Wind & General Energy

Question 1

Explain why it is difficult to harness the full potential of the UK’s wind resource.

Answer 1

Areas of highest wind speeds are often very remote or are places of rugged landscape e.g. Highlands and Island of Scotland.

Therefore difficult to harness top wind speeds as terrain can cause both installation and maintenance hazards. Turbulent winds causing failures due to fatigue.

Question 2

Give three reasons why the renewable energy resource in the UK is likely to be substantially less than the total energy consumption.

Answer 2

1. Due to safety concerns, resources such as wind power cannot be fully utilised in urban areas.
2. While other countries have significant natural resource, e.g. hydropower in Norway, the UK is
   not as abundant.
3. The practical resource is not vast relative to the total demand. Current consumption is greater than the maximum conceivable and attainable renewable resource.
4. Without a means of storage capacity, wind power cannot be utilised on a large scale since it
   is intermittent and unreliable, can cause severe grid problems (blackouts) if used at above 25%.

Question 3

Elaborate 2 approaches to demand reduction and 2 approaches to energy supply that may be employed to create a sustainable energy system in the UK. In each case identify a principle barrier.

Answer 3

Demand Reduction:

1. Use of district heating. Barrier: Significant capital and continued investment, due to maintenance, required to ensure system robustness.
2. Unanimous use of biodiesel public transport. Barrier: Although public transport would put significantly less strain on the biofuel demand, changing human demands (personal transport) is a challenge too great.
   (3. Smart grids: Barrier: Requires high levels of communication between lowest levels of demand and higher levels of production, meaning likely high maintenance and general running costs. )

Energy Supply Approaches:
1. Combined renewable/storage solution. Barrier: Requires a significant investment to achieve the required infrastructure to balance supply, demand, storage and its associated losses, likely at the expense of the user.
2. Coal replaced by biofuels. Barrier: Biofuel is not capable of outputting the same amount of
power as coal, in MW/Kg, and regrowth has not yet been proven to be sufficient enough to consider biofuel as sustainable.

Question 4

List two methods of wind farm optimisation.

Answer 4

1. Contra-rotation: used to eliminate effects of downstream turbulence, which can cause power losses of up tp 40%. Turbines are arranged to rotate in different directions.
2. Digital modelling: Data captured on how turbines react with topography and each other can be used to build computer models of wind farms. Model used to establish most efficient position for each turbine and therefore optimise whole wind farm.