18-06-2019, 05:11 PM
Which is why making energy policy by kneejerk reaction is a bad idea. Especially if you suddenly decide to take a substantial fraction of your country's generating capacity out of service without some very good engineering reasons. One of the many mistakes that have been made and will continue to be made on the route to a low carbon future.
Unless you have huge amounts of storage or massive interconnects (like the Desertec project, nice idea but I don't see it happening anytime soon) you need backup generation on the system. Since it's only going to be used occasionally it needs to be low capital cost and easy to start. Fuel efficiency is secondary. Open cycle gas turbines are a likely solution.
How about Argentina and several other south American countries recently. Major fault causing cascade failure perhaps? I don't think Europe (including UK) has ever experienced a major cascade of failure. The 1987 storm took out a lot of the southeast but the grid as a whole was OK. The US/Canada has had a couple of major failures like this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeas...ut_of_2003 I was in Vancouver during that outage.
Unless you have huge amounts of storage or massive interconnects (like the Desertec project, nice idea but I don't see it happening anytime soon) you need backup generation on the system. Since it's only going to be used occasionally it needs to be low capital cost and easy to start. Fuel efficiency is secondary. Open cycle gas turbines are a likely solution.
How about Argentina and several other south American countries recently. Major fault causing cascade failure perhaps? I don't think Europe (including UK) has ever experienced a major cascade of failure. The 1987 storm took out a lot of the southeast but the grid as a whole was OK. The US/Canada has had a couple of major failures like this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeas...ut_of_2003 I was in Vancouver during that outage.
www.borinsky.co.uk Jeffrey Borinsky www.becg.tv
