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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Monday, February 25, 2008

No wind when you need it

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Last week as I was traveling around the UK, it occurred to me that I was inhabiting the alternative-energy-provider’s nightmare scenario. The weather charts were dominated by large high-pressure system, largely unmoving, centred right over the UK. Leading to cold, bright days and, under clear skies (except, of course when we wanted to watch the lunar eclipse) – very cold nights. With no wind to speak of, across the whole region. Result – every outcrop of wind turbines I passed was either idle or just managing to turn listlessly.
In short, the classic problem of wind power; maximum demand occurring when you have minimum output. Which is why, of course, its detractors always point out that you need to back up wind power with a similar level of conventional generation. Or do you? Could a densely populated industrial society operate if a significant part of its electrical power generation were intermittent?
That takes you into discussions about how badly the thermal load (ie buildings) is insulated in most countries, how little ability we have to store energy, and so on. You can store energy to some extent – Portugal is building a series of hydro pump-storage dams for exactly this purpose, to store wind- and solar-generated power when it is in surplus. But you can only work that trick with small population densities and (relatively) big hills. Exactly how much, as a percentage, of total energy generation capacity could we tolerate losing for extended periods if we had centrallised control of discretionary loads? At its simplest, if the supply authorities had the power to say, “Don’t run now” to our washing machines?
I’ve never seen any figures for that, but someone must have worked it out. But I haven’t the time to try to look it up for now, as I must depart for the Embedded World exhibition and conference in Nurnberg. Where, of course, exactly the technologies you would need to implement that strategy will be displayed, and of which, more later.

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