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When the wind doesn't blow...

Jim Audiomisc

pfm Member
This was prompted by a question on 'Any Questions' I heard on R4 recently, combined with the 'COP'. They were both in Scotland.

I was struck by how backward-looking some of the responses were to the question about 'wind turbines' as a renewable resource and the 'problem' of when the "wind doesn't blow". As an Inguneer who is an IEEE member I've read various recent reports from them about the R&D progress. In parallel I did this simple 'map' based on Crown/Scots legal info wrt the region which Scotland legally can regard as the area over which it has nominal control for economic resources like wind/wave/tidal power.

see http://jcgl.orpheusweb.co.uk/temp/ScotsPower.png

Note that the area is well over 7 times the size of Scotland itself. And is an area where, erm, it is known to generally be 'quite windy'. Also, we know wind blows more at higher levels. And injuneers are already developing wind platforms for deep water, high winds, high level wind, etc. So when we consider what may well be possible 10 years from now if we switched from giving fossil fule cos a *130%* tax break on building huge structures, etc, to search for fossil sources and instead supported develoment of wind/wave/etc over this area. It seems to me utterly crazy now to not to do this rather than foot drag and assume that what we will do 10 - 20 years from now will be as limited as what we've been able to do to date. Wind turbines, etc, continue to develop very rapidly.

Discuss. :)
 
I remember seeing stats on how often the wind doesn't blow over most of the UK. I think it was about 1 day per year. With sufficient energy storage it isn't a problem.
 
One small point from me - I have a family member whose job is to get the electrons from where the cables come ashore to all the little houses that need the electrons. Not so long ago, he needed an armed close support officer to protect him when he attended pre-planning meetings in villages across the country to discuss where the cables might go. Meetings attended by 30 people in village halls deep in the country had landowners turning up with their barristers.

There’s still a public opinion job to be done on the finer details.
 
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A complete aside, but it certainly isn't blowing here in Essex at the moment. Looking at the stunning copper beech outside my window, I could be looking at a still photograph, always a bit unsettling when that happens.

Oddly for me (I was driving), I heard the programme too, and even put up with Any Answers for a while. One of the callers, who was an ex-oil industry worker 6 years unemployed, was developing some interesting points regarding the non-materialisation of thousands of promised jobs in renewables, and the fact that the millions poured into fabrication yards had not prevented jobs being exported abroad, while the yards lay dormant. Unfortunately, just as it was getting really interesting, she appeared to call into question 'the science'. She was cut off faster than you can say 'knife'.

Sorry, I digress.
 
One small point from me - I have a family member whose job is to get the electrons from where the cables come ashore to the all little houses that need the electrons. Not so long ago, he needed an armed close support officer to protect him when he attended pre-planning meetings in villages across the country to discuss where the cables might go. Meetings attended by 30 people in village halls deep in the country had landowners turning up with their barristers.

There’s still a public opinion job to be done on the finer details.

Yes. It will be aided by people realising that we essentially have no choice on the long run. And in the shorter term, as the price of other sources of power rises in real terms.... whilst we subsidise the fossil fuel biz.

However Scotland and hydro have already set precedents up here as they used the freshwater of Scotland to get power. Also with the newer laws which deal with public access and use of the large estates, etc.

And landowners can, of course, gain income from having wind turbines and cables on their land. Similarly, remote villages may get advantageous prices for electricity as the cabling is short and direct for them.

So the cat is skinnable. And TBH we have no sane alternative unless fusion in a suitcase arrives.
 
Oddly for me (I was driving), I heard the programme too, and even put up with Any Answers for a while. One of the callers, who was an ex-oil industry worker 6 years unemployed, was developing some interesting points regarding the non-materialisation of thousands of promised jobs in renewables, and the fact that the millions poured into fabrication yards had not prevented jobs being exported abroad, while the yards lay dormant.

Indeed. Afraid the Scots Gov does have some bad 'form' on that topic. as dwellers in Fife will ken well. However the future isn't the past unless we meekly allow it to be. And if we switch the subsidy from fossil to renewable and the result becomes competitive, then jobs will rise in the sector. Just a matter of people waking up and getting on with what injuneers know they can get on with given support.

Sadly, people have antequated ideas about things like 'windmills' and no real grasp of how things can develop. I recall when people thought it was a mad impossibility to build the oil platforms or gain much old or gas... But doing that shows we can do much the same for offshore wind, only on a bigger and more sustainable scale. Add in systems that can gain wave and tidal flow power as well...
 
Living in the Snowdonia National Park, I have zero problem with cables as long as they're buried. And I can't imagine people holding that anti cable view if buried and the implementation is done sensitively and discretely. Pylons, though, round here there is plenty of opposition to cabling done that way. It's so expensive, they bleat, to bury cables. Tough, that's the only way you're going to get public opinion with you.
 
20 years ago building licences were granted purely on mean wind speeds. There was no accounting of how much wind speed was needed to turn the turbines. The whole process was unscientific and should have been based on how many hours the wind speed exceeded certain thresholds. = Politics. Don't start me on the winds used for planning based on Cairngorm winds...
 
Can someone explain this?:

Surely as a turbine changes wind motion to electricity, we are gradually taking a net amount of energy out of the atmosphere long term, and the more wind turbines that go up, the more this surely affects wind patterns and weather systems. Is it deemed to little to be of significance, or is it that the sun's activity constantly renews our atmosphere, tops it up so to speak..?
 
Can someone explain this?:

Surely as a turbine changes wind motion to electricity, we are gradually taking a net amount of energy out of the atmosphere long term, and the more wind turbines that go up, the more this surely affects wind patterns and weather systems. Is it deemed to little to be of significance, or is it that the sun's activity constantly renews our atmosphere, tops it up so to speak..?

Lower energy means cooler as frictional losses mean all motion is converted to heat, a good thing, the big worry is whether all those windmills will create so much drag that the world will stop going round.
 
Living in the Snowdonia National Park, I have zero problem with cables as long as they're buried. And I can't imagine people holding that anti cable view if buried and the implementation is done sensitively and discretely. Pylons, though, round here there is plenty of opposition to cabling done that way. It's so expensive, they bleat, to bury cables. Tough, that's the only way you're going to get public opinion with you.
They're not pylons, they're cable lifters...
 
I remember a spell one winter in the early 80s. There was an arctic high over Scotland. Result no wind, sub zero temperatures for several days (one day the maximum was -10.5).

This makes me think of the issues a Scotland reliant on wind power would face during such a period of continuous cold still weather with a resulting high demand for heating.
 
I remember a spell one winter in the early 80s. There was an arctic high over Scotland. Result no wind, sub zero temperatures for several days (one day the maximum was -10.5).

This makes me think of the issues a Scotland reliant on wind power would face during such a period of continuous cold still weather with a resulting high demand for heating.
Burn wheelbarrows of English pounds, which will be worth nothing by then.
 
Obviously in todays cranked up parlance even five minutes without electricity is a nightmare. I was in my twenties in the seventies when we had scheduled blackouts due to miners’ strikes. Don’t rememver even having a bad dream.
 
Obviously in todays cranked up parlance even five minutes without electricity is a nightmare. I was in my twenties in the seventies when we had scheduled blackouts due to miners’ strikes. Don’t rememver even having a bad dream.
Or having children, or old people needing heating, or...
 
Yep, the 70s blackouts were well-timed for me, too. My parents were in their early 50s, both in good health, plus they’d lived through the war and a few nights without lights weren’t going to bother them. My siblings hadn’t yet had any children, and I was still at school.

For different reasons I was unaffected by the WW3 scares in the 80s, but I know that people a few years younger that me were traumatised by the constant fear that the US and USSR were about to blow the world to bits.
 
I was in my twenties in the seventies when we had scheduled blackouts due to miners’ strikes

The Hydro-Electric Board (now part of SSE) HQ was in Elgin less than 2 miles from the farm. My uncle had good connections with some of the managers. They were very helpful in managing our power cuts so that we could make sure we could pasteurise and bottle the milk to keep Elgin and the surrounding area supplied. Power cuts at the wrong time such when we were pasteurising would have cause big problems, lots of milk would have been dumped.
 
They're not pylons, they're cable lifters...

The nice new fancy ones being installed in Somerset (as part of providing reinforced grid connectivity for Hinkley Point, along with tens of miles of buried HV cable are definitely in the dressy 'cable lifter' category - at last:

https://www.nationalgrid.com/national-grid-build-worlds-first-t-pylon-somerset

These resulted from an open design competition about three years ago; and are intended for future new installations elsewhere in the UK.
 
was developing some interesting points regarding the non-materialisation of thousands of promised jobs in renewables, and the fact that the millions poured into fabrication yards had not prevented jobs being exported abroad, while the yards lay dormant.

I have maybe mentioned this issue previously. I believe all recently awarded word farm contracts require a 40% UK input. As I have seen with recent work contracts offshore there are precious few Brits involved on the installation side, hardly surprising as all the vessels are built and managed elsewhere................

Yes all power cables should be buried although even buried cables have to be brought up to ground level for reactive compensation stations to be installed. Both Hornsea 1 and Hornsea 2 have a dedicated jacket for these to be installed on.

There is a plan to lay a 400KV interconnecter not far from us which was shelved when onshore winds farms were 'banned', I suspect this may re-surface now that ban has been lifted. Obviously people, including us, objected. SSE pointed out that burying cables was much more expensive and that RC stations would be needed. I have no idea how frequently such a building would be needed.

This is a link to an RC station SSE are building now - https://www.ssen-transmission.co.uk/projects/alyth-275kv-substation-reactive-compensation/

Two problems with wind farms. The first is using excess energy they generate rather than curtail them, the second is no wind at times of high demand. The two are kind of intertwined. Storage is the problem.

Regards

Richard
 
Energy storage is the key to the future of renewables. Perhaps using surplus to create hydrogen is one way forward. Flywheels and gravity storage or local batteries such Tesla are possible for dealing with short term peaks in demand. For longer term shortages we need energy dense solutions.
 
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