Did you not digest my post Bruce…?
You pump water to the top of a hill, but you are not storing electricity…You are storing the means to produce electricity.
Lithium battery storage actually hold on to a charge of electricity…
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That is not true, Australia has been using pumped Hydro for many decades. You pump water from the bottom of a hill to the top of a hill (used to be at night) and store it in a specially built dam, then you release that water during the day to generate electricity. You recover about 80% of the energy used to pump the water up hill.
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Sucking eggs springs to mind… 
You don’t generate much electricity sucking eggs.
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Isn’t that the opposite of “economies of scale”?
As in Australia being part of the British Empire’s diseconomies of scale?
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Water storage for the purposes of generating electricity makes it somewhat synonymous.
There are, of course, other uses for surplus electricity in terms of storage. Apart from land “reservoirs”, iirc development in building water towers for largely the same purpose has been developed.
Using excess energy to create hydrogen for hydrogen fuelled electric engines would also be useful.
It does seem somewhat silly that wind farms are turned off so they don’t produce electricity which isn’t “needed” at that precise moment, but that the companies are still largely paid for it, when that could and should be used for potential storage and their equivalents.
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I think we are proverbial ‘knee highs’ when it comes to storing electricity Dex.
There are some ingenious ways to produce electricity at the drop of a hat, but none so efficient as a power station, whatever you decide to fuel it with.
However, I think we will keep trying, and I’m sure that one day a solution will be found.
Meanwhile, we all pay for the projects on our bills, whether they are cost efficient or not…
I do believe that wind turbines have to keep rotating whether they are generating or not. Most use diesel engines or steal electricity from the grid.
They won’t tell you that on the BBC…
No, they don’t, they just turn the blades to face the wind - watch the video in the OP.
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Really? By what measure of efficiency? If it is fuel in for electricity out then both solar and wind (zero fuel) would be infinitely high efficiency. Which is quite efficient.
They might do that in Australia Bruce, but not here…
Because you have power 24/7 whether the wind blows or the sun shines.
Perhaps I should have said ‘Reliable’
I don’t really care about efficient, as long as I can turn my heating, lights and hob on when I want to.
The trouble with yer green energy, is that it only produces when nobody wants it…
By the way…It might seem free at the point of generation, but you’ve got to try and store the stuff, something that is quite elusive at the moment. I hope that you factor in the cost of your ‘free’ electricity to thousands of wind turbines and hectares of solar panels plus hundreds of miles of cable and huge lithium battery storage facilities that only last 20 years if you’re lucky.
Whereas a combined cycle gas fired power station turning out the same output can hardly been seen behind some trees on a small patch of land…
Which would you say is ‘Greenest’?
No, sorry Bruce, they stop if it’s windy, and they stop if it’s not…
I think the word is “ought”
If a turbine can turn, then it ought to. There is no point to paying a turbine operator a fee to not create energy/electricity. But, that’s what happens.
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Got it.
Part of the issues is that we haven’t got sufficient infrastructure to handle excess energy. I don’t really understand the physics/mechanics of it all, and so no doubt some of you will be able to correct my errors.
But, as far as I am aware, if there is, say, a shortage of available renewable energy in Cornwall, it is not possible to utilise a potential surplus available in Scotland. Hence, fossil generators need to be turned on more than they might otherwise need. Even more bonkers is that the turbines in Scotland would be turned off but the companies still get payment via subsidies.
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Sounds about right to me Dex
Wind turbines are one thing, but solar panels in the UK…That’s just sackless…
This is the contribution that solar panels made to the grid yesterday…(solar is the yellow stripe)
It will be like this until the end of March when the days get longer than the nights.
I have lots of solar powered lights scattered around the garden, and since September they only last about 2 or three hours after charging stops. At present, you are lucky to get one hour of illumination from them. During the summer (when nobody needs much electricity) they last completely through the night.
Apart from small applications on private dwellings, are they really worth the expense, pollution in manufacture, pollution in decommissioning, and the vast amount of land that solar farms require?
Wind Turbines however…Have got promise…
How many of these would you have to lump together to make a substantial addition to the national grid? Bearing in mind that it would only be during the day.
I tried to find the solar hours calculator but was unsuccesful but I did come across this
It seems that the peak averages about 3 or 4 hours per day. That is basically three or four hours of “free” electricity. Sure you have to pay for the infrastructure but it pays for itself in a relatively short time.
That should mean that worst case you reduce your electricity bill by about 14% surely that is not to be sneezed at?
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Thanks Bruce, but I don’t think the infrastructure would pay back the cost of setting it all up anytime soon, and that prime farmland could be feeding lots of people and providing jobs.
I have yet to see a solar panel farm in the UK use the land for anything other than solar panels, and when you live on a small island with almost 70 million people, land is so precious.
and solar panels produce electricity when you least need it, so you need to factor in the cost of huge lithium battery storage facilities, and the land that they require…Which would probably be about the size of land needed for one gas fired power station that would provide a reliable 1 or two gW’s of power round the clock.
I was thinking more in terms of roof top solar not solar farms.
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I do think that domestic use of solar panels is a good idea Bruce, I just don’t think it’s any use for mass use with hectares of land and the need for battery storage.