More Insanity
Firms paid to shut down wind farms when the wind is blowing
"Energy firms will receive thousands of pounds a day per wind farm to turn off their turbines because the National Grid cannot use the power they are producing Photo: ALAMY
Energy firms will receive thousands of pounds a day per wind farm to turn off their turbines because the National Grid cannot use the power they are producing.
Critics of wind farms have seized on the revelation as evidence of the unsuitability of turbines to meet the UK's energy needs in the future. They claim that the 'intermittent' nature of wind makes such farms unreliable providers of electricity.
The National Grid fears that on breezy summer nights, wind farms could actually cause a surge in the electricity supply which is not met by demand from businesses and households.
The electricity cannot be stored, so one solution – known as the 'balancing mechanism' – is to switch off or reduce the power supplied."
I don't get this at all. I thought you could invest in wind power and sell electricity to the local energy lines.
Selling electricity back to the grid
"Energy firms will receive thousands of pounds a day per wind farm to turn off their turbines because the National Grid cannot use the power they are producing Photo: ALAMY
Energy firms will receive thousands of pounds a day per wind farm to turn off their turbines because the National Grid cannot use the power they are producing.
Critics of wind farms have seized on the revelation as evidence of the unsuitability of turbines to meet the UK's energy needs in the future. They claim that the 'intermittent' nature of wind makes such farms unreliable providers of electricity.
The National Grid fears that on breezy summer nights, wind farms could actually cause a surge in the electricity supply which is not met by demand from businesses and households.
The electricity cannot be stored, so one solution – known as the 'balancing mechanism' – is to switch off or reduce the power supplied."
I don't get this at all. I thought you could invest in wind power and sell electricity to the local energy lines.
Selling electricity back to the grid
posted by nolocontendere at 4:24 PM
2 Comments:
You can sell to the grid but they will agree with you a maximum so they will let you know how much you're allowed to produce. SOoner or later someone will come up with ways to store energy. Thats when the whole thing becomes really juicy!
Can't store the energy? There are so many ways. It just requires the will. It's not even necessary to store all of the energy in the most efficient form, but in forms which are still useful and for which there can be independent demand.
Splitting hydrogen and oxygen from ionized water is one of the most practical if suitable precautions are taken for storage, careful choice of ion/salt to avoid fumes, and based on a bit of initial investment. Somebody just needs to put 2+2 together, and start a gas farm using mills. If the grid doesn't want it, somebody else does.
For longer-term storage, a synthetic HE plant could pump water against gravity into a holding cell, and allow it to run a turbine to recover the stored energy later on.
A lot of good work has gone into pin flywheels which are essentially centrifugal energy reserviors based on mass/inertia. They are electrically spun up in a vacuum with low friction bearings (ideally a diamond pin & jewel), and remain spinning for long periods, until the energy is tapped magnetically, at some loss.
So many ways. So little progress.
It is depressing how incapable we have become as a species, without being told what to do.
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