The subject of renewables has taken up quite a few column inches in the press over the past couple of week, particularly Wind Power.

According to statistics for the third quarter of 2011, released just before Christmas by the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC), the amount of fuel made in the UK dropped by 20%. Renewable energy sources, however, generated 9% of the UK’s electricity from July to September. Hydro energy saw the largest increase in that quarter, jumping 41.3% as a result of higher rainfall.

Combined with the first three quarters of 2011, the statistics show an increase of 64% in the amount of electricity generated by offshore wind than in the same three quarters of 2010 – despite increased activity from anti-wind protestors. The increase was all due to offshore wind generation. Onshore wind generation was down by 2.4%.

Meanwhile, energy provider E.ON is reinforcing its interest in renewable energy and offshore wind farms in particular by investing €7 billion over the next five years. One of the first projects using part of the cash to be built will be the Amrumbank wind farm in the German North Sea, which is aiming to supply 300,000 households with green electricity.

E.ON is also currently building the London Array in the Thames Estuary, off the UK coast, which when complete will be the world’s largest offshore wind farm so far.

Riello provides a range of power protection solutions for use in renewable energy applications alongside uninterruptible power supplies. For more detail visit our website.

Scottish Wind Farms Receive Record Constraints Payments

Wind power has received mixed coverage of late. First of all, Scottish online newspaper Scotsman.com ran an article last week reporting that wind farm operators in Scotland received more than £14 million in the past two years in return for switching off their turbines at times of high power generation.

To balance things out, however, the story was brought to light by the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF), a charity that has publicly spoken out in the past against wind farms.

REF released information that said that since 2010, a system of ‘constraint payments’ has been operated by The National Grid to compensate wind farms if they are taken off the grid when it cannot cope with high supply.

A spokesperson from Scottish Renewables stated that constraints payments are paid to all electricity generators, including coal and gas power stations and not just wind farms. Such payments are a standard practice in that suppliers are paid not to generate at times of lower than expected demand or when there is congestion on the grid.

At Riello UPS, we see renewables, of all types, as a key part of of the future energy generation landscape and are continuing to develop products and solutions that enable customers to take full advantage of those technologies alongside ensuring power protection for critical applications.

While the debate surrounding the pros and cons of wind power rumbles on, the increasing numbers of turbines that are appearing across the country are beginning to make a real contribution to the UK’s energy supplies.

The National Grid reports that Monday 6^th September saw a record output for the wind farms of Britain – generating nearly 5% of all power going into the Grid at that time. The company confirmed that with output peaking at 1,860MW, the power generated by the wind energy sector was greater than that produced by three nuclear power stations.

The National Grid believes that over that 24-hour period (and taking into account embedded wind generation), nearly 10% of the UK’s power came from the wind alone. A great achievement, even if the UK is still a long way behind other parts of Europe in this field. Spain and Portugal, for example, consistently meet 50% of their energy demands through wind farmed along the Iberian Peninsula. But as mentioned in an earlier post, the political, social and economic infrastructure of these nations seems to offer greater support to the renewable cause than here in the UK.

When considering the 2020 target of generating 15% of the UK’s energy from renewable sources, this latest data should be encouraging news for the industry – and could go a long way to helping raise the common image of wind farms from ‘noisy blots on the landscape’ to valuable part of the renewable energy mix.

I was reading yesterday about how the UK Government has been ‘blue-skying’ the future of energy – Nuclear or Wind Power? Centralized v distributed supply? It got me thinking about the future of UPS and I decided to do a bit of blue-skying myself:

Examine any technological innovation over the years and what usually happens is that all efforts, once it has been invented, turn to ‘miniaturization’. UPS is no different. The uninterruptible power supplies of the future – even in huge industrial applications – will be tiny in comparison to today’s units. Transformers, inverters, filters, conditioners, fans and all internal elements in a UPS are being continually downsized.

Alongside an increasing upsurge in demand for energy, ‘income-per-squarefoot’ is something business managers are trying desperately to increase, which is why essential equipment like UPS needs to be smaller, take up less space, be more energy efficient and at the same time more sophisticated, faster and better than before.

The challenge for us as UPS manufacturers in blue-skying the future is to develop products that meet these demands whilst at the same time ensuring reliability, quality, innovation, resilience and ease of use. To me, the best definition of progress is development towards an improved or more advanced condition. So, to borrow the phrase from a well-known advert – “more forwards please…………….”