Hi Hugh, You say : “…the ten year cooling trend?…” I say : What utter piffle ! Just look at this chart (link below). It’s a very simplified form of the temperature charts, just to make it easy for people like me to refute people like you :-
Fury at plan to power EU homes from Congo dam – Grand Inga – World Bank supports controversial $80bn project
Plans to link Europe to what would be the world’s biggest hydroelectric dam project in the volatile Democratic Republic of Congo have sparked fierce controversy.
The Grand Inga dam, which has received initial support from the World Bqank would cost $80bn (£48bn). At 40,000MW, it has more than twice the generation capacity of the giant Three Gorges dam in China and would be equivalent to the entire generation capacity of South Africa.
Grand Inga will involve transmission cables linking South Africa and countries in west Africa including Nigeria. A cable would also run through the Sahara to Egypt.
Russian dam disaster kills 10, scores missing 25 GW in milli seconds illustrating that all plants are intermittent.
An example of intermittent power – 25 GW lost in a millisecond Source: Reuters : By Ilya Naymushin CHERYOMUSHKI, Russia, Aug 17 (Reuters) – Ten people were killed on Monday and up to 72 were missing after a turbine room flooded at Russia’s largest hydro-power station, forcing steel and aluminium plants in Siberia to turn to […]
Tidal Barrage power generation potential in England
At the last count, the sum of the estimates of potential power from those bays & estuaries that have at least one bank in England, is about 5.57GWe (49TWh/y), equivalent to about 12.7% of current electricity demand
Conference on Offshore wind power planning, economics and environment University of Birmingham Friday 28th August 2009
MORE DETAILS FROM: Dr David Toke, Senior lecturer in Environmental Policy, University of Birmingham, email : d.toke@bham.ac.uk
Wind Energy Variability and Intermittency in the UK : New Reports
Three completely independent reports on the wind variability issue appeared in June and July 2009, all with the same message: the variability of wind needs to be taken into account, but it does not make the grid unmanageable; and the additional costs, which are modest, can be quantified.
Prof Dave Elliot and Renew – Claverton Energy Group's "House Magazine"
Renew, the long-running 34 page bimonthly newsletter on renewable energy developments and policy, is now being offered to subscribers in PDF form. It’s an invaluable and unique source of news and analysis produced by Prof Dave Elliott of the Open University. Now in its 30th year, it covers news and issues from the UK, EU […]
UKERC topic scoping workshop (TPA – Technology and Policy Assessment theme)
2009/8/13 Gross, Robert J K Dear Colleague The UK Energy Research Centre Technology and Policy Assessment theme (www.ukerc.ac.uk) is hosting a workshop for stakeholders from across the energy arena to help define its priority research areas for the next 5 years. We very much hope that you will be able to attend and contribute. The […]
Small scale gasification. by Neal Van Milligen, Manager, Bioten Power and Energy Group, Gasification Division
While renewable energy is one of the most environmentally responsible courses for consumers, the same technology which provides green power can be profitable as a traditional power source as well. Renewable energy portfolios are being mandated worldwide resulting in comfortable returns on $.12 USD/ kW and more on $.15 USD/ kW green energy programs. However, […]
Vision 2020 and beyond – Dr. Gregor Czisch Ex Kassell University discussed the integration of African Power production internally and with Europe to fully exploit the vast hydro power available at the Inga Dam site
” The Grand Inga dam can provide 2/3 of African power needs and some of Europe’s”
While integration – meaning electrical inter – connections of neighbours – on the
one hand may enable cheap electricity, on the other, it can cause dependence.
Therefore, to avoid a single source dependency, it might be seen as a better
solution, to use less favourable resources inside a given country, and accept higher
costs and other disadvantages. Another way out of this dilemma is diversification of
interconnections. Therefore regional integration may be more attractive when the
number of participating countries rises.
In some cases, regional integration is the only reasonable way of using known
resources which are too big for a national approach.
An extreme example is the hydropower potential near Inga, by the Congo River, in
the Democratic Republic of Congo. The African Power Pools have been formed in
order to erect large scale regional integration projects – leading in a structure one
may call an African Supergrid – to be able to handle the tremendous amount of
electricity which could be produced here at very low prices, and which would be
enough to deliver two thirds of the current African consumption. But the huge
capacity makes it difficult to bring the different objectives together.