Wind Turbines
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I hope you mean 3.0MW (megawatts) not 3.0 milliwatts
Graham
ha ha good call...i DID mean 3.0MW
it would have been even better if it was from a 3.0mW turbine though!! something to aspire too!!
We have just come back form holiday and on holiday we went to CAT (Centre for alternative technology). There was a lot of interesting info there. The concencus was that land wind turbines are effectively a waste of time. Off shore ones were not however. As for nuclear power Well I used to visit a few to service analytical equipment that was used to test the reactant water for Rubidium. This was in a C£ lab below ground and right next to the reactor wall. Boy are they noisy!!
A lot of rubbish is spoken about low level neulcear waste. At Hartlepool the whole site is classed as C2(easier for security). But that means that stuff that is nearlly five miles away from the reator is classed as low level neuclear active waste(including the waste from the kitchen!! or your letter of complaint). The fact that a lot has never even seen any radio activity is nothing to do with it!
Having said all that , I am against nuclear power stations. But the trouble is huamans are like a virus. We comsume everything in site and keep expanding. The only way we will sort out our energy demands is to have less demands(IMHO).
Alan
A lot of rubbish is spoken about low level neulcear waste. At Hartlepool the whole site is classed as C2(easier for security). But that means that stuff that is nearlly five miles away from the reator is classed as low level neuclear active waste(including the waste from the kitchen!! or your letter of complaint). The fact that a lot has never even seen any radio activity is nothing to do with it!
Having said all that , I am against nuclear power stations. But the trouble is huamans are like a virus. We comsume everything in site and keep expanding. The only way we will sort out our energy demands is to have less demands(IMHO).
Alan
I dont know that land ones are worthless, the ones in norfolk seem to be doing well, well according to their ecocenter people, norfolk is mostly flat land, so the windflow is pretty nice.
Mr. Sanderson has touched on a very important point in his posts. To some extent it explains why there's such a lot of the "hot air" in this thread, as pointed out by another poster.
About half the cost of the electricity that you buy goes into electricity distribution. Not the generation, the distribution. That means sub-stations, transformers, transmission lines, safety systems, storage schemes, monitoring, load balancing, power conditioning, metering, maintenance, you name it.
The idea that you can solve all the problems just by spending the entire nation's wealth (and then some) on solar panels completely misses the point that we, as a nation, ALL watch "Big Brother" at seven o' clock for half an hour, and then get up from the sofa to make a cuppa. Well it might not be seven, I don't know because I've never seen it.
Anyway from the point of view of an electrical engineer (and I'm a Chartered Electrical Engineer) when ten million people all switch on the kettle, interesting things happen back at the generating plant. Electricity is a lot like water. What comes out of the pipe at one end has to be put into the pipe at the other end, and vice versa.
So unless somebody fires up 25 gigawatts of generating plant at precisely seven thirty, the lights will go very dim and you'll all be complaining about the power company when in fact you're being totally unreasonable with your demands. Electricity doesn't just sit in the socket waiting to come out at your whim. Back at the generating plant, somebody has to be metaphorically waiting for when you flick that switch, ready to give the electricity an extra little push.
Again from the point of view of an electrical engineer, if you've prepared for it then it's fairly easy to fire up a 1GW(e) gas-fired power station. Or even twenty-five of them in this scenario. But you can't do that at all with solar panels, wind turbines, tidal generation, wave-power schemes, nor even easily with nuclear power plant.
One solution to this problem is storage. But we simply do not have the storage capacity available to be able to cope with the capricious electricity demands of the UK public. Look for example at the Dinorwic pumped storage scheme. It has less than one-tenth of the capacity required for just those kettles, and it cost over 400 million quid in the 1970s. It took ten years to build it.
Think about that the next time you dash to the kitchen at the end of the feature film.
About half the cost of the electricity that you buy goes into electricity distribution. Not the generation, the distribution. That means sub-stations, transformers, transmission lines, safety systems, storage schemes, monitoring, load balancing, power conditioning, metering, maintenance, you name it.
The idea that you can solve all the problems just by spending the entire nation's wealth (and then some) on solar panels completely misses the point that we, as a nation, ALL watch "Big Brother" at seven o' clock for half an hour, and then get up from the sofa to make a cuppa. Well it might not be seven, I don't know because I've never seen it.
Anyway from the point of view of an electrical engineer (and I'm a Chartered Electrical Engineer) when ten million people all switch on the kettle, interesting things happen back at the generating plant. Electricity is a lot like water. What comes out of the pipe at one end has to be put into the pipe at the other end, and vice versa.
So unless somebody fires up 25 gigawatts of generating plant at precisely seven thirty, the lights will go very dim and you'll all be complaining about the power company when in fact you're being totally unreasonable with your demands. Electricity doesn't just sit in the socket waiting to come out at your whim. Back at the generating plant, somebody has to be metaphorically waiting for when you flick that switch, ready to give the electricity an extra little push.
Again from the point of view of an electrical engineer, if you've prepared for it then it's fairly easy to fire up a 1GW(e) gas-fired power station. Or even twenty-five of them in this scenario. But you can't do that at all with solar panels, wind turbines, tidal generation, wave-power schemes, nor even easily with nuclear power plant.
One solution to this problem is storage. But we simply do not have the storage capacity available to be able to cope with the capricious electricity demands of the UK public. Look for example at the Dinorwic pumped storage scheme. It has less than one-tenth of the capacity required for just those kettles, and it cost over 400 million quid in the 1970s. It took ten years to build it.
Think about that the next time you dash to the kitchen at the end of the feature film.
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Good question. You sort of can, to an extent, but there are two technical problems and probably a lot more organizational ones.
First technical problem: you can push heat up a hill, but the higher the hill the harder it gets. If you put a jacket of water around the black heat exchanger fins at the back of your fridge or freezer, the water would warm up to the point where the heat pump in the fridge can't pump any harder. At that point, the thermostat in the fridge would stay permanently switched on, all the ice in the fridge would melt, your food would go bad, and you'd still only have some tepid water.
Second technical problem: your fridge or freezer uses only a few hundred watts. You need a few thousand watts to supply the demand for hot water in the home unless you're prepared to wait ages after junior's had a bath so that you can have your own.
Organizational issues involve plumbing the fridge into the domestic water system for example, and it just isn't worth the candle when you can do it properly using suitably sized heat pumps (several kilowatts instead of several hundred watts). That's when you start to make savings, typically you get twice the heat out that you put in although you should be able to get three times if it's done right and the salesman will probably say five times. But we all know about salesmen
On the other hand, if you're heating your home, the fridge is helping a little so the heat it produces isn't really wasted.
Yeah, in-line boilers. Had them over here for years, saves on a large water tank.
They are also known as Combi Boilers.
They are also known as Combi Boilers.
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I knew of this issue many, many, moons ago when I was at school. My physics teacher referred to it as the "Coronation Street Effect". I thought that it had been significantly reduced by the spread of viewers across many channels, although I guess it's come back now that every channel seems to put on their adverts at the same time.
LOL. It has the same effect on the plumbing. In the early 1980s when the final episode of MASH aired, the water pressure dropped dramatically when it was over and everybody went to the toilet at the same time. IIRC it was the only time the effect was even greater than at the end of the Super Bowl.
I managed to live comfortably for 10+ years with a small wind turbine and photovoltaics on my boat so you're talking out of your elbow Rik
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They were common in the 1950s, we use to call ours "the gas geyser" because it was (town) gas heated, and sometimes more steam came out of it than hot water. :yikes:
Electric shower heaters are commonly what we call 'instant' but I don't know if these on-demand types are popular for sinks etc. any more. I use both the 'instant' electric shower heater and the 'under-sink' heater with a small (15 litre) tank for small amounts of hot water which heats up quickly as the heater is the same power as you'd have in a hot water storage tank with ten or fifteen times the capacity.
We have some pretty strange water regulations over here, so it may be that legislation plays a part. I'm pretty sure our old gas geyser wouldn't have met current regulations, it used to frighten the life out of me!
I have a gas powered "Instantaneous multipoint water heater", which is like a combi boiler but only heats hot water going to taps. It supplies all the hot water in my house. I don't think it was an original fit to the house (1960s build) as there is an airing cupboard with some sealed-off electrics and some holes in the floorboards that are slightly bigger than 15mm in diameter. However, looking at the other houses on the estate they all seem to have boiler/water heater flues on the walls. Some, perhaps most, of the houses have long-since been converted from gas-fired warm air to radiators, so they probably have combi boilers. Works very well, and was replaced about 7-8 years ago when the heat exchanger on the old one finally failed.
Graham
Graham
I grew up in a house powered by mirco-hydro pushing out about 4.5kW barring drought, spate or a big freeze. It's fantastic. But then most people don't have an uninhabited mountain behind their house. The system relies on 4" pipe with running down the hillside from a collector to a nozel driven pelton wheel turbine at the bottom. In the summer, the flow in the burn is significantly reduced. Because we're the only house that relies on it, that doesn't really matter.
Archimedes screw type turbines are better for low head, large volume water courses to generate electricity. They have a smaller footprint and let fish transit them downstream safely (a ladder is needed to allow them to swim upstream).
Solutions which can be successfully applied to remote rural installations go only a very small way to address overall energy production in this country.
Archimedes screw type turbines are better for low head, large volume water courses to generate electricity. They have a smaller footprint and let fish transit them downstream safely (a ladder is needed to allow them to swim upstream).
Solutions which can be successfully applied to remote rural installations go only a very small way to address overall energy production in this country.
A lot of the problems of wind power will be solved with 2 things:
1) Siting offshore - where the wind is stronger so more energy available, they aren't an eyesore, a danger or an earsore
2) Economies of scale. As more are built we learn to make them more energy efficient and cheaper. Also, the more they are distributed offshore around our coasts, the more of a statistically reliable energy source we have.
A common criticism is 'what when the wind doesn't blow?'. It's a valid criticism but more for energy storage than energy production.
Energy is a multi-faceted problem there won't be one killer solution but a bunch of technologies. For example, LED lights are getting better & cheaper & use far less electricity than incandescant or even long life bulbs. Battery technology is improving on the back of the mobile phone industry.
My favourite low tech solution though is that all prisoners have to produce X watts of electricity per day on various gym like machines attached to generators. Once they break the reasonable wattage barrier they are given food. Once they have covered the cost of keeping themselves in prison they can be paid for the watts they produce. Boring, hard work, socially useful and a lesson on getting back on the right track all in one. So it would never be allowed.
(Hope that wasn't too political)
1) Siting offshore - where the wind is stronger so more energy available, they aren't an eyesore, a danger or an earsore
2) Economies of scale. As more are built we learn to make them more energy efficient and cheaper. Also, the more they are distributed offshore around our coasts, the more of a statistically reliable energy source we have.
A common criticism is 'what when the wind doesn't blow?'. It's a valid criticism but more for energy storage than energy production.
Energy is a multi-faceted problem there won't be one killer solution but a bunch of technologies. For example, LED lights are getting better & cheaper & use far less electricity than incandescant or even long life bulbs. Battery technology is improving on the back of the mobile phone industry.
My favourite low tech solution though is that all prisoners have to produce X watts of electricity per day on various gym like machines attached to generators. Once they break the reasonable wattage barrier they are given food. Once they have covered the cost of keeping themselves in prison they can be paid for the watts they produce. Boring, hard work, socially useful and a lesson on getting back on the right track all in one. So it would never be allowed.
(Hope that wasn't too political)Though they may not be massively efficient, I'd rather look upon a few turbines than a great big power station!
They don't work, end of story, waste of money. Lets get the nuclear plants built asap.
I've read of a few people that live off-grid and rely on wind turbines to charge battery banks. They're not going to ever provide all the power we need, but they do help a little. When I looked this morning, the National Grid was reporting nearly 800MW being supplied by wind turbines. It's a small percentage of the total production, but it's something.
