Top Ten UK Alternative Energy Projects
Solar Powered CIS Tower in Manchester
The UK’s top ten alternative energy projects have been named by the UK government’s Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). They include offshore turbines in Kent, the solar-powered CIS tower in Manchester and a wave buoy in Cornwall.
A target of supplying 10% of the UK's electricity from renewable energy by 2010 has been set by the British government.
The list includes three wind farms, three solar-power projects, and two examples of microgeneration, or projects with lower outputs.
According to the government, the 30-turbine Kentish Flats wind farm has been described as "the Ferrari of the turbine world".
Black Law A in South Lanarkshire was one of the largest wind farms approved in the UK, and the Cefn Croes project near Aberystwyth the most powerful when it opened in June.
The CIS tower in Manchester - the city's tallest building - was on course to be the biggest user of solar panels in the UK.
The biomass plant in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, was singled out for producing a "revolutionary new wood pellet bio fuel", created by burning sawdust and woodchips.
The wave buoy project off the north Cornwall coast was highlighted as a project that would "speed up the installation of one of the world's first wave farms". The site is being investigated as a possible wave hub location - an offshore electrical socket that would be connected to the national grid.
Cornwall Wave Buoy
“Revolutionary” Northern Ireland Biomass Plant
Labels: biomass, solar energy, solar power, uk, wave energy, wave power, wind energy, wind power
posted by James at 1:31 pm
2 Comments:
Lots of wind farms are planned. The key drawback of wind energy is addressed in an article this month.
Because the power is intermittent and therefore unreliable for grid use, Jeremy Rifkin recommends it is used to produce hydrogen.
In the continuing absence of suitable batteries to store the wind power, this seems a way forward.
On the contrary a grid is an excellent way of spreading out the variable output from all forms of RE including Wind Farms.
The grid is designed to cope with (and often does) sudden shut downs from our larger conventional power stations units, which are typically 600MW in size.
I find it helpful to also consider the peaks and troughs experienced by our grid during for example commercial tv breaks during world cup football games. In the UK we have experienced power surges of as much as 3000MW in 5 minutes, which is as big as some of our largest conventional power stations!
By comparison, our largest wind farms in the UK are some 100MW in size and the output varies slowly over several hours, not minutes, as they are situated normally in very exposed, sometimes offshore, locations.
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