It makes me wonder how duped our political class are when it comes to renewable energy. They keep banging on that it is needed to sustain our way of life, rather than that nasty CO2 producing conventional power station.
Well, tonight my Bird Mincer Wind turbine (I haven’t really got one. I’m not a brainwashed, green, cretin), would be producing sweet fuck all, as there is not a breath of wind here in deepest darkest Kent.
However on Thursday and Friday there was oodles of wind. Enough to power The large Hadron collider barely my lighting if I had a commercially bought, private property device.
But to cut to the chase. Even supposing I had a turbine that could produce three times my consumption, how would I store the surplus? Well I could invest in a transformer and go and get dozens of batteries from Halfords, (Halfords, if you’re reading this, the free plug here, is worth a few quid for my help with your sales) or I could build a heat sink in the garden and recover the energy by a heat pump system.
The trouble with this strategy is, it is cost prohibitive to the lay person.
And of course, it will be to the national projects as well.
It’s different in places such as Norway, where they can use the energy produced to pump water up to high level reservoir to be used to generate hydro-electric power when the wind ceases to blow.
So if we go down the road of having 20% of our energy from renewables in the future. Where is 20% of the energy tonight going to come from?
Links to previous ramblings on this subject can be found here
We have plenty of tidal and wave power potential around the UK. Wind & solar are so obviously incompatible with our weather conditions that you have to wonder why Huhne is in favour of it. Could it be (a) he stands to gain or (b) his mates stand to gain? Certainly the UK will not benefit from investing in wind or solar, so there must be another (t)reason.
ReplyDeleteNo wind, no electricity. Too much wind, no electricity. Rough seas, no electricity. Wave and tidal are still in their infancy and will be decades away from producing mass power. There are also environmental issues to solve and lets not forget that the sea will do all in it's power to destroy the mechanisms as has already happened to many prototypes.
ReplyDeleteThe green taxes and all the other crap being put forward is going to cost us £18bn a year. It would be better to spend that amount on speeding up fusion research if we want carbon free electricity. Trouble is if our leaders did it now, it would not be going for 25 years, so no plaudits those guys who need the instant fix.
ReplyDeleteGas. The power source of the future is gas. There is so much gas that we now have reserves for 100 years usage or more.
ReplyDeleteWe will of course not get the benefits because they won't let us have it at prices we can afford.