Turbines are worse than useless
FURTHER to recent letters on the unreliability of wind-generated
electricity (May 31 and June 1, 2 & 3), following its plaudits by the
policy director of Scottish Renewables, Morag Watson, a point seemingly
overlooked is their drain of power when they are static.
Thus, they are actually worse than useless when there is no wind. Each
individual windmill and its connective wiring has to be kept live by the
electricity generated from the currently-shrinking alternative generators.
This to enable them to be brought back into generating service when the
wind returns.
Perhaps this total power demand from the thousands of propellers could be
added to information already requested by other correspondents from Ms Watson.
I won’t hold my breath.
John Taylor, Dunlop.
No proper back-up system
JOHN Palfreyman (Letters, June 3) failed to highlight the data required to
assess the problems facing the Scottish economy if the wind fails to blow
in a power system largely based on wind farm output. The current annual
energy demand of 50TWhours of electricity plus 150TWhours of gas will
increase to 350TWhours a year after a four-fold increase in output to
charge electric vehicles plus replacing gas as a fuel source are implemented.
That is around 1TWhours per day, which requires 40,000 MW of plant to meet
the required energy demand. If the wind fails to blow there is no back-up
system that can meet such a demand without a massive capital investment in
plant that will sit idle for around 95 per cent of the year and, to put the
demand into context, the pump store plant at Cruachan only generates a
maximum of 400MW for around six hours, hence hundreds of such units would
be required to cover the failure of the wind to keep the lights on in
Scotland.
Ian Moir, Castle Douglas.

SAS Volunteer

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