Windmills don't work during cold brought by high-pressure systems

[Atash Hagmahani]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1345233/Its-use-waiting-turbines-warm-snow-returns.html

Cold air is often windless due to high pressure systems. UKs windmills are mostly sitting idle during the cold spell.

That's not necessarily a tragedy, but something to think about as European countries get serious about wind energy.

[offdalip]

I'm an absolute expert at this.

The only time you have wind is when there is a high pressure system and a low pressure system.

The greatest wind is right in the middle of them.

these set up most often during the spring and during the fall.

If you are lucky you can live in a dessert microclimate close to the sea which heats up and cools down quickly
setting up daily thermal generated winds. Which is the other way to generate wind.

CA and OR have alotta the latter, The East coast and most mid-America have the former.

The former never happens during the summer except in a very few places.

wind energy increases are exponentially related to the wind speed increase

[Atash Hagmahani]

Uh oh. There are financial consequences for the fact that they are sitting idle. One of the things I keep trying to emphasize is that there are NO MAGIC-BULLET SOLUTIONS.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1345439/Customers-face-huge-wind-farms-dont-work-cold.html

The failure of Britain’s wind farms to produce electricity in the extreme cold will cost billions of pounds, create an economic crisis and lead to blackouts, leading industrialists have warned.

To cover up the ineffectiveness of wind farms the Government will be forced to build emergency back-up power plants, the cost of which will be paid by industry and consumers.

Jeremy Nicholson, director of the Energy Intensive Users Group, which represents major companies employing hundreds of thousands of workers in the steel, glass, pottery, paper and chemical industries, said the failure of wind power had profound implications.

He was speaking after new figures showed that during the latest cold snap wind turbines produced less than two per cent of the nation’s electricity.

Now Mr Nicholson predicts that the Government will encourage power companies to build billions of pounds worth of standby power stations in case of further prolonged wind failures.Last updated at 1:20 AM on 9th January 2011

And the cost of the standby generation will be paid for by industry and households through higher bills – which could double by 2020.

Industry regulator Ofgem has already calculated that the cost of achieving sustainable energy targets – set by Brussels but backed by the British Government – will amount to £200 billion, which will mean that annual household fuel bills will double to about  £2,400 on average within the next ten years.

[The Future]

I say and I say again.  Wind energy, in fact virtually all "renewable" forms of energy do not at this time represent what in the power industry is called "firm capacity".  Pedestrians are not fully educated on such matters and this is a problem when governments, also not fully educated on the matter, set renewable targets, supposedly in the public interest.

The intermittent nature of wind, solar etc. mean that any system to which they are connected must have as much generating equipment in a ready state AS IF THERE WERE NO RENEWABLES CONNECTED AT ALL.  The simple fact that there will be times with no wind and no sun should make this obvious.

Add to this that, as I keep saying, no policy maker is preparing people for a LIFESTYLE shift that would be required to 'rely' on renewables (in other words match consumption patterns with incident energy in real time) they inevitably there will be two costs, not one - the cost to install and maintain the renewables and the cost to install and maintain equipment of the same capacity as if there were no renewables.  The total (higher) cost will be paid for by consumers.

Backup plant demands much higher rates than baseload plant (ask the operators who virtually deliberately cause the California blackouts years ago, and go rich bringing plants online after the fact).  Consumers need to know the true costs of renewables or be prepared to change their lifestyle.

To say renewables are "ineffective" as the article suggests is either ignorant or malicious.  Of course they do not produce constant power...anyone who thought they would...

If anyone running a national gird had planned for renewables as firm capacity, they also need to lose their jobs.

The holy grail in the renewables fields remains efficient energy storage.  No one has found that solution yet.

On the plus side, my location and many others do have fairly consistent winds.  This won't affect the intermittent loss of wind/sun but it will allow investors to extract good value from their equipment.  The backup plant will still likely require higher rates...and the customers will still likely pay more for electricity.  No one said green was the same cost as not green folks.  You want green, put up green (money).

[offdalip]

The holy grail in the renewables fields remains efficient energy storage.  No one has found that solution yet.

Yes they have.

many different ways have been in fact proposed.

1. you could turn wind / sun energy into producing ammonia, which can produce energy / store energy in a miriad ways

2. you could turn wind / sun energy into producing hydrogen, which can produce energy directly or store it as a metal hydride

3. you could turn wind / sun energy into pumping water up a hill, which can produce energy when the water comes back down hill

the list is endless................... efficiency is the main concern

[The Future]

maybe you missed it in my original posting but we are agreeing - I said No one has found a solution for "efficient energy storage".

Everything so far wastes somewhere around half the energy in the storage/retrieval process.

Cost of storage is another cause it hasn't been deployed on a large scale.

There was one proposal to use compressed air in vacant desert caves etc in Scientific American cover story some time back.  But the efficiency numbers the authors use are very muc in question.  It seemed they claimed using some heat/cooling energy output (byproduct of compression/decompression) as part of the harvested energy and it remains to be seen how they could, ironically, efficiently gather than energy.

With that said, even inefficient energy storage would be viable if it were cheap enough using large scale renewables.

So add cheap to efficiency requirements.

[offdalip]

I think the 3 on my list have been the cheapest efficiency models that have been proposed so far.

the ammonia one is actually getting funded up in the NE I read as a trial project