Didn’t want to further pollute the wind speed thread.

“though I’m wondering – do your lights go out when there is no wind in the UK?”
the lights dont go out in the house

Obviously not as green as they’re making out then. I can’t see how it’s possible on that basis to supply their customers with green energy when the wind doesn’t blow.

From the ecotricity web site:

We take the money our customers spend on electricity and invest it in clean forms of power like wind energy. What’s more, we’re the only green electricity company actually building these new renewable energy sources. In 2007 alone we invested £25 million in wind energy.

Can somebody reassure me on that basis that none of the money I spend on electricity is going towards building windmills if I’m not with them?

I do love the obfuscation in http://www.ecotricity.co.uk/about/why-green-electricity-prices-follow-brown/ – and how they skirt around the issue of the fact the reason prices go up is because in reality their customers are actually paying for oil and gas, just in a roundabout way.

Most “environmentally sound” power generation requires significantly greater fixed costs that most carbon based ones. It’s key economic advantage is it’s relative marginal cost of production (other than finance) is extremely low. Most green electricity generation can only get the green light (so to speak) exactly because of carbon energy inflation driving up all unit prices of electricty whether green or brown.

Another point you’re missing is that the price of green energy is higher at the moment as any excess electricity sold back to the grid is undervalued. Users of alternative energy in Germany get about 4 times the price per unit that the UK pays.

undervalued

I wouldnt say it was substantially undervalued. I agree it’s significantly less than in Germany, but the German price isnt it’s value either.

Selling back to the grid will get you about 4.5p per unit. Buying from the grid costs between 4p and 12p I gather.
http://www.energyhelpline.com/energy-guide/Electricity-units.aspx
http://www.ecocentre.org.uk/selling-electricity-back-to-the-grid.html

I’ll admit there’s some slightly wishy-washy thinking going on with the German way of valuing electricity, which makes out that conventional electricity generation comes with massive hidden costs in terms of pollution and running expenses. That said, the UK rate is apparently going to get a big increase soon – whether this will kick-start a massive surge of interest in renewable energy remains to be seen.

“Can somebody reassure me on that basis that none of the money I spend on electricity is going towards building windmills if I’m not with them?”

All generation companies have an obligation to generate a certain percentage from renewable sources. Those that fall below are allowed to buy certificates from those who produce more than the requirement, such as Ecotricity. The problem for the consumer is that this creates double counting – “green” tarrifs are often not driving any addtional renewable generation.

Having said that, I’m with Ecotricity because unlike other electricity suppliers, their sole purpose is to build renewable capacity, which in my view is a very good thing.

As for the intermittancy thing – all forms of generation are subject to intermittancy (e.g. breakdowns, planned maintenance), which is why the national grid has reserve capacity. Whilst wind power is more intermittant than most, it’s been estimated that wind power could generate close to 20% of our total supply without incurring significant extra costs in reserve capacity.

Can somebody reassure me on that basis that none of the money I spend on electricity is going towards building windmills if I’m not with them?

no 5 % target of green /renewable energy for all providers iirc
OP why do you object ?
Wind alone is clearly not the answer but clearly fossil fuels have a limited life span and environmental impact and nuclear is very expensive (ignoring the debate we could have on that as off topic)

OP why do you object ?

Because wind power is a really rubbish way to generate electricity if you want a reliable energy supply. It’s not even actually that green if you consider the whole system including the conventional power stations which supply ecotricity customers when the wind can’t, and don’t suddenly stop burning fuel when the windmills come back on line.

As for the intermittancy thing – all forms of generation are subject to intermittancy (e.g. breakdowns, planned maintenance), which is why the national grid has reserve capacity. Whilst wind power is more intermittant than most, it’s been estimated that wind power could generate close to 20% of our total supply without incurring significant extra costs in reserve capacity.

Is the best you can do to suggest that other forms of electricity generation have the same problem? Do we lose most or all of our conventional power stations for several days at a time due to breakdowns and planned maintenance? Who exactly made that estimate – I bet they had a vested interest.

Note, I’m not at all against renewable energy – it would be great if we could rely on hydro like Norway. Just against doing it badly, and overhyping (and subsidising) things that don’t actually work that well.

ChrisM, I’ve stayed in a holiday home where all the electricity was provided by photovoltaic cells. They are well-known as a rotten, inefficient way of generating electricity, and there was I think one of these things on the roof, with a couple of batteries in the garage. But this gave us more than enough electricity for lighting, watching TV when the weather was rubbish, and running the washing machine every few days. Appliance use had to be cut to the bare minimum but in the context of a holiday, at least, this was actually quite nice. Wind turbines are waay more efficient and if you had the right location, I reckon it would be perfectly feasible to run a low-energy house without even connecting it to the national grid.

On a small scale, using lots of energy storage, yes. The issue being that without the batteries, it wouldn’t actually be a practical system either with solar or wind generation, and you’d need rather a lot of LA batteries to keep the whole grid going!

and don’t forget, most of your children will have legs so if they want to watch telly or use the xbox, a turbo trainer with a generator will suffice nicely.

I’ve been “designing” a house in my head for the last year or so that will have a combination of groundwater heating/solar heating and wind turbine/photovoltaic cells.

The electricity production would run an inverter that generated Hydrogen from water and stored it in a large underground tank. The energy storage density of hydrogen in a tank would be much higher than SLA and I reckon cheaper.

Heating would be taken care of using the combination of grund/solar water heating with sold fuel (wood) booster.

So the only battery technology available is LA? 🙄

Why, what alternatives do you suggest which are more viable from an economic, or any other perspective?

Good plan, Stoner. Everybody should follow suit. Shame about the massive deforestation to fuel all the wood burners 😈 😉

Given prison is far too easy, what we really need are treadmills in prison to replace the windmills. Convictricity anybody?

Stoner beat me to it.

Chrism, I know **** all about renewable energy technology, but as an eavesdropper on nerdy night riding threads I do know that SLA batteries aren’t exactly cutting edge.

Shame about the massive deforestation to fuel all the wood burners

Or the massive forestation when biomass becomes regarded as a commercially viable fuel. 😉

the other technology to look for are new carbon nano tube batteries. Carbon plates are good storgae media apprently but being plate sthey fracture when the are highly charged. the higgledy-piggledy fibre-like form that’s being developed doesnt fracture but has huge energy storage density.

Another one is a new LiPo system that speeds up the charge rate massively making intermittent power supply storage a possibility, rather than the wasterful trickle charge of LA.s

Shame about the massive deforestation to fuel all the wood burners

I will be coppicing. 🙂

as an eavesdropper on nerdy night riding threads I do know that SLA batteries aren’t exactly cutting edge.

There’s a big difference between the requirements for bike lighting and fixed installations.

Thanks for pointing that out. I’ve been trying to heat my home using an over-volted Cree XRE. 😉

Another one is a new LiPo system that speeds up the charge rate massively making intermittent power supply storage a possibility, rather than the wasterful trickle charge of LA.s

Is that a particularly big issue for LA storage, given you surely need to be storing hours rather than minutes of power (you halve the charging rate by doubling the capacity)?

the new technology allows extremely fast charging meaning you can “capture” energy much more efficiently . Let me go find the article…

http://mb.com.ph/articles/200094/mit-develops-quickcharge-battery

http://www.lowcarboneconomy.com/community_content/_low_carbon_news/4970

Interesting technology, but I don’t see the benefits for domestic energy storage, where you simply don’t have the generating capacity to recharge your batteries that quickly (assuming you have sufficient battery capacity).

Even for the stated applications it’s going to take some significant changes to other bits of kit – 300W mobile phone charger with 60A cabling?

Obviously not as green as they’re making out then. I can’t see how it’s possible on that basis to supply their customers with green energy when the wind doesn’t blow.

Any halfwit can see that wind isn’t the whole solution. And absolutely no-one is saying that it is.

However the wind is almost always blowing somewhere, especially just offshore. So you can get a hell of a lot of energy from wind turbines for very little outlay.

The German scheme afaik is designed to encourage renewable energy and also micro-generation to build the industry and technology as much as anything. It’s an incentive for a purpose, not a purely economic tool.

60A cabling

Yes, I too wondererd how they were going to flash that much juice down the pipe so fast without using 99.9999% copper rebar 🙂

IMO having superfast charging technology reduces energy waste. Bursts of surplus energy produced at a wind generator in a gust for eaxmple could be more efficiently captured.

What I would love to do, to satisfy the analyst in me, is calculate the diurnal/annual power consumption sycle of a 4 person house (excluding heating) and map that against the diurnal/annual energy production by PV cells/ wind generator of a given size and determine the maximum energy storage requirement. Then calculate the most efficient storage technology for that level of capacity, whether it be SLA, LiPo or Hydrogen gas.

The German scheme afaik is designed to encourage renewable energy and also micro-generation to build the industry and technology as much as anything. It’s an incentive for a purpose, not a purely economic tool.

absolutley correct.

Here, we banned tungsten bulbs instead 🙂

Did they also ban incandescent bulbs in Germany?

As for charging a mobile that quickly – the charger would be a supercapacitor that discharges into an inductive charger. Put your phone on a pad, press a button and it’s fully charged… The phone would weigh a bit though, you’d need a few small pieces of sturdy metal to pick up that kind of current mind. Unless of course it was really really fast in which case the conductors would not have time to warm up.

Any halfwit can see that wind isn’t the whole solution. And absolutely no-one is saying that it is.

So ecotricity aren’t even halfwits?

However the wind is almost always blowing somewhere

Almost always is almost good enough.

Did they also ban incandescent bulbs in Germany?

banned across the EU by 2012. Not all countries doing it with such haste as us though.

Then calculate the most efficient storage technology for that level of capacity, whether it be SLA, LiPo or Hydrogen gas.

Energy conversion / electrical efficiency? These decisions are normally made on an economic basis, in which case I’d be very surprised if LiPo/LiIon got anywhere near LA. Don’t know about economics of hydrogen, but doubt it works out cheaper for a single household sized plant (given larger plants must surely be cheaper).

Not that LA has significant issues with energy storage efficiency.

I dont expect LiPo to get there, but I reckon hydrogen could give LA a good run for it’s money since the marginal cost of capacity is negligeable compared to LA. Just a bigger tank rather than more cells.

I don’t think anyone at the moment installs a renewable energy system in their house because it’s the most economical choice. Even a really simple, uncontroversial energy saving measure like insulating a home properly takes time to see some financial payback. There is a bigger picture you’re missing here – idealism maybe, but also a degree of self sufficiency and cushioning against constantly increasing living costs. Not to mention that installing a renewable energy generation system probably adds a fair few quid to the price of your property should you decide to sell it.

It doesn’t have to be for an individual household either – if you look at stuff like the Vauban development in Germany, it seems to be perfectly possible for like-minded people to come together and build a development with shared power sources from renewables.

I’m with ecotricity, of course the lights don’t go out if it’s not windy – as with all suppliers, you draw power from the grid, not direct from their turbines. Using them is the best way to ensure my money goes toward building more turbines.

If there was a nuclear tariff I’d be happy to sign up for that instead…

So ecotricity aren’t even halfwits?

They’re not trying to persuade people that wind only is good enough, are they? I’m a customer, they are a very sound bunch of people. Do you think that everyone’s stupid apart from you? That people who work and spend their lives involved with renewable energy would miss something so blatantly obvious?

Wind power electricity is a big fraud. It works, sort off, but requires to be heavily subsidised. Plus it is destroying many areas of natural beauty so that pasty faced resource burning high-rise urban pseudo environmentalists can claim the moral high ground.

Simply wear more clothes, cut your heating bills.

Hydro, nuclear, yes. Anything but wind.

but I reckon hydrogen could give LA a good run for it’s money since the marginal cost of capacity is negligeable compared to LA. Just a bigger tank rather than more cells.

Which is exactly why (without knowing anything at all about the exact economics) I’m dubious that it’s economically viable for a single home installation, given it doesn’t seem to be used in rather larger applications. Bearing in mind that the typical buyer would presumably already be energy efficient, so need less storage capacity than an average household.

Not entirely true that the marginal cost is negligible though – the generator and fuel cells still need scaling.

Having checked, the energy conversion efficiency is only ~40% for hydrogen storage (vs ~80% for LA), so you’re wasting a lot there.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1033683/Fill-car–home-hydrogen-fuel-station.html

about £2k for the generator and small tank.

They’re not trying to persuade people that wind only is good enough, are they?

It appears to be what they’re spending all their money on though. Of course they’re not actually stupid, as from their POV it makes perfect economic sense to get people to buy their electricity from them on the basis that it’s green – and also rake in all the subsidies available for building windmills. Therefore there must be somebody else who is stupid to think that basing all your energy supply on wind is a good thing (or missing the fact that that’s what ecotricity are doing)…

chrism – nobody is saying that all electricity production should be from wind. Ecotricity use subsidies to build wind power capacity just as BNFL or whoever use subsidies to build nuclear capacity. As a nation we need a mix. As a consumer I choose a supplier who will help provide a better mix by building more reusable capacity.