* Posts by Donald Allwright

1 publicly visible post • joined 3 Jul 2008

Research: Wind power pricier, emits more CO2 than thought

Donald Allwright
Linux

Why no mention of demand management

It seems that no consideration at all has been given to demand management - a certain proportion of energy usage is not time critical and can wait until times of lower demand or higher wind energy availability. This would cover for example heating and refrigeration loads, charging of electric vehicles (very small at the moment but likely to increase) and washing/dishwashing on the domestic front, as well as a large number of industrial loads. These don't need to happen during the evening peak and can easily be postponed (at least in part) until the night-time low (or when wind power is high).

However without a suitable infrastructure to enable devices to know when the load is low, this is unlikely to happen as there's no financial incentive to develop suitable devices. The claim that only gas turbines can compensate for variability is a fundamental flaw in the logic of the article.