B&Q Wind Turbines (Merged Thread)

magyar

What I mean is it's hard to use the phrase 'how much to make a unit of electricity' because it simply doesn't work like that. On a simple level, let's take a 2 MW wind turbine:

Generation over a year, assuming a 30% capacity factor will be 5,300 MWh

Capital costs will be about £2.1m if you include grid connection, civil work etc.
Lifetime operating costs will be about £1.5m (present value)
(there is assumed to be no decommissioning costs for a wind farm because the scrap value of the steel is assumed to match those costs)

So the actual cost of generation is (£3.6 m) / (5,300,000 kWh * 25 yrs) which comes out at 2.7p per kWh.

But as I say, what really matters is what that means to a company; i.e. will they make a profit from that? If it's more profitable to build a wind farm, they'll build wind farms; if it's more profitable to build nuclear, they'll build nuclear.

All the government can do is to incentivise, set targets and allow consents where appropriate, so it's impossible to NOT include the subsidies.

magyar

moonrakerz wrote: »

I am not convinced they are the way to go, I used to travel to Germany a lot, which is well provided with these things, and even the Germans are now having second thoughts about their usefulness because of their overall very low efficiency.

You still need to have something to back them up for when there is no wind.

As you indeed do with any form of generation. Every power station has a 'load factor' which is effectively the maximum amount of it's theoretical power it will generate. Because of failures, maintenance time, etc., no site has a load factor of 100%; typically it's 75-80%. Clearly wind is lower, because it isn't windy all the time, but the typical UK load factor is 30%. But the UK grid can support up to 20-25% intermittent power with no technical problems whatsoever.

Regarding Germany, it's really suffering from being a leader in its field. Most German wind farms are older than those being installed over here, so they're less reliable, less efficient and less productive. They're also mostly owned by the farmers who run the land, whereas here they're mainly run by large companies, so you get more economies of scale regarding maintenance etc.

moonrakerz wrote: »

Conventional power stations cannot be turned on and off at will, the only thing that can do this is a pumped storage plant, such as Dinorwig, but these plants can only run for a few hours. Another problem with this type of plant is that they consume 20% more electricity than they make !
(Dinorwig can go from zero output to 1800Mw output in 16 seconds)

I think we should look more intensively at tidal power (how long have they been talking about the Severn Barrage ???) and conventional hydro electric power. Conventional hydro power has another benefit of storing water - which at the moment, (unfortunately) we don't seem to be short of !

Controllability is actually far less of a problem than you might imagine. Most of the UK's energy needs are extremely predictable and the suppliers have very accurate forecasting models. Wind and nuclear, which are the least flexible, effectively supply 'base load', which is always required. But gas and coal stations, whilst they can't be 'turned off and on' quite so easily, their output can be.

Don't forget that dam hydro is just as controllable as pumped hydro. The problem with pumped hydro is the staggering cost (you'll never see another Dinorwig!) and the problem with dam hydro is (a) the environmental impact and (b) the fact we've more or less run out of decent sites. Run-of-river hydro is still being developed quite actively, but these sites are quite small and, again, the good sites are running out.

Marine is certainly being actively developed but we're only just seeing the first commercially-viable projects. It's a long way from being a mature technology. Severn Barrage, great idea but massive environmental impact and who's got the £12bn to build it?

moonrakerz wrote: »

Finally, I dare say I am going to upset a few people here ! The "cleanest" power available is nuclear and (upset again) it is safe !
It is certainly expensive, but price is a good regulator of consumption.

Agree on safe, agree on expensive, don't quite agree on cleanest, but yes - agree we need it, and actually because our power stations are getting older and nearing end of life; we're likely to see a massive problem if we don't build new nuclear.

We'll never see more than about 30% renewables at best (until large scale marine kicks off, which will be at least 40-50 years I'd say) so the rest will always have to be made up by conventional plant.

colinS

That should have been Nikola Tesla, sorry but I was really running out of time - and today the library computers are running slow, I think they are waterlogged.

I do not make these posts because I am anti wind, I just can't stand the !!!!!!!! concerning RE, it makes money for crooks and gives our politicians bandwagons to ride on. As for urban wind power, if you care to visit www.fieldlines.com and use my user name, CG, to search, you will find postings where I stuck my neck out in defence of the Windstor project. Windstor ended in being a complete fiasco, with contractors building an underground control room and errecting a tower above, while Mckenzie Bay, the company behind Windstor, didn't even have a turbine to put on it. I even sent them an email congratulating them for this first commercial installation two days before it failed - there are probably pics on the net of the unfinished work. It's a case of, once bitten, twice shy, with me, and I watch every urban wind energy plan like a hawk.

The Y installation designed for multi -Quiet Revolution turbines would cost a fortune, and deliver a generating capacity of about 30kw. You could site two Proven 15kw machines for much less than than, and the Provens would not need to take power from the grid to start up, and not have to shut down in winds over 16ms, as the QRT machine does.

The honey pot I was talking about is the Olympic Games fund honey pot, and architects will already be dipping their fat fingers into that to build stadiums that will hardly be used after the games, so I don't think we should let them propose silly wind energy ideas; we must speak out against them.

I have nothing against companies siting the QRT machine on their buildings, just so long as it's not with taxpayers' money; as a nation we spend little enough as it is on RE projects, so we can't afford to waste any.

adr0ck

from house builders update





Microgeneration: the real costs

Bit by bit, without really planning ahead or indeed any planning at all, I seem to be becoming a strident critic of microgeneration, i.e home-baked renewable power. I criticise the government, always an easy target, for their barmy zero carbon homes scheme and their mean stamp duty tax break for zero carbon homes. Then I turn my guns on Bill Dunster, a far less comfortable target for me as I am otherwise well-disposed towards him. I spend a couple of days worrying about whether I am just being spiteful for the sake of it. Maybe I am developing blogger syndrome where everything exists merely to be shot down in flames by cynics.

So I turn to Wikipedia and to trusty Excel and I start crunching some numbers. How do all the green and not-so-green methods of generating electricity stack up?

Turns out the UK is currently consuming 350 terawatt hours of electricity per annum. That’s 350,000,000,000 kWh. If you divide it by the 65 million people in the UK, it works out at a more manageable 5,300 kWh/annum each, round about average for Europe. In comparison, the USA consumes 12,000 kWh per annum each, India just 480 kWh per annum each.

Now, just suppose you were to try to make this amount of electricity using zero or low carbon sources. How would you go about it? Ignore for the moment all the arguments about practicalities and intermittent supply and everything like that.

350 terawatt hours per annum would require either
• 14,000 giant 10MW off shore wind turbines, operating at around 30% efficiency or
• 260 million 1kW micro wind turbines, operating at 15% efficiency, (that’s roughly ten mounted on every building in the land) or
• 4,000 sq km of PV cells. That’s pretty much the size of a county like Suffolk or Hampshire. Or enough to cover the south facing roofs of around 100 million homes — there are just 25 million in the UK or
• how about 25 European Pressurised Nuclear reactors (EPRs), as being built today in Finland? Each one is designed to have an output of 1600MW.

And what about comparitive costs?






Nuclear power plants cost around £1 billion each, so 25 No. would require £25 billion to supply UK’s 350TWh/a electricity needs. What is harder to factor in is the running costs and the clean-up costs at the end of the lifespan: nuclear power is notoriously difficult to cost because of this.

Giant off shore wind turbines. Around £5 million a piece, so 14,000 would cost £70 billion in total.

Micro-wind turbines. Around £1,500 each from B&Q, so 260 million would cost £525 billion in total.

PV arrays, around £1,000 per m2. A county-full would cost around £3,500 billion.

I think my case rests. Microgeneration is ridiculously expensive, just as I thought.

ANDY597

Im going to throw the cat amongst the pidgeons a little bit with this post a little bit me thinks.

First off all, I quite fancy one of these for my house as I stay right on the very corner of a housing estate faced by fields. Im in scotland, about 10 miles away from the coast, and its consistently windy.

I have already insulated pretty much everything I can at the moment but do long term want one of these. BUT NOT YET.

I reckon that after the initial novelty factor has worn off, you will be able to pick one of these up for, oh "not much cash"

I first heard about these a couple of years ago, windsave had approached a well know energy company to back them, but they didnt for whatever reason. Also initially windsave claimed that the time to outlay repayment was only 3 years.

Ive read almost every entry in the post, and my honest opinion is that for some people the technical stuff is great. But for most "normal" people on this board, the people in the street that want to save a few quid or do their little bit for the environment most of the posts so far are too technical.

Just my tuppence worth.

Cheery
A

adr0ck

i think the point is with the windsave andy is that for most people if they get one will be doing their little bit to make things worse for the environment

think of the energy costs in making one, transporting it etc etc

and then it produces nothing

magyar

ANDY597 wrote: »

First off all, I quite fancy one of these for my house as I stay right on the very corner of a housing estate faced by fields. Im in scotland, about 10 miles away from the coast, and its consistently windy.

Andy, as you're in Scotland you will probably have decent wind speeds, but you'll get the best value for money if you put up a larger turbine. Have you considered getting together with neighbours to see if there's any land you could put a larger turbine up?

colinS

Andy597

Lets get this straight; to save money,you want to buy a wind turbine with a life expectancy of about 10 years, and a payback period of about 50 years, and you call yourself "normal" ?

I left secondary modern school in 1959 aged 15,with no academic qualifications whatsoever, and I have attained none since; if you think what I post it too technical, I dread to think what your standard of education is.

But do waste money on a Windsave turbine, Gordon "The Incredible Sulk" Brown has cut the rebate scheme to the bone, so it will be all your money you are wasting, and your neighbours you will be upsetting when the thing goes wrong and you haven't got a service contract, because you have managed to buy it for "not much cash"

colinS

Just spotted this and it could be interesting. http://www.photonenergy.co.uk/press.html
They intend to test another turbine against the Proven later.

Cardew

ANDY597 wrote: »

Im going to throw the cat amongst the pidgeons a little bit with this post a little bit me thinks.


Ive read almost every entry in the post, and my honest opinion is that for some people the technical stuff is great. But for most "normal" people on this board, the people in the street that want to save a few quid or do their little bit for the environment most of the posts so far are too technical.

Just my tuppence worth.

Cheery
A

Andy,
I do understand the point you are making about being too technical; but that is only for those who want some sort of explanation of why it is so roundly condemned.

If you want it simple:

They are a complete and utter waste of money; their environmental credentials are questionable; they have technical problems etc.

Rather like the Sinclair electrical 'car' I have little doubt they will be unsupportable by the manufacturer in a fairly short while.

Read above for explanations!