Wind turbines used to absorb a power surplus?

If a power plant is to kick in fast, to back up a shortage in a system, it has to be "hot standby spinning reserve", with the generators rotating at synchronous speed and a trickle of steam to keep net power at zero. That has momentum and can be ramped up in fast as needed. NG boilers are much faster than coal.

Stack gas is hot, so keeping up boiler pressure is a constant loss too.

Presumably a country-wide array of solar cells will fade in and out slowly as weather changes, as long as one doesn't lose a big transmission line. At least eclipses are predictable.

It took engineers over 100 years to evolve a reliable power system. A few greenies with law degrees can destroy it lot faster.

You'll appreciate that insulation when there's no power to run your heat pumps and you are running out of wood for the fireplace.

But based on what you are saying, our insulated house would not need a heating/cooling system. Bring it to temperature and it will hold forever.

Have you actually run boilers? How much insulation has to be on them? Give me facts, not theory. Tell me about the power plants you were in.

Of course there is some loss, but actually a steam turbine ramps up pretty quickly from static. As they were used extensively in ships fora a while

I dint know of the relative merits of running them disconnected or as 'spinning reserve'. What I do know is that the energy to run them either way is a small fraction of full power

Absolutely,. With gas prices back to pre covid levels my electricity bills are now 4 times what they were.

The only thing that has changed is that there is less fossil and nuclear power and more renewable on the grid

Go figure

Yeah, thats te EU. Here we import a small fraction from the USA. Mainly by product of their lumber industry. The EU can go f*ck itself. I am sick of the lies , corruption and duplicity and the German card being played all the time,

I built a house. I know all about heat calculations. How much you insulate depends on your fuel costs and the rate of interest. But that sort of cost benefit analysis seems beyond you.

My hot water boiler feeds an insulated tank. It stays hot all day without need to add heat.

There are forests being grown in the USA just to make wood chips for "renewable" power plants in europe.

Cold and hungry people will vote for people who will give them heat and food, but there are time lags in that feedback loop.

Evidence?

Some one did the calculations. The lumber business in the USA is MASSIVE. If they can sell on the waste as chippings for fuel, why not? And if these first they are growing are sustainable, then again, why not?

Either they are able to grow what they burn and the carbon cycle is closed, or they will run out of forests and solve the problem that way.

Not so very great lags as current European unrest is showing

Perhaps you want to review physics, particularly the thermodynamics part.

Yes, I had the same and works great in the house. However, I also ran a steam plant with a couple of boilers. It does not work the way you think it does. I've also been in large power plants running steam boilers for electricity.

Get back to me when you figure how to maintain 200psi with just some insulation.

No, I don't need to do that. You do.

The earth is still with a molten core. That's because it has a large volume to surface ratio and some fairly good insulation, and nothing is keeping it warm apart from a smidgeon of decay heat

No you haven't. maintaining 200 psi is easy with out any insulation . any tractor tyre can do it.

You have no idea about the underlying physics of anything. You just know what your limited experience made you *think* was the case.

This ain't hard to Google:

Some gets burned, some pulped into paper products.

Do you fill your tires with steam?

But 200 PSI is an interesting pressure for a tractor tire. Mid-20s is more common.

So what is the temperature range of that tractor tyre? What is the pressure difference as temperature changes? They do lose pressure as the temperature drops, physics at work.

A I said, get back to me when you see reality of running steam boilers. Your ego will explode once you learn about them from practical experience.

That thing about tire pressure is a bit crazy. Some are radials. Most I've seen run under 30 psi. It's a benefit to let the tire squat a bit on the ground for increased traction. Could a tractor tire stand 200 psi? I don't have the math skills to calculate what the total pressure would be on a typical tractor tire. Here's a link with tire sizes if you want to give it a shot.

But only in John Larkin's fantasy land - one fantasied for him by the climate change denial propaganda machine.

Greenies have a interest in keeping the population onside - they need their votes - and they have no interest in making the electricity supply system unreliable.

Now that solar cells are the cheapest source of electric power, with wind turbines close behind, even after you have figured in the cost of covering their intermittent nature, the greenies have and interest in making the electric supply system sell the cheapest possible power.

The climate change denial propaganda machine is funded by people who are currently making a lot of money out of digging up fossil carbon and selling ti as a rather expensive fuel source, and they want to slow down the changeover as much as they can. Feeding nonsense to gullible twits like John Larkin is definitely cost effective. Crippling the US education system so it produces more gullible twits like him is even more cost effective. There aren't any direct costs to them at all.

It does damage US society, but they don't care about that.

Upper class Brits can't cope with rational argument, and want to go back to their imaginary past where they thought that they could win an argument by asserting their upper class status.

I worked in the UK from 1973 to 1993, and saw them trying it on from time to time. It never worked, but I was working in businesses that got things done.

Brexit was a suicidal gesture driven by that kind of nostalgia. It will get undone, eventually, but it will take a couple of proper Labour governments to restore rationality first.

Tony Blair was Fetters rather than Eton, and merely a different kind of upper-class twit.