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| tom66:
Peak time energy is generally worse because it's supplied by less efficient 'peaker plants' - either they are open-cycle gas turbines or they are closed-cycle gas turbines, but are started up only for the peak time, which reduces their efficiency. Also, in some cases, it's supplied by oil or diesel, especially if demand is beyond original estimations. In general, in the UK at least, there's a bias towards using renewables, but they are currently only able to provide a significant amount of power during the off-peak periods (with some exceptions for very sunny summer days with lots of wind at 5pm.) |
| Someone:
--- Quote from: paulca on April 12, 2022, 09:31:11 pm ---Power stations have one purpose. If they are not generating power they are losing money. So, it makes sense for them to run all night long offering a discount to temp people to use it. Rather than shut down a few or all turbines overnight. --- End quote --- You forget that it is a commodity market, a consumer doesn't care who produced the electricity, its interchangeable. Being a market (auctions/bidding/trading) the price paid for electricity varies depending on supply and demand. When its windy the UK can see an excess of power being generated and the price paid collapses (even negative). That can end up lower than the marginal cost of fuel to power a conventional power plant. This makes the people who invested in baseload generation unhappy as they expected to be running all the time like you imagine, spreading out the fixed/capital/investment costs over more hours of live operation. So their profitability goes down, and they need to get higher prices when operating to break even. |
| paulca:
The UK running an excess of wind energy only happens in limited geographic areas when the moon, stars and harry potters wand all line up! Scotland has over produced a few times, due to warm sunny weekend days with lots of wind.... everyone's out for the day, no body has heating on, lots of solar and wind, so for an hour or two Scotland is literally paying people to take power off them so they don't need to shut things down. Shutting down, powering up plants takes a lot of time. Spinning them on the grid idling is more likely what they do, maintaining the 50Hz heartbeat if nothing else. But nobody wants to see a Scottish 1950s power nuclear reactor venting turbine steam to not over run it's turbines and allow the wind turbines their "hay day". I'm fairly sure those "over production" events include the nuclear base load as it's "non carbon" |
| paulca:
On "Smart" crap. In the 1990s, if you bought a washing machine or dishwasher et. al. it had a big knob on it, spring latched power switches and you could set the program, load the thing and later just switch it on at the wall and away it would go. In the 2000s they have "soft power", microcontrollers, control state machines and literally force physical interaction to run the thing. If you switch it off and then back on an hour later, it is extremely unlikely it will pick up where it left off and carry on. So, my prediction of where this is going... By the mid 2020s almost all "heavy powered" home appliances will have a cloud/wifi/smart gubbins installed. This will feature the ability to turn them on remotely, or even on schedule and many more glorious things. However, hotpoint will have their system, bosch will have some crazy german system, google and amazon will team up with philips and zanussi and all of these devices send ALL your habbits and data back to the cloud. All your devices become susceptible to hacking. The by 2030s the energy providers, the regulators and thus the gubberment will get involved, maybe slowly introducing incentives to subscribe to load management schemes. "Allow us to schedule your Class A and B devices this fall and get 20% off your off-peak kWh rate!" By 2040 I doubt it will be a choice. Hopefully if it has to be manditory we have a sensible gubberment that does not privatise it and therefore make it something only the rich can do... run high power electric devices whenever they want... or at all. |
| tom66:
--- Quote from: paulca on April 13, 2022, 09:30:50 am ---The UK running an excess of wind energy only happens in limited geographic areas when the moon, stars and harry potters wand all line up! --- End quote --- The UK doesn't have enough wind power to run in excess, ever. So not sure what your point is? The grid is slowly reducing its dependence on fossil fuels. This chart summarises it pretty well: Whilst I'm skeptical of the 2025 claim that we'll be fossil-fuel free for some days, I think 2035 is probably achievable. |
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