Some politicians and newspaper editors - illiterates all - propose wind power as a substitute for coal/oil/natural gas/nuclear based electricity. Here's where reality intrudes.
... physicist Howard Hayden has commented:“Power from wind varies dramatically with wind speed, as anybody can tell by merely looking at the power curves from any turbine manufacturer on the planet. If the wind speed increases from 10 mph to 20 mph, the power increases by a cool factor of eight. If the wind speed drops from 20 mph to 10 mph, the power it produces drops by 87.5%. Such variations are at odds with the necessity of keeping the grid voltage constant within a few percent, and the frequency constant within 0.03%. In the electricity business, stability is the key ingredient”Not experienced in physical issues, some politicians might readily endorse schemes where the instability is hidden; their failure to perceive the fatal limitation of wind power is one such example.
1 comment:
Makes you wonder why the physicists and engineers who DO understand this persist in the delusion that wind power is a legitimate replacement for base power, instead of being limited to niche and supplementary uses. After all, the science is settled.
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