How Orkney Leads the Way For Sustainable Energy (theguardian.com) 201
An anonymous reader shares a report: It seems the stuff of fantasy. Giant ships sail the seas burning fuel that has been extracted from water using energy provided by the winds, waves and tides. A dramatic but implausible notion, surely. Yet this grand green vision could soon be realised thanks to a remarkable technological transformation that is now under way in Orkney. Perched 10 miles beyond the northern edge of the British mainland, this archipelago of around 20 populated islands -- as well as a smattering of uninhabited reefs and islets -- has become the centre of a revolution in the way electricity is generated.
Orkney was once utterly dependent on power that was produced by burning coal and gas on the Scottish mainland and then transmitted through an undersea cable. Today the islands are so festooned with wind turbines, they cannot find enough uses for the emission-free power they create on their own. Community-owned wind turbines generate power for local villages; islanders drive nonpolluting cars that run on electricity; devices that can turn the energy of the waves and the tides into electricity are being tested in the islands' waters and seabed; and -- in the near future -- car and passenger ferries here will be fuelled not by diesel but by hydrogen, created from water that has been electrolysed using power from Orkney's wind, wave and tide generators.
Orkney was once utterly dependent on power that was produced by burning coal and gas on the Scottish mainland and then transmitted through an undersea cable. Today the islands are so festooned with wind turbines, they cannot find enough uses for the emission-free power they create on their own. Community-owned wind turbines generate power for local villages; islanders drive nonpolluting cars that run on electricity; devices that can turn the energy of the waves and the tides into electricity are being tested in the islands' waters and seabed; and -- in the near future -- car and passenger ferries here will be fuelled not by diesel but by hydrogen, created from water that has been electrolysed using power from Orkney's wind, wave and tide generators.
What the treehuggers won't tell you (Score:5, Funny)
If everyone harvested the wind and the waves, there'd be no wind and waves. This solution simply does not scale.
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If everyone harvested the wind and the waves, there'd be no wind and waves. This solution simply does not scale.
Are you perhaps related to the guy back in the day who said cars can't travel faster than fifteen miles per hour because all of the air in the cab would be sucked out the back?
As for changing the weather patterns, think about this next time a hurricane is blowing people into the sky.
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If everyone harvested the wind and the waves, there'd be no wind and waves. This solution simply does not scale.
Are you perhaps related to the guy back in the day who said cars can't travel faster than fifteen miles per hour because all of the air in the cab would be sucked out the back?
I think you done went Whhoosh.
Re:What the treehuggers won't tell you (Score:5, Funny)
If everyone harvested the wind and the waves, there'd be no wind and waves. This solution simply does not scale.
Well, their first choice was to build a Dyson Sphere... but once they looked at Dyson’s Catalog, they decided the company’s prices are just too outrageous.
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Well, their first choice was to build a Dyson Sphere... but once they looked at Dyson's Catalog, they decided the company's prices are just too outrageous.
Plus transparent plastic looks cool but it's just not the best choice.
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It looks bad after the first use, but at least you can see how full the bin is. Kinda wish the hose was transparent too so it's easier to look for blockages, although these days I mainly use the hand-held ones anyway.
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The problem is however very visible in the current issues we're having with CO2. The CO2 we're adding to atmosphere is insignificant compared to the natural cycle. But it's apparently enough to overcome the tolerances within the biosphere, and cause rapid enough increase of CO2 to cause a rapid global warming.
It's almost certain that same can be said about extracting raw kinetic energy from the very same system. We can likely do it to some extent "for free" because it will fit within tolerances of the syste
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I would just submit that there IS a point at which pulling energy from the wind may actually have consequences, as ridiculous as that may sound.
It's the difference between principle and practice.
Converting the energy from wind to electricity cannot not have some effect. There will be slowing of the wind, some heat somewhere. From a tiny demonstration wind turbine up.
But the wind energy extraction process is pretty darn inefficient. And at what is essential point source extraction, the effects will be pretty local and small.
Hydrogen is a form of storage and not a good one (Score:2)
Re:Hydrogen is a form of storage and not a good on (Score:5, Interesting)
Hydrogen is a way of storing energy the same as a battery. Today batteries are better in every possible way except possibly air travel. Hydrogen is dangerous, hard to store and hard to transport. Again, except possibly for air travel, hydrogen is either expensive or less efficient to turn back into mechanical energy.
True, but the reason hydrogen storage is still interesting is that the storage capacity you can achieve with hydrogen based completely dwarfs anything you can achieve with batteries, hydro storage or practically anything else at the moment. The round trip efficiency is currently between 30-40 %, it can realistically be increased to 50% in the near future. If you recover the stored energy by burning the hydrogen in in a combined cycle gas power plant the efficiencies is as high as 60%.
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Lithium batteries have a round-trip efficiency of about 95%.
For hydrogen, it is about 60%.
So lithium wins for most applications.
Hydrogen wins when weight is a really big concern. So it may make sense for aviation.
Hydrogen also scales well, since big tanks have a better volume-to-area ratio. So it may make sense for ships.
For static applications like grid-storage, sodium-ion or vanadium-redox may be better than either lithium or hydrogen.
But for cars or smaller, lithium batteries are the way to go. You wi
Re:Hydrogen is a form of storage and not a good on (Score:4, Insightful)
Lithium batteries have a round-trip efficiency of about 95%.
For hydrogen, it is about 60%.
So lithium wins for most applications.
Hydrogen wins when weight is a really big concern. So it may make sense for aviation.
Hydrogen also scales well, since big tanks have a better volume-to-area ratio. So it may make sense for ships.
For static applications like grid-storage, sodium-ion or vanadium-redox may be better than either lithium or hydrogen.
But for cars or smaller, lithium batteries are the way to go. You will never see a hydrogen fuel cell in a cell phone.
Hydrogen wins when you need to store store truly massively amounts of excess energy which is something you cannot currently do with batteries. That is the one big thing what still makes Hydrogen interesting despite the low conversion efficiency. If you are producing huge amounts of excess energy and can't store it in battery arrays, storing it as Hydrogen at 50% round trip efficiency is still better than letting all that energy go to waste assuming you can do the hydrogen conversion cost effectively. The currently most sensible thing to do with this hydrogen is use it to power always on gas power plants to supplement solar and wind power and then use the energy to charge cars or whatever else it is you need the energy for. This, again, assumes that you can do the round trip conversion of electric energy into hydrogen cost effectively.
Re:Hydrogen is a form of storage and not a good on (Score:5, Interesting)
Hydrogen wins when you need to store store truly massively amounts of excess energy
Actually, it is usually not the best solution. Pumped storage and compressed air have better efficiency and need less capital investment. Vanadium-redox will give much better efficiency, and can scale with just a bigger tank.
If hydrogen made sense for grid storage, profit seeking companies would be doing it. They aren't.
Hydrogen storage only makes sense when weight and/or power density are more important than efficiency.
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Hydrogen wins when you need to store store truly massively amounts of excess energy
Actually, it is usually not the best solution. Pumped storage and compressed air have better efficiency and need less capital investment. Vanadium-redox will give much better efficiency, and can scale with just a bigger tank.
If hydrogen made sense for grid storage, profit seeking companies would be doing it. They aren't.
Hydrogen storage only makes sense when weight and/or power density are more important than efficiency.
Vanadium redox batteries require about 10 tonnes of Vanadium, an element priced in troy ounces per MWh of capacity. For something small like an island, just call Elon. That's the right scale for Li+. Either that or use a bunch of recycled auto batteries if you really want to save on price.
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Multiple-assertion citations required.
Current best processes for water electrolysis (PEM or alkaline electrolysis) have an effective electrical efficiency of 70–80% [wikipedia.org]. Hydrogen fuel cells have an efficiency of 70-80% [wikipedia.org]. So best case is 0.8*0.8 = 64%. Plus you need copious energy to compress or liquify the hydrogen for storage, which lowers the effective efficiency even more.
Vanadium-redox has a RTE of 65-75% [wikipedia.org].
Pumped storage has an RTE of 70-80% [wikipedia.org].
In practice, compressed air has an RTE of about 70% [wikipedia.org].
Re:Hydrogen is a form of storage and not a good on (Score:5, Informative)
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Hydrogen has about 142 MJ per kg, about 3X that of diesel and gasoline. Which themselves are about 25X that of LiPo batteries (the best, mass-producible rechargeable batteries out there). Making hydrogen about 75X the energy density of the best battery packs.
Except that the same mass of hydrogen takes up a HECK of a lot more volume.
And once you factor in the mass of the containers and other hardware needed to secure hydrogen, the advantage per mass is no longer as clear either.
Re:Hydrogen is a form of storage and not a good on (Score:5, Informative)
Nope [wikipedia.org]. You get about 9.7MJ/L for compressed hydrogen, and about 40% of that (4.3 MJ/L) for LiPo batteries. Hydrogen is much more efficient by weight and volume.
And if you need 700+ kg of tank to store your hydrogen - you're doing it wrong. Here's a massive 850L tank [mahytec.com] that would be equivalent energy storage to about 4800 kg of batteries - and it weighs 215 kg. Not even close.
Re:Hydrogen is a form of storage and not a good on (Score:4)
What about the combustion engine and complex drivetrain? With an electric motor you shave a lot of weight. No fuel pump/plumbing, no radiator, no water pump, no belts, no alternator, no exhaust system, very simple fixed gearbox, smaller 12V battery, no engine oil, and of course no engine block with pistons and spark plugs and all the rest of it.
Also a lot lower maintenance.
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I would think that electric is also quieter.
But what about the material to make the battery? If the whole world started using batteries for everything, would there eventually be a shortage of such material? Also have to consider the disposal of such material. Is such material considered hazardous?
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All the grid scale stuff is abundant and easy to recycle, e.g. lithium and sodium.
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And if you need 700+ kg of tank to store your hydrogen - you're doing it wrong. Here's a massive 850L tank [mahytec.com] that would be equivalent energy storage to about 4800 kg of batteries - and it weighs 215 kg. Not even close.
Are you serious? That tank is the equivalent of a 100 kWh battery. Just like the one you get in some Teslas. Are you claiming that those Teslas weigh over 4800 kg?
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Run the numbers yourself. A little 38kg, 52L tank [mahytec.com] holds about the same energy as 132 kWh of batteries
Well, I did. That tank is cited as containing 1.5 kg of hydrogen, which is worth around 35 kWh in your typical fuel cell, NOT 132 kWh. Your math skills suck.
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And if you need 700+ kg of tank to store your hydrogen - you're doing it wrong. Here's a massive 850L tank [mahytec.com] that would be equivalent energy storage to about 4800 kg of batteries - and it weighs 215 kg. Not even close.
Assuming that's just the weight of the tank, it contains 60kg of liquid hydrogen. So the energy contained is 60*142MJ in 215+60kg, so the actual energy density is 31MJ/kg. For petrol that's still about 180L, or 40 gallons, which is not really typical of the typical car. So if you scale it down
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Hey, I'm all for continuing to use gas and diesel! It's a great source. I am a firm believer that we are experiencing climate change, but that it is dominated by natural cycles - our little bit of CO2 in the air is not a driver of much of anything natural - just political.
However, hydrogen is quite a bit better than batteries. You said [slashdot.org] that
the same mass of hydrogen takes up a HECK of a lot more volume. And once you factor in the mass of the containers and other hardware needed to secure hydrogen, the advantage per mass is no longer as clear either.
That is not correct. Hydrogen storage, as compared to battery storage, is about 60% more efficient by volume, and around 25X more efficient by weight. Batteries are
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That is not correct. Hydrogen storage, as compared to battery storage, is about 60% more efficient by volume, and around 25X more efficient by weight.
...and the tank you've linked above is comparable to a 100 kWh Tesla automotive battery, at about half the mass and twice the volume. So it's not 60% more efficient by volume, but 50% LESS, and not 25x more efficient by weight, but only 2x as much. Liar, liar, pants on fire...
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Hey, I'm all for continuing to use gas and diesel! It's a great source. I am a firm believer that we are experiencing climate change, but that it is dominated by natural cycles - our little bit of CO2 in the air is not a driver of much of anything natural
CO2 has pretty much doubled. By what mechanism does that not have the effect now it had in the past, and not the one demonstrated by physics?
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There is another tank on that page, that stores 52L of hydrogen. That's about equivalent to a 132kW battery - double the typical Model 3. And the tank weighs in at 38 kg.
*That* tank is equivalent to a 35 kWh battery, HALF the typical Model 3. TWO of them would be equivalent to a Model 3. A 200 kW fuel cell stack would add another 100 kg. All three would occupy about 250 liters of volume. Model 3's battery has around 360 liters, making it 45% mode voluminous. However, it can *also* be placed more out of way, since its smallest element is less than ten centimeters long, whereas those tanks have a 33 cm diameter. It actually forms Model 3's floor.
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Check the bottom tank on that page - 700 bar, 52L. Given there are 9.17 MJ/L for compressed hydrogen, that's about 476 MJ of energy. At ~278 Wh per MJ, that is equivalent to a 132 kWh pack - about double a Model 3. So a small, 38 kg tank has the same energy storage as a pair of Model 3 battery packs. Tell me again why batteries are good? Less energy density (by weight or volume), a lot longer to charge, and provably more damaging to the environment (the environmental cost of making a 132 kWh battery pack is huge compared to the electrical energy needed to compress 52L of hydrogen).
Most people don't want their car to blow up. [youtube.com] Hydrogen is difficult to store and requires you cooling it so it actively requires continuous input of energy to keep it stored. Its best use is for grid scale storage but requires certain energy market conditions to be profitable. Basically, the energy prices need to swing at least 2x per day due to other intermittent power sources. Good news is that that happens in CA and Germany most days. Bad news is that nobody other than energy traders want the prices
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Hydrogen goes in a tank. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
At a density of 71 kg/m^3, and a temperature of 20 K.
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Why would you want to carry around 800 kg of batteries when you could do 12 kg of hydrogen?
You forgot the weight of the hydrogen tank and the fuel cells. There are many whys. One, hydrogen is soluable in many metals which makes building effective tanks surprisingly difficult. Then there's the issue of filling via very high pressure hoses, something which is a rather different prospect from liquid hydrocarbons or just plugging in. Then there's the infrastructure required to either create or ship hydrogen. It
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Hydrogen has ~75X the power density by weight
Absolutely not. Two tonnes of batteries today have a power output of almost 2 MW. That requires around a 1000 kg fuel cell today. So it's at best 2x as much, and only if you completely discount the storage which might easily almost double that. So it's maybe in the 1.5x ballpark for power density.
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How heavy is the battery pack in a Model 3?
Around 360 kg. However, it's designed to be flat and have a low CG, so it's mostly out of the way (under your feet). Cylindrical tanks and the fuel cell stack would require some room either in the front or in the back.
We know that two of those battery packs are about the same as the 38 kg tank I linked
We know it's the other way round; you need two of those tanks with 1.5 kg hydrogen in each to store an equivalent amount of electricity that one Model 3 battery pack can store, plus a 100 kg fuel cell to power Model 3's 200 kW motors, or a 170 kg fuel cell to power the 350 kW performance model
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See above - hydrogen tanks and valving is really not that heavy.
quote the numbes then. It's not going to be as heavy overall but it's not as light as you're making out. It's not a 75x difference.
A couple hundred kg to carry the equivalent of a tonne or two of batteries.
It's reached the stage of needing actual hard numbers.
Hydrogen has ~75X the power density by weight
ITYM energy density.
that leaves a BIG overhead factor for a tank or valving system.
Well no. Hydrogen has more or less fixed costs for the valv
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Hydrogen has about 142 MJ per kg, about 3X that of diesel and gasoline.
Yes, but the issue is MJ/litre, not per kg in a practical sense for creating cars.
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Convert it to methane? It makes it a lot easier to store and transport.
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> Today batteries are better in every possible way except possibly air travel
What about the materials used to make batteries? Are those materials available in near limitless amounts?
What about the processing and disposal of those materials?
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Re:Hydrogen is a form of storage and not a good on (Score:4, Interesting)
Are you familiar with the Aquion Saltwater battery? http://aquionenergy.com/techno... [aquionenergy.com]
I haven't really dug into it, but it sounds like the technology is at the very least a *lot* cleaner than the existing options, and possibly no more toxic than the ambient environment.
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I wish their site had more technical detail. It would be interesting to compare it with low temperature sodium sulphur, which is the other big player in grid scale batteries. Similarly it's pretty good on the environmental front, the only real down side is that "low temperature" means about 100C so it does require heating to operate. As ever it's a trade off between build cost, running code, efficiency and environmental sustainability.
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Agreed on wanting more information. From what I recall, possibly from other sources as well, the Aquion battery is made from relatively common, nontoxic materials, can be made for a similar price to lead-acid, with a similar energy/weight ratio, but lower energy/volume. So not really suitable for mobile applications, but with great potential for grid and home use.
And then there's the unrelated liquid metal batteries - I don't recall hearing of any commercially available models yet, but they seem to hold th
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Agreed on wanting more information. From what I recall, possibly from other sources as well, the Aquion battery is made from relatively common, nontoxic materials, can be made for a similar price to lead-acid, with a similar energy/weight ratio, but lower energy/volume. So not really suitable for mobile applications, but with great potential for grid and home use.
And then there's the unrelated liquid metal batteries - I don't recall hearing of any commercially available models yet, but they seem to hold the promise of simplicity, effectively unlimited lifetime (since the normal mechanical damage associated with charging can't form in liquid) , and extremely high charge and discharge rates. Of course, operating at temperatures that keep the metals liquid makes them unsuitable for many/most applications, but the grid potential is immense.
Very poor energy density. 1/100th that of Lithium-ion. Basically would require more land than the solar or wind that its backing up per watt hour of storage. Its nice for remote small/cheap solar though and very environmentally friendly.
Thats a cool idea (Score:4, Funny)
Put in large systems that run off the currents in the ocean that fill up tanks full of hydrogen so that automated ships can come dock with them and move the hydrogen around? Sounds like a great idea to me. I'm glad they thought of this.
--
“Time and tide for nae man bide” – Unknown
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that fill up tanks full of hydrogen
And what do you plan to do with the remaining oxygen?? It's a deadly poison.
(I bet it even makes a "whoosh" sound...)
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Orkney - population 21,000 (Score:4, Interesting)
they cannot find enough uses for the emission-free power they create
How about using all their excess electricity to make the next generation of wind turbines to replace the ones they bought from an industrialised country?
Generating their own electricity is nice, but it doesn't make them self-sufficient. They are completely dependent on places with mines, steel plants, manufacturing and development to send them the equipment to generate electricity and to maintain it. If they wanted properly sustainable energy, they would have produce the wind turbines on their islands.
But that would require a fully industrial society which their small population could not support.
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Since nobody claimed they were self sufficient (except in energy) your point is... what exactly?
(Seriously, how did this drivel get modded up?)
Its exceptionally windy there (Score:3)
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Proof of the exceptional weather in Orkney is that my mother told me I have special genetic variations to cope...
Big feet and a low centre of gravity!
Uglification (Score:2)
FTFA :
Today the islands are so festooned with wind turbines ...
I'm dropping any idea of visiting there as a tourist*. The place must look like an industrial estate.
* Perhaps they see that as a plus point.
Oddly... (Score:2)
...the story doesn't mention anything about subsidies and/or tariffed rates. Is this that rarest of beasts, unique in all the world, a commercial wind turbine installation built for the purpose of generating a profit?
Of course not! https://www.theguardian.com/en... [theguardian.com]
"The Scottish government warned this week that if Westminster ruled out allowing onshore windfarms in the Western Isles, Orkney and Shetland to compete for subsidies, £2.5bn of investment would be put at risk."
Anyone who's worried that win
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By the way, I wonder what wind and solar (and tidal in the case of the Orkenys) has done to the cost of electricity?
Made it cheaper, for people living in the Orkneys. Tiny little islands the world over typically generate electricity using imported diesel. It's expensive. It's stupidly expensive. It's permanently stupidly expensive. Solar is cheaper. Wind is much much cheaper.
In the next decade, there's going to be a glut on the market of used tanker ships that formerly delivered diesel to islands that don't need it anymore.
Fully Charged (Score:2)
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Agreed - hydrogen is a difficult fuel to work with, which sets a lower limit on how far you can scale it down before competing technologies become far more attractive. I'd love to see it take off for grid-scale energy storage though. And islands like these, that don't have a lot of other options, would seem to be a good place to refine the technology.
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Would it be pure hydrogen, or would it get used to create methane, which would be easier to handle and use as a mobile fuel, especially for ferry-type watercraft?
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If they're using electrolysis, I would assume pure hydrogen. Synthesizing methane/ethynol/etc. involves considerably more complicated infrastructure, while hydrogen is quite simple and requires only water as an input material - you can synthesize it with nothing more than a glass of water, a 9V battery and some very corrosion resistant electrodes. Presumably a grid-scale system would be more sophisticated, but a lot simpler than creating a more complicated fuel.
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Isn't Florida known for hurricanes?
Isn't Kansas known for tornadoes?
Isn't Washington known for hot air?
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Isn't Washington known for hot air?
Ah, that is how you call farts now?
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Scotland is not atypical.
And you don't grasp what a capacitor factor is.
Most place will actually need 3-4 as much nameplate wind capacity to replace nuclear,
No. What would be the point of having 4 windmills standing still? Hu?
You can not use capacity factors from a book to plan a wind installation or a grid. You have to measure what kind of wind you have at a certain place. And to that place your CF is bound, depending on the specs of your windmill. A windmill optimized for 8m/s wind, will produce 8 times
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Re:wind turbine locations (Score:4, Interesting)
Correct, but also missing the effect of geographic distribution. Turns out that when you have enough capacity over a wide enough area the capacity factor of the fleet as a whole goes up a lot. Throw in some battery backup to smooth output and handle peaks and you have a capacity factor close to coal or nuclear.
Obviously you still want a mix of energy sources, and long distance transmission lines, but 4x overbuild for capacity is likely excessive.
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Typical capacity factor for offshore wind turbines is about 0.35.
Uh...greetings from the 21st century! How are things back then in 1999?
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When isn't the British coast windy after all?
In comparison to Orkney. the North tip of Scotland and Shetland, The rest of the UK is not particularly windy. After WWII, when the UK was setting up a nationwide weather reporting system, reports were regularly rejected as incorrect as they reported more wind than "experts" in London considered possible.
solar: great bit of kit that should be deployed in more places, but some areas get less sun that others.
They find solar very effective in Germany which is further north than much of the USA. If it was not efficient, you don't think they would do it do you?
More of both, but let's be realistic as to where these things can be useful and on whether they can solve all of our energy problems.
Renewable energy could solve our needs but that's no
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Re:wind turbine locations (Score:4, Interesting)
Thing is a nice dyke across the Pentland Firth could extract enough tidal energy to power the whole of Scotland, and be utterly predictable as to it's output. Just stick in some additional pumped storage (plenty of capacity for that in Scotland) and we would be sorted. Now sure that dyke is going to cost, but they want 30 billion GBP for a nuclear power station with less capacity.
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Good point.
We cannot solve all of our energy need by using hydroelectric dams. You cannot put dams just anywhere. Also dams have their own environmental impact - just like wind and solar.
Also, without any constraints on population, or consumption, I don't see how any energy source can do much to solve the problem.
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The windy places, almost nobody lives in.
The sunny places, people need aircon.
The tidal / water places, don't have the majority of the population.
And let's not forget that all three are HARSH conditions - requiring more maintenance, repairs, tougher materials, longer service times, more shutdowns (especially with wind - you can blow a turbine to pieces if you don't put the brakes on when it's really blowing), more difficult access etc.
What kills renewable energy isn't that you can't use it in the permanent-
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Don't feed the (Democrat) troll (Score:2)
Re:This is good! (Score:4, Informative)
1. For every turbine erected, cut down a tree, so the total wind blockage remains constant. Ban the planting of new trees.
Even if your comment wasn't completely absurd in the first place, the Earth loses 18.7 million acres of forests per year [livescience.com] .
So yeah, there's already plenty of "wind changing" going on, more so than we could ever erect enough windmills to counteract.
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Why large swathes of the desert? What about all the roof space in cities? Say a 3kw system per house, millions of houses means gigawatts of power. Industrial roofing, malls, office blocks, you could build a superstructure over car parks to support panels, all that is a very large space.
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Why large swathes of the desert? What about all the roof space in cities? Say a 3kw system per house, millions of houses means gigawatts of power. Industrial roofing, malls, office blocks, you could build a superstructure over car parks to support panels, all that is a very large space.
Because that only gets you about 10% of the way there. Cities don't actually cover a huge amount of space. So when some says it will take 12% of the land to put solar, you should think that means 2x as much land use by humans and much less for nature. Also, GW are nice but we measure grid level electricity usage in 1,000s of terrawatt hours. Look into the problem yourself and you will start making fun of everyone for their lack of math. Hint, more solar and wind means natural gas.
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Hint, more solar and wind means natural gas.
It's one way to deal with intermittency, but the requirement can be offset with a balance of renewables and continental-scale HVDC too, demand shaping, storage, and some residual generation from other sources, for example natural gas, hydroelectric and perhaps nuclear to provide an assured baseline such as the reduced demand overnight when solar does not generate and there is a chance wind will not.
Completely different (Score:3)
This isn't anything like Denmark because they don't have a cable to send the excess power anywhere. So they're going to see if storing and transporting it as Hydrogen is economical. It's not clear to me that it will be, but they seem to think it's worth a try..
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They are connected the main grid in Scotland. But they produce to much excess power for that connection.
It will be economical when they start to change the ferries to electric ferries based on fuel cells. Many ferries are hybrid already, and ferries in Norway are switching to electric already.
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More sane choice would be to lay more power cables to sell energy to the main islands. The reason I suspect it's not done is that investment would be too much, especially considering the increased need for spinning and cold reserve.
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But they produce to much excess power for that connection.
As I said, they don't have a cable to send the excess power anywhere.
It will be economical when they start to change the ferries to electric ferries based on fuel cells.
Maybe, but I question it because conversion of excess power to Hydrogen isn't being done economically anywhere else.
I understand that this is a special case in which they have no other market for the power and building the wind towers on this particular island might be less expensive than elsewhere. I hope it works out for them.
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Maybe, but I question it because conversion of excess power to Hydrogen isn't being done economically anywhere else.
If you have excess power, anything you do with it is economical.
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Russian? Pillock? Or did you go for the double?
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Adding turbines would reduce the load on non-renewable energy, a net positive. In fact, the Altamont pass in the East Bay Area is a very well-utilized wind farm that could easily be expanded
The Allegheny Front in Pennsylvania is another place where wind is being exploited. Along the front, the wind pretty much never stops. And we're not finished either. Hasn't been any talk of building new fossil fuel turbines lately.
Fun stuff: Some folks have been yapping about "What do you do when the wind turbines wear out?" as if they have stumbled upon some fatal flaw. Well if you have a field of hundreds of individual turbines, you just go up and refurb or replace them one by one.
As compared to a w