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Veteran
Posts: 275
 
| I thought this was quite interesting http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2011/01/europe... - it's billed as a Memorandum of Understanding between the "North Sea Countries" to work towards a "supergrid". Strangely, the "North Sea Countries" include Ireland and Luxembourg, but the general idea seems to be that off-shore windfarms in the North Sea will require additional grid infrastructure to get the energy generated in-shore, and if that is needed, maybe it's worth going the extra mile to connect them all into a North Sea grid. From an engineering point of view, this is excellent news - the wider the geographical spread of wind turbines over the grid, the less the chance that all the turbines are becalmed, and the higher the chance that there will be demand for the output. From the Transition point of view, things aren't so clear - obviously this has nothing at all to do with local resilience, but maybe there's another angle to resilience - if we have a strong enough multi-national infrastructure, arguably that brings more resilience to the whole region. | |
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Veteran
Posts: 275
| Here's a bit more on off-shore wind. http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2011/01/offsho... - the article also mentions the Memorandum of Understanding. Interesting that Scotland apparently has 25% of Europe's off-shore wind resource. The total installed capacity for the UK is reported as 1.3 GW. At a capacity factor of 40% (i.e. average generation being 40% of maximum) that suggests off-shore wind generates about 500 MW - or about 1% of UK demand. And the UK is the world leader in offshore wind power, by some distance. It just goes to show, even though by historic standards there's a lot of activity, we're still a long way from offshore wind being a significant contributor to our demand. | |
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| Hopefully a supergrid will allow our wind turbines to be used to their full capacity.
Instead of the national grid switching them off when there is a surplus of power we could export to Europe. | |
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Extreme Veteran
Posts: 319
| It's already happening see http://www.nationalgrid.com/uk/Interconnectors/Netherlands/ | |
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North Sea Super-grid