The plan to smother Wales with Windmills

[scooterscot]

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

I don't need to as I'm an engineer who is paid to build mathematical models that predicts the safety, lifespan and maintenance periods of wind turbines. Weibull is probably all mince to google researchers.

Most modern turbines will easily last 40 years with the proper maintenance. If anything the transmission medium is less reliable than the generation.

[TimberWolf]

I don't need to as I'm an engineer who is paid to build mathematical models that predicts the safety, lifespan and maintenance periods of wind turbines. Weibull is probably all mince to google researchers.

Most modern turbines will easily last 40 years with the proper maintenance. If anything the transmission medium is less reliable than the generation.

Your personal view is useless, entertainment value excepted. Provide a reference to one credible citation that backs it up.

[TimberWolf]

Your personal view is useless, entertainment value excepted. Provide a reference to one credible citation that backs it up.

Actually I've found one myself, from Wind turbines UK:

What is the life expectancy of a wind turbine?
A wind turbines life expectancy is 20 - 25 years. The expected life time of a refurbished wind turbine is another 15 years.
Wind Turbines UK - About Wind Energy

It's more an advert than peer reviewed citation, but it's perhaps enough to throw some doubt over whether life expectancy might be extended beyond the usually quoted 20 or so years, but not whether paying customers would view the economics of doing so as favourably and with credibility matching those of a seller.

[Fred Bloggs]

Seeing as I'm feeling a little OCD this morning, Ffestiniog is indeed a pump storage Hydro Power station, pretty small beer though at 360Mw maximum output. The big daddy of UK pumped storage is actually Dinorwig which is not far away from Ffestiniog across a mountain or two. Dinorwig can ramp up from 0Mw to 1320Mw in 12 seconds, now that is impressive stuff! Details here.

[TimberWolf]

Seeing as I'm feeling a little OCD this morning, Ffestiniog is indeed a pump storage Hydro Power station, pretty small beer though at 360Mw maximum output. The big daddy of UK pumped storage is actually Dinorwig which is not far away from Ffestiniog across a mountain or two. Dinorwig can ramp up from 0Mw to 1320Mw in 12 seconds, now that is impressive stuff! Details here.

Here's an interesting alternative: pumped air. Instead of pumping water uphill, you pump air downhill, or more specifically pump air underwater. This still needs huge bodies of water and pumped storage energy density, even at say 1000m height (or depth) is a hundredth of that of chemical storage per unit mass. About the same energy density as ordinary batteries.
Compressed air energy storage - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I quite like the idea of combining pumped storage with tidal power, because it's possible to extract more energy out than put in. By pumping water up at high tide and utilising the potential energy at low tide, though given that tidal ranges are in upper single digits, it won't offer much additional energy without huge bodies of water being available again, and some monster pumps.

[Fred Bloggs]

Snag is capital cost and shortage of mountains we can hollow out for pumped storage or compressed air storage. Not to mention the nimbys who hate any kind of development at all but still want the lights to work 24 x 7. Compared to cheap to build CCGT plants it's non-starter for proftability.

[scooterscot]

Crack knuckles..

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.

Well I was happening to think of a land that has plenty hilly parts in the north.

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.

Like a mortgage windfarms pay themselves off in the long term. By mid-life service they only need cover maintenance costs.

Investment, that word. I'm not suggesting a blind leap into the unknown but a measured risk instead. Investment needs to come from the government and not from additional taxes.

Here's an interesting thought. Since 2008 UK banks were given more investment than the all of engineering and science ever.

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.

In the night energy companies were paid £900,000 to halt the turbines for several hours between 5 and 6 April because they were producing to much energy.

I don't know about Ffestiniog but 20% only operational time, where does that number come from I wonder. Hard to believe anywhere in all of Wales the wind only blows for 2.4 months of the year.

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.

I'm comparing nuclear with wind, same output and a whole lot less worry and expense. What more important our environment or our business? The dawn of a new meaning can't can soon enough.

Fossil fuel is all very well until there's a spill. The shetland islands have yet recover, the Gulf, the Arctic? the risks are almost as bad as nuclear yet so unnecessary. Comparing oil based products with burning oil does not make sense as the energy in the product remains stored, the petrol if burnt.

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.

I agree this is fantastic. Yet I think it diverts away from the fact that one day recovering oil from the worlds remaining deposits will become too expensive to be profitable, where will we then turn? "If only we invested in that earlier" they'll say. We're now so desperate for the stuff it has become acceptable for Blackpool to suffer the odd earthquake while we recover gas. Madness.

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.

Yes I agree, we can always improve the current technology, become more efficient however does that make it sustainable? The internal combustion engine well over 100 years old now! The volatility in the oil market has only increased in recent decades, the massive peaks in oil price forever getting closer together. Yet we throw caution to the wind despite the 'in our face' statistics. Indicators for investment in new technology don't get much clearer than that.

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'm working on it.

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.

Well it's a good job too that a square meter of solar panel does not collect as much energy as a coal station generates or I'd be slapping on the SPF 1,000,000

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.

That's always 50 years away, for 50 years now. Have you seen how much deuterium costs these days? The extraction process is energy-intensive. Also, why are we obsessed with generating large amounts of energy in the one location? A country with many sources is more likely to survive during natural disaster or attack. We need to think about generating supply in small amounts many times over across the land.

[OwlHoot]

...

Also, why are we obsessed with generating large amounts of energy in the one location? A country with many sources is more likely to survive during natural disaster or attack. We need to think about generating supply in small amounts many times over across the land.

That is a good point, but you can have compact, secure nuclear reactors. Look at the ones on submarines.

[Mason Boyne]

We could always attach piezo crystals to the keyboards of half the windbags on here and mumsnet and rake in the power.

MF alone could supply half of Berkshire.

[hyperD]

Once again, thanks for the reply scooterscot... (pours another strong Absinthe)...

Well I was happening to think of a land that has plenty hilly parts in the north.

Unfortunately, it's very rare to find the perfect geographically designed fit for pumped storage. If you have to find the capex to cultivate large holes in the hills, it's a better ROI to invest into cheaper CCGT or other conventional fossil fuelled power plants.

Like a mortgage windfarms pay themselves off in the long term. By mid-life service they only need cover maintenance costs.

Investment, that word. I'm not suggesting a blind leap into the unknown but a measured risk instead.

Here's an interesting thought. Since 2008 UK banks were given more investment than the all of engineering and science ever.

Windfarms are subsidised, like nuclear and other conventional plants, but to such a degree as to make them a financial no go from the start, if you removed the subsidy. While I agree that the surface appeal of windfarms is that once you've paid an arm and a leg for them, you only pay for maintenance costs, but below you’ll see why operationally, they add no value.

But leaving aside the integration into the National Grid issues aside for now, why would we, for the purposes of illustration, pay for a more expensive Renault ZE Electric Car, when we could buy a cheaper conventional Fiat and have money left over to create a better standard of living for our families, all in the name of homage to the almighty Gaia?

Once again, look at the reasons why financial decisions are being misdirected rather than the subjects of astonishment that are born out of them.

The fracking incident in Blackpool was a picturebook in sensationalism from the press, aggressively encouraged by the green lobby. I'm not going to link porn here, but I'll simply reflect on the usual press reaction to any oil operation that I was involved with back in the 90's: out of touch, sensationalised, devoid of any facts, spun, exaggerated and ultimately designed to sell newspapers.

Minor seismic occurrences have happened since the dawn of oil extraction. Remember, oil is not sitting in a vast cave and when you extract it, the cave collapses causing an earthquake. It is mingled within porous rock and normally water is injected at high pressure while it's removed.

Once again, I plead to you all, do NOT read dumbed down, newspaper sensationalised opinion pieces on eco-alarmism and absorbed them unchallenged as fact: we have the internet, and somewhere there is information from engineers that work in the business, backed up with at least some resemblance to the facts.

Investment needs to come from the government and not from additional taxes.

All our taxes belong to us. BBC weasel words sadly, however, the real meaning is: "investment" = our additional taxes.

In the night energy companies were paid £900,000 to halt the turbines for several hours between 5 and 6 April because they were producing to much energy.

This perfectly describes the scenario of the misfit of wind turbines and our National Grid: the surplus power from our wind turbines is not planned and at off peak times is not required - it's wasted, it cannot be stored and due to the barmy EU legislation, the final insult is that additional taxes from us have to go to the hands of those that have been paid for by our taxes to operate these wind farms in the first place.

It’s incredible that the EU have these perverse regulations whereby in effect you can still be remunerated if the windmills spin and the power is not required. Insane.

This is the source of my discourse with wind technology: it does not fit into the way the real world operates in energy management, and never will.

You will have better luck in taxing water to run uphill.

I don't know about Ffestiniog but 20% only operational time, where does that number come from I wonder. Hard to believe anywhere in all of Wales the wind only blows for 2.4 months of the year.

Plenty of studies out there to come to this figure. Remember, the wind must operate within a certain range for a windmill to produce the boilerplate power output: variability of the wind ensures that this does not occur as readily as their sponsors would like us to believe.

I'm comparing nuclear with wind, same output and a whole lot less worry and expense. What more important our environment or our business? The dawn of a new meaning can't can soon enough.

Fossil fuel is all very well until there's a spill. The shetland islands have yet recover, the Gulf, the Arctic? the risks are almost as bad as nuclear yet so unnecessary. Comparing oil based products with burning oil does not make sense as the energy in the product remains stored, the petrol if burnt.

Oil carries risks. Energy carries risks. A tanker spill is dreadful. I was particularly saddened by the demise of the tanker MV Braer off the coast of Shetlands, I used to spend a lot of time in the beautiful part of St Ninian's Isle when I worked in Sumburgh. But the island recovered over time, in the big picture of what oil provides us with compared to the alternatives, it's the best we can do. That sounds particularly fatalistic, but consider what our lives would be like without a continual supply of power, or more horrifically, power that was rationed to only those that could afford it.

I agree this is fantastic. Yet I think it diverts away from the fact that one day recovering oil from the worlds remaining deposits will become too expensive to be profitable, where will we then turn? "If only we invested in that earlier" they'll say. We're now so desperate for the stuff it has become acceptable for Blackpool to suffer the odd earthquake while we recover gas. Madness.

As technology improves, the relative cost of extracting oil reduces making it viable. It's the Moore’s Law of the oil world. Peak Oil is still a hypothesis, as is the limit to CPU power. It's all based around the improving technology vs economics.

China has, for instance, 400 year’s worth of coal. They are not going to stop producing coal powered power stations to bring areas of China out of poverty.

Market costs of energy will likely increase long term due partially to the oil cartel and a reflection of our diminishing economic wealth, and the fact that our taxes are being used to pursue the criminal act of this eco-garbage that is pricing vast amounts of those worse off to our energy supplies.

This is the crime.

Also, why are we obsessed with generating large amounts of energy in the one location? A country with many sources is more likely to survive during natural disaster or attack. We need to think about generating supply in small amounts many times over across the land.

We have a multitude of fuel types and diverse spread of power stations around our country. The great thing about fossil fuelled power stations is that they do not have geographical restrictions. We have a National Grid. A network of power. Where small power stations can plug in and out to the Grid and provide the nation's power. You may say, well, so can windmills. As I outlined before, the big difference is that fossil fuelled power stations can guarantee that power AT THAT TIME. Windmills are governed by the random chaos of the wind.

If you plug a windmill into the National Grid, it is likely to be taken offline as its variable power is likely to cause Grid spiking.

Windmills are not a solution to our energy needs.

No conventional powered power plants will be switched off when windmills are online.

Scotland is finanically doomed if they run off Scandinavian exported hydro and windfarms.