Readers letters
Tim Fox, IMechE, urges storage of renewable energy, specifically mentioning a 30GW wind fleet!
Windmills are always the preferred form of generation for system controllers, because the government has dictated that we must buy it all for 25 years, at six or seven times the price we pay for nuclear electricity, also carbon-free.
We buy wind energy because we are forced to, we buy nuclear because it’s cheapest, so that comes next to wind in preference.
Fossil fuel comes in between, cost-wise, so our marginal load is always supplied by fossil energy, and will continue to be. The emissions are an unsolved problem, but we can stock fuel, and that is why I refer to nuclear and fossil generation as reliables. Nuclear particularly – reprocessing “waste” in store could, in today’s more developed reactors, fuel all our electricity supply for decades.
We can’t stock wind, we haven’t any to spare. That’s why we recharge PS-hydro reservoirs 11pm – 7am with fossil fuel.
Analysis of the 7,000 half-hourly generation mix figures so far this year, scaling our wind fleet up to 30,000MW, it can be seen that it could have displaced fossil fuel entirely on 161 of those occasions – assuming we keep up our present level of nukes.
Look at Denmark, www.emd.dk/el 3,800 MW wind installed, outputs down to 14 MW last week.
Has Tim Fox researched at all the drawbacks of the various forms of generation? I’ll email/post him a copy of my summary if he likes, lots of data.
Bill Hyde, Offham, Kent
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