Dinorwig uses grid power to pump the water back up to the top reservoir, so most of it will be from the base load coal fired stations, some the nukes and tiddly little bit from renewable sources.
It also doesn't need the grid to start up. One of it's functions is to enable the restart of the grid from black. Though "they" don't like talking about that and just quote the 1GW+ capacity online in 12s or so...
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Agreed, but how would you manage this? Load based auto start/stop and synchronisation on the 10kVA set? or load based auto start/stop on both sets and switch over rather than synchronising them?
I suspect it's the case that a "sustainable" supplier BUYS the energy from a renewable source and you pay them for that: what happens after that doesn't really matter as you've done your bit!
Me too! The thing is it's all very well saying the market determines the generation of electricity but only if the price contains all the factors of generation. In general external costs such as pollution and long term environmental costs for future generations are only an ill informed judgement.
Insignificant and a cost which the individual can decide on *if* the fuel really does have all its costs built in to it.
There's almost certainly a direct correlation between national wealth and energy consumption, currently averaging 2kW(t) per person in UK, so tinker with energy cost unilaterally and the economy may unglue.
In a Darwinian sense there is no advantage in nature to conserving energy, though the result in the future may be catastrophic.
With the current rate of technological progress there is quite a lot of reason to be optimistic that current use of fossil fuel will not be necessary, but I have a worrying feeling....
In fact I am out of the loop on this as the wildlife trust that installed this set up has become so large that they no longer require voluntary input. Last I heard was they were appealing for the GBP50k to have a grid installation and full redevelopment of the site to accommodate more staff and offices.
I had wanted to put the 10kVA 3cyl lister into reserve during the summer and use propane powered inverter sets. These are effectively permanent magnet dc generators feeding inverters, these can be linked with one master driving the other inverter. The engines thus run asynchronously and can throttle up and down with demand. My thinking being the propane, though expensive, would increase engine life and reduce maintenance cost.
I haven't really considered how to share the varying load between gen sets, I would tend to avoid trying to synchronize them, especially as this is a 1ph set up. Whatever scheme is used you need to minimize engine starting and stopping.
What does seem clear is that with a grid connection it's nigh on impossible to compete on price by generating your own, chiefly because there are vast economies of scale in generating and fuel costs and a home user pays the distributed price for both electricity and prime fuel. Having said that there are a number of chp schemes at the MW level which seem to pay on a private wire basis.
The areas where it does pay, especially for large users, are CHP and load shedding during high price peaks. The latter only normally occur during winter months so may not be applicable. CHP may be worthy of consideration if you have a suitable heat requirement. You do not have to use the heat only during the winter, an absorption refrigeration set could use it during the summer as well.
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