New Power Consulting Wind Report
Now where have we seen pointless profligacy with public money before ....?
h/t Bishop Hill
Where's it going to end up? - perhaps Spain is showing the way?
Now where have we seen pointless profligacy with public money before ....?
h/t Bishop Hill
Where's it going to end up? - perhaps Spain is showing the way?
The challenge is that politicians make their money through directorships in big business. Big business likes big projects worth multi millions where scale and duplication can be utilised to lower costs and increase profits. You will not find big business in hydropower schemes as they cannot be duplicated, they are limited in scale. On the whole of the River Thames you can put at most 24 hydropower schemes the largest making 450kw at peak. An offshore wind farm can have 300 turbines making megawatts when the wind blows. Unfortunately no wind = no electricity. Too much wind = no electricity. You need the right kind of wind, seems familiar to snow and leaves on the line.
ReplyDeleteA simple story about wind involves the French, don't be too aghast read on. The French have developed quite a lot of wind power. They also have lots of nuclear power . They had more capacity than they required. The only solution was to reduce the nuclear generation. This is not a simple task also bringing nuclear back up to capacity is not a quick process. They reduced the nuclear generation. All is well wind is making up the difference. Then in the middle of winter a high pressure system moved in, no wind. Extremely cold, high power demands, insufficient power available. The simple easy solution was adopted.
Go on guess what it was.
They re-commissioned and started up a few old coal powered dirty high CO2 power stations from the 1950's. Hardly a green option but it is what they now use every time there is a power shortage due to no wind. It gets the coal miners vote.