubt it, they're happy with their model and would view this as an excessive cost with an abysmal ROI unless taxpayers funded this.

2. What are the Ffestiniog operators going to do for the 80% of the time when the wind isn't blowing? And, more importantly, the refill operation occurs during the night when the wind is least likely to blow so that figure is probably higher.

I get the feeling we're back to the original point I was trying to make - this is simplistic eco-ideology overriding normal fiscal real world events and operations.

I don't care for the whole Co2 argument one bit and the excuse of creating taxes to support it infuriates me. However I do believe as a civilisation we should look towards minimising with a view to eradicating our impact on nature.

Agreed, we should not waste energy, we should look towards utilising our resources more efficiently: it makes good economic sense.

However, I believe you may be making the populist inference that fossil fuelled energy is inherently dirty and damaging the environment. Some parts of the process have been damaging, some still are, but large amounts of the industry are significantly cleaner than they were before. There is a very pavlovian type response when one mentions oil: words that are normally uttered are "dirty", "polluting". And yet when you ask people where their makeup came from, or their clothes, or their toys, their computers, their TVs, ipods, pretty much everything… they have no idea it all comes from oil.

There's a lot that goes on behind the scenes in design and development of a refinery. Take BP's Wytch Farm refinery in Dorset, not just the hiding of the refinery by conifers, but the sheer genius, for example, of cleansing the waste water from the refinery units with bacteria to break down the suspended oil particles so it's clean and can be released back into the wild again.

There are many, many more things like this, but unfortunately they are beyond the operating capacity of your standard MSM journalist's pea brain cut 'n' paste mentality, so you won't necessarily get to hear about them.

Our energy industry through legislation is cleaner than decades before: engines run cleaner, jet engines especially (remember the old 70’s films with a jet taking off overhead and the huge dirty plumes of kero exhaust billowing out?), fuel is cut cleaner, technology has not only enabled us to get more oil and gas out of the ground increasing global potential reserves, than ever before, but has made the process of refining it more efficient and cleaner.

Well the 21st century has just begun and look what we have to show for it. Massive debt with an economy utterly dependant on services. If that's the growth and prosperity to which we aspire the worst is yet to come.

Typo - mea culpa - I meant 20th century!

Once again I agree scooterscot, there's an awful lot wrong with the economies of the world and sometimes I wonder whether the horn of plenty will come to an end. However, as I inferred earlier, increasing taxation on energy is a sure sign to escalate the demise of businesses and our livelihoods.

Energy is the source of prosperity. Make it cheaper, make it more plentiful, make it more available and the world is a better place.

I blame the media. The debasing of science and engineering in the UK is truly dismal. Little wonder we make anything let alone have a desire to be inventive. Yes maybe only 14 Concordes ever went into service but my what an achievement. I long for that technological leadership to return. However our government seems happy enough to allow the corrupt financial cartel that is our banking system to discover new ways to screw people over, at home and abroad.

100% agree with you on this. In a former life I was a process engineer working on refineries and power stations and on many occasions had run ins with the press, hence my unbridled disdain for the inaccuracy and sensationalism of their Catweazle (no offence, EO) type hysteria over anything "electrickery" related and I am saddened that more people are not vocal about the tax on our energy bills being used to subsidise the production and installation of these windmill follies that simply will not provide a reliable, cheap and useful energy source complimentary to our energy infrastructure but are simply free cash injections for non-UK multinationals and wreckers of arable farmland with their monstrous concrete bases

It all comes down to energy density.

When it comes to power, density is the key. Energy density. The reason that solar power, wind power, and ethanol are so expensive is that they are derived from very diffuse energy sources. It takes a lot of energy collectors such as solar cells, wind turbines, or corn stalks covering many square miles of land to produce the same amount of power that traditional coal, natural gas, or nuclear plants can on just a few acres.

The ultimate goal of all this is likely to be fusion but there are significant technological hurdles to overcome before this is even in the prototype stage. Can you imagine what a world would be like with this energy prevalent around the world? No eco-lunacy, minimal pollution, no oil industry, no more wars, no more famine. A chance for global prosperity. A milestone in human achievement.

And without wishing to awake the pjclarke behemoth, this windmill nonsense is all being done under the banner of AGW and eco-fundamentalism, a sprinkling of good old government tax addiction, with a good solid dose of media driven ignorance.

It is a sad day for humanity when the elite decry that energy should be rationed only to those that can truly afford.

Although it’s heavy engineering, Master Resource is a good reference for this sort of thing.