Electric Power Generation
- Thread starter Hysteresis
- Start date
Sponsored Links
I think you will find that it was an atheist that started the God thing....
Dead funny you are Eddy. I like the subtle way you seamlessly introduced religion into this thread.ok. never heard such tripe. Lets give up and pray to a non existent god. Or build modern day planetary arks, tell you what, you and your like can be on the first one if you like.
You are a covert genius.
Sponsored Links
Come on Norcon, retaliate man. I'd tell them the one about the light (seeing as this thread is about power generation),,,,,.. We had a power cut the other evening and I was speaking to one of my neighbours, who said "It's terrible without the light." This got me thinking about god,, God is the light, therefore it follows that those without the light, are those without God. I prayed and prayed and lo,,,,, the lights came on. Hooray, All of my neighbours praised Eon, but I praised the Lord.
This is what happens when a wind turbine gets out of control in high winds.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqEccgR0q-o
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqEccgR0q-o
The key to this issue, and I didn't see it on the skim read-through is spinning reserve.
As the OP stated, with more loads adding onto the grid at peak times, the grid controller schedules gas/coal and on really bad days oil to come online. Some coal and gas stations are also base load, but nuclear is always regard base load (in the UK - a different picture in France). Before the stations are scheduled on, they are "spinning reserve", ready to close the output breaker and apply a block load at a few seconds notice (and this stops frequency plummeting through the floor).
The advent of wind (and to a lesser extent tidal) has meant spinning reserve is required to support not only the feature indicated above, but also to flatten out the troughs of supply from wind turbines when the wind has died off for a second or so. If you have a really large wind farm, the effect is averaged across the whole lot as not all of the turbines will suffer loss of wind gust at the same second - when it does happen the spinning reserve will be instructed to output more and so the larger the wind farm you have, the more spinning reserve you need to back it up!
A smart solution to this is to use a product such as that offered by ITM Power, but it is not yet in large scale use.
The long and short of it is, national grid cannot use wind as base-load supply as it needs to have spinning reserve - and that makes it NOT base-load! So the wind farms help to supply peak demands instead, they offset the need for extra gas, coal or oil (in that order) but there is often still a requirement as the wind supply falls as demand rises across the day.
Nozzle
As the OP stated, with more loads adding onto the grid at peak times, the grid controller schedules gas/coal and on really bad days oil to come online. Some coal and gas stations are also base load, but nuclear is always regard base load (in the UK - a different picture in France). Before the stations are scheduled on, they are "spinning reserve", ready to close the output breaker and apply a block load at a few seconds notice (and this stops frequency plummeting through the floor).
The advent of wind (and to a lesser extent tidal) has meant spinning reserve is required to support not only the feature indicated above, but also to flatten out the troughs of supply from wind turbines when the wind has died off for a second or so. If you have a really large wind farm, the effect is averaged across the whole lot as not all of the turbines will suffer loss of wind gust at the same second - when it does happen the spinning reserve will be instructed to output more and so the larger the wind farm you have, the more spinning reserve you need to back it up!
A smart solution to this is to use a product such as that offered by ITM Power, but it is not yet in large scale use.
The long and short of it is, national grid cannot use wind as base-load supply as it needs to have spinning reserve - and that makes it NOT base-load! So the wind farms help to supply peak demands instead, they offset the need for extra gas, coal or oil (in that order) but there is often still a requirement as the wind supply falls as demand rises across the day.
Nozzle
Yes, indeed, I should. My apologies.
Sponsored Links
