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.

...because it might put favored liberal policies or politicians in a bad light. That's why Sharyl Attkisson resigned.

This leads me to wonder if a good space based weapon wouldn't be to just dump heat into an enemy ship and cook the people inside without worrying about punching through the armor. If you can exceed their ability to radiate heat, wouldn't that cook them fairly quickly?

Unlike the above books, it's non-fiction, and people were actually killed for the crime of reading it. ("In Soviet Russia...")

Almost almost: Science often progresses by finding which things are false (that is the method of Null Hypothesis Testing), but the ultimate outcome is learning which things are true through this process.

I hear what you're saying but I think that you're a bit off target because you're ignoring the complex realities of living in a world where there is so much scientific knowledge.

Just because I do not understand at a subatomic level how an LED works, this does not mean that my belief in its ability to light up a room is a magical one. It is sufficient for me to believe that SOMEONE on this earth knows how it works, and that if, given a few years, I could learn this knowledge for myself. Whether something is magic or science is not a function of whether the information concerning its function currently resides in my head, but rather that it exists somewhere in the world, and could, in principle, be learned, if time were no obstacle.

For example, tell me this: imagine that a person used to understand the principles of flight, but is now in their 90's and has lost that information. Has their belief in airplanes switched from science to magic?

Disclaimer: I am a scientist. I have been running experiments and creating models for years. I have over 30 publications in peer-reviewed journals.

I read the summary and thought that this article might be on to something, but on reading it I don't think the author really understands science at all.

Here are some excerpts that I find particularly disagreeable:

"Science is not the pursuit of capital-T Truth. It's a form of engineering "

Absolutely not. Science is indeed in pursuit of Truth. The author criticizes Aristotle's form of "research", quite rightly, but then throws the baby out with the bathwater when he says this.

"Because people don't understand that science is built on experimentation, they don't understand that studies in fields like psychology almost never prove anything, since only replicated experiment proves something and, humans being a very diverse lot, it is very hard to replicate any psychological experiment."

This is factually incorrect. There are many Psychological phenomena that can be reproduced reliably. The Stroop effect, the Simon effect, visual illusions..

"What distinguishes modern science from other forms of knowledge such as philosophy is that it explicitly forsakes abstract reasoning about the ultimate causes of things"

This is completely incorrect. A core goal of science is to understand the cause of things by developing abstracted understandings of them (i.e. theories).

I know nothing about this author, but from the article, I suspect that he is trying to reconcile his beliefs in science and religion by convincing himself that science cannot answer the big questions, it's just for making airplanes and computers. I could be wrong of course (--- very important scientific principle)

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).