For a moment I was starting to think FT, N stood for 'For Trump, Now!'
You can tell us apart by our hairstyles. And those Russian hotel pictures - those could have been anyone's buttocks, and anyway I only met Ljudmila the once.
I presume when you say 'unreliable' you are referring to the wind, not the turbines; the turbines are anything but unreliable.
With the efforts now going into
Enhanced Frequency Response, plus the massive increase in
battery production that will shortly come online, large capacity grid energy storage starts to look like a serious player. Which means that highly-efficient WTs can work all the time there's a wind, either powering the grid or charging batteries.
Indeed, the wind is unreliable, and sometimes so absent that wind turbines become net consumers of electricity. Developing batteries to store excess power for its own sake, so other than in electric vehicles, is at present a nonsensical idea. Even when wind is providing its highest proportion of the electricity mix, it never produces a surplus. The practical effect is that we can turn down the gas on the
CCGT▸ stations. When we have a base load from some non-fossil source to cover the minimum electricity we use, then wind may tip the balance into surplus, but by then we will hopefully be running much more of our rail fleet on electricity, and will have a lot more electric cars. Of course, that will increase the amount of electricity consumed, changing the equation yet again.
Meantime, coal has made a sudden comeback, rising from almost zero not long ago to 17% today - someone has turned a few stations back on! They take time to get to working speed, and are generally run flat-out if possible. If we were to store excess power, it would be better to do that at coal stations rather than either dumping the suddenly unwanted hot water in the cooling towers or running the turbines without generating power. That coal is back tells me that we certainly don't have the generating capacity we need now, without considering electrifying public and private transport on a bigger scale.
Now, if trains can be run on solar power, and you need somewhere to put the panels, why not on the train roof? It is connected to the power supply, and power is already returned to the system in regenerative braking? No train would ever be able to power itself, not even on the sunniest day, but on the basis that "every little helps" could it work?
FTR▸ , FT, N! awaits the outcome of the proposal to build a tidal lagoon somewhere near Swansea with interest. So long as this doesn't solve one problem but cause two more, it could be a goer on a national scale. We know with remarkable accuracy what the tide will be doing there at any given time within the next 100 years, and the energy density of water is higher than that of wind.
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