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Aureon posted:.. Ok, again. Let's say you have a 1GW nominal capacity (hydro generators), but only 0.8GW continuous power from actual water piling up in your reservoir. You can temporarily generate more electricity by letting more water out, except you need to fill up before you can do that again. This way you can backup 0.2GW of peak power that wind may not be generating when you need it most. In fact, if you have too much wind power at night, you can start pumping water back up in the reservoir. In Holland we use our electricity at night to power Norway (!), which lets them save their water levels for the next day, when they give it back to us. No actual pumping yet, but there are plans for it. Unrelated, I work as an engineer on offshore wind parks so I know a fair amount about them. If anyone has any questions I'll be happy to answer. e: There's a name for it: Pumped Storage Hydroelectricity Knitting Beetles fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Sep 7, 2012 |
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Sep 7, 2012 16:54
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Hobo Erotica posted:This sounds interesting, could you tell us some more? Where do you work, what do you, what is it like on the job, what's it like in the market place? Missed your post, sorry! My job is as a contractor, working at an engineering firm designing and building the electrical transformer platform that sits at the center of the wind farm. Its main function is to connect the individual wind turbine cables (at 30 kV) to the big cable (150 kV) going to shore. I work in The Netherlands, but most of the farms are built in Germany at the moment. Germany has a relatively small piece of the North Sea pie, but they plan to cram as much wind turbines in it as possible, see this link. I'm not entirely sure how much of this is subsidized by the German government, only that it's substantial. To compare, The Netherlands has more North Sea but only two small wind farms, with not a lot of plans for more. The case for wind parks on land vs sea is mostly about scale. On land (in densely populated Northern Europe at least) it's very difficult to build a 100-turbine farm because you would run into a mountain of poo poo from local governments and NIMBY residents. The NIMBY attitude is pretty valid as well because for wind turbines to be effective they need to be very large, say 100 meters high with 120 meters span. Apart from the eyesore these turbines make a lot of noise that carries very far due to the height. The noise is a killer here, you're talking about a 40-50 square km area where you can hear turbine noise all day every day, good luck finding one. On sea you don't have this problem but going offshore means there are a lot of practical problems and expenses that you don't have on land. It's a pretty hostile environment for people doing maintenance, and because wind turbines break *often* you have to deal with lovely winter weather and high wind (oops) at sea. Everything is made from high grade stainless steel ($$$), but it still rots like a motherfucker because salty air is one of natures best ways of increasing entropy. Safety systems, emergency generators, redundant communications, helicopter landing pads, it all adds up pretty quickly. If you have the room, build them on land really.
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Sep 14, 2012 15:45
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Yeti Fiasco posted:Why would you want to though? Surely a better location is near a metropolitan area so there's less transmission lines. The location of a nuclear plant depends pretty much only on water availability for cooling, that's why they're all close to sea / rivers / lakes. Transmission losses are pretty small for the first few hundred km.
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Sep 17, 2012 15:47
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Hobo Erotica posted:Sydney is launching a plan to overhaul our energy supply, if anyone is interested there's a detailed 118 page plan here: It is, like any renewable energy proposal I guess, quite optimistic. I'll just comment on things I actually know something about so they could be right on the rest. Building windmills within the city limits sounds awful, they make so much noise. The case study says it's not a problem because the city also makes noise, excellent! Estimating offshore wind capacity factor at 40% is laughable. German offshore wind farms do 17% and it's not because they're technically incompetent. poo poo breaks, offshore poo poo breaks more often and takes a lot longer to fix. In Germany they also have a lot of trouble with the effects of windy at night / not windy during the day combo so unless you have some nearby hydro power to offload excess energy this may be a problem as well. Mini turbines on high buildings are window dressing, they amount to absolutely nothing. The case study mentions a building with 19 kW nominal capacity, lol. Tidal / wave power is a pipe dream and I think it'll stay that way forever. It's just too expensive to build and maintain rotating equipment under water for the relatively small amount of energy you get from it. Also you slow down the earth's rotation  (not really)
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Aug 1, 2013 23:26
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