Prices of the electricity we use to charge

[MikelBikel]

In Spain right now..
Wait for the spark..
Zero Zap, that's Net Zero for you!

AMERICAN LINEMAN $10,000 SAFETY GEAR vs INDIAN LINEMAN FLIP FLOPS and BARE HANDS #electrician

That special moment when you realize safety regulations are actually just geographic suggestions Watch this high-voltage technician demonstrate the proper ...

youtube.com

 

[MikelBikel]

No, you misunderstood. The reason I mentioned nuclear reactors is because all of them have a big flywheel installed right at the beginning. They are however easily overwhelmed by sunny or windy weather.
The overproduction needs to be stored or wasted to protect the grid. As it was, there was not enough storage for the excess of electricity. The situation was made worse over recent years because of the expansion of renewables. Only hydroelectrics can easily have its function reversed, from producing to storing. Next best thing is storage batteries. The lesson is we need to install rapidly storage batteries or rebuilding barrages.

I thunk you misunderstood
Baseload Thermal power stations have huge spinning Generators which have the Inertia to Stabilise the grid frequency and load..
Unreliable Non"Renewables" do Not.

 

[Woosh]

I thunk you misunderstood
Baseload Thermal power stations have huge spinning Generators which have the Inertia to Stabilise the grid frequency and load..
Unreliable Non"Renewables" do Not.

The new landscape is characterised by enormous amounts of solar and wind energy that can change one minute to the next, too fast for the old stabilisers.
On a sunny day like last Monday, Spain produced enough from solar and wind for 100% of its demands. When the German solar farms come online after midday there was no spare storage capacity.
They need storage batteries and hydroelectrics. Fast switching on and off does not suit the grid.

 

[soundwave]

cant fire up much these days from a standstill even a nuke reactor needs to power up or the reactor roof might end up 25 miles away.

what happens if you open up a worm hole in front of a black hole next to a sun holy$hit

 

[saneagle]

No, you misunderstood. The reason I mentioned nuclear reactors is because all of them have a big flywheel installed right at the beginning.

Last time I looked inside a nuclear reactor, there was a load of very hot plasma in there, which burnt my face. I think you're thinking of steam engines that have flywheels.

 

[soundwave]

 

[soundwave]

 

[lenny]

 

[Woosh]

Last time I looked inside a nuclear reactor, there was a load of very hot plasma in there, which burnt my face. I think you're thinking of steam engines that have flywheels.

I should have said steam turbines.

 

[Ghost1951]

Last time I looked inside a nuclear reactor, there was a load of very hot plasma in there, which burnt my face. I think you're thinking of steam engines that have flywheels.

All thermal power generators have what are in effect flywheels. They have multiple huge spinning rotors turning at 3000 revs per minute. The alternator rotors at the Drax power station each weigh ninety tonnes, and you can also count the weight of the spinning turbines too - add another 200 - 300 tonnes per 5Mwatt generating set. HUGE amounts of rotational energy are involved there, and it does help smooth out the grid frequency by continuing to maintain the rotational speed when other generators suddenly disappear. Obviously, the natural tendency of an alternator suddenly asked for more power is to slow down unless it has limitless power being applied to it as steam. The rotating mass of the machinery resists that in the short term, helping prevent wild excursions of frequency and the consequent decoupling of plant as generators shut down to protect themselves.

It is an absolute fact that the power generating system depends on regulation of instantaneous frequency anomalies through massive 'flywheel' effects of the rotating mass of power generators. A solar farm goes off momentarily, and the rotating mass counteracts the electro-magnetic braking impact of the sudden loss, when the demand remains the same. Of course, given the scale of demand, that rotational energy can only sustain the frequency of the grid for a short period, which is why in Spain last week, the frequency declined beyond acceptable limits pretty quickly and the generators decoupled from the grid to protect themselves.

Nuclear plant of course also have massive generators and turbine sets spinning at speed. So nuclear plant do have 'flywheels'.

Grid balancing is a crucial part of powering the grid, and the more solar you have the more of a problem it becomes.

Refurbishing a 300-tonne generator core within the heart of a power station - Drax Global

It takes collaborative working with a multinational team of engineers and enormous rollers in a purpose built clean room to do this money-saving job.

www.drax.com

The Power Generation Game - Engineering Hawkins Forensic Investigation

The process of turning mechanical energy into electrical power is pretty fascinating. You may remember turning a magnet near a coil and seeing a light bulb illuminate at school? In practice, power generation in the real world is fairly similar; an electromagnet is spun by a turbine (through...

www.hawkins.biz

 

[Ghost1951]

 

[Ghost1951]

 

[MikelBikel]

"No-one expects the Spanish Inquisition, oops, no , I mean Blackout " Per Que?
Oh, Gibraltar not affected coz they have their own Real generators?

 

[Woosh]

"No-one expects the Spanish Inquisition, oops, no , I mean Blackout " Per Que?
Oh, Gibraltar not affected coz they have their own Real generators?

Gibraltar has its blackouts too. You can look up at their web site.
It's clear that the European grid of interconnectors need a lot more battery storage but it's also clear that renewables are the way to go for replacing existing capacity.

 

[Ghost1951]

Gibraltar has its blackouts too. You can look up at their web site.
It's clear that the European grid of interconnectors need a lot more battery storage but it's also clear that renewables are the way to go for replacing existing capacity.

Do you remember the weather in Britain last November December when for about six weeks the contribution of our nearly 30 Gwatts of installed wind power was most;y producing at or below 1 Gwatt of power?

Of course at that point in the year - solar power was negligible too.

We entirely depended on powerful and reliable gas turbine generation.

The problem with fanatics, is that they don't react sensibly to the REALITIES of our actual situation. They just keep on demanding more of their ideological magic trick.

I am all in favour of an integrated system with maximum use of wind and solar when it is available. What's not to like about using wind when we have loads of it, or any of it. But no sensible power engineer would advocate getting rid of gas. WE CAN NOT DO WITHOUT IT.

Gas has a wonderful advantage over other kinds of thermal power generation in that you can rapidly switch it on when you want it and turn it off when you don't. Most kinds of thermal power involving steam have HUGE penalties attached to letting them go cold. There are big thermal stresses in pipe work, boilers, turbines and all the hot stuff. The expansion and contraction, damage them badly, and their service lifetime is shortened. It costs big money. Gas turbines don't have that problem. They can step in when needed and turn off when not.

As for Woosh's demand for more battery power - we talked last winter about how many terrawatts of battery storage we would need to run the UK during a winter high without gas. We were using 30 gigawatts of gas power for a month while the wind turbines didn't even turn. Do the sums..... 30 gigawatts x 24 x 30 = almost 22 terrawatt hours of battery storage.... Good luck with that. We have 8.2 Gigawatt hours right now and hopes of building another 12 Gwatt hours. Even at that level it would not last half a day of flat calm if we had no gas backup.

Every winter we get that kind of weather for at least a week and often for a month or more.

 

[Woosh]

Do you remember the weather in Britain last November December when for about six weeks the contribution of our nearly 30 Gwatts of installed wind power was most;y producing at or below 1 Gwatt of power?

Of course at that point in the year - solar power was negligible too.

We entirely depended on powerful and reliable gas turbine generation.

The problem with fanatics, is that they don't react sensibly to the REALITIES of our actual situation. They just keep on demanding more of their ideological magic trick.

I am all in favour of an integrated system with maximum use of wind and solar when it is available. What's not to like about using wind when we have loads of it, or any of it. But no sensible power engineer would advocate getting rid of gas. WE CAN NOT DO WITHOUT IT.

Gas has a wonderful advantage over other kinds of thermal power generation in that you can rapidly switch it on when you want it and turn it off when you don't. Most kinds of thermal power involving steam have HUGE penalties attached to letting them go cold. There are big thermal stresses in pipe work, boilers, turbines and all the hot stuff. The expansion and contraction, damage them badly, and their service lifetime is shortened. It costs big money. Gas turbines don't have that problem. They can step in when needed and turn off when not.

As for Woosh's demand for more battery power - we talked last winter about how many terrawatts of battery storage we would need to run the UK during a winter high without gas. We were using 30 gigawatts of gas power for a month while the wind turbines didn't even turn. Do the sums..... 30 gigawatts x 24 x 30 = almost 22 terrawatt hours of battery storage.... Good luck with that. We have 8.2 Gigawatt hours right now and hopes of building another 12 Gwatt hours. Even at that level it would not last half a day of flat calm if we had no gas backup.

Every winter we get that kind of weather for at least a week and often for a month or more.

France's energy mix is 72% nuclear. The remaining 28% is free market, of which, you have hydroelectric, renewables and gas. It's not the fanatics that is obsessed with renewables, it's the capitalists. They put their money where it will make the best return. Why don't they want to put their money on new gas? Offshore windfarms and onshore solar farms are what makes the most profit when the winds blow and the sun shines and the world enters a new conflict.

 

[saneagle]

I've told you guys before, several times. When people make a complicated and convoluted technical explanation for what caused some problem, that sounds sort of feasible, it's nearly always a distraction from the true cause, which is nearly always something simple and direct.

This is a derivative of Occam's Razor, which I had never heard of, but found out about after I had already developed my own problem solving methods, to get to the root of problems quickly, including the above principle.

One such example was when I was working at Vaillant to solve their boiler issues. We found a diaphragm in a valve that had swollen, like what a balloon does after you blow it up and let it down again. We invited the supplier in to help with it, and they brought in a laptop and a load of print-outs of finite element analysis of the stresses in the diaphragm. They claimed that the finite element stess analysis showed that the part was getting over-stressed and that it wasn't their fault because the tool that they had inherited from the previous supplier wasn't correct and they needed some huge amount of money to make a new tool.

My simple logic told me that there were thousands of boilers working correctly with the same diaphragm in it, so if it wasn't strong enough, they would all fail. I therefore told the guys from Vaillant not to pay for the tool and to look for the cause elsewhere. I was suspicious about the material, but couldn't rationalise why only a few diaphragms failed. To cut a long story short, the supplier had cheated on the material and had used a cheaper version that couldn't deal with high enough temperature. The problem only manifested itself when there were other issues that cause the temperature of the boiler to go higher than normal, but still well within the spec for the EPO that the diaphragm should have been made of. Instead of getting all that money for a new tool, the supplier got kicked out for cheating.

I used to deal with situations like that on a daily basis, which is how I developed my theory, which has been shown to have a surprisingly accurate correlation to actual situations. I guess Mr Occam found the same thing.

 

[Woosh]

As for Woosh's demand for more battery power - we talked last winter about how many terrawatts of battery storage we would need to run the UK during a winter high without gas. We were using 30 gigawatts of gas power for a month while the wind turbines didn't even turn. Do the sums..... 30 gigawatts x 24 x 30 = almost 22 terrawatt hours of battery storage.... Good luck with that. We have 8.2 Gigawatt hours right now and hopes of building another 12 Gwatt hours. Even at that level it would not last half a day of flat calm if we had no gas backup.

I think you over-estimate the amount of strictly needed battery storage capacity needed to avoid the kind of situations like April 28th blackout.
I can't find the chart of the production of the grid in Spain on the day of the blackout but I remember clearly that the fluctuations are in minutes, not days.

Each day, the people in charge of the grid run an auction as to who will supply the power the next day based on what they know about the level of energy demands for the next day. The lowest cost bidders are then contracted to supply the amount needed. Someone made a mistake somewhere playing with the on/off switch when the price of energy went negative.

 

[Ghost1951]

I've told you guys before, several times. When people make a complicated and convoluted technical explanation for what caused some problem, that sounds sort of feasible, it's nearly always a distraction from the true cause, which is nearly always something simple and direct.

This is a derivative of Occam's Razor, which I had never heard of, but found out about after I had already developed my own problem solving methods, to get to the root of problems quickly, including the above principle.

One such example was when I was working at Vaillant to solve their boiler issues. We found a diaphragm in a valve that had swollen, like what a balloon does after you blow it up and let it down again. We invited the supplier in to help with it, and they brought in a laptop and a load of print-outs of finite element analysis of the stresses in the diaphragm. They claimed that the finite element stess analysis showed that the part was getting over-stressed and that it wasn't their fault because the tool that they had inherited from the previous supplier wasn't correct and they needed some huge amount of money to make a new tool.

My simple logic told me that there were thousands of boilers working correctly with the same diaphragm in it, so if it wasn't strong enough, they would all fail. I therefore told the guys from Vaillant not to pay for the tool and to look for the cause elsewhere. I was suspicious about the material, but couldn't rationalise why only a few diaphragms failed. To cut a long story short, the supplier had cheated on the material and had used a cheaper version that couldn't deal with high enough temperature. The problem only manifested itself when there were other issues that cause the temperature of the boiler to go higher than normal, but still well within the spec for the EPO that the diaphragm should have been made of. Instead of getting all that money for a new tool, the supplier got kicked out for cheating.

I used to deal with situations like that on a daily basis, which is how I developed my theory, which has been shown to have a surprisingly accurate correlation to actual situations. I guess Mr Occam found the same thing.

Nice theory, but completely wrong - not even feasible.

Nuts theory and COMPLETELY wrong.

It has already been discussed at length by experts who are power generation and power distribution engineers and actually KNOW what the problems are of keeping power networks stable - especially when they have large amounts of non spinning renewables. You only need look at reputable sources, but of course - you don't do that because you think they are all plotting to deceive you.

The other day you were expounding on the idea that it was an unauthorised experiment or a cyber attack.

Anecdotes about your work life in an entirely different sphere have no bearing on this, and neither does your faith in 'Occam's Razor'. How would Occam's Razor have applied to just about any complex technical failure? Would it ever have discovered why the early Comet aircraft were falling to bits in the sky? Never in a million years. The answer to every problem is not a hammer. Would it have discovered how the solid rocket boosters on the Challenger failed? - Oh - I forgot - you think that was a put up job and a fake like the moon landings. you are on record here saying so and arguing at length - even asserting that it is not possible to communicate from the moon to earth with low power radio signals. That was another area that you have no knowledge of, but contradicted people who do know, and even concocted the idea that the whole project was faked.

There is nothing complicated and convoluted about the cause of power networks getting out of balance when they suddenly lose a chunk generating capacity and don't have much spinning inertia like the Spanish grid. It is well known as a serious issue in the power distribution industry.

Prices of the electricity we use to charge

https://slate.com/technology/2011/09/lro-spots-apollo-landing-sites-in-high-res.html If I were sitting in the orbiter, I looked out of the window and saw those tracks with my own eyes, I'd say that they were probably done by humans. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I might say that those tracks...

www.pedelecs.co.uk

 

[MikelBikel]

France's energy mix is 72% nuclear. The remaining 28% is free market, of which, you have hydroelectric, renewables and gas. It's not the fanatics that is obsessed with renewables, it's the capitalists. They put their money where it will make the best return. Why don't they want to put their money on new gas? Offshore windfarms and onshore solar farms are what makes the most profit when the winds blow and the sun shines and the world enters a new conflict.

And 72% Newkleer means 72% thermal steam turbines and massive generators spinning at 3000rpm? That grid is NOT going to wobble or fail, thanks for confirming the correct mix.

Windmills and solar flaps are Expensive *Subsidised Greenwashing* driven by Socialist politicians with Public tax money for their "Friends" in Oligarchism, Not capitalism.

The grid of Spain had a Socialist Ex Housing minister in charge with No Engineering expertise.
"El presidente she no working, what shall we do?"
"I dunno, turn it off and on again..That's what I do with my laptop"