The previous idiot was claiming that a wind turbine can produce 200% of its nameplate capacity; but by definition the most it can produce is the nameplate capacity.

Now, you, you're claiming that wind power requires a large spinning reserve. The information I have is that this is false. The reality is that there's very little spinning reserve used for that purpose; wind forecasts are used to predict wind power generation several days in advance, and generation is bought in and out as needed in the normal way they would when demand changes.

There are indeed some costs associated with warming up plants to bring them online when wind is predicted to drop, but they're much smaller than the value of the power produced by wind farms.

Incidentally, wind farms cannot lose synchronisation in the way you state; they typically use double fed induction motors; they cannot use simple synchronous generators because the rotor speed changes too much as wind conditions vary.

I'm pretty sure that coal is already more expensive than wind- definitely for NEW power plants.

But basically, anything that is already paid off is dirt cheap.

This Wikipedia article covers this kind of stuff:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

On the upside though, if something is paid off, it becomes easier to shut it down because it's done its job and nobody owes anything.

There is a Norwegian-Danish link up though, and Denmark are currently running on more than a third wind power; actually the first 6 months of this year, they were over 40% wind power.

Yeah, but if the government taxes coal more, then they tax wind less, and it will be cheaper, and then the consumers will go for the power suppliers that use more wind and less coal, and then gradually that will come to be reflected in the actual power generators; they will build more wind turbines; and the coal plants will start to shutdown.

I'm sorry, but you're very ignorant.

First, no powerplant is ever available 100%. Plants do fail sometimes. Any given baseload generator is supposed to be there with some probability, usually 95% or better; and then backup powerplant capacity is provided to kick in 5% of the time.

Second of all, wind turbines have a generator, and the generator has a rate power, known as the 'nameplate' power. The generator CANNOT generate any more than that; it would burn out. IT CANNOT generate 200% of the nameplate power. You may be thinking of the average power. The average power is the nameplate power multiplied by the capacity factor.

You more or less get the definition of base load correct:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

But you don't seem to have understood how that relates to wind power and backup generators.

It's not really overstated, but it is very good to have wind power over a wide area.

The main advantage of geographically distributed wind power is that it smooths out the changes.

So it still comes and goes, blows really hard, and drops out almost entirely, but it takes hours to do that, because it takes the weather systems time to move around. Whereas if you only have one small wind farm somewhere, the wind can come and go in a few minutes.

The overall effect is that it makes the power much more predictable, the weather forecasts work better and the slow changes give you a chance to kick in other power sources. But it still comes and go quite a lot.

Here's the UK grid, you can see wind power wobbling around in more or less realtime:

http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk...

Base load is power that is available 95% of the time. The other 5% you kick in backup generators. So you need one backup generator for every 20 baseload generators.

The thing is, the wind is practically always blowing a bit.

It turns out that about 95% of the time it's giving you one third of the average power.

So if wind power is giving you 30% of the nameplate power, then it gives you about 10% of the nameplate power as base load.

The rest of the power is variable, but is available on a predictable schedule, known as the weather forecast, and you can schedule the other variable power you around that, and the wind power has the effect of cutting pollution.

Nope. It's:

1±½ + 1±½ = 2±SQT(1/2)

virtually always, because the ± notation is standard deviations, and standard deviations add in quadrature for statistical reasons.

Actually, coffee may be part of that.

Turns out that coffee delays the build up of some chemical that makes you tired... i.e. it makes your body clock run slow, when taken in the morning.

However, if you take it late at night, before you go to bed, then the level of that chemical goes down more quickly and you'll wake up earlier the next day. Surprisingly it doesn't make it that much harder to go to sleep either, although if you're not already tolerant to coffee, all bets are off on falling asleep promptly.

Other things that affect the body clock are light, and food (big breakfasts are good for waking up early the next day, skipping breakfast = super bad).

> They can't simply trust users to appropriately mark packets - you'd have some who simply marked everything as high priority.

Last time I heard about it, and I don't think it's changed, Microsoft Windows marks all its packets as highest possible priority.

The immediate effect of them doing that, was that all ISPs immediately started ignoring the priority classes, which made them completely useless globally.

How about not quoting me out of context?

"... and take away that money and then some if they're partially or completely overturned"

It doesn't seem like a good idea, challenging patents in court is likely to be a lot more expensive than any patent clerk could ever be.

> Again this would lead to corruption with patent pre-screening and favoured people getting patentable stuff and unfavoured people getting junk and working for free.

No, I'm not saying that they would get paid only for passing patents. They would get paid for examining patents. It's just they would get paid more for being successful patent clerks; for passing patents that are enforceable and novel.

And the patents could be assigned randomly from the pool of patent clerks that accept the patents.

They should perhaps pay patent examiners some money annually for each patent that is passed, and take away that money and then some if they're partially or completely overturned. That way they've an incentive to work quickly, and a disincentive to do sloppy work.

You seriously think that other sources are free of errors? Newspapers for example??

At least with Wikipedia when errors are found they can be removed.

Also, in any GA/FA quality article there's lots of references; you can actually go to those sources and check stuff.

Just because there's a lot of non GA/FA quality articles in there doesn't make Wikipedia useless, it just means it's still being written.

I mean, Encyclopedia Britannica has been going for more than one century; Wikipedia is only just over a decade old, and is literally a hundred times bigger it covers much, much more; but it's about as reliable as EB.