Thursday 18 July 2013

Windpower: Unexpected Benefits

Don't fall for one eyed cost benefits when there are more benefits than merely, current primary production:
The subsidy doesn't just pay for the primary product, clean electricity at its current production levels, but also significantly reduces UK imports of energy improving our trade balance which lets face it, needs all the help it can get! And not only that, but the subsidy also pays for the very rapid growth of the wind sector.

So the anti-wind power one eyed zealots when they just choose to look at current primary product, they are avoiding looking at the big picture where the UK benefits from trade balance improvement, rapidly improving energy security.

No Need For Spinning Reserve
As windpower doesn't vary in practice very rapidly, there is no need for conventional spinning reserve as falsely claimed by the antis - infact, spinning reserve is expensive and windpower can in future provide spinning reserve services to the grid!

http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/56817.pdf

As spinning reserve is expensive to provide, having some or all of it provided by windpower is an unexpected benefit of windpower - by using the nations many thousands of wind turbines as a store of Kinetic Energy, we have a fairly resilient spinning reserve capability which the grid can call on at the flick of a switch in case of an outage of a major power plant.

There is a false claim that wind power is putting up energy prices
The renewables obligation is only a small % of everybodies energy bills, yet prices have gone up much greater than that % - so at the very worst, windpower adds on a small extra burden - but it probably doesn't:

The most inefficient use of gas is to burn it, to generate electricity - far better to burn it for direct heating or cooking. The more windpower we have, the less we're using gas to drive electricity generation. The laws of supply and demand therefore suggest that the existance of wind turbines decreases the demand on gas, which will tend to keep prices down.


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