Wind power - is it the future of electricity generation?

whatalanger · 15-10-2004 7:20pm #1

Is wind power really all its cracked up to be or will this country have to consider nuclear power to meet demand for electricity when fossil fuel resources inevitably run out?

Capt'n Midnight · 16-10-2004 9:35pm

Wind power is part of the solution, not the be all and end all.

Hydroelelectric is unlikely to generate a lot more than at present since all the best spots are in use/environmental issues.

The ESB have used pumped storage in Turlough hill since before most of youze were born. This is just as well because electricty demand is even more erratic than wind power. In fact you could replace the generators and just use windmills to pump water for later hydroelectric use.

Peat stations could be replaced by coppiced willow. It might even be possible to use something like a combine harvester on stilts to gather the biomass.

Wave power is more constant than wind power.

Waste thermal treatment generates nearly 1% of the dioxin as released on bonfire night so we can't do that. Instead we ship 80% of "recycled" material to places like China and India.

Most other methods of generating waste require imports, even nuclear power means importing most of the technology as well as the fuel and paying for waste disposal. The ESB is earning money with overseas projects.

Stoner · 02-11-2004 5:22pm

Personally, I think Nuclear power is the way to go. Wind energy is "dirty" power, marine is still to make a break through, i never studied bio avenues, it seems thay they have great potential though, my primary qualification is in Power Engineering, I always loved it but jobs were limited in ireland, I guess our/ my biggest scare with nuclear energy is having the faith in us Paddys to run it safely , LOL , sad but true

Capt'n Midnight · 02-11-2004 5:54pm

Stoner wrote:

Personally, I think Nuclear power is the way to go. Wind energy is "dirty" power,

Dirty compared to nuclear , pray do tell...

I guess our/ my biggest scare with nuclear energy is having the faith in us Paddys to run it safely , LOL , sad but true

I'd be more affraid of brown envelopes at planning, construction, waste disposal stages, the nuclear industry especially the americans ain't squeaky clean, nor are the local powers that be.

Stoner · 03-11-2004 12:11pm

True Cap,

but i ment (as you may know) "dirty" as in spikey, difficult to sync, variable etc - as in poor quality electricity, I guess your right on the planning auth too

Red Alert · 03-11-2004 11:15pm

Yes indeed, the erratic nature of wind power is not exactly to the grids liking. It's quite hard to manage and is certainly not a set-and-forget technology. As a matter of interest, how is the frequency kept constant with wind power? Is there only one rotational speed that a turbine can operate at to maintain the 50Hz?

Stoner · 04-11-2004 1:14pm

Not 100% on this as it changes alot, but usually when there are farms, they are mech geared to rotate at a semi constant speed or not at all, stronger winds turn more load at a constant speed, as you know electrical load appears like a mechanical load at the o/p of the generation, the mills parallel supply the grid, on generator generating too fast or slow can cause problems pole hop staqrt apearing as additional load etc, so if wind picks up your output picks up too so extra energy can come on board but when coupled with say coal generation it can be difficlut to manage as coal would be a constant base supply, hydro is easier to control, oil and gass are very easy to control but expensive to run, but these forms of generation you can perpare for peaks with all of them except wind as there is no Buffer/resevoir , thats why pumping water up a hill is good because you can control when you release the water into the hydro gen set, the pumped water simulates a battery that fills up when its windy and emptys when you need it. This removes the need to sync the wind power
Im unsure about the operation of some of these stand alone mills that the farmers have in mayo etc, i guess they are synched diirectly to the grid and supply is directly and are kept in sync by electric control, this is maybe over simplified but you could see how the spikes could occue in this arrangement ie woth power coming in and out at 50 Hz but in consistant output

Capt'n Midnight · 07-11-2004 11:48am

I still think pumped storage would be ideal for windmills, since most of our ones are on top of hills in areas that have enough rain.

Any offshore wind farm will almost certainly use DC because of undersea cables, and perhaps most of the onshore ones produce DC which then gets converted to AC before transmision, it's a lot easier than synchronising the windmills and sorts out lots of voltage regulation problems...

Stoner · 08-11-2004 5:06pm

All true, i agree on the pumped storage too 100%

Nukem · 16-05-2005 1:50pm

Did a bit of work on the new energy sources yada yada........(spare ya the deatils) the one they really are/should more push is Wave energy. Reliable with the tides at twice a day,coming in and out so predictable 4 times a day,huge energy implications. Technology is getting there slowly but surely.

Wind is a pain in the ass some times due to the temperment of the wind turbines - wind not fast enough they wont work and too fast they stop as a safety feature,need a good bit of maintenance.

Nukem

Capt'n Midnight · 16-05-2005 1:58pm

Nukem wrote:

Wave energy.

Salter's Duck the technology of the future - for as long as anyone can remember - be nice to see someone use it

Nukem wrote:

with the tides at twice a day,coming in and out so predictable 4 times a day,huge energy implications. Technology is getting there slowly but surely.

- bit problem with tide is that you don't have a large head - the drop is very small if you want to generate water as the tide runs out, might be better off letting all the water out when the tide is at it's lowest and use many different stations in round robin fashion, and the environmental impact is messy too.

Nukem wrote:

Wind is a pain in the ass some times due to the temperment of the wind turbines - wind not fast enough they wont work and too fast they stop as a safety feature,

Energy demand fluctuates more than wind and it wouldn't be a problem until we get a large % of our energy needs from wind

Nukem · 16-05-2005 2:28pm

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

-bit problem with tide is that you don't have a large head - the drop is very small if you want to generate water as the tide runs out, might be better off letting all the water out when the tide is at it's lowest and use many different stations in round robin fashion, and the environmental impact is messy too.

Ah the pitfall - a Norwegian company have come along and thought outside the box. We always think of tide in rising and lowering,vertical. What about the horizontal,some tides stretch and the water flowing over or through a miny turbine of huge length generates massive power. As far as i know its in the development stage still.

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

Energy demand fluctuates more than wind and it wouldn't be a problem until we get a large % of our energy needs from wind

Was in Moneypoint Powerstation recently and they were telling me that they can nearly predict power fluctuations but within reason

johnnyc · 16-05-2005 2:54pm

at the moment wind power doesn't generate enoght electricity, the future electric source would be nuclear. Maybe they will be able to find the solution to nuclear fusion how to produce it?

daveirl · 16-05-2005 4:26pm

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Capt'n Midnight · 16-05-2005 6:19pm

How are you going to protect small reactors from terrorists / corrupt governments ?
How will they be cleaned up afterwards ?

Note: they are various species of plants and microbes called hyperaccumulators. These organisms could be genetically modified to concentrate uranium, and they would prefer one isotope above another providing a cheap low tech way to generate weapons grade material. - oh and it's not science fiction - it already happened about 2 billion years ago.

Economically producable Uranium is not going to outlast coal. And plutonium is far too dangerous to justify it's use for power generation. Yes it's hard to make the explosive lenses, but even a fizzle would be catastrophicly explosive not to mention the fallout.

daveirl · 16-05-2005 6:49pm

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CathalMc · 16-05-2005 7:54pm

Ya, there was an interesting article on pebble bed reactors in some issue of wired back a few months. The chinese are ahead of the game on this, using (originally) german technology. Its an inherently safe principle with respect to other forms of nuclear reactors. The principle they are shooting for is "walk away" safe, that if you just picked up and walked away from the pebble bed during a coolant failure, the system will not melt down. The uranium fletchetts are encased in multiple layers of silicon carbide (if i recall correctly) which is extremely durable (rated to a million years). Furthermore, due to something called doppler broadening (again if i recall correctly), the pebbles expand when in a overheated scenario like coolant failure which reduces the neutron absorption so the reaction slows down. Its fascinating stuff but you'd have to wonder how viable it is to make the huge numbers of pebbles at the scale needed for commercial use. As far as my limited perspective is aware, China is faced with a bigger energy crisis than the rest of the world at the moment since it is developing so fast, so I believe theres going to be some real exciting research to come out of it, not just in the nuclear fields. Interesting times.

(all details are from my recollection only)

daveirl · 16-05-2005 9:04pm

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bandraoi · 22-05-2005 2:11am

very interesting articel in the ICE magazine there lately. It was about wind power, looking at Denmark, which has the the highest proportion of wind farm generated electricity in the world.

The basic conclusion was that the only reason Denmark can get away with this is because its grid is so heavily interconnected with other countries, in particular Norway and Sweden.

When the wind is exactly right, but demand is low, they can easily sell the excess to foreign markets. When the wind suddenly goes over the edge from stong but manageable to too strong, or in gusty winds Denmark can easily buy in electricity from other countries with steadier out puts.
Further to this, if the wind dies suddenly during peak times (which happens several times a year) the responsive nature of hydro electric power in Norway and Sweden can quickly kick in to save their asses.

Basically if you want to use wind power, you need very responsive back up power capable of meeting your peak demand with no wind. That's a big and very costly thing to do.

Capt'n Midnight · 22-05-2005 1:42pm

bandraoi wrote:

Basically if you want to use wind power, you need very responsive back up power capable of meeting your peak demand with no wind. That's a big and very costly thing to do.

No one is suggesting that you run the entire grid from wind alone. And aren't we windier than Denmark ?

And we already have pumped storage, ( which I haven't heard the nuclear lobby mentioning, 'cos Nukes have to run 24/7 and pumped storage is a key component if you want to have a large proportion of your energy efficiently from nuclear - another cost to add to decomissioning )

I don't know the technicalities but I'd imagine it should be possible to retro fit pumped storage to many of the existing hydro stations, once you can find a decent lower resevoir.

Responsive backup power - interconenctors to Wales / NI / Gas turbines - do able.

Oh and a lot of the peat stations could be converted to run on twigs, from coppiced willow, not timber but the sort of stuff you weave baskets from. Of course most of the peat stations are beyond their sell by date so may not be worth the conversion.

Or we could use wind power to generate Hydrogen and use it to run gas turbines or later on fuel cells or even mix it into natural gas for industrial / domestic use - because the other problem with wind can be excess power when not needed.

theCzar · 23-05-2005 7:39pm

I've also heard that we're the windiest in Europe, but it seems to me that most of the current (onshore) windfarms are never really going to be more than subsistence generation. The Offshore farms can produce reasonable amounts of energy, and don't have the enviromental impact, but they have obvious engineering complications.

On a side note, does anybody know much about the new electricity "stock market" which allows generators and distributors bid for electricty, and potentially speculate on the market? I know it's being introduced, in fact I think it may have come in already with full opening of the Irish electricity market. I heard a talk on it while working for the ESB, but it made little sense!

Nuclear power is a bust IMO, however safe and reliable (theoretically), the problems of waste management have never been solved properly, and since we have no local Uranium deposits, it's not going to be cheaper. C'mon fusion!

Capt'n Midnight · 23-05-2005 10:33pm

theCzar wrote:

On a side note, does anybody know much about the new electricity "stock market" which allows generators and distributors bid for electricty, and potentially speculate on the market? I know it's being introduced, in fact I think it may have come in already with full opening of the Irish electricity market. I heard a talk on it while working for the ESB, but it made little sense!!

The thing that makes little sense is in the UK where large engineering companies can make more money by closing down then by trying to make a profit from the stuff they do - and it's all to do with cost and amount of electricty they would otherwise use, that the electric company can sell elsewhere at a higher price..

bandraoi · 25-05-2005 12:18pm

Energy from waste is one of the best options for environmentally friendly energy production at the moment, but try telling that to the knee-jerk environmentalists.

Wind power - is it the future of electricity generation?

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