221–230 of 334 posts
Stops the power being wasted ( though obviously hydrogen generation is less efficient than direct use ), and also creates a stored form of the energy for less windy days.
BTW also not suggest a hydrogen everywhere energy economy - use it centrally to augment/replace gas powered backup.
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Yeh I'm about 2km from a large wind park, it's the least obnoxious thing imaginable. Jogging through them at night with their dim red blinking strobes or watching them work overtime on a windy winter day is great and gives you a sorely needed feeling of optimism and hope for the future. Yes directly underneath them there is some gentle swooshing noises but I think beyond 500m it's basically imperceptible. Nothing I'd…
I can’t stand the fact that we put everything to committee when we’re trying to do something good, but not otherwise. I live near a highway, I can hear the cars all day, where’s my veto? I’ve lived near trains—but they were freight trains, so I didn’t get the “public transit is helpful for the little people” veto, I guess. It’s like we can only accomplish anything as a society if if the fact that it is going to piss…
Existential threats always seem to have an interesting way of unlocking progress.
Just look at how quickly Germany was able to build the north sea LNG terminals in the face of the russian gas crisis [1].
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Out of interest, what would happen if you were to sell/give it to your neighbours anyway? Is it a slap on the wrist, or are we talking of multi-thousand pound fines? I ask because whilst I believe there are no doubt (probably very strict) regulations around the selling of electricity, I wonder how enforceable they are on the average Joe. If I were to run a cable to my neighbour and just deny I was sharing my electric…
Well, unless you invest non-trivial extra work, you're going to start showing up on grid monitoring and finally someone will drill down in problem looking for broken substation and find you doing exactly the things that caused the problems and the reason for it being illegal to "just hook up". It's just that often in many places law lagged in ways of dealing with islanded operation, and semi-islanded cases (where you…
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I wonder why somebody doesn’t open a datacenter in Scotland. Sounds like they have too much power… also it is a bit chilly, right?
Despite wind energy being in excess in Scotland AFIR end users are still paying very high prices due to marginal pricing used in the UK - electricity cost is set by the most expensive source of energy (even if it is 0.1% of the mix) and most of the time gas is the most expensive source. I think marginal pricing is detrimental but there is no political will to axe it.
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Who opposes Power lines? Never heard that this is a thing. As a foreign influence I'd be delighted to target all infrastructure proposals and bombard it with trolls.
Power lines I don't get as a NIMBY concern. The other things I can see the argument. I bought a house partially because it has direct access to a pole mounted transformer. I've had a lot of issues with last mile power delivery in residential areas that rely on buried lines and pad mounted transformers. If a transformer on a pole blows up, it can be replaced within 4 hours. Buried lines and pad mounted transformers ca…
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Saw multiple people on HN literally 2 days ago complaining about how noisy solar is. Absolutely baffling.
What's noisy about them? The transformers? Or something else?
This website doesn't provide much context if you're not familiar with the situation. I found this article helpful: https://www.the-independent.com/climate-change/octopus-energ...
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This is all true, the NIMBYs are real and we must construct additional pylons... but the largest part of curtailment costs come from the UK energy sector's project mismanagement. 1. We have two undersea cable projects (EGL1&2) to provide transmission capacity between all the new windfarms in Scotland, and SE England where it's used. Both projects are years late. 2. But we keep approving and switching on more windfarm…
I wonder why somebody doesn’t open a datacenter in Scotland. Sounds like they have too much power… also it is a bit chilly, right?
I don’t know why Northern Canada is not full of data centers. There’s untapped hydroelectric potential up there as well as free cooling.
If Russia wasn’t a basketcase politically Siberia would be great too.
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This literally is the bottleneck which wastes the energy and is so stupidly expensive in the case of Britain (and Germany). The issue is lots of renewable generation far from places where it is used and not enough transmission capability. This is called curtailment and is really, really bad. Energy providers need to pay the windfarms for the energy that they (the grid operators) fail to transmit to where it is needed…
It’s an issue right now because we lack the ability to steer demand. Connect a few million electric cars and heat pumps to the grid and allow the grid operators to talk to them and the issue is much less severe.
You have an intermittent power source (wind), far removed from where the energy is needed, and you do not have sufficient electric transmission capacity.
Heat pumps or EVs far removed from the source of generation will not do you any good. You need load where the energy is produced or you need more transmission capacity.
The situation GB has is that there is load, and there is enough renewable generation on the grid to meet that load, however they do not have the capability to bring the electricty to where the load is. You can lessen the demand, but the generation would not get less through that. The only benefit of that would be that you wouldn't have to spin up gas plants, but the same amount of wind energy would still be lost.
The UK has notoriously long build times for new power lines which heavily contributes to this problem. I think the FT said a new connection for a big user or power supplier often takes ten years, with planning alone now reaching 4.5 years and half of all new connections getting sued, which is insane considering the productivity loss and how it’s a already known problem. Sadly the government seems dar more interested…