Wind turbines used to absorb a power surplus?

Tell that to any operator of a steam locomotive. Of course they can. All reliable generators except hydro take a bit of time to get steam up, but there is energy in to boilers to cope with medium term peaks of a few minutes.

Rubbish. You mean wind generators who get paid not to produce

It is not, That is why you add batteries to the grid.

They take power form the grid to turn when there is no wind otherwise the main beraings deform

You can throttle a stem plant instantaneously. All that happens in the limit is a safety valve will blow of excess steam pressure.

The UK ran on pretty much 100% coal up until the 1960s. They managed.

And those also use street paving quality gunk, preheated to make it liquid.

I am not sure why they switched from steam turbines to diesel, I wouldn't think there was much difference in complexity

Ah. according to the net it was simply a matter of fuel efficiency. Diesels use less bitumen :-)

There are massive differences between steam locomotives and plants that generate electricity using steam.

? Of course they can.

A given generator needs to spin at a specific frequency, and the margins on that frequency are very small.

Where multiple generators are fed from a common steam prime mover, the startup time for any one generator is on the order of 10's of minutes - far too long to respond to large changes in demand.

The spot price is not what you think it is. In general power stations are contracted to supply power at a fixed rate. If those contracts exceed demand, the price goes negative and someone will be paid to shut down.

Its not a question that the coal people are paying to stay on, its that someone else will be paid to not generate, even if they could, and have a contract to do so. The ones who benefit most are those that pay the most from fuel. So gas typically would shut down

The way the electricity market works is that there are long term contracts and then there is an imbalance between the long term supplies and the short term demand. That goes into a balancing market - al least here in the UK - and prices can and do go crazy until some one steps in to silly the next 15 minute period or something at insane prices. Or someone agrees to get paid to cut output.

As long as its only twowatts. In general the biggest pumped hydro only lasts an hour or so, at full chat. The rest is marketing spin.

Its not quite that bad, although the amount spent on adding kit to make renewables reliable is far greater than the cost of just chucking in a couple of nukes

If you look at UK demand (

) there is generally an evening peak of around 5GW in winter, that is spread out over an hour or two.

This is covered by a couple of GW of pumped, and a couple more of straight hydro, plus a little messing with imports, since france has a slightly different clock as it were.

Another couple would be handy if it could be built sanely No storage can cope with two weeks of no wind and cold weather and buggrall sun. That's renewable pie in the sky. In the end once you have skimmed all the profits and gouged all the customers, the reality that if you want to decarbonise electricity you don't use renewables. Nuclear is way cheaper overall.

You just plug it onto the existing grid close to where the demand is and that's all you need to do.

Well if you get paid to USE surplus electricity that is of course a grand plan

Or melt lots of salt, or heat a heatbank of water.

So get rid if the stupid mediaeval windmills and solar panels that generate when you don't need it. And stop paying them not to produce

And massive, guaranteed profits.

We do, because they still get paid to stop generating as if they had been generating.

No they are not.

But no one does

The greenies are either in the pockets of Big Energy - gas/ oil. renewables...or they are simply so low IQ that they cant see the flaws in the fairy stories they swallow.

We have squirrels that like Fritos too, but no local rabbits. We do have coyotes and owls in the canyon a couple of blocks away, but they don't visit us much.

Sf has big flocks of wild parrots. They are noisy.

This is a sweet rom-com:

Jesus wept. A full blown tinfoil hatter.

Bless! The naivete of people. It all goes on yer bill at the end of the day.

Just a different way to pay for it

Dont be bloody stupid.

I think they are correct to do that. switzerland everyone has a gun too. In case Putin wanders in.

Governments since really Thatcher have all been about following a common plan that has no interest in giving people more than the bare minimum that will get them re-elected. The people behind the scenes pull the strings and the politicians spout bullshit and argue over gender identity while you get more tax and a worse service.

And there is no point voting for a different party, they are already compromised. Maybe the Reform party has some honesty. Its a shot to nothing as far as I am concerned, UKIP never got into government, but it scared the f*ck out of the tories. And no, its former voters haven't all died off. Or changed their minds

The longest commercial super conducting cable I have heard of was less than 2 km long.

The problem with super conducting cables is the outside heat entering _into_the cable. This heat must be removed to maintain superconductivity even in 'high temperature SC cables. Removing the heat requires a lot of electricity and is proportional to the cable length but independent of the actual SC current. In order to use only a small fractional part of the cable current, the cable current/power must be huge (about 10 GW for a 1000 km cable). This might have been feasible for a DESERTEC cable feeding solar energy from Sahara into Europe.Unfortunately Desertec is not feasible due to the political instability inn the area.

After 5 or 50 years ?

Perhaps in Australia with very low population density, but getting RoWs in Europe with a much higher population density becomes harder.

Regarding wind turbines, some sources claim that the turbine should be installed at least 20 times the windmill height from the closest inhabited house to avoid NIMBY problems. Thus wind farms can be only at remote locations. .

Ive got a box full I removed because they were plain awful. LEDs are all I install when incandescents go.

None are synchronous. Not any more and I cannot recall that any were. You need a massive step up gearbox or a multipole generator to turn 60 revs a minute into 50 or 60 Hz.

They are all using inverters which is why the grid needs batteries for frequency stabilisation. Inverters have no spinning mass.