At peak, Spain gets 53% of its energy from wind | Hacker News Reader

At peak, Spain gets 53% of its energy from wind

greenmonk.net

70 pointszzkt30 comments

*during high winds at 5:50am on a Sunday morning

This, while impressive, is not a routine occurrence. It was due to abnormally high winds. Consider the following quotes from the Guardian article:

"High winds over the weekend supplied 53% of Spain's electricity"

"Experts estimate that by the end of the year, Spain will have provided a quarter of its energy needs with renewables, with wind leading the way ..."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/09/spain-nati...

The linked article is a bit ambiguous, but remember that electricity is a subset of a country's total energy needs.

I think this blogpost debunks this pretty good:

http://uvdiv.blogspot.com/2009/11/spanish-wind-power-exposed...

Spain only gets about 9% of energy from renewables on average, which is much less than a lot of other countries. The 53% number is very deceptive IMHO, and really shows that you can't count on wind for reliable energy.

Oh wow. I was just lurking here, and I see my own blog mentioned!

I hate to be an exasperating pedant, but I am, and I must annoy you:

"Spain only gets about 9% of energy from renewables on average,"

It's actually 9% of electricity from wind power, which is a very different statistic. As other commenters point out here, actually ~25% of Spanish electricity is renewable [1]; most of the difference is hydropower, which is also renewable. And then the proportion of energy is different yet, since most energy consumption is in forms that are not electric: i.e. natural gas heating, petrol fuel. See example energy flowcharts here [2].

[1] (PDF file) http://www.ree.es/ingles/sistema_electrico/pdf/infosis/sinte...

[2] https://publicaffairs.llnl.gov/news/energy/energy.html

Not debunking at all, the first words in the article were:

"Ok, not all the time, but last weekend at 5:50am on Sunday morning (8th Nov) Spain set a new record, hitting 53.7%"

Which instantly made it clear that this was an exception. I don't think anybody is suggesting that you can provide all of your power requirements from Wind, but - clearly, Wind can be an important part of your renewable portfolio in some cases. Obviously Solar, GeoThermal, Hydroelectric, Conservation, Efficiency all have important roles to play as well.

The title of this post was edited after I posted, it was something like "Spain gets 53% of its energy from wind" first.

As the author of the article I can categorically refute this.

The title of this article was never edited.

And WordPress has obligingly saved all of the post revisions so I can quite easily prove this, if necessary.

He means the title on HN.

Some people do, not by living in perpetually windy environments but by reducing consumption and using stored energy supply (eg batteries but pumping water to provide hydroelectric which can be used at any time is also a possibility).

9% is the lowest value, not the average!

Oh no, it is the average value. You don't want to know the lowest value. Or if you do, go to the Spanish utility's site and browse statistics for the summer months, when wind is usually slower:

http://www.ree.es/ingles/operacion/curvas_eolica.asp

E.g. July 1st 2009 - minimum of 105 MWe, or about 0.3% of average demand. The recent peak was 11,500 MWe:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/09/spain-nati...

You're right. Anyway, and what I mean, is that the average of energy provided with enough wind is pretty high. The average isn't that low for the 95th percentile (and the bottleneck is still the wind)

For everyone who keeps saying that this is only at peak, that doesn't mean that it isn't important. If you can generate that much wind, then store the energy with pumped storage - you are still getting far more overall renewable energy than you would have otherwise.

Assuming perfect energy storage, the number you want is the average power production. You get this by multiplying the maximum output by the capacity factor, which is 21-23% in Spain.

Impressive.

But the headline is slightly deceptive, as 53% is the maximum ever recorded.

What's more impressive is the that over the 24 hours presented the contribution from wind never drops beneath 30%.

Contrast this with the current UK renewables target of 15% by 2020 (http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/what_we_do/uk_supply/e...)

Spain receives colossal amounts of wind energy from the Sahara. IIRC winds have been known to continue without a break for weeks, if not months.

When you have 9 million square kilometres to your south and an oceanic climate to your north, you tend to get a lot of wind.

The reason the UK gets so little wind in comparison is that the prevailing wind comes directly from Spain, just a lot later. Although anyone who's spent a few years in the UK can testify, you either have a weak Saharan wind or a strong Siberian wind.

The UK's best potential for renewable energy is if we ever get the technology to tap the gulf stream, as it wraps around the UK meaning it likely won't have to disrupt any shipping lanes. As the Gulf stream holds over 100 times the energy used yearly by the whole world, it could certainly be marginally tapped without any effect on the circulation. By marginally I mean we could likely supply the present day world without consequence.

Where did you get your data from?

Most of the time, here in Spain, the wind come from the Atlantic Ocean, from an area a hundred miles to the west of UK. And it's nothing special, compared with France, AFAICT.

The wind from the east blows a half as often and it's only strong near Tarifa.

I don't see how it is deceptive. It's stated quite plainly that it is a record, and not a normal occurrence. (None of this is spoken in a harsh, rude, or sarcastic tone.) How would you say it differently? (Real question.)

The title suggests peak energy demand, in fact it achieved it at minimum energy demand (early hours of Sunday morning)

It's like an airport saying that all it's flights were on time at peak - then saying that they didn't mean thanksgiving, they meant that on sunay morning they peaked by getting both flights out on time.

The headline has been edited since I made the comment. It originally didn't start "At peak". It is now more representative of the article.

Hmm, I don't know if I'm so jaded by bs news attention grabbing at this point or what, but I assumed that it hitting 53% was the news story, hence it being an event (and implicitly, a peak), not a steady-state average.

*during high winds, at 5:50 on a Sunday morning

I can't see it from the article: are they talking about total generated energy or consumed?

In Spain our government has banned new nuclear plants, so we have to buy electricity from France, that produces it using nuclear plants anyway.

The high percentages of wind power is no wonder. There are a lot of generators installed.

> so we have to buy electricity from France

No, you're really wrong. Just have a look at our realtime demand & generation graphs: http://www.ree.es/operacion/curvas_demanda.asp (right side)

As I write this, it's 2h05 (15-nov).

We actually have some spare energy, and we only import energy when we expect spikes (mostly by night). Right now, we're using exactly 1% of imported energy (..who said from france?). Also, at 22h45 (14nov) we were exporting about 4% of our energy. And we exported between ~4% and ~3% of our energy on the 22h to midnight term.

Yesterday (14-nov) we used between 0.5% and 1% of imported energy between 21h and 22h. And between midnight and ~3h in the morning, we're expecting to import between 2% (that actually was at midnight) and 0.5% (for the next 4 hours).

By the way, there's a clear policy about new nuclear plants: avoided if we can (because we still have some spare energy). We rely on combined cycle (17% as I'm writing this), wind (18%) and nuclear (26%). So, nuclear is still here. But don't need more. And, what we import is pretty ridiculous (we export much more than we import).

... Hey, we have nice-looking, nifty graphics, with real-time data! Please, use them! :)

> so we have to buy electricity from France

Lie.

  Year	Electricity - imports (million kWh)
  2000	9000
  2001	11945
  2002	12166
  2003	7588
  2004	7588
  2005	9800
  2006	8700
  2007	8300
  2008	8773
  2009	8773

  Year	Electricity - exports (million kWh)
  2000	5600
  2001	6230
  2002	7832
  2003	4138
  2004	4138
  2005	4400
  2006	7500
  2007	11400
  2008	14520
  2009	14520

Source: Cia Factbook.

More: http://twitpic.com/5zscj/full And more: http://twitpic.com/5zxm3/full 2nd chart show how much % of Portuguese electricity is imported from Spain

Source: Red Electrica Española (Spanish grid operator)

France exports electricity to other countries such as Belgium and such (70k kWh last year)

Last link shows consuption, production, imports and exports of electricty in Spain: http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?v=79&v=81&v=82...

Thank you for your eye-widening comment. It's surprising how we swallow "well known facts" as this (everybody pretends to know that we import energy from french nuclears), without any research.

The comment you answer wasn't mine, but it could have been. Thanks.

Interesting, I admit to have repeated what I've heard so many times without checking it.

And most of the time, it has much lower wind production, and they make up the difference by burning a lot of natural gas. This sort of thing is why the natural gas companies like wind so much.

... last weekend at 5:50am on Sunday morning. Still impressive though.

As a kite surfer I enjoyed your post.

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