Renewable Energy- Is the government missing a trick?

there are a number of misconceptions in this thread.

1 - wind turbine technology is not "new" per se but the technical engineering challenges related to the design, build and maintenance of large capacity turbines are not currently understood. the new bit is the large size, offshore (and onshore) turbine development and construction.

2 - the generated electricity is subsidised by feed in tariffs which are provided by government but vary across the world. i'm not convinced by the roi figures above, if it was that attractive everyone would be doing it! in reality there are consortiums of power companies, turbine manufacturers, financers etc all financing the projects.

3 - unreliability in output is addressed by storage and redistribution. just because the blades stop turning it doesn't mean the lights go out.

4 - modern turbines (i.e. larger ones, 3MW etc) require less wind speed to generate more electricity, it's extreme weather conditions that cause more issues than low speeds. upscaling farms (replacing low capacity turbines with high capacity turbines) mean more electricty per turbine/farm footprint.

5 - turbines are supposed to be rated to a 20 year life span given everything is "normal". due to the newness of the large turbines there are none about to test this. it's all virtual testing and accelerated life tests atm.

6 - nuclear may well be the "best" option in the long term, however to build and commission a number of nuclear facilities will cost more and take longer than it will to perfect any type of renewable technology.
 
Nuclear if done right is the logical solution for now... until be can crack Fusion or discovery a better way. I wonder how many advanced nuclear power stations could have been built with the money spent on "the war on terror", hmmmm.
 
The problems with wind turbine electricity generation are:
- Infrastructure
- Effectiveness
- Availability

The infrastructure is not there. I worked with Carillion who were acting on behalf of the company behind the Greater Gabbard Wind Farm. I witnessed the terrible hardship the company had to endure to get planning permission to lay a cable trench to the Sizewell B substation - and to think they wanted their own substation! The National Grid certainly won't pay for it.

Just look at Greater Gabbard. It's the world's largest offshore wind farm and just generates 500MW, when we're lucky.

In 2010 during the cold wintery months when it was icy and snowy, wind turbines contributed to very little of the UK's electricity demands. Most of which the statistics can be found here:
http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/statistics/publications/dukes/dukes.aspx


J-FRO said:
Nuclear is dangerous and very expensive to run though.
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Who told you this?

ShaolinDreams said:
Nuclear if done right is the logical solution for now... until be can crack Fusion or discovery a better way. I wonder how many advanced nuclear power stations could have been built with the money spent on "the war on terror", hmmmm.
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None. At the time it would have made little sense to construct a PWR reactor when EPR and AP1000 were around the corner.
 
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Wind farms will never payback the energy required to make them (extracting materials, fabrication etc etc). Also to power them when it's not windy they actually use electricity from other sources (nuclear) etc just to get the ****ing turbines spinning to make it look like they are doing something. How on earth is using them a good idea?

On a small scale, one per each house then yeah, that would be decent. Large scale ones just aren't efficient though. Nuclear is the only way forward for our increasing population. The UK is pretty much ****ed though as we sold our nuclear plans to the French for a minuscule amount of money courtesy of Mr Brown.

Wind farms aren't a good idea. They use more energy than they will ever produce. :(
 
Ricochet J said:
None. At the time it would have made little sense to construct a PWR reactor when EPR and AP1000 were around the corner.
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Im just saying about costs.. if we didnt waste trillions we could easily build these expensive advanced ones. AP1000 or whatever im sure you can buy a few for a couple of trillion and still have some change for a pint and bacon sarnie.
 
ShaolinDreams said:
Im just saying about costs.. if we didnt waste trillions we could easily build these expensive advanced ones. AP1000 or whatever im sure you can buy a few for a couple of trillion and still have some change for a pint and bacon sarnie.
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Money is all relative though. If the world went pitch black now do you think people would care about money? No presumably. Firstly, we'd be absolutely screwed. If we did have a chance to redeem ourselves though I'm sure nobody would care about who had the money. Man power and resources would surely be more valuable?
 
ShaolinDreams said:
Im just saying about costs.. if we didnt waste trillions we could easily build these expensive advanced ones. AP1000 or whatever im sure you can buy a few for a couple of trillion and still have some change for a pint and bacon sarnie.
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The government would not have given the money. The government can give incentives but they have consistently implied there is no public funding for nuclear. It'd have to be private. What they could have done was start to think about a repository...
 
Ricochet J said:
The government would not have given the money. The government can give incentives but they have consistently implied there is no public funding for nuclear. It'd have to be private. What they could have done was start to think about a repository...
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Yeah true mate, it's not going to happen how i would want, not in this world.

Macky said:
Money is all relative though. If the world went pitch black now do you think people would care about money? No presumably. Firstly, we'd be absolutely screwed. If we did have a chance to redeem ourselves though I'm sure nobody would care about who had the money. Man power and resources would surely be more valuable?
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I havent got a clue what youre trying to say mate.
 
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The biggest thing against wind turbines is the lack of realistic electricity storage. Even the largest hydro pumped storage operations in the UK don't have significant storage potential for smoothing generation against demand. If (BIG IF) we had a smart net and everyone drove a battery powered car, neatly forgetting the immense captial and maintenance costs of such a scheme. Then wind and renewable generation might make sense on a grand scale. Until then it is a fig leaf for our misplaced eco-consciousness because each GW of wind power requires a GW of relaible conventional generation to act as reserve so you pay twice for the same capacity.
 
PlacidCasual said:
The biggest thing against wind turbines is the lack of realistic electricity storage. Even the largest hydro pumped storage operations in the UK don't have significant storage potential for smoothing generation against demand. If (BIG IF) we had a smart net and everyone drove a battery powered car, neatly forgetting the immense captial and maintenance costs of such a scheme. Then wind and renewable generation might make sense on a grand scale. Until then it is a fig leaf for our misplaced eco-consciousness because each GW of wind power requires a GW of relaible conventional generation to act as reserve so you pay twice for the same capacity.
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One of the most underrated aspects of electricity production and supply is actually energy storage - if you could store electricity effectively for significant periods of time some of the major drawbacks of technologies like wind and nuclear power would become irrelevant.
 
Unfortunatly thats true, there is no practical way to store large amounts of power and it makes most renewables next to useless. Solar tidal and wind are all never going to fulfil any meaning role because of this more than anything else.
 
Ricochet J said:
Who told you this?
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It was a comparative point.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

Enough said on the dangers in comparison to renewable sources.

And as I've said, I've got no problem with Nuclear. I think it's better to head that way than be stuck on carbon based fuels. But it is dangerous nevertheless. One slip up and that's it. Of course there will be rigorous safety checks, but there is still a risk and that's all that matters.

And I truly am talking long term, wind farms and tidal power for the long long term are going to be necessary eventually.

Yeah the government might not want to invest now as politics will stand in the way, but down the line, when our children or grandchildren are growing up or whenever, and when there is a lack of coal/oil/gas due to political tensions or god knows what, the country will be stuffed then. That why we have to invest at some point in such renewable energy resources, and if the utility companies start monopolising on it now, the government wont be able to get involved in the future.
 
Offer this to the government.

If the government give you £1,000,000 now, you will give them £10,000 every year forever (I'll even be nice enough to increase this every year, according to inflation figures). It should pay for itself in 50 years right?

Now ask yourself why no sane person or entity will accept that and then you'll understand why the private sector haven't jumped on the renewable energy bandwagon without subsidies.

Simple answer is something called discounting.
 
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The only 'trick' the government is missing is NOT investing in nuclear power.

J-FRO said:
It was a comparative point.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

Enough said on the dangers in comparison to renewable sources.

And as I've said, I've got no problem with Nuclear. I think it's better to head that way than be stuck on carbon based fuels. But it is dangerous nevertheless. One slip up and that's it. Of course there will be rigorous safety checks, but there is still a risk and that's all that matters.
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Have a read about molten salt reactors, which China are currently developing. I'm going to shamelessly quote from Wikipedia.

MSRs can be safer. Molten salts trap fission products chemically, and react slowly or not at all in air. Also, the fuel salt does not burn in air or water. The core and primary cooling loop is operated at near atmospheric pressure, and has no steam, so a pressure explosion is impossible. Even in the unlikely case of an accident, most radioactive fission products would stay in the salt instead of dispersing into the atmosphere. A molten core is meltdown-proof, so the worst possible accident would be a leak. In this case, the fuel salt can be drained into passively cooled storage, managing the accident. Neutron-producing accelerators have even been proposed for some super-safe subcritical experimental designs, and the initiation of thorium transmutation to 233U can be directly accomplished with what is essentially a medical proton-beam source.[18]
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People are always looking at Chernobyl which was a Gen I reactor, and very poorly maintained. The cause of the disaster was the fault of the operators not the reactor, they disabled a number of the reactors protection features because they simply did not know what they were doing.
 
J-FRO said:
One of the huge bonuses of renewable energy is that there are no fuel costs. Once set up (which of course you need a lot of money to do), renewable energy sources such as wind farms will pay for themselves.
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No they don't they require massive subsidies from the government and even after that off shore wind still costs more perunit than nuclear due to the extremely high maintenance costs. (not to mention wind is unreliable so you still need to have a gas generator running al lthe time ready to spool up quickly and take up the slack.)

Renewables are great, but wind isn't.

You want reliable and feasible renewable we're going to have to do what the Scandinavian countries and china did and flood more valleys or build more river barrages hopefully wave wil lalso make progress.

Out of all the renewable wind for some reason is given publicity when it's one of the worst.

Also wind farms **** with radar.
 
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