Dept. of Irony

@bassingbourne55 wrote:

It’s not climate change we should be worrying about, but rather what we do when the oil and gas runs out. But the solution to both problems is the same – a combination of renewable energy and energy savings.

It is planned that Britain will be producing between 35% and 45% of its electricity from wind power by 2020. The Round 2 offshore windfarms will soon be getting under way – one of the biggest, the Thames Array, 12 miles off the Thames Estuary, will produce up to 1000 megawatts, equivalent to a nuclear power station.

The Crown Estates are working out the Round 3 offshore windfarms – these will be further offshore and some will be vast. It even includes provision to install big wind farms on the Dogger Bank in the middle of the North Sea.

This huge project is going on almost un-noticed by the media, while elderly middle-class nimbys protesting about a proposed wind turbine a couple of miles from their homes makes the news.

Electric cars are now really on the agenda again as major manufacturers get involved.
Renault has even announced that it’s stopping research on hybrids and concentrating on pure battery electric cars. That is probably because they see a gap in the market since all the other biggies are working on hybrids.

So it’s all coming together. Surplus energy generated by wind turbines at night, when demand is lower, can be utilised to charge the batteries of electric cars. Plug-in hybrid cars like the Chevrolet Volt overcome the limited range problem – they run as pure battery electric cars until the battery starts to run low, when the engine starts up to drive a generator to charge the battery.

I think we’re on the edge of proving the doubters wrong. We are on the edge of a huge leap forward in harnessing renewable energy. On wind turbines, the doubters would say: “But do you know how many wind turbines you’d need to produce the same amount of electricity as a nuclear power station?”, hoping they could destroy your argument by explaining that you’d need between 400 and 500. But they didn’t expect the response “Well, in that case, let’s build them, in the North Sea!

Coldest day in 2006 coincided with peak energy requirements in the UK. Guess what? No wind to speak of that day.
Problem with renewable energy is that it doesn’t work when we need it most of the time so you need conventional back up for when it doesn’t work. That costs money to run 2 seperate systems. Much easier to drop the inneficient wind, wave and other renewable energy and spend it on something that actually works and doesn’t cost 5 times the amount as standard power generation.
If you want clean carbon free (silly term) then nuclear is your only option.

@bassingbourne55 wrote:

Wind power is not inefficient since the ‘fuel’, i.e. wind, is free. The efficiency comes in designing the turbines capture as much of the wind energy as possible and converting it to electrical energy.

The wind energy policy recognises the fact that the wind is inconsistent. The expected total average output from the offshore windfarms, according to the statistics, is about half their total rated capacity, which isn’t bad. One has to remember that only a proportion of the heat generated by a nuclear reactor or coal-fired boiler actually goes into producing steam to drive the generators, a lot is just dissipated.

It’s true that we cannot rely on wind power alone. A lot of gas-fired power stations have been built in the last 20 years and these have the advantage that they can be started up and shut down rapidly, unlike big coal-fired or nuclear ones. The windfarms will mean that the gas-fired power stations will be dormant for much more of the time, saving on the consumption of North Sea gas, which is already running out.

Windpower has made the journey from eco-hippie gadgets, via political pressure groups, to big business. Vestas, Enercon, Seimens, Nordex, RE-Power and General Electric, to name just 6 manufacturers, build large wind turbines on a commercial scale.

I agree nuclear might have a place in future energy policy because nuclear power stations are best kept working at a constant output. But, given the decomissioning costs that will be incurred by all nuclear power stations, they are likely to cost as much as the wind option …..and uranium is a finite resource.

An interesting new development is the ‘Wave Treader’ device, that generates electricity from waves. Rated at 0.5MW, it’s designed to be attached, by a collar, to the base of offshore wind turbines. So, theoretically, each 2MW offshore wind turbine could become a 2.5MW combined wind/wave device.

The one worry I have about this huge expansion of offshore windpower is the long-term durability of the turbines. Generally they are pretty robust but occasionally one breaks. What would the casualty rate of turbine blades be in a storm like the 1987 hurricane?

You miss my point, I’m not saying that they don’t generate power, just that they don’t generate it when we need it. That’s why they are all but useless, they can’t even store the power they generate (capacitors being useless for this purpose) That’s why for all the alternative energy sources that are built, you need a standard back up supply for. far simpler to just use the reliable back up instead and scrap the alternatives as a costly and wasteful use of resources.