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Comment by probably_wrong | Hacker News Reader

> On Monday 10th February 2020 something historical happened. For the first time, the market price of electricity fell below zero in Finland.(...) While this single day was a very windy one...

I feel I should point out that "a very windy day" is a big understatement. February 10, 2020 was the day when storm Sabine arrived in northern Europe. In Germany, all medium and long distance trains stopped (electric trains, btw), and plenty of people stayed inside. Lots of closed schools, too.

I don't necessarily disagree with the article's central points. But picking up the one outlier in which there's ridiculous amounts of wind and entire countries are working at half capacity seems naive at best.

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I don't actually have a clue about this stuff but I think wind turbines actually won't produce any power when the wind is too strong because they might break or something.

True, but if you look at an entire country like Germany, only about 10% of the turbines will be in an area where the wind is too strong as the storm passes through, the others will still produce...

Some probably has to do as blades/axis could break due to stress, which there are videos of turbines with malfunctioning brakes spinning out of control and breaking.

Mostly wind turbines have issues with frequency as you don't want to change/adjust frequency too much (adds to cost) to that of the main grid they only generate when within acceptable frequency ranges and internal equipment is able to compensate.

Modern wind turbines can angle their wings in a way that they can produce in conditions that would have required a shutdown 15 years ago.

With this storm control the turbines lineally increase the resistance and are only shut down when the wind speed reaches more than 34 m/s as a 10 minute average. That's 122km/h. [0] The recent storm reached these levels at times, but didn't sustain them for longer periods over larger areas.

[0] https://www.enercon.de/en/technology/wec-features/ I'm sure other producers have similar technology.

Do you know a rough percentage for how many wind-turbines in use are modern turbines like these?

We don't really have to speculate, since energy production data is available [0]. There certainly was a lot of energy produced by wind turbines. About the same as last week (also quite windy). But the "entire countries are working at half capacity" doesn't seem to be valid, at last I don't see a dip in power consumption.

[0] https://energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=all-sources&year=2...

Notably these graphs show that Germany was exporting quite a lot of power on the 10th, but was still burning gas, brown coal and hard coal in large quantities at the same time. Also nuclear, which I don't mind as much of the others, but still Germany has decided to phase it out so it seems Germany still needs more renewables.

We called it storm Ciara in the UK. I wonder why we don’t unify names.

brexit means brexit /s

In seriousness, wasn't Storm Ciara named by Met Éireann ? that was certainly my impression, given that most people in the UK struggled to pronounce it. So there is some unification between The Met offices of Ireland and the UK with regard to naming.

It would have been called Ciara even if the storm was named by the Met Office. The names are unified and a list is published every September:

https://www.countryliving.com/uk/news/a28924357/met-office-s...

> The names are a mix of British, Irish and Dutch monikers.

t'was called Ciara in Belgium also.

The Netherlands it was also called Ciara. A few days later Dennis came around the block.

Names are being unified actually. The Dutch meteorological institute now cooperates with the British and Irish institutes for naming via the EUMETNET system.

There are now two regions in Europe where names are decided in cooperation: West, and Southwest.

West is Ireland, United Kingdom, Netherlands, and Belgium, where storms tend to originate in the West.

Southwest is the Iberian peninsula and France.

A third region (Southeast) is being set up for the Mediterranean.

Every region has its own list of names, but when a storm is first named in one region, the other regions will use that name instead of assigning their own (if the storm crosses regions).

This means that everyone called this storm Ciara, except for the Germans. Germany is an exception, and has its own (commercial) naming system at the moment.

Source: https://www.knmi.nl/kennis-en-datacentrum/uitleg/naamgeving-... (Dutch)

That's fascinating, thanks for sharing

germans sold the naming off to sponsor students. so germany is the outlier here.

Well, the UK is apparently not very interested in unifying things, nor in being part of the EU...

I wonder why we even name storms in the first place. All it does is feed the 24 hour news monster

Exactly. Fear everything, including the weather.

Why do we name vulnerabilities in software? It’s much easier to talk about it that way.

The article linked above explains it https://www.countryliving.com/uk/news/a28924357/met-office-s...

To 'raise awareness' of weather events, as if one might not notice them otherwise. To be less cynical, people might pay more attention to weather warnings if they are named storms? Not sure how long that effect will stick if we have a named storm twice a month! I think you might not be far wrong saying it's about grabbing headlines.

In my home it definitely works. We say "Wow, a NAMED storm is coming tomorrow". We say it in a half joking tone, because the naming thing is a bit quirky, but we do pay more attention and are more careful when it's named.

In Japan, the typhoons are just numbered. “Let’s not go out this weekend, Typhoon 12 is supposed to make landfall”

This is not ridiculous at all to point that, those kind of event will be common as more intermittent renewable come into power, because they are all correlated in Europe.

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