Please use this thread for comments about the BBC’s current programming and activities. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog – scroll down for new topic-specific posts. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments, rants or chit-chat. Thoughtful comments are encouraged. Comments may be moderated.
Arthur Dent | 10.12.07 – 2:28 pm |
Quite right. I think I’m right in saying that all generators need to synchronise with the grid and this takes time. Nuclear stations sync and desync very quickly, almost but not quite immediately. Everything else requires a ‘ramp’ time which can be in the order of 0.1-10MW/min. Sync levels vary but a coal fired station may sync at 50MW which means that any electricity produced below that is ‘wasted’ or rather the fuel to produce it is and at 2.5MW per ton of coal that some waste if it doesn’t sync quickly.
Wind turbines, and nuclear stations come to that, require another source of power to enable them to operate when they are not producing power themselves. These are usually sync’ed fossil stations gaily wasting a ton of coal per 2.5MW produced. Sane isn’t it?
The above’s all from memory after a couple of years in the industry several years ago. Things have hopefully changed …
Arthur Dent: Quoting me “nuclear, though by far the best long term solution to the problems either of energy supply or carbon emissions, is essentially baseline supply and can’t be turned on and off like a light bulb”
What? That is precisely what you can do with a nuclear plant, its output is controllable from zero to full power by simply inserting or withdrawing the control rods.”
Mea culpa. I was making the wrong point very badly. Technically I’m sure AD is right. What I was striving towards was the economic point that nuclear power is most economically effective in providing continuous baseline power, 24/7. To keep serviceable nuclear plants offline to fill in for wind not delivering would make the entire energy strategy unnecessarily, grotesquely and massively over-expensive – and probably involve providing baseload power from fossil fuelled stations rather than nuclear.
At least we agree about the difficulty of managing the grid with 20% plus wind power.
we have a largish wind farm just outside burnley.Last winter when we had a spell of cold but calm weather said turbines were inactive.Typically , in the UK when you get very cold frosty weather it is due to a ridge of high pressure over the country which is accompanied by very low winds – in other words when demand for power is likely to be high the turbines can’t produce the required power.We’ll have to then import it (at a premium) from nuclear equipped France – hence the comment “of course we will have to pay a premium” – just in time for me to be retireing and join the ranks of “do we heat or eat” pensioners
This is not the forum for a debate on the benefits or otherwise of wind farms.
I was not attempting to start that debate here.
I was pointing out that the reasoning behind the decision to go for them was energy reliance, diversification and sources, not man made global warming (yes including nuclear).
That labour and conservative alike had made that clear.
Personally I believe wind can make a significant contribution to our needs and so can tidal, as we are a windy island we need to use our domestic sources for more of our energy.
That leads to choices about what is important in our environment to us.
But my personal views were not the point about the bias.
What was clear from the BBC article was that the real reasoning was there but the BBC as usual downplayed and ignored it in favour of its blinkered man made global warming only agenda.
It would appear to me that the argument is not really about the efficacy of wind power as an energy generator, but that the question is really about storing energy, not about generating it.
Couldn’t excess wind energy be captured and stored by, say, a large fuel cell stack during times when gusts are strong, and then the fuel cell stack used to generate power at times when there’s no wind? Or transported from a gusty area to a power plant in an area that typically receives little wind?
I’m by no means an expert, but I understand that progress in energy storage technology is growing exponentially.
Maybe some of the more knowledgeable people could chime in.
Susan | 13.12.07 – 2:35 am |
As far as I am aware, there is no way of storing AC power (what comes out of your wall socket, and most industry uses).
You can store DC power, and then convert it to AC using an Inverter (a small example can be used with your car cigarette lighter, to power for example a small tv set).
Whether this is an economical proposal I don`t know.
…Of course a pile of Coal, Oil or Nuclear materials could be viewed as a store of energy..
Susan: I dimly recall a project in Wales where electricity produced by nuclear power stations at night was used to pump water up into a reservoir when there was low demand. Then in the day the water was released and it generated electricity via a turbine.
So it is possible to effectively store electricity.
I always thought it was a rather elegant engineering solution.
Come on Doc, you should know basic electrical principle. The only thing that can store an electrical charge is a battery (or at least anything that works on the fundamental principal of a battery such as a capacitor).
Water is not electricity, so how can the storage of it be regarded as such?
This is what always amuses me about the solar energy elite. They somehow think they are powering devices with sunlight when all they are doing is storing up a charge in a great, big fat ugly lead acid battery.
Lead acid. Yeah. Wonderful addition to the environment.
Reg: Yeah but one of the arguments about alternative energy sources is you might need to store it and such a scheme would let you do just that. It worked for nuclear power after all. (Just to be clear you’re turning electricity into potential energy to store it and then back into electricity again)
Reg: That doesn’t go for solar thermal power though does it? The kind the Israelis are building? The kind with the mirrors that concentrate the sunlight to make steam, which turns a huge turbine? They are building some of those in the desert in Calif. (Not that this would be a solution for Blighty.) Although of course these would not work at night — same problem of storage.
What about hydrogen fuel cell stacks, though? They are safe and non-polluting like batteries, yes or no?
David Gregory:
“Just to be clear you’re turning electricity into potential energy to store it and then back into electricity again.”
Ah, potential energy! Fair enough, although you referred to it as stored electricity and not stored energy. In which case the Sun would be the biggest electrical source available.
Susan:
Whether hydrogen fuel cell stacks are safe and non-polluting only time will tell I’m sure. And yes the games they play in the desert with solar panels are somewhat serious. My point was that in this country, solar panels are a costly token coupled with the menace of sealed lead acid. Hydrogen fuel cell stacks not being an option for a couple of inner city hippies with more solar panels on their roof than sense.
My point was that in this country, solar panels are a costly token coupled with the menace of sealed lead acid.
Reg: But you only need huge batteries (or fuel cell stacks) to store solar power if you are off the grid, right? If you’re on the grid your excess power produced by the solar panels just goes back to the power company. In California we have “net metering” which mandates that the utility company has to accept the excess power produced by solar panels and give the homeowner a credit off his bill in exchange. AFAIK, no lead acid batteries are involved in this process. In CA in the summer time, some people produce so much excess power from their solar panels, their utility bill actually goes backward. Of course the PV panels are still very, very expensive, but research is making them come down in price.
Susan:
In California I can well imagine solar panels having an effect.
In Britain it’s just an embarrassing costly joke.
If there were any way of generating sunshine through hot air rather than hot sunshine then Britiain would be the biggest generator of electricity on the planet.
An alleged comedian on Have I Got News For You – a taped show – has tonight repeated Al Fayed’s libellous accusation that the Duke of Edinburgh orchestrated Diana’s murder. Will the BBC’s David Gregory, who keeps posting to this blog, kindly apologise to the Duke, and make a suitable donation to the Duke’s charities out of the BBC’s propaganda fund? (This is supplied by the European Commission under its Audio-Visual Programme, for trashing the monarchy and all things national). After all, David, how annoyed your colleagues would be if they were accused of corruptly engineering the BBC’s programme procurement process to suit themselves! This latest outrage by the BBC brings us closer to a license fee strike on the British mainland – in parts of Northern Ireland, of course, it’s been under way for years.
Ian, Gregory wont do anything about these things, or at least he wont on this blog. As a named BBC employee he doesn’t want to go out on a limb.
I’ve taken the liberty of linking your comment to the latest open thread above because I don’t know how many people will come down here and see it.