From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t idau
Just as well we don’t rely on renewables for all of our electricity then!
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Storm Darragh leaves UK’s Biggest solar farm in pieces
Plenty of cheap 2nd hand panels will be available shortly, due to spec changes they will look to replace the lot if the insurance contract allows.
I…fall…to pieces
each time the trees start to sway
I…fall…to pieces
each time the wind blows my way.
You want to believe that I never Fail
You always preach of me
Like I’m the Holy Grail
But each time the lights go out in wind snow or hail
You just cry
and I get blown to pieces
Many donkeys there in Wales. Treadmill-driven turbines anyone?
If you find yourself short a few donkeys (biblical Asses) we have 45 in our Senate and 215 in our house we’ll gladly loan you. 😉
Beating you hands down! We’ve got 650 in the Commons and 805 in the Lords! That’s about the only thing the UK excels in.
I’m so sorry. Is there anyway I can help?
W O W
Datsa Lotta A$$es
Now they know how many Holes it takes to fill the House of Lords
We’d Love to Flush Them Alllllllll
With apologies to McCartney and Lennon.
I think you are under counting
That’s as of the latest US Elections
All those elephants are pretty much asses also. In fact, as far as I can see, there are very few among the 545 (?) who aren’t
I see your point. Asses and Rinos
Stealth asses.
Seems kind of idiotic to rely on power sources so easily damaged by bad weather when their sole purpose of being is to tame bad weather in the first place. Definitely unfit for the task!
Maybe it would be better if solar panels could be situated in more protected situations, such as in huge hangars?
oh wait . . .
Put some wind turbines in a big wind tunnel.
Use the power from the turbines to power the lights in the solar panel hanger.
Use the power from the solar panels to power the fans for the wind tunnel.
Problem solved!
By the time the power trickles down, this will be the largest fan that.can be powered
And then only on occasion…
Use the coal fired power plant to power the fans in the wind tunnel. 😅🤣😂
There’s a lot of closed underground coal mines in the UK, seems to me that would be cheaper than building hangers.
Yes, I know, same problem, but its actually an advantage. With 0 output from solar, the real power plants wouldn’t have to cycle up and down to accommodate the fluctuations from solar. Win win!
This is a very real and telling point, and one of the reasons renewable energy is so scared of nuclear power…
As long as the government in its infinite stupidity doesn’t pay the solar “farm” to produce nothing.
Oopsie too late, solar already has that sweetheart deal. It’s called a Subsidy.
They also have “Take or Pay” where utilities must take their power or pay them anyway
They should attach them to Wind Turbine Blades to assist catching both Sun and Wind
Thereby tripling the minimum wind speed to get them turning and reducing the maximum speed before disengagement…
How about if the Solar Panels were installed …
Wait for it…
Underground!
Then they would be protected from the elements…decommissioning/disposal would not be an issue…AND you would still get the same amount of useful energy from them.
Once the greens succeeded in regulating nuclear to the point that construction was effectively halted in the U.S., they focused their attention on coal. The acid rain scare didn’t work because the industry developed scrubbers, so they pivoted all their efforts to climate. Their problem now is that it took so long to fool enough of the masses that there’s an entire generation of adults that didn’t grow up with fear of nuclear power pushed on them. As you point out, renewables aren’t the answer if storms are going to get worse, so even people that believe the climate scam support nuclear power.
Wasn’t even that big a storm to be honest.
Nearly 40 years ago, the winds took down a cooling tower, at Fiddlers Ferry power station near Warrington UK.
Darragh took out a power station chimney.
https://www.northernirelandworld.com/news/emergency-incident/storm-darragh-chimney-damage-halts-electricity-generation-at-ballylumford-power-station-4899959
Tis barely a scratch!
Must not have been very well constructed!
I think, the winds created a twisting moment, and it kind of screwed itself into the ground.
Oops! Do they still have drawing boards to go back to in the UK?
“Do they still have drawing boards”
Maybe, but very few people who know how to use them for anything but drawing petty pictures !
How much Sun could one possibly get in a place like that, anyway? Must be cloudy a lot!
Anglesey is located at the 53rd parallel, even assuming no clouds during the winter, its actual capacity factor is no more than 5%-6% of total capacity.
It farms subsidies in winter, not sunlight
They all farm subsidies, all the time. Only reason any of that worse-than-useless wind and solar crap exists.
They compensate for the inefficiency by making it larger. There is some expression about roundabouts and swings that explains it. The electricity out is powered by money.
You’ve got it in one. This would almost certainly be a subsidy farm; any electricity generated would be likely have been incidental to the decision to build it.
At least China’s virtue signaling is honest; the build the worse-than-useless wind and solar and don’t bother connecting it to the grid.
I don’t know about “not connecting it to the grid” but China has so much over-capacity in solar [and steel etc] that they have to keep the workers busy by either Belt-and-Road projects over seas or home projects, even if un-economical .
You cannot beat them on price due to slave labor, poor enviromental regulations and/or gov sunsidies.
From the one picture it’s interesting to view the destruction. Some areas, top far left and top far right. appear to have no damage, but those in the center front are the most damaged.
I wonder how much the installation process contributes to the damage. Were some panels not secured as well as others? Were different materials used in the installation.
I’m sure there were various crews doing the install.
Wind gusts, micro bursts, etc., are not uniformly applied.
The big storm of 1987 in the UK was very selective about which bits of forests it felled. I saw woodland in Suffolk that had been hollowed out, yet all the trees around the edges were still standing!
Very interesting pattern of damage.
The panels nearest the maintenance lanes are mostly undamaged.
Also, the top panels of each slant assembly were the most likely to be damaged.
I doubt they do any wind tunnel testing for solar panel installations, but I suspect their array was not optimal to avoid wind burst damage. (If you can even test that in a wind tunnel?)
Seriously, this is a good point. Almost like someone was expecting the inspections to be near the road, and maybe the quality of work is different near the middle.
Looks like the wind was from the left
The top of each row would have taken the brunt of the wind force, and panels have been flipped down over the lower panels to the ground on the lee side.
Which sections were installed by the DEI hires?
“I wonder how much the installation process contributes to the damage.”
The biggest contributor to the damage was that they installed to begin with.
Mother Nature says: Renewables? Think again.
You know she’s right.
These renewables now need to be renewed.
For some it means renewable insurance payments, renewable construction contracts, renewable subsidies, etc.
“These renewables now need to be renewed.“
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! First chuckle of my day (-:
Have you only just realised why they’re called “renewables”?
I had some time ago, but I do not matter. I hope that general public realizes that sooner than later, and particularly that everybody is subsidizing this craziness out of their pocket.
Another word for “renewables” is “sustainable”. Sustainable losses covered by sustainable subsidies, etc.
Yes, progressives will see this as good for the economy, think of all the jobs.
Next they’ll figure out how to “create jobs” by having some “workers” dig holes and have others filling them.
Something there is that doesn’t love a solar farm.
(With apologies to Robert Frost)
Puerto Rico also had a storm. that wiped out many just-installed solar and wind systems.
However, the loans extended by EU banks and pension funds to build the EU provided solar and wind systems insist on being paid.
The PR elites are not suffering, because they cleverly took their bribes up front, but the poor suckers, like you and I, will be paying for 20 years. and then paying some more years to repair the damages.
We are so screwed by the IPCC climate hoax, which led to a Wall Street-style financial scam.
The end has to come very soon, as otherwise the US, etc., will be sucked into a BLACK HOLE.
We are now completing an analysis on the subject of ‘repayment’ for ‘investing’ in IREs. Lazard created the metric, LCOE, that is widely used in funding IRE fleets. The metric has the function of guaranteeing that the ‘useful idiots’ in governments rapidly discount the guaranteed loans to the bankers. That is the only concern – rapid and certain payment of the ‘invested’ funds which are 100% guaranteed from the start. The risk to the ‘bankers’ is ZERO.
Proponents of these installations are apt to call on governments to provide “certainty” for the “investors”. For “certainty” read subsidy and/or income guarantees. Most real investments come with a health warning: the value of your investment may go down as well as up, that kind of thing. But the usual rules don’t seem to apply to renewables.
Simply because if those rules were applied to “renewables” (aka wind and solar), nobody would build any of that worse-than-useless crap. They were never “good investment” and never will be.
First, Lazard is a self-serving wind and solar promoter, as is Bloomberg.
They consistently low ball costs per kWh to attract wealthy kinvestors.
Second, no bank would make loans, based on being paid back by a bureaucrat fanciful, woke, DEI scheme.
Third, 100% government loan guarantees are paid for by the taxpayers.
I will fight tooth and nail to prevent it.
All risks must be assumed by the investors.
The can reduce their risks by buying insurance
“Third, 100% government loan guarantees are paid for by the taxpayers.”
Federal deficit spending in the US means taxes are nearly interest only.
JP Morgan’s ‘Electravision’ 14th Annual Energy Paper (March 2024) is scathing about Lazard’s LCOE
“LCOE is a mostly useless measure when comparing renewables to baseload power”
“After 16 years Lazard admitted the cost of firming the intermittency of wind and solar – ie the cost required to provide power when there is not enough wind or sun to meet load demand”
They quote also an MIT Professor Paul Joskow
“LCOE comparisons of baseload and intermittent non dispatchable generation make little sense: what is needed instead is a system wide model rather than simplistic LCOE calculations”
But… But… these wind and solar installations were cheaper than fossil fuels! /s
And more reliable too!
And they reinforce the grid….
No problem. The builders, owners and operators will all make out just fine. The taxpayers and ratepayers will pick up the tab so all is well.
Replace the broken panels with new ones that’s why it’s named renewable energy 😀
At N53°, I don’t think this project was intended to pay for itself. It is about the same latitude as Edmonton. That far north, today, there is a total of 7.5 hours of daylight.
Oh dear,
what a shame,
never mind.
You saved me the trouble of writing some thing similar. If any are still working they’ll be covered in snow soon.
Mother Nature always has the last word. This is another aspect of the fragility of IRE system. The huge area occupied places the wind turbines and PV fleets in harm’s way. PV and Wind will only rarely survive natural weather events for 20 years, even in the relatively quiet European weather systems. Meanwhile, base power cares less about the weather. Only the grid system is vulnerable, and that is enough. Since the oligarchs are now openly investing in both nuclear and fossil fuel power, the dam is breaking.
It gets better: this solar farm cost 60 million GBP. That’s over 6300 GBP per “up to 9500 households supported”.
Now factor in fossil fuel backup or battery storage, 5% interest opportunity cost on the capital, the certainty of massive subsidies paid to EDF (the French utility company that owns it), curtailment costs when this farm produces more power than anyone wants – I wonder just how beneficial these setups are even disregarding this storm damage.
The 9500 will be a gross exaggeration, that figure will be at midday on a sunny cloudless summer day. Winter on a sunny day will be 950 at midday, 95 in winter on a cloudy day at midday. And regardless of the season zero households at midnight 365 days a year.
Perhaps their calculations of number of households is predicated on government rules for energy paucity – only 2kWh/day for the peons and no guarantee of when it will be available
Any time they tell you “how many households” will be “powered” by ANY “wind farm” or “solar farm,” THEY ARE LYING. The number of households “powered” by wind and solar IS ZERO, unless those “households” are satisfied with electricity “on occasion.”
24/7 power CANNOT be provided by wind and solar, so an honest statement would never make such ludicrous claims.
5%? That’s favorable.
How beneficial?
You’re being far too generous. They are *not* “beneficial” at all, except to the trough feeders that get rewarded for building this worse-than-useless crap at taxpayer expense.
oh my goodness.
re: “Storm Darragh … ”
Storm name relegated to the category of noise.
So much for the claimed 20+ year life expectancy.
At some point there is enough comparable field data to ask why they use chamber simulations and accelerated aging of small samples under foreknown conditions.
Is “powers [some number of] houses” a unit in the SI system? I can’t find it on the NIST web site. Is it a unit of energy such as the Joule or the BTU? or is it a unit of power (energy * time^-1) such as the Watt or the horsepower? Or is it a unit of bovine excretions?
The last on your list.
fanciful ideas X unicorn fart energy rating X cost to society for not doing anything
———————————————————————————————————
maximum energy rating of renewable resource
Aha! If climate change becomes sentient, this is exactly what I predict will happen. Gaia MAD!
I guess the environmentalist energy company did not bother doing an environmental assessment to see what strength was required.
Milk those subsidies and run.
One of the silly arguments against nuclear power plants is they take too long to build. I would maintain the important criteria is how much power is produced over the life of the plant.
I calculated how long it would take to build solar PV capacity equivalent to my last power plant before retiring which was in China,
85 years!
This was based on a utility scale solar project in the desert southwest US. That project has a CF of 19% in the first year of operation.
My first commercial nuke plant came on line in 1982 with a design life of 40 years. It is still operating with an extension of operating life to 60 years, it has been unrated in power output and has been running at 10% higher CF than the originally projected.
My last new plant was designed for 60 years. One feature is a large equipment that allows even the reactor vessel to be replaced. I will be dead a 100 years before we find out when that might be needed.
So my personal problem with nuclear is job security for new builds, Boom bust cycles require you to find other work. This is why I have also experience in renewable design.
In the solar junk industry, they claim a design life of 25 years. So if it takes 85 years to match a nuke plants, you will never get there.
I have yet to find any that last 25 years. Five is what I expect for junk.
In the US, you will see pictures of nuke plants. I like the ones with a sailboat in the foreground. At one nuke plant I worked at in Califonia we had solar panels that did not work.
Here is the deal. If the cost of repairing the solar system is more than the project cost of the electricity produced it does not get fixed.
A couple of inches of snow would have the same effect.
Perhaps. Perhaps worse.
I do not know how much load bearing stress the panels can take.
A couple feet of snow? Hmmm….
Melts and refreezes? Might introduce a tertiary failure.
I live a bit further inland along the estuary of the Dee. The wind was recorded at about 63mph here and 93 south of the anglesea coast. It would have been in the 80s at this sight. If you look at the map you will that anglesea sticks out into the irish sea. Not a good place to stick a solar harvester. Low sun, high winds, about 54 North