Digit":20tc0tdf said:
From a reliability view point Craig, currently, coal or nuclear. As you say, criticism is easy, but so is day dreaming. Would you buy a car that could only run one day in three?
During a three day spell in June last year the wind generators through out the country produce 2 per cent of their rated out put.
For the future wave power and geothermal are also likely reliable producers.
Roy.
Clearly wind power is no good without some storage medium. When wind starts to contribute a bigger percentage of the power used then this will be more critical. Currently our grid operates in a way that can be turned on/off as needed. They simply turn on/up the power stations during the day an evening. Wind power doesn't work this way, but it doesn't mean it's useless, it just means we need to evolve the power grid into something that works differently.
Would I buy a car that only operates 1 day in 3, obviously not. However a better analogy is would you buy a car if the pertrol stations were only open 1 day in 3? Yes if the tank on the car was big enough of course you would. There isn't a petrol station on every street corner, and there doesn't need to be wind all of the time.
Stepping back to the report briefly ...
They have fundamentally (deliberately?) confused efficiency with load factor, and are badly reporting truths. The %s reported are the load factors of the devices and not the efficiency. Load factor is the power produced compared with the theoretical maximum of the device. Efficiency is the power out compared with the power in.
A wind turbine may be able to theoretically produce 5MW (example) in a good wind, however nobody would be stupid enough to claim they will always achieve this. Saying they only achieve 25% load factor is fairly meaningless without understanding the design expectations. If it was designed to work at 20% then it's doing great!! Traditional power stations are not on all the time either. In order to cope with peak demands, they are unlikely to average more than 50%.
Back to the car analogy: My car can do 100mph. If I was to drive it at 70mph constantly it would have a load factor of 70%. But that doesn't make it only 70% efficient. But hang on, I have to sleep, so I just drive it 12 hours a day. OMG - does that make it only 35% efficient? No of course it doesn't!!
Forgive me for sounding like a rant. It's not, honest! It just really p*sses me off when bullsh*t statistics are presented in this way, without correct explanation. It is a deliberate intention to mislead people and IMO that's wrong!
Craig