next message in archive
next message in thread
previous message in archive
previous message in thread
Index of Subjects
daylight hours decrease the nee Hi Dave, A larger problem is that currently and forseeably wind is relatively small potatoes and intermittent, and putting in many wind farms doesn't even remotely average out the power fluctuations. You also mentioned somewhere that this fluctuation could be solved by storing electrical energy during an energy glut by pumping water uphill into a storage reservoir (then recovering it in times of increased demand by letting the water run back down, powering turbines). This rang a bell as this year we had visited the Dinorwig power station in Snowdonia Natl Park (Wales), built discretely inside a mountain, that operates on just this principle with a large water differential height of ~500 meters. It is an enormous project but can't even out daily fluctuations in demand even with 3 other similar smaller stations running. It is used these days mainly to add a surge of power to the national grid at the end of popular TV programs in UK like East-Enders, when literally millions of viewers head simultaneously for the kitchen to plug in their electric kettles for cups of tea -- really: Dinorwig alone can go from 0 to full 1.3 GWatt power in 12 seconds to cope with this, and can supply some power for a few hours. The turbines are reversed at night when electricity is cheaper, to pump water back up to the upper storage lake. There's some info on Dinorwig in Wikipedia, but the point of this note is that in looking this up, I came across a book that discusses all this with numbers and excellent graphics in the context of the recent UK current practical energy mix: David J. C. Mackay, 'Sustainable Energy without the hot air', 2008-9. He discusses how many Welsh and Scottish pairs of lakes/lochs you could feasibly convert like Dinorwig to even out all the variability in power demand if you had the will to do so, and concludes that it simply can't be done in UK (not enough useful lake pairs with good differential heights, never mind the politics). Instead, glut electricity needs to be exported to some other form of storage, and he discusses how this is more easily possible e.g. for Denmark with its links to Scandanavia. You don't even have to ask Santa for it, as it can be downloaded for free as a PDF from http://www.withouthotair.com/download.html I've only just skimmed a bit of it, but it looks good from what I've read so far, and could save us all from unsupported generalizations as to what is practically possible in all of this. Some things just aren't. Steve (Hfx) ________________________________________ From: naturens-owner@chebucto.ns.ca [naturens-owner@chebucto.ns.ca] on behalf of David & Alison Webster [dwebster@glinx.com] Sent: Friday, December 19, 2014 4:13 PM To: naturens@chebucto.ns.ca Subject: Long again: Re: Long: Re: [NatureNS] light >> ... Wind and water could produce nearly all of our electricity if the will were there to do it. Because our governments have fumbled the wind generation ball it is a real mess; 26 different sets of standards for setback (if I recall correctly) in NS alone and these change at the whim of fear and rumor... <<
next message in archive
next message in thread
previous message in archive
previous message in thread
Index of Subjects