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Smart Wind Consortium moves closer to wind farm
Business Digest: Massive wind farm off north Yorks takes ‘significant step’
The Smart Wind Consortium, a joint venture between Siemens and Irish firm Mainstream Renewable Power, today hailed a boost for its plans to build a vast offshore wind energy generating plant in the North Sea.
Chairman Andy Kinsella said the company had secured a connection to the National Grid allowing it to push out power from its 4,735-square-kilometre site between 34 and 190 km offshore. He called the agreement a "significant step" towards the farm becoming reality.
The £15bn Hornsea site would produce enough power for three million homes, equivalent to four per cent of UK demand, from 1,000 turbines. The Thanet wind farm opened last week, hailed as the largest offshore wind farm to date, is just one tenth the size.
Read a full report at the Times ·
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The thing that worries me is the book by one of this country's top national grid control experts - Dennis Birkett - in his book "When Will The Lights Go Out?". He is predicting that about 6 Gigawatts of UK wind power will destablise the national grid and cause blackouts. His colleagues think that about 10gig will do it. This is because the power injected to the grid is very variable and not very predictable. Mere power loss due to lack of wind can be covered by standby generators (mostly gas and hydro for fast reaction times). But uncontrolled power variance must be monitored and compensated in realtime, and this is hard to do. The more wind power, the worse this problem gets. So Thanet offshore wind farm brings us up to about 5gig now, and the next year will see us go up to about 6gig. Future wind farms will easily take us over 10gig. So it looks like we can expect wind variance outages between 2011 and 2014. This has already happened on the continent in Spain, and in the US.............So be afraid, be very afraid. And John Etherington in his book "The Wind Farm Scam" predicts that the EuU will suggest an EU-wide "supergrid" to cure the problem! Are you not afraid yet? Really?