Wind turbines used to absorb a power surplus?

Steam turbines on ships (now mostly diesels) engaged a "turning gear" electric motor to slowly rotate things so a hot turbine shaft wouldn't sag.

Steam ships used cheap fuel, basically street paving quality gunk, but were so complex that it was hard to find crews to keep them running. Diesels are much simpler.

Using your argument about 15 minutes for a smart meter installation per house not costing a lot the 30 seconds to read a meter once every 12 months means that the payback time for just the labour is more more than

30 years. If the meter takes 1 hour to install the saving payback time for not having a meter reader is 120 years :)

A gas meter will need a new battery in 10 years, or less

"Up to days at a time".

You pay bills once every 12 months? You don't count the time for the meter reader to walk to and from the house and to drive from house to house?

The UK has very litttle coal fired power generation anymore.

And the gas fired power generation is easy to modulate.

Fraid so.

It's not 30 seconds to read a meter. Try walking from your meter, to your neighbor's meter, and to the next, for the block. Many have the meters in the back yard and houses are often far enough apart that the reader has to use a car. I did a paper route, which is even faster and I couldn't average 30 seconds per customer.

Why are you talking about 1 reading in 12 months? Here the utilities can estimate bills, but have to read the meter at least six times a year.

I find it surprising they would have batteries. I've seen discussions where it was said they run on utility power... after the point where the meter is measuring the power. So you pay for the power in the meter.

alan_m snipped-for-privacy@admac.myzen.co.uk> wrote

And that is a completely insane thing to do, tax everyone, pump that money thru the bureaucracy and staight back to precisely the same people that it came from in the first place.

Only advantage is that in theory it forces people to have CFL light bulbs which they would otherwise not bother with and might see some use them given they are 'free'

We were never actually stupid enough to have a green tax and our electricity suppliers did hand out free CFL light bulbs. I ony ever used a couple of the dozens I got given.

lørdag den 18. marts 2023 kl. 17.38.33 UTC+1 skrev John Larkin:

some jet engines require a minimum low power warm up period after standing still for a while to let the shaft straighten before it's allowed full power

The bunker fuel diesels run on isn't much better, but there are now rules on how bad it can be and in many places close to the coast they need to run on fuel oil (diesel)

and more efficient

The LEDs save energy so make everyone's costs go down.

We only have a few incandescents left. Either old, very rarely used bulbs, or one small incandescent on a string of LEDs to make them dim properly. Some "dimmable" LEDs and some dimmers don't work together.

Over the whole area of the UK (which isn't all that big) wind turbine output is occasionally low for a few days at a time.

That's not why the UK has high voltage links across the Channel to France, across the North see to the Netherlands and a rather longer one further north to Norway. but they do allow geographical averaging as well as temporal averaging.

We were given coupons to buy six packs of several sizes and colors of CFL bulbs when they were still a new thing. I still have most of those. That's how long they last. The only ones I've had to replace are the ones I put in enclosed spaces, like inside a globe, that got hot and burnt out. Incandescents work by being so hot they glow. You have to protect the walls and ceilings where you install them. LEDs and CFLs have sensitive electronics that don't like being warm, much less hot.

They save enough electricity to pay for themselves in a year or two. Mine have paid for themselves many times over.

Nope, a senile rabid pom.

here it probably wasn't even once a year, they'd ask you'd to read the meter instead. Only as a periodic check, moving out, or it the usage was much less that they expected would they come and read it

compared to the gas bill probably not worth worrying about

It's no big challenge to stabilized the grid on a time scale of seconds. Weeks and months are the big problem that people will notice.

Wind turbines spin slowly so don't store a lot of kinetic energy. During calms, they store none.

There are synchronous machines that have no drive or load and are used for power factor correction and transient storage. They can spin fast so store a lot of energy and can have high peak power in or out.

Given a wind turbine running at full power output, I wonder how many seconds of output is stored in its kinetic energy, namely how long it could run its load if the wind suddenly stopped. A few seconds?

Yep, this 1,500 MW scheme will make up for the UK shortfall when the wind doesn't blow. The difference for the UK wind between blowing and not blowing is close to 15,000 MW so to just backup the existing windmills we need 10 of these pumped storage facilities. When even more windmills are built the shortfall when the wind is absent requires perhaps 20 to 30 of these facilities. And what happens for when the wind doesn't blow for 14 days and the pumped water head runs dry after a couple of days?

This scheme probably only makes financial sense if we rely on windmills where they can sell back the electricity at 10x the going rate when there is no wind.

There is, pumped hydro. Problem is that the UK has f*ck all suitable sites for that.

alan_m snipped-for-privacy@admac.myzen.co.uk> wrote

Ours are read 4 times a year and it takes a lot more than 30 seconds to read.

5 years is more realistic.

But you probably would have got the bulbs cheaper by purchasing them yourself rather than overpaying on your bills and then being given some of your own money back (via bulbs) minus an administration charge.

There was never "FREE" LED bulbs - you just paid for them in a convoluted way.

The only incandescent bulb I have is in the microwave, I have 2 CFL in the loft and switched on perhaps twice a year for 10 minutes at a time, all the rest are LED.

A few days buy you enough time to start/stop oil/gas generators.