Carbon Trust: Rooftop windmills are eco own-goal

STORAGE !

ALL TOGETHER NOW: It's not the GENERATION of power that's the problem, it's STORING it so it can be used when needed. Jeeze, how often do I have to say it: STORAGE, STORAGE, STORAGE !

Paris 'cos she understands storage. Or something rhyming with that.

@JonB

"Now, we do have rather a lot of prisoners, ~80,000 so if each of those could give us a few KWh a day on the bikes... Hmm... Prison sentences measured in KWh might help..."

I like it as well... in fact let's go a bit further - we should extend this to the unemployed claiming benefits as well... so benefit money could be based on a KWh exchange rate...

There are currently about 800,000 claiming jobseekers allowance, so we've got quite a good generating capacity there - while they're not doing much else they can help with the energy crisis, thereby becoming a boon for society.

With 4 hours a day, they'd generate about:

880,000 x 200Wh x 4hrs = 704,000 KW

That's 704 MW (Sizewell B nuclear station produces 1,188 MW, so that's over half a nuclear power station!)

Devil's Advocate

Of course, this all assumes that oil and gas has begun to run out, or will in the near future. But nobody knows whether this is the case or not, because any calculation based on reserves estimates (a la Hubbert) can be safely compared to pissing in the wind. If you've ever seen the amount of fixing and bullshit that goes into these reports then you know what I mean. They're political / commercial documents and no technical conclusions can be drawn from them.

What we have at the moment is a crisis of supply, not a crisis of accumulation. I predict that if Iraq begins to ramp up its production in the next few years, the oil price will stabilise and even begin to drop, but not back down to $20-30/barrel. But since a barrel of oil has traditionally been valued at less than a barrel of mineral water, maybe we're all paying closer to what we should be now.

We may be in a period of long-term decline, but it will be a damned long tail, with quite a few surprises along the way...

@Tom

Your £70 70A alternator was probably a service exchange one, new ones from Bosch/Lucas are about £120 retail (unless I'm buying them from the wrong place)

But I'm a member of the nuclear camp, In my area (Mid/North Wales) we have both windfarms and a former reactor, and I'd much rather the reactor, as it's much more compact with regards to land use and generates a great deal more electricity for more of the time.

Also, we have a lot of microgeneration as there are still many farms without a mains connection, these tend to be on Diesel generators, as wind turbines are simply not reliable enough, even the centre of alternative technology down the road (aka Hippie Heaven) have two great big diesel generators as backup to their renewable supplies. To me, that says a lot.

Going Micro

If you really want microgeneration, it would be more sensible to build yourself a CHP system using a diesel (read: used cooking oil) engine, some 24V truck alternators, open-vented lead-acid batteries and old UPSes -- basically, just 24-to-230V inverters, but they can be picked up very cheaply second-hand when the original crappy sealed lead-acid batteries can no longer hold a charge. The engine's cooling system is plumbed through your existing radiator circuit using a three-way valve to select between it and the boiler. You can also add a 230V alternator into the mix, but you might end up having to buy this new rather than bodging it out of scrap.

The electricity you generate won't be suitable for feeding back into the grid, but you should cut down on your gas consumption by transferring heating to biodiesel (aside: since this is a non-roadgoing application, it won't impact on your 2500, or 5000 if you have a climate-change-denialist in your street, litres p.a.) and generate a fair proportion of your electricity needs. The batteries mean you can have your juice when it's needed. And it doesn't depend on the sun shining brightly enough or the wind blowing at the right speed -- only on people eating chips!

micro generation plant

They should change the regulation in the UK to make it possible for every land owner in a rural area to set up one full size wind turbine without legal hassle from the local communities, neighbours and councils. Look at what the Swedes have done - you can today see one full size windturbine next to every other farm. These are often rather centrally located on those properties and so do not generally interfere with neighbours properties.

Except for adding their beatiful posture to the views of the "open landscape" in the countryside ofcourse!

oh - thats why it will never work here in the UK... tsss

@"880,000 x 200Wh x 4hrs = 704,000 KW"

You mean 200W, not 200Wh

880,000 x 200W x 4hrs/day = 704MWhrs/day

Sizewell B nuclear station produces 1,188 MW and runs about 24 hours per day, or 28512MWhrs/day.

If you increase unemployment and prison population by a factor of ten (probably the correct government targets), and double the number of hours they pedal/row then they are almost equal to half a Sizewell B. As a punishment for incompetent arithmetic, repeat "Educational standards are not falling" three times. (This is how politicians deal with problems, so it must work ;-)

The price of a mini windmill has nothing to do with materials or engineering. Manufacturers can sell sufficient windmills if they can show payback in ten years (with inappropriate figures for maintenance and wind speed). Double the peak power output, and you can double the selling price.

The interest on a loan for £5000 for photovoltaic + solar heating + windmill is similar to my gas+electricity bills. Now add costs installation, maintenance and energy storage (because the sun does not shine at night, and the wind hardly ever blows). I would rather spend my money on insulation and heat recovery ventilation.

Water, water everywhere

George Monbiot will be pleased. He gives micro-wind pretty short shrift in "Heat", saying they're more likely to rip the side of your house off, or poze a hazard to light aircraft, than generate any useful power.

So now this is dead, can we have another look at mini- and micro-hydro? There are hundreds, if not thousands of sites in the UK where you can re-use existing mill estate to produce electricity. It's not as simple as hooking a generator up to the millwheel and letting the race do the rest, as these handy resources will demonstrate:

http://www.british-hydro.co.uk/index.asp

http://www.claptonmill.co.uk/mill.htm#hydro

Still, it's nice that periods of high rainfall coincide with periods of higest electricity demand, i.e. winter.

@ AC posted Friday 8th August 2008 12:41 GMT

Exactly something the greens, planners and nimbys all conveniently forget.

I'm with you.

It's a little known fact....

that wind turbines can wreck your house as well. Why do you think we stopped using windmills mid 19C. The short answer is because of the oscillating loading caused by the sails most of them had to be put out of use before they fell apart. The cost of maintaining them was higher than the cost of fossil energy. If you buy one big enough to make a real contribution to your energy consumption do not under any circumstances fasten to to your house.

Nothing new here then.

Of course you might want to stay awake on a windy night with your wind turbine is drumming away. On the other hand you could take it back to the DIY store and complain about the noise. Do not be surprised if you get the answer "What do you expect? It is a windmill".

@Anonymous Coward - Devil's Advocate

While you're almost certainly right to disbelieve any published numbers for "proven" (meaning "not proven") and "probable" (meaning "wishful") oil reserves (famously, the House of Saud has published near-identical reserves numbers for the last thirty years, implying that, conveniently, they're finding oil as fast as they're pumping it), a more enlightening view of the industry comes from looking at the jobs they're hiring for now, and what those hires are doing.

At a party the other week, I was chatting to a girl who turned out to be an exploration geologist who spent her days inspecting "empty" oil fields to try and work out whether it was worth sinking a butt-load of cash into them to try and recover the last few percent, and what the oil price needed to be to make them profitable. (Precising), her opinion was that from an exploration perspective we hit peak oil several years ago: finding new reserves is becoming harder and harder, they're in ever-more unappealing locations and they're not as big as they used to be.

However, if you fancy a career staring at seismograph plots trying to work out whether there's any Texas T left under them thar hills then this is your time...

You wouldn't get much power out of me

I had a similar idea about prisoners generating electrcity and posted it elsewhere on the internet around 2005. The unemployment figures are roughly 1.65 million (not quite sure where I read that), so in addition with prisoners all doing exercise i suppose you could generate enough to power a light bulb or two. I think those who suggested/agree with it should stand as Labour MP's as it is the same barmy intellectual nonsense coming from the PPE politicos. If you alerted your current (Labour) MP to this, I'm sure it would become a reality in 2057 or something like, but it would all grind to a halt due to Health & Safety/Diversity/Equality legislation, not to mention cost. As for turbines, there's no demand for them. I spoke to a couple of (would be) installers and they said that in the majority of cases customers wouldn't get planning permission. I'm off for a stroll in England's grey and unpleasant land. Ooo, a brown envelope full of cash... aren't turbines brilliant?

Trehugger comments...

We have maybe 100 years of nuke fuel left at current consumption rates.

- assuming we don't dig any more up. That figure comes from 'proven reserves', which essentially are those we found before the 1960s (when we stopped looking). Any reasonable estimate gives upwards of 1000 years (at increased consumption rates), and that's not counting breeder reactors, which would do away with any shortage at all...

Demand is rising, especially if we want to replace any fossil usage with nuke. We are close to peak nuke fuel production (so prices are going to rise).

- peak nuke fuel!??!! there is an essentially limitless supply in all the world's granite! This cries out for a cite...

We are not building breeder reactors...

- actually, we are not building reactors full stop. We should start immediately...

Greenies and big generators

There was one event billed as "green" whose organisers attempted to ban petrol and diesel generators from site.

Such a policy would almost certainly have led to most of the electricity used there originating from disposable batteries; probably about the most magenta* way of getting the stuff, especially given that this was in the days before white LEDs, so torch bulbs were filament bulbs. Disposable batteries create way more pollution than even those cheaply-made 2-stroke generators that have suspiciously-increasing VA ratings every time they are advertised.

* work it out .....

What is this?

"A couple of months ago, New Scientist had an article estimating 50-80 years total known reserves and less than 20 before we hit peak production, with no-one willing to gamble on finding new reserves..."

The New Scientist? Citing a once-reputable magazine which has turned into a Greenpeace house mag? For a comment on this estimate from the British Geological Society, see http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19526140.700-uranium-reserves.html

"@ "then I don't believe the whole CO2 scam". Bloody big gamble that one. I'm personally skeptical (about everything), but if you're wrong then we're all toast."

Umm. I have looked at the theory of AGW. Oddly, it's not a proven hypothesis. It goes like this:

1 - The CO2 concentration has been going up.

2 - The average temperature of the world has been going up

3 - If the two are related, it might be that the CO2 (which 'absorbs' sunlight), is causing a bit of warming which causes more water vapour to form in a runaway feedback. Note that there are several ifs there.

4 - We can model this proposal on a computer, and if we pick the right figures, we can get the model to match the earlier warming.

5 - So the world is in peril unless we lower the CO2

Normally, a scientific hypothesis remains theoretical until it has actually made predictions which can be tested. Oddly, this hasn't happened with AGW. No predictions have been formally made and tested at all. Various phenomena, such as a stratospheric 'hot spot' are implied by AGW, but these have not been found to exist in reality. When increased CO2 and temperature are found in ice core data, the temperature always comes before the increased CO2. When this contary datais produced, odd mathematical fudges are produced to explain the lack of corroborating evidence away. Occasionally, people with embarrassing counter evidence are denied the opportunity to print. Appeals are made to 'concensus' and 'authority', but no one is proposing or funding investigations which are designed to prove or diprove the hypothesis.

There are now sets of embarrassing data, indicating, for instance, that the Earth is no longer warming up. Oddly, no one pays attention to these...

So, no, I don't think it's a gamble to reject this hypothesis. If I'm wrong then we might live in a Mediterranean climate, but there is no AGW proof, just assertion in the face of ever more negative evidence. I am being asked to drink the Kool-Aid and then jump on a passing comet....