Loading ...Energising renewable energy
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Why is renewable energy becoming energised so slowly in 'backward' countries like the Great Britain?
 Proven turbine chugging quietly away at the back of the community co-op shop, island of Eriskay, ScotlandGoing slow: Why is renewable energy becoming energised so slowly in 'backward' countries like the Great Britain which is where I live? Why has it taken off in Germany? Both countries have similar climates: lots of grey skies and wind. In fact, Britain has more wind and a vast resource, as yet untouched, of wave and tide power which Germany with its limited coastline does not possess. And yet Germany is streets ahead on producing energy from renewables, principally photovoltaics. Renewable energy made up more than 14 percent of Germany's power consumption in 2007, up from almost 12 percent in 2006, with wind as the main contributor (source: The Guardian). Why Germany?
Becoming energised: It seems it's all down the German government's intelligent foresight. The government guarantees a market for solar power by operating a system of feed-in tariffs. There, as explained in a New Scientist article (Solar power: The future's bright, 8 December 2007), anyone who produces electricity from solar power can sell it to the national grid for between Euros 0.45 and Euros 0.57 per kilowatt-hour, which is almost three times what consumers pay for their electricity, roughly Euros 0.19 per kilowatt-hour.
And the result? Today there are over 300,000 photovoltaic (PV) systems in Germany, mostly on the rooftops of homes and small businesses, and Germany is the world's fastest-growing PV market. It has 55 per cent of the world's installed base of PV panels and can generate around 3 gigawatts of electricity from solar energy, equivalent to between three and five conventional power stations (ibid, New Scientist). All from a country which passes much of its time under grey cloud like Britain.
The windiest European country lags badly: Great Britain could have done this for wind energy -- PV too since the amounts of solar energy received by Britain and Germany are fairly similar. It could have done it for waves and tide power but instead, it relied of cheap oil and gas from the North Sea, coal and the massively-subsidised nuclear industry.
It needn't be like this: A smart British government would follow Germany's lead -- now actively being pursued by Italy and Spain for PV -- and California is, as usual, leading the way in the USA with major subsidies for new PV installations. Britain is well placed to energise its wind power generation together with developing emerging technologies for storing the energy produced by using compressed air energy storage (CAES), perhaps utilising the vast underground caverns left by salt-mining in central-west parts of England. At present, the British government offers a derisory grant and rumour has it that even this is to be axed. So there is little incentive for someone like me to invest in a wind turbine on my windy north-west Wales farm.
NIMBY and turbulence: Quite apart from the requirement for planning consent for stand-alone turbines, there is the problem of those people who object to 'spoilt views' (it seems the numerous power pylons are okay bringing energy from a far-off polluting coal power station which is not, of course, in their back yard!) and who complain of 'possible noise' (aircraft? helicopter? cars? lorries? All okay, it seems). That is quite sufficient for a local council to reject an application for a turbine.
Turbulence is another issue and can be a serious problem around buildings and in urban areas -- which makes the new 'bolt on your wall'-type turbines a bad buy. But what about farms? Fields are open; turbines are free-standing: it's not difficult to find space on any farm of my size (5 hectares) or bigger. Farms are already host to eyesores like huge barns, stacks of silage, slurry tanks and grain silos, all acceptable to the planners. The view is already compromised.
Decentralised power stations: So imagine if every farm had a turbine or two? There are several first class turbines (like the range offered by Proven, as featured in my picture) which are tailor-made for farm use. In fact, Proven are attempting to start a new way of producing wind energy called wind crofting. There are tens of thousands of farms in windy Britain. Every farm, linked into the grid, could be electric energy-independent as well as feeding surplus power into the national grid. The wind is almost always blowing somewhere. (As I write, it's blowing a severe gale here!)
Could be? Should be and would be if there was a scheme for feed-in tariffs like Germany's. I'd be one of the first to join! Come on, British government: get your act together and stop approving coal-fired power stations on the flimsiest of pretexts (Carbon Capture and Storage -- CCS -- might perhaps someday become a reality) and tap into this massive resource of power available now, pollution-free with no decommissioning costs...
If the practical side of renewable energy interests you, keep an (RSS feed) eye on my Mur Crusto eco-farm blog because my wife and I are agreed that, notwithstanding all the difficulties and lack of assistance available, we shall try and install a 6kW Proven turbine this year. As the project proceeds, I'll be posting... Comments
In the comment below, Hugh claims that windfarms operate for only 27% of the time and therefore do not enable a single power station to be decommissioned. But last night i heard a climate profressional say that if everyone in the UK changed just one bulb in their household to a low energy one, that would be enough to decommission Didcot power station. It seems odd that windfarms operating even at quarter-time cannot achieve what lightbulbs can manage. can this be correct, or has someone mixed up their maths?
Peter: The overall cost will be around 20,000 UK pounds. The turbine and its tower make up around half of that. The rest is foundation (which I can help build), installation and control equipment. We need to reduce our energy consumption drastically if the lights are not to go out in 12 years time. Farmers can already get grants for building wind turbines on their land. However wind farms are a worthless irrelevance to the UK's energy problems. They require enormous subsidies to be viable (more than doubling the cost of electricity) and yet because they only operate for 27% of the time they do not enable a single conventional power station to be decommissioned. Large amounts of energy are wasted running generators on low-load waiting for the wind to start blowing. Also, because wind strength is constantly changing, serious instabilities would be created in the National Grid if turbines were constructed in appreciable numbers. N.B. Germany and Spain have both destroyed vast areas of pristine wilderness (and the associated tourism) with these eyesores to no useful purpose (the total output of their windfarms does not even equal the ANNUAL INCREASE in China's electricity generation from fossil fuels). 
Very interesting. Do you have a sense yet of what the 6kW turbine you have in mind is going to cost - and how the budget breaks down? The government guarantees a market for solar power by operating a system of feed-in tariffs. There, as explained in a New Scientist article (Solar power: The future’s bright, 8 December 2007), anyone who produces electricity from solar … Read More |
A modern wind turbine produces electricity 70-85% of the time, but it generates different outputs dependent on wind speed. Over the course of a year, it will generate about 30% of the theoretical maximum output. This is known as its load factor. The load factor of conventional power stations is on average 50% (from BWEA). Obviously, the wind doesn't blow all the time. But neither do nuclear or fossil fuel stations run all the time either. A partial solution for renewables is to have a mixed bag, widely distributed, and interconnected by a high voltage supergrid which could be pan-European. The other part of the solution is to have surplus renewable energy stored in some way: special 'batteries' are being developed for this purpose and compressed air energy storage looks very promising. Meanwhile, every kilowatt hour generated by wind turbines means one less needing to be generated by fossil fuel.