Reply to: Germans want to power themselves TOTALLY with wind/solar ...

[scooterscot]

I think if I remember rightly when I worked there, they use a CCGT (gas fired) power station to run the refinery there and I think the excess was sent (sold) to the Grid. Refinery margins are pretty tight at the moment.

Oil rigs generally use diesel for their generators for their ops.

The offshore platform I'm working on (both surface with subsea installations) get their electrical power from gas turbines. Noisy buggers too. But they're rather large platforms saying that. Much of my work on these platforms for the last two projects has been about extending their useful life.

I think the point I'm poorly trying to get at is that when you look at the efficiencies over a commercial scale, CCGT trumps over everything, which is why it is employed as the major way of generating power.

As I said before, I'm not personally against any new tech coming along to provide a suitable power base, but all the renewables (and their combined schemes) have not come close to commercial CCGTs, and hence, will always be a more expensive way of producing energy, however attractive they may sound on paper. It's all about energy density.

Don't disagree, CCGTs are impressive. Yet nearly 200 years after his death I wonder what James Watt would make of the fact we're still using steam to produce energy. Whether it's nuclear, coal, or gas - steam is still used to drive the turbines, something about this keeps me amused. Still I look forward to seeing more elegant technologies emerge that allow excess renewable energy to produce gas that drive those CCGT's on a on-demand basis. I wonder how many you would need. No one would want to live near them for the noise - Howl. Perhaps bury them inside a mountain.

Some subcontractors in the aviation business have cut corners leading to some pretty nasty incidents. I think all businesses share some risk of corner cutting.

I remember verifying a failure mode analysis for one aviation client, a major Germany aerospace company, it was littered with shortcuts and assumptions. I could not accept it, and was able to fault the outcomes without much effort. Saying that, I believe human life continues to be of greater value in aviation, followed by rail, then marine, O&G comes last imo, life is cheap especially when you get to the more remote locations.

Glad you enjoy your work scooter - wish I could enjoy mine with as much enthusiasm as you! LOL!

Interesting re: maintenance schedule of windmills. I assume the critical point of failure is the gearbox/governer?

I decorate my office space with materials of projects I've worked on, offcuts on my bookcase -

You'd be surprised how often schedules are performed with little or no rational behind them. Too many times it is 'ah the more often we check the safer we'll be' when the reality is failure is not caught, and more problematic to the operation when availability is reduced increasing costs. Part of the reason I was impressed with NATS at the time, operating a radar system @ 99.999% availability. That's just over 5 minutes of annual downtime anywhere on the system. IT systems can only dream of such statistics.

You'd think gearbox. You've probably seen these turbines, they look like food whisks upside-down. However the components most responsible for mechanical failure were often the magnets. The derbies get loose causing havoc. Turbine failure is nearly always electrical. Usually something in the local control system, with failure events coming into two categories, basic & mission. And nearly every time there's a failure I've found it going back to something that occurred during the part's assembly. It's frustrating but quality matters more and more these days. The environment these things operate under (consider diurnal cycles of day & night, the seasons, coastal variations from salt air to desert sand) compared to a power station where it's a known, you only then realise how far he technology has already come. Its truly impressive but this is not something I expect the average Joe to understand. It is in part why I'm quite excited by this technology because of whatever we think of it, we're being proactive in a big way and not just relying on old proven technologies that we know to be unsustainable in the longer term.

[d000hg]

Being realistic, exactly how can you store excess generated electricity in the umpteen megawatt level so that it's available instantly and reliably at periods of higher demand/lower generation?

Other than reservoirs (which I assume is what you refer to) you can break water into Hydrogen+Oxygen and store the former (and sell the latter or pump it out to be super green).

You could also I suppose store the energy as heat, in essence creating a geothermal energy source. I'm thinking heating the ground.

[Old Hack]

I pay around €340 a quarter for power, heating and hot water for a large 3 bedroom place so that ain't too bad

Is that average? So about £280 all in? That's not bad at all really, considering.

[darmstadt]

I pay around €340 a quarter for power, heating and hot water for a large 3 bedroom place so that ain't too bad

[hyperD]

In Grangemouth alone they burn oil on a massive scale just to produce steam to extract the black stuff from the sea floor so that it may be pumped through the forties pipeline system.

I think if I remember rightly when I worked there, they use a CCGT (gas fired) power station to run the refinery there and I think the excess was sent (sold) to the Grid. Refinery margins are pretty tight at the moment.

Oil rigs generally use diesel for their generators for their ops.

As a bonus the generation of hydrogen through the electrolysis process is as clean as it gets. Inefficient yes, but not near as expensive as extracting oil or gas.

I think the point I'm poorly trying to get at is that when you look at the efficiencies over a commercial scale, CCGT trumps over everything, which is why it is employed as the major way of generating power.

As I said before, I'm not personally against any new tech coming along to provide a suitable power base, but all the renewables (and their combined schemes) have not come close to commercial CCGTs, and hence, will always be a more expensive way of producing energy, however attractive they may sound on paper. It's all about energy density.

I'm really dismayed at the lack of scientists & engineers representing the country in parliament. It's truly awful. 1 scientist out of 350 odd MP's. Regardless of the colour in power, how are we ever to improve our engineering infrastructure if we're dependent on the advice of civil servants who are worried about their jobs? And even when they do stick their necks our they get is massively wrong, for example the First Group versus Virgin Trans fiasco. Goodness it's embarrassing.

Totally agree.

Not wanting to detract away from the conversation so much, I do agree, risk is often undermined in the energy business. That's never the case with aviation, but that's not an energy business.

Some subcontractors in the aviation business have cut corners leading to some pretty nasty incidents. I think all businesses share some risk of corner cutting.

This is what I love about my job. On a monthly basis I'm asked to measure risk of various events ever occurring. So I build models to determine the outcomes. The approaches employed by various industries does not come as a surprise, all having they're own preferred standards and level of detail. What astonishes me most of all is how this attitude varies depending on the country I'm in.

For example here in Germany, a number of my clients get a thrill from understanding events that 'could happen' through preventive actions. (in best Sea man voice, by god that's quality). Where as a client in Aberdeen, it's all reactionary with head scratching 'why did this happen?' - the knowledge gap between the two amounts to years of study leading to massive increase in the cost of operations.

I'm convinced that such attitudes in the renewable energy business prevail back home. In fact a recent study for a London based wind turbine client asked me to perform a maintenance study. They conduct inspections of their installations every 6 months. I asked why 6 months? They had no answer for me. After completing the study it was found they need only inspect their installations every 22 months. The cost of maintenance of course dropped somewhat. It evens get more exciting than this because the intervals they were checking had no technical merit, and this is important the 22 month mark "the most likely point of a first failure occurring" would have been completely missed at 6 month intervals! The cost of maintenance for this client was compounded through unnecessary frequent inspections, a reacting to failure on event. But try explaining that to a client when I'm trying to make a sale and I see glazed expressions. Over here I see joined interest and brain storming round the table.

Glad you enjoy your work scooter - wish I could enjoy mine with as much enthusiasm as you! LOL!

Interesting re: maintenance schedule of windmills. I assume the critical point of failure is the gearbox/governer?

[scooterscot]

Those (everyone, including all businesses) that suffer an unaffordable energy bill each month. The costs of converting the windmill energy to liquefied gas are very high. You assume the conversion processes is free - it's not (simple thermodynamics), hence the high costs.

I'm interested in converting excess renewable power into hydrogen. This process is not expensive, far from it. Especially when you consider the cost of extracting oil from the sea floor. In Grangemouth alone they burn oil on a massive scale just to produce steam to extract the black stuff from the sea floor so that it may be pumped through the forties pipeline system.

As a bonus the generation of hydrogen through the electrolysis process is as clean as it gets. Inefficient yes, but not near as expensive as extracting oil or gas.

EDF's massive investment into the technology:

http://www.eon.com/content/dam/eon-c...PowertoGas.pdf

http://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/Hydrogen:_Hype_or_opportunity/$FILE/Hydrogen_hype_or_opportunity_UU_14.pdf

Whether "private" or "commercial" "pumping" into homes is a non sequitur: the sheer cost of the process you are describing is so inefficient compared with the base efficiency of a CCGT running at ~60% of burning gas to generate electricity via their generators. This is the driving market raison d'être of a national efficient, always on demand service.

I don't think anyone is disputing the need for a 'always on demand' this is in part the reason for all the investment in the technology. I think this perhaps relates to my earlier comment that we in the UK want the best for next to nothing without exploring / investing in new technology. I wonder where we'll be in 20 years time if the rhetoric continues while countries like Germany plunge more and more investment into the area.

Don't disagree with you there - public travel infrastructure in our country is dire compared with the rest of Europe. But I blame both consecutive Liebour and Tory governments for that.

I'm really dismayed at the lack of scientists & engineers representing the country in parliament. It's truly awful. 1 scientist out of 350 odd MP's. Regardless of the colour in power, how are we ever to improve our engineering infrastructure if we're dependent on the advice of civil servants who are worried about their jobs? And even when they do stick their necks our they get is massively wrong, for example the First Group versus Virgin Trans fiasco. Goodness it's embarrassing.

Governments have only the next election and their next private board job in mind, purely taken on board to progress to the next corporate goal. That is the way of the political elite.

Don't get distracted by the colour of the shirt they are wearing - partisanship is a misdirect and a sign that you haven't understood the flow of money.

Fortunately not all governments act like this. This is very much the British approach to politics and you'll struggle to find the same attitude in countries such as Sweden. We're obsessed my money and much less innovation. The best scientific & engineering minds are now all to often coerced abroad to realise their potential.

Safety gets the concerns that is legitimised under the umbrella driver of profits. O&G has been through plenty of retrospective legislation when incidences and "lessons learnt" have been investigated. Once again, energy is a risk business and most companies don't start out deliberately cutting already stated HSE corners at the detriment of their staff, believe me, I was one of them.

Of course, there are companies that will try and subvert the legislation for maximum profits, but that is no different for any rogue company that operates, so O&G and renewables is no different from the Food Industry and the Pharmaceutical, despite the legislation set down.

You worked in NAS, I was under the directorship of NATS for many a flight under my own pilotship of a twin aircraft, and I appreciate the same effort that has resulted in a set of rules of policy flying in a crowded airspace. But with every event, every policy board, there are still some events that do unnecessarily occur that need refinements of those policies, and as a risk, such as flying and drilling, these will continually prevail.

Not wanting to detract away from the conversation so much, I do agree, risk is often undermined in the energy business. That's never the case with aviation, but that's not an energy business.

This is what I love about my job. On a monthly basis I'm asked to measure risk of various events ever occurring. So I build models to determine the outcomes. The approaches employed by various industries does not come as a surprise, all having they're own preferred standards and level of detail. What astonishes me most of all is how this attitude varies depending on the country I'm in.

For example here in Germany, a number of my clients get a thrill from understanding events that 'could happen' through preventive actions. (in best Sea man voice, by god that's quality). Where as a client in Aberdeen, it's all reactionary with head scratching 'why did this happen?' - the knowledge gap between the two amounts to years of study leading to massive increase in the cost of operations.

I'm convinced that such attitudes in the renewable energy business prevail back home. In fact a recent study for a London based wind turbine client asked me to perform a maintenance study. They conduct inspections of their installations every 6 months. I asked why 6 months? They had no answer for me. After completing the study it was found they need only inspect their installations every 22 months. The cost of maintenance of course dropped somewhat. It evens get more exciting than this because the intervals they were checking had no technical merit, and this is important the 22 month mark "the most likely point of a first failure occurring" would have been completely missed at 6 month intervals! The cost of maintenance for this client was compounded through unnecessary frequent inspections, a reacting to failure on event. But try explaining that to a client when I'm trying to make a sale and I see glazed expressions. Over here I see joined interest and brain storming round the table.

[hyperD]

Who cares about efficiency when the sun shines, the wind blows for PtG? The gas is generated when there is spare capacity otherwise inefficiency only increases.

Those (everyone, including all businesses) that suffer an unaffordable energy bill each month. The costs of converting the windmill energy to liquefied gas are very high. You assume the conversion processes is free - it's not (simple thermodynamics), hence the high costs.

In any case in the same link you posted:

"PtG might not always result in the most efficient use of electricity, but it clearly offers services that are valuable now or will become valuable in the near future."

Beside PtG is not for private use, only commercial. It was never intended to be pumped into homes. The gas would be used in power stations to generate electricity.

Whether "private" or "commercial" "pumping" into homes is a non sequitur: the sheer cost of the process you are describing is so inefficient compared with the base efficiency of a CCGT running at ~60% of burning gas to generate electricity via their generators. This is the driving market raison d'être of a national efficient, always on demand service.

Partly because we've never invested in the national rail network since the 1980's, and even when we did it was a poor job indeed. The west coast line upgrade is still not yet complete despite construction starting last millennium. When we compare our efforts to modernise against other european countries I really do wonder what we've done when we've had much more tax money to spend. The minds boggles where our properties lie.

Don't disagree with you there - public travel infrastructure in our country is dire compared with the rest of Europe. But I blame both consecutive Liebour and Tory governments for that.

Consider this, :"bank rescue package totalling some £500 billion (approximately $850 billion) was announced by the British government on 8 October 2008"

That's enough to build 8 x HS2 lines. Which would you rather, a modern high-speed rail infrastructure across the country or failed banks? What have we to show for it?

Although I appreciate your sentiment, I think none of the above have a direct bearing on our conversation of energy infrastructure, but both will be affected by it.

Yes - I agree, our long-term investment is near non-existent. Political parties seem only interested in winning the next term. When this becomes the norm alarm bells should ring, why anyone would expect a single government to turn the country around in one or two terms seems delusional. Perhaps it's an argument for further coalition governments to get our house in order before any one party is allowed a majority control of our country because in my book neither has demonstrated an interest for it's citizens.

Governments have only the next election and their next private board job in mind, purely taken on board to progress to the next corporate goal. That is the way of the political elite.

Don't get distracted by the colour of the shirt they are wearing - partisanship is a misdirect and a sign that you haven't understood the flow of money.

Yes I agree. But I don't believe safety gets the concern it requires. O&G companies will always put profit first. When was the last time you heard national air traffic services cocking it up over the busy skies of London? I used to work at NATS for while, the safety requirements put in place to ensure continuous reliable, safe, service seem redundant to me. O&G could never be as bold, and it's a problem that grow ever more larger with ageing platforms on the north sea. In fact the oil & gas is more likely to stop flowing because of poor maintenance of those platform & their subsea installations long before the juice runs out. Remember last year when inflation shot up? It was largely because of one-off factors such as platforms closing down for urgent maintenance, suddenly we were relying on imports pushing prices way up. It seems to me this is some we're going to see more of in the near future, yet it's only now being address in the last 12 months. Don't panic!

Safety gets the concerns that is legitimised under the umbrella driver of profits. O&G has been through plenty of retrospective legislation when incidences and "lessons learnt" have been investigated. Once again, energy is a risk business and most companies don't start out deliberately cutting already stated HSE corners at the detriment of their staff, believe me, I was one of them.

Of course, there are companies that will try and subvert the legislation for maximum profits, but that is no different for any rogue company that operates, so O&G and renewables is no different from the Food Industry and the Pharmaceutical, despite the legislation set down.

You worked in NAS, I was under the directorship of NATS for many a flight under my own pilotship of a twin aircraft, and I appreciate the same effort that has resulted in a set of rules of policy flying in a crowded airspace. But with every event, every policy board, there are still some events that do unnecessarily occur that need refinements of those policies, and as a risk, such as flying and drilling, these will continually prevail.

[scooterscot]

Have you thought of going global?

Scale is not important to me, only knowledge.

[DodgyAgent]

Who cares about efficiency when the sun shines, the wind blows for PtG? The gas is generated when there is spare capacity otherwise inefficiency only increases.

In any case in the same link you posted:

"PtG might not always result in the most efficient use of electricity, but it clearly offers services that are valuable now or will become valuable in the near future."

Beside PtG is not for private use, only commercial. It was never intended to be pumped into homes. The gas would be used in power stations to generate electricity.



Partly because we've never invested in the national rail network since the 1980's, and even when we did it was a poor job indeed. The west coast line upgrade is still not yet complete despite construction starting last millennium. When we compare our efforts to modernise against other european countries I really do wonder what we've done when we've had much more tax money to spend. The minds boggles where our properties lie.

Consider this, :"bank rescue package totalling some £500 billion (approximately $850 billion) was announced by the British government on 8 October 2008"

That's enough to build 8 x HS2 lines. Which would you rather, a modern high-speed rail infrastructure across the country or failed banks? What have we to show for it?



Yes - I agree, our long-term investment is near non-existent. Political parties seem only interested in winning the next term. When this becomes the norm alarm bells should ring, why anyone would expect a single government to turn the country around in one or two terms seems delusional. Perhaps it's an argument for further coalition governments to get our house in order before any one party is allowed a majority control of our country because in my book neither has demonstrated an interest for it's citizens.




Yes I agree. But I don't believe safety gets the concern it requires. O&G companies will always put profit first. When was the last time you heard national air traffic services cocking it up over the busy skies of London? I used to work at NATS for while, the safety requirements put in place to ensure continuous reliable, safe, service seem redundant to me. O&G could never be as bold, and it's a problem that grow ever more larger with ageing platforms on the north sea. In fact the oil & gas is more likely to stop flowing because of poor maintenance of those platform & their subsea installations long before the juice runs out. Remember last year when inflation shot up? It was largely because of one-off factors such as platforms closing down for urgent maintenance, suddenly we were relying on imports pushing prices way up. It seems to me this is some we're going to see more of in the near future, yet it's only now being address in the last 12 months. Don't panic!

Have you thought of going global?

[scooterscot]

Power station decommissioning is expensive, especially nuclear, but back to the point of the new tech you are involved in: the issue you've not addressed is that the process of using renewable energy to utilise the Power-to-Gas (PtG) concept:

"...might not always result in the most efficient use of electricity". here.

And herein lies the problem of your admirable renewable arguments: doing something else that might not involve the conventional mix of cost and energy efficient power delivery to a nation will ultimately lead to a very high cost of base energy that will effect everything from trading, commuting to simply heating a home. Some people will be financially inconvenienced with this new power delivery alchemy, they will suffer.

Who cares about efficiency when the sun shines, the wind blows for PtG? The gas is generated when there is spare capacity otherwise inefficiency only increases.

In any case in the same link you posted:

"PtG might not always result in the most efficient use of electricity, but it clearly offers services that are valuable now or will become valuable in the near future."

Beside PtG is not for private use, only commercial. It was never intended to be pumped into homes. The gas would be used in power stations to generate electricity.

National rail networks cost a large amount of taxpayers' funding to run, and yet we have one of the highest in Europe. Why is that? Unions? Energy costs? Demands? I dunno.

Partly because we've never invested in the national rail network since the 1980's, and even when we did it was a poor job indeed. The west coast line upgrade is still not yet complete despite construction starting last millennium. When we compare our efforts to modernise against other european countries I really do wonder what we've done when we've had much more tax money to spend. The minds boggles where our properties lie.

Consider this, :"bank rescue package totalling some £500 billion (approximately $850 billion) was announced by the British government on 8 October 2008"

That's enough to build 8 x HS2 lines. Which would you rather, a modern high-speed rail infrastructure across the country or failed banks? What have we to show for it?

I agree - governments of all colours have done just this, perhaps my above comment addresses this?

Yes - I agree, our long-term investment is near non-existent. Political parties seem only interested in winning the next term. When this becomes the norm alarm bells should ring, why anyone would expect a single government to turn the country around in one or two terms seems delusional. Perhaps it's an argument for further coalition governments to get our house in order before any one party is allowed a majority control of our country because in my book neither has demonstrated an interest for it's citizens.

All energy has a risk, although most O&G and power companies are striving legislatively to improve, and even due to governments' continual progressive are pushing for greater safety for their operations.

Yes I agree. But I don't believe safety gets the concern it requires. O&G companies will always put profit first. When was the last time you heard national air traffic services cocking it up over the busy skies of London? I used to work at NATS for while, the safety requirements put in place to ensure continuous reliable, safe, service seem redundant to me. O&G could never be as bold, and it's a problem that grow ever more larger with ageing platforms on the north sea. In fact the oil & gas is more likely to stop flowing because of poor maintenance of those platform & their subsea installations long before the juice runs out. Remember last year when inflation shot up? It was largely because of one-off factors such as platforms closing down for urgent maintenance, suddenly we were relying on imports pushing prices way up. It seems to me this is some we're going to see more of in the near future, yet it's only now being address in the last 12 months. Don't panic!

[hyperD]

No problem. I will be shipping in a few thousand Eastern Europeans to do the work.

Help me, DodgyAgent, you're my only hope.

[DodgyAgent]

You are right OH, the power gets dumped regardless and sadly, yes taxpayer funds are used for reimbursement, hence the overtly costly nature of "renewables". However having a large farm array generate power when not required cannot be dumped into the Grid because of spiking and is just spinning furiously for nobodies benefit but the landowners.

Just an aside, once FITs are deemed too expensive to run any more and the turbines are eventually removed, who's going to pay for the removal of the thousands of tonnes of concrete require for the windmill bases?

No problem. I will be shipping in a few thousand Eastern Europeans to do the work.

[hyperD]

Particularly when you consider decommissioning cost associated with nuclear, which run into billions of pounds -

Power station decommissioning is expensive, especially nuclear, but back to the point of the new tech you are involved in: the issue you've not addressed is that the process of using renewable energy to utilise the Power-to-Gas (PtG) concept:

"...might not always result in the most efficient use of electricity". here.

And herein lies the problem of your admirable renewable arguments: doing something else that might not involve the conventional mix of cost and energy efficient power delivery to a nation will ultimately lead to a very high cost of base energy that will effect everything from trading, commuting to simply heating a home. Some people will be financially inconvenienced with this new power delivery alchemy, they will suffer.

Maintenance of new technology is always more costly until the period of reliability growth is achieved. Indeed current reliability monitoring of farms I'm working on is several times greater that of the national rail network.

Well, I'm sure any project will grow if sufficient taxpayers' funds are thrown into the project at the detriment of an efficient portfolio of energy power delivery.

National rail networks cost a large amount of taxpayers' funding to run, and yet we have one of the highest in Europe. Why is that? Unions? Energy costs? Demands? I dunno.

The trouble is in our country we expect the best for next to nothing. Then when we're faced with a major event we pay through the nose instead of prudent long-term planning.

I agree - governments of all colours have done just this, perhaps my above comment addresses this?

I don't believe that. That's just a smokescreen to appease the simple, the stoned, the hippies. The truth is we're developing this technology because our resources we've been so dependent are of finite supply. Safety is another driver.

Let me burst your MSM driven bubble.

And to address your peak oil concerns. With new(oldish) technologies such as fracking and economic/viable options of new gas and oil fields.

All energy has a risk, although most O&G and power companies are striving legislatively to improve, and even due to governments' continual progressive are pushing for greater safety for their operations.

Actually I see these structures as a reminder of what engineering wonders we can achieve in a nation that has chosen to put the engineer as someone who fixes photocopiers.

I see these as a folly to the ignorant amongst a lobbyist self interested paradigm that just want to profit off the backs of those that are succeeding. But for proven power efficiencies that can benefit the world with cheaper, safer and more affordable power I'm all ears.

I know of not one system that operates in this fashion. Yet if we wanted to we could use excess energy to make gas and pump that gas back into the fields using existing systems installed across the north sea!

Although the losses of the pumping process makes the plant a net consumer of energy overall, the system increases revenue by selling more electricity during periods of peak demand, when electricity prices are highest.

Yet we have the cash to invade three countries in the past 13 years, which were of absolutely of no benefit to anyone in this country.

As pjclarke would say: strawman.

That's a problem for the supplier, nothing to do with they who generator.

Electricity Act 1989

[VectraMan]

I've no much interest in the climate business either. However saying that, I'm convinced our ability to survive in our changing environment is a must. And we would be generating our energy requirements with renewable sources, not finite supplies.

I don't buy that it's necessary for survival, at least not in the medium term, and I'm not an ecomentalist, but I do find all this very interesting. It's proper large scale engineering, and that's kind of cool and not something we do enough of anymore. Just accepting the old way of burning fossil fuels is just backwards thinking.

I'd really love to see wave generation take off with some massive investment. Enough power in the waves exists off shetland to power the whole of the UK.

Some things just have a smell of "never going to work" about them, and I think wave is one. I might be wrong. Whereas tidal, as much as putting turbines under the sea where nobody will see them, seems like a no-brainer. And the tides are predictable, if not able to provide constant power.

BBC News had an article about a test of such a scheme recently, but it made for depressing reading. The plan was for "up to" 300 odd turbines - in fact the whole article used "up to" and "could" a lot, as does every article about renewable power. As in, it "could" provide power for "up to" 40,000 homes. Which of course is just homes, no businesses, schools, factories etc., and then just electricity, not heat. It said that was 40% of The Highlands, and 40% sounds impressive. Except The Highlands is presumably the most sparsely populated area of the UK.

When there's a scheme that can actually provide power and heat for a city, then we'll be onto something and it'll probably snowball. But that seems a long way off.

[scooterscot]

Not only is it expensive to develop, it's expensive to maintain and operate compared with a mix of coal, gas and nuclear to power a nation's grid.

Really? It's an area of business I'm closely involved in and I'm just not convinced. Particularly when you consider decommissioning cost associated with nuclear, which run into billions of pounds - Maintenance of new technology is always more costly until the period of reliability growth is achieved. Indeed current reliability monitoring of farms I'm working on is several times greater that of the national rail network. By comparison if we spent the cash we need to to operate an reliable rail network rail fares would be required to increase to a level where people might actually start rioting.

The trouble is in our country we expect the best for next to nothing. Then when we're faced with a major event we pay through the nose instead of prudent long-term planning.

Well, it's the main driver for all this expensive and incompatible renewables charade.

I don't believe that. That's just a smokescreen to appease the simple, the stoned, the hippies. The truth is we're developing this technology because our resources we've been so dependent are of finite supply. Safety is another driver.

Hideously expensive to build and maintain.

Actually I see these structures as a reminder of what engineering wonders we can achieve in a nation that has chosen to put the engineer as someone who fixes photocopiers.

Most of our hydro is run as peaking power stations for the situation you described - they make their profit from the price differential from peak power (morning/evening) and low (night) spot prices.

Using a windfarm instead to provide the power during the night to recharge the reservoir would not only be a huge additional capital expenditure on the pumped storage facility but would still not solve the problem of when the ol' wind no blow.

I know of not one system that operates in this fashion. Yet if we wanted to we could use excess energy to make gas and pump that gas back into the fields using existing systems installed across the north sea!

And we don't have the geography (nor the cash) to artificially excavate and build more pumped storage facilities.

Yet we have the cash to invade three countries in the past 13 years, which were of absolutely of no benefit to anyone in this country.

And of course, the overarching legal caveat when you are in the power generating business, you must be able to guarantee a certain power deliver at a certain time. Having a windmill gives you a twitchy ringpiece unless you are Nostradamus.

That's a problem for the supplier, nothing to do with they who generator.