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You only need access to my customers Jira :D
E.g. ask http://enbw.com/ or https://www.tipico.de/ or http://www.postbank.de/
I'm pretty sure they give a random idiot access to the Jira and the source code repository to browse if he can find a bug that can be attributed to angel'o'sphere or the team he is part of. Good luck.

Provide me access to the software please to verify, or stop lying. Can't have it both ways.
Ah, just because you can not verify it it is a lie?

Just because you can not find a bug in a piece of software, you know there is a bug, hidden somewhere?

Please stop showing to the internet that you are a complete idiot.

So the peak power vastly overstates their average contribution.
That is nonsense as the peak power production of wind mills is usually no where stated.
The nameplate on the windmill: is the power it produces at a certain wind speed. And if that wind speed happens to be common, rare or or often exceeded is a question of the place where the wind mill is placed.

BALTIC I and BALTIC II, the two research wind plants in the baltic sea of http://www.enbw.com/ e.g. have capacity factors of over 100%. Because typical wind speed is over the course of t a year 50% of the time significantly above the rated wind speed of the turbines.

So you got your CUBE argument completely wrong. Nameplate capacities are usually underrated because they are for low wind speeds and kinda a "guarantee" of the manufactor. In RL a wind mill placed at the right spot will always have CFs above 80% and up to 400%.

Wind also requires huge swathes of land
No it does not. You simply build them on farmland: http://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/...

and if you want to put it in the ocean it faces severe challenges - salt corrosion and storms.
Which are no big problems. Every ship faces the same. Hence why everyone is building them ;D

If you have to put a plant offline because the wind is to high (which is at extrem high wind speeds only), other wind farms produce premium power as power production increases with the cube of the wind speed.

https://www.enbw.com/baltic1/i... or https://www.enbw.com/unternehm... no idea where the english pages went ... a few years ago when the parks where under construction they had english versions as well.

Power shortages due to over reliance on renewable technologies are inevitable
They are not. Depends on the grid and the size of your country. Europe is big enough and already has a grid that spans it that one side of Europe can power the other side if there would indeed be a big "problem". Germany alone is big enough to power itself from wind power alone, it is physically impossible that all of Germany has not enough wind.

unless nuclear is in the mix in a big way. Yeah exactly, and that is why one of the leading western industrial nations is switching them off and sitting in the dark ... (*facepalm*)

Wind also requires huge swathes of land
No it does not. You simply build them on farmland: http://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/...

and if you want to put it in the ocean it faces severe challenges - salt corrosion and storms.
Which are no big problems. Every ship faces the same. Hence why everyone is building them ;D

If you have to put a plant offline because the wind is to high (which is at extrem high wind speeds only), other wind farms produce premium power as power production increases with the cube of the wind speed.

https://www.enbw.com/baltic1/i... or https://www.enbw.com/unternehm... no idea where the english pages went ... a few years ago when the parks where under construction they had english versions as well.

Power shortages due to over reliance on renewable technologies are inevitable
They are not. Depends on the grid and the size of your country. Europe is big enough and already has a grid that spans it that one side of Europe can power the other side if there would indeed be a big "problem". Germany alone is big enough to power itself from wind power alone, it is physically impossible that all of Germany has not enough wind.

unless nuclear is in the mix in a big way. Yeah exactly, and that is why one of the leading western industrial nations is switching them off and sitting in the dark ... (*facepalm*)

I have wind farms in germany with 140% performance.

And CF can never exceed 100%. If it does you have created some kind of magical power source.

Perhaps you should grasp what a CF is? And why your idea that the CF of a wind plant is by definition only 30% is wrong?

Rated wind turbine:
5MW at 20km/h

Now I have 10 days 20km/h wind. How much power will it produce? How high is the CF on those ten days? Easy, isn't it? so, why do you think it is 30%?????

Now we have a fluctuation between 15km/h - 25% of the time, 20km/h over 50% of the time and 25km/h for the other 25%.

Does the wind turbine produce more power or less power in the second scenario? Hm? You already fail at that ...

If you place a wind turbine that is rated 10 MWh at 30km/h wind at a place where the wind is regularly above 30km/h: you have a CF above 100%. One of the main reasons why your american idiotic focus on CF makes no sense at all.

So, if you want to find the best turbines ever, I would simply visit the wind farm operators web sites, like http://enbw.com/ ... BALTIC I and BALTIC II ... their biggest off shore plants (research plants btw, over 10 years old) have CFs in the 140% range.

Notice the wind capacity factor for Germany based on real historical data is just under 17.5%.
That is very unlikely. I suggest to use links like this one: http://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/e... to figure CFs ... you will realize that the term "capacity factor" does not occur in the PDF. The reason is pretty simple: no one in the energy industry (at least in germany) is using this metric. It is a useless metric.

As I said, there are plenty of wind farms that have a CF above 100%, e.g. http://enbw.com/ 's Baltic I and Baltic II offshore wind farms in the baltic sea. (Data to them you find on ENBWs web site, in english)

Me: "Everyone working in that industry simply uses the hard number of MW produced"
You: "Sorry but that is complete nonsense. No intelligent grid planner would consider solar panels installed in New Mexico the same as solar panels installed in Alaska."
Erm, you don't get it? You use REAL DATA not a CF. Obviously I have the real data as load profile for both installations. Such data I have for every day. Because if the PV plant is not sun tracking the first of january and the first of august produce complete different load profiles, see below. And even if it is tracking the 1st of january is a "shorter" day than the first of august. So using CFs helps no one.

How would you propose to compare to different technologies when the "name plate" capacity is calculated so differently and the actual ability to produce electricity is dependant on very different parameters?

You don't do that at all. Every technology has its well known advantages and disadvantages, you don't need a CF to figure that.

To compare plants you either use historical real data aka "load profiles" or estimated prognosis data of "load profiles".

Even if you only plan a small roof top solar installation or as a farmer a small wind mill, using CFs (from where ever you wanna pick them) gives you much to much margin of errors for any useful calculation of ROI.

If a wind plant is placed at a place where it only produces 10% to 30% of its rated power, it is either the wrong plant type for that place or the wrong place for that plant.

E.g. the wind parks BALTIC I and BALTIC II of http://enbw.com/ produce over the period of a year roughly 200% - 400% of their rated power. (Papers about this on their web site, also in english)

Power is limited by winding size in the generator. You can't just generate 150% of rated power when the wind is stronger then the design speed. When that happens they shut the windmill down to prevent damage. Of course you can, happens roughly 25% od the running hours of a wind plant, and it is not 150% it is 300%, roughly 50% they run at rated, another 25% above rated and bottom line something like 2% they are offline (substract the 2 wgere you like it best)
Why don't you check http://enbw.com/ and click on english and search for "wind park" or "baltik 1" (or baltic 1) and you get nice reports about the two research wind parks of the EnBW?

Again: You are bad at math and physics, aren't you?My math might be rusty but actually I have a degree in both, euqivalent of a bachelor, actually a bit higher. Wa a side effect when I studied computer science.

At this point I have posted a cite supporting my position. You have an irrelevant site and unsupported opinion. Why is EnBW.com irrelevant? It is a majour power company.

So readers decide for yourself: Value supplied by EE supported by cite, 48% or value boldly asserted by someone who obviously doesn't understand how an alternator works, 140%...
You forget several things. The 48% you post is the actual, power produced by the plant. As the load on the grid varies from roughly 40% (in fact lower) in the night between 1:00 and 5:00 to 100% at peak, obviously the plant has to be powered down. Especially if you take into account that Denmark (you linked a danish plant, no? Or no it was our parent) produces a high amount of its power by wind and at that time in the day they rarely find buyers on the international market.

You have never talked to a plant operator! Much less anybody from the grid control room.
As I wrote or was involved in developing nearly every software used by them: yes I was in their comtrol rooms and talked to them (lots of talks as I worked 30% of my time as requirements engineer)
The grid control guys run 'my' (team lead) software to do day and week ahead Monty Carlo simulations with real time initial conditions from SCADA. Sounds pretty strange but interesting. Are you sure it is not just load profile based prognosis with weather data and actual data from today? What should a monte carlo simulation help in running a grid? Never heared about something like that.

Capacity factor has been used for decades. Perhaps the term is so old that it got phased out already? Frankly, unlike as a hobbyist who wants to have a plant on his own property (and can not freely chose the position or orientation of the plant) the term is pretty useless. As a matter of fact: no databse of www.enbw.com contains that term.

Plant operators get worried when their plants capacity factor goes too low, they know it means they may be working at a new plant soon (depending on the plant type).
Surey ... sigh, and how should that happen? A coal plant can lose pipes, they tend to burst overt time and get replaced during maintanace ... but what other kind of plant should lose 'capacity factor' ... there comes nothing to mind.

Mostly plant operators keep their plant running and stand watch for any problems. System planning guys are the ones with plant lists sorted by capacity factor. Erm, system planning guys are those who plan to build new plants? Or the dispatchers who dispatch a fleet of plants? The software (s) I worked on, which is used for all plants of the EnBW certainly has no such field, and I know for sure that none of the databases have that field. So if they use it for something in planning it must be via Excel sheets :)

Most capacity factors are simply wrong and written into wiki pedia by hobbyists (and plant operators don't use that term anyway, it only exists since a few years invented by forum posters).
Windmills are designed for a certain expected wind speed, if the wind is constantly higher they produce more power than rated, it is that simple. Offshore plants usually produce far more power than rated. (Check the baltic sea plants of http://enbw.com/

I don't get your point. Brazil is one of the prime examples of countries that could rely completely on wind and solar (with a bit pumped storage ofc for load balancing) in a very short time frame.

At 7PM the german grid is still at high load, close to the peak actually.
This is an immage with typical load patterns in the winter for different days (Sunday/Saturday/Workday): http://commons.wikimedia.org/w...

Unfortunately a bit inaccurate, the author made a few mistakes by layering "official" load curves on top of each other, hence a "base line" indicating the true "base laod" would be helpfull (and was on that wikipage a few years ago). In the time from roughly 0:00 to 6:00 we still deliever about 40% of the peak power into the grid, to refill pumped storages, hence the "base line" and hence the name "base load". The picture however is accurate regarding demand from "customers".

In other web sites I saw that base load is now considered more at 50% or even 55% level ... the last picture I saw however was aboutn 40% (I mean graphic with load curve, where base load was explicitely marked). Now base load seems to be 40GW with a peak depending on time of the year at 75GW to 80GW.
Note: such load curves usualy picture 'demand' and not 'production', so you don't see the exported power on this particular graphic.
Here you have more infos, besides the missleading name all energy sources are covered and partly imports and exports: http://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/e...

Right now we don't use solar much in the evening (or in the morning for that matter), most installations (that means a really huge percentage of the current installations) is facing more or less south. However new installations are meanwhile often turned to a different heading to have the biggest capturing at a different time of day (ofc they are tilted according to the average hight of the sun at that angle).

As germany is quite far in the north (relatively speaking) the shortest day in winter is only slightly more than 8 hours. So you can "optimize" for the most output of your personal plant at different times of the year and day times. Which obviously means if you want to sell peak energy in summer at 7PM you will sell nothing at all in winter at that time of the day :D However such a thing would make perfect sense for a beer garden which uses most of its power itself (and out door activity of that beer garden is closed in winter).

The question how fast the wind needs to be depends on the turbines, they are designed for specific wind speeds.
If you have your wind average at 30km/h, you use turbines suiting that average, then they will produce 100% (not 60%) of their rated power at that speed. (Offshore wind parks of the company http://enbw.com/ in the Baltic Sea e.g. produce roughly 4000h/y at 'rated' level and a bit more than 4000h/y 'above rated' level and about 300h/y they don't produce because of maintanance or to much or to less wind. So the mythical 'capacity' factor of those plants is above 100% Search on their web site, the pdfs covering this should be public available.)

The lower the wind speed, the turbines accept, the more "time of the year" they produce power, but their peak production is less (IIRC).

BTW: it is easyer to use m/s instead of km/h because that is usually the unit for the nameplates and easier to google (especially if you want to buy a turbine or want to know the average wind speed at a certain place on the world).

This is a nice german/english publication, a bit to much markettroidish IMHO: http://www.dewi.de/dewi/filead...

But it gives a good overview about

Erm, I guess you mixed up the start up times with a different power plant type? It looks more like an old coal plant.

A *modern* CCGT starts up *imediatly* and is on roughly 5% - 10% load in *one minute*. From zero to full load in 60 minutes.

http://www.enbw.com/content/en/group/innovations/power_stations/optimising_the_operating_characteristics_in_rdk/index.jsp

My profession: writing and supporting utility billing software, I have setup the tariffs, I have seen the half hourly meter readings, I know what I am talking about here.

I do the same :D working for EnBW http://www.enbw.com/ :D

In germany high power demand is not from households but from the industries and other businesses.

I ran the article thru google translate and it is the same hydroplant I found.
The article does mention the existing weir but for some reason it doesn't say it actually uses it

The pamphlet I found is
http://www.enbw.com/content/en/group/_media/_pdf/water_is_energy.pdf
Page 26 explains what they did and page 29 has some details of the plant (esp the head of water)

The companies delivering PowerLine in Germany
( RWE (english PowerLine description), MVV and EnBw) should know that they have no chance against DSL, cable (just starting in Germany) and satellite.

Because a whole neighbourhood has to share
the 2Mbit/s (or in the future 10Mbit/s) -
as stated in other comments - the effective speed
will drop very low. Additionally there are
the interferences with amateur radio and others.

Although the companies claim they can compete
with DSL&al they are beginning to spread into the
3rd world. Currently RWE is doing some "evaluation" in Brasil. They hope that in the 3rd world - with no telephone lines, but power lines
they have a market. That's acutally what they say.

But I personally doubt that there is a market
for PowerLine - neither in Germany nor elsewhere in the world. It's already a dead technology
if it does not change fundamentally.