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The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

wastedwind.energy

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Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#331

Post by yrro »

IshKebab wrote: post #305
yrro wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air has a rough estimation of the amount of energy we can generate from offshore wind. https://www.withouthotair.com/c10/page_62.shtml 16 kWh/day/person for shallow offshore and 32 kWh/day/person for deep offshore To build enough wind turbines to generate 48 kWh/day per person is estimated to require 60 million tonnes of steel. That's three times the amount of steel that the United…

That book hasn't aged well in my opinion. Reality has done much better than its doom and gloom predictions. On that very page he is doubting that the UK will ever have 33 GW of installed offshore wind capacity, but we're already at 16 GW. We don't have to generate 48 kWh/day/person for it to make sense to build a mountain of offshore wind.

I'd like to see an updated edition too.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#332

Post by immibis »

p_l wrote: post #51
hgomersall wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would make sense for energy to be given away locally before we have curtailment used. Why is that not a thing?

Because curtailment is about the available pickups not being able to take the energy. If you had a sink for it, you wouldn't be paid for curtailment so long as it was send through the grid. I bet if you used an alternate local grid the grorious (sic) (in)efficiency of capitalism will figure out how to be paid double.

Then reduce prices in that area, and there will be demand and you'll make more money.

Except you can't because there's a law saying the price of electricity has to be the same everywhere in the country. You can be right next to a wind turbine that's turned off, and they're not allowed to sell to you for less than the price they'd sell to the other end of the country, even though they're also not allowed to sell to the other end of the country.

Of course, this law was probably a reaction to a previous time where the price differences were excessively huge. A law like this doesn't exist for no reason. There is a balancing act, as both extremes were already found to have problems. It can be that the "stupid can't sell law" is actually considered good because it makes investors build new supply at the other end of the country or to build more transmission lines, instead of building where you are and trying to sell to you locally.

Re: The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain

#333

Post by physicsguy »

yrro wrote: post #331
IshKebab wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That book hasn't aged well in my opinion. Reality has done much better than its doom and gloom predictions. On that very page he is doubting that the UK will ever have 33 GW of installed offshore wind capacity, but we're already at 16 GW. We don't have to generate 48 kWh/day/person for it to make sense to build a mountain of offshore wind.

I'd like to see an updated edition too.

The guy who wrote it died not long after the last edition came out, so unfortunately it’s not likely to see one.
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