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The main reason Longannet coal fired power station shut down was because of energy distribution politics where Scottish energy producers are charged £millions to attach to the National Grid whereas suppliers in neighbouring (but much less green energy producing per capita) England are subsidized to attach to the grid. Newspaper articles here and here.

Some are saying it's part of a general fight back by the United Kingdom for having the audacity to have a referendum to leave the UK. We're seeing it across all sectors where Scottish businesses who were not in favour of the union are being discriminated against.

> Really? Every grid-tie inverter, ever, has this built in.

Exactly. This is why it has been a problem. In the event of a grid disturbance, a large amount of grid-tie inverters falsely detected an island and tripped out simultaneously.

> Pointer to the UK issue you're referring to?

http://www2.nationalgrid.com/a...

Although the initiating cause was 2 large thermal plants tripping, the rapid reduction in grid frequency caused approximately 300 MW of grid-tie inverters to trip simultaneous, accelerating a grid frequency collapse event.

National grid has recommended new grid-tie inverter firmware configurations, which should be present in new inverters, but this reduces the sensitivity to true islanding, but this is now considered a lesser issue than loss of embedded generation.

The noise floor is not that simple.
If you analyse the noise, you find it's broadly spread over a wide variety of frequencies.
If you analyse 10s or so slices of signal, over the range 47-53Hz, things get considerably easier.
10 seconds means that your effective number of signal levels is not 2^16 (65536)
It's sqrt(44100*10)*65535, about 25 bits.
Throwing out the out of band noise means you lose >99.5% or so of it.

As a practical measure.
Go to pretty much any CD you have, and do a FFT in the range 47-53 or 57-63hz.
In the vast majority of cases, you will find a signal.

And it's not quite a timestamp, unless the recording is quite long.
http://www.nationalgrid.com/uk/Electricity/Data/Realtime/Frequency/Freq60.htm - for example - this is the UKs last hours frequency.
The graph is clearly enough to show that even if you can 'only' resolve in 10 second intervals the frequency, it's quite plausible to say if a 10 minute video can be one specific timeframe, or not.

as shown in this graph: http://www.nationalgrid.com/uk/Electricity/Data/Realtime/Demand/Demand8.htm

This is such a bunch of FUD. Several UK studies show that very substantial carbon savings can arise from wind power even at 30% of total electricity provision.

The point about backup is that we have it already for existing plants; adding quite a bit of wind will have minimal impacts on this requirement, both in carbon and cost terms. Having substantial amounts of wind just means more intelligent load balancing from the grid operator, more flexible generation from existing fossil fuel/nuclear plant, and more demand management of consumption.

Again in the UK context, the Centre for Alternative Technology's recent Zero Carbon Britain report shows how the UK could fully decarbonise without gas by 2030 (though it would take quite radical action).

Here is a map of England and Wales' high-voltage electricity grid, but I'm not sure if it's complete for Scotland. It extends to Orkney, anyway.

Sure, but it's not very efficient. I was listening to an interview with one of the techies who does load balancing on the UK's national grid who said that wind and solar (any form) give him the willies because they're so unreliable from minute-to-minute. The fossil / nuclear plants need to be kept hot with the turbines spinning all the time in order to pick up the load immediately, meaning that the practical savings from renewables are much less than the theoretical ones. He liked hydro though.

Total power loss on the UK grid in 2005 was 1423 MW out of 63 total demand.

Hardly most of the power lost in transmission.

Sources - http://www.nationalgrid.com/uk/library/documents/sys05/default.asp?sNode=SYS&action=&Exp=Y

Despite the fact that no realistic way to overcome the problems with intermittent supply, that they don't produce energy at night

With most of nuclear reactors built in the west ending their licensing in about 2030 - 2040, Oil running low and gas prices rising due to low demand, it seems likely that nations will turn to coal.

Why not link Windpower to something like the Ffestiniog Pumped Water Power Station in Wales. Off peak, the station pumps water back into the resevoir, then lets it flow during peak times. Now with a bunch of Wind Power stations putting power into the National Grid, you could use places like Ffestiniog to "store" that power by pumping water back into its resevoir.

"Put 100 megawatts of power into a transmission grid and I doubt much more than 50 or 60 megawatts come out the other end."

False. Modern transmission systems can achieve under 2% loss in large-scale power transmission. And that's talking about a scale of Terawatts Hours, not Megawatts (keeping in mind that as the amount of energy lost in transmission is proportional to the amount of energy transmitted). Granted the site is for the UK power grid, but it shows you that any modern transmission system is ridiculously unlikely to be operating at 50% loss on a megawatt scale, even when dealing with distribution levels (transmission refers generally to connected substations, etc. on the power grid, distribution refers to how it gets to your house from there).

Transco also own GridAmerica, for their opinion on the blackout, see this press release

ah, but you don't need your local company to provide dsl (well, you might depending on your area) all you need is their wires.. but check with other ISP's in the area. For instance, in quite a bit of NY state, Logical Net provides DSL service, and they simply use verizon's (or your local bell's) wiring (for a meager fee) and boom, you have lovely DSL, without even talking to your all powerful bellco Then, there's Roadrunner, and other cable modems, as you all know, but if you can't get ANY other high speed, there's always sattelite. (and if you can't get that, you should probally move somewhere that has power.

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Any way about it, I have vonage, and it's a Wonderful thing.. it's cheaper than any other phone company.. (oops, did I say that?) umm.. base station land line telecommunications service, (IP or otherwise) you can hook up regular phones, answering machines, fax machines, anything with a phone jack! (non-vonage sponsored faq, and cheap plug for referrals) Not to mention you can keep your regular phone number, equipment, etc.. (FYI, if you use a refferal, you get an extra month free, instead of going directly to vonage :) Where else can you get a true to life 800 number for a couple extra bux a month?

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ok.. I'm done now..

(yeah, I know, you already knew most of that anwyays...)

The London Underground blackout has nothing to do with this, it was a failure of part of a utility service, and was contained within that utility.

I don't know where you got that idea from but it's completely wrong. London Underground ran their own power plant for nearly 100 years before they closed it last year and went onto mains power. Bad (or unlucky) call. The report on the power failure is instructive reading on how a combination of circumstances can break what should have been a quadruply redundant system.

It annoyed the hell out of me that even here in London they reported a "London Blackout!" over the top of footage of a brightly lit evening street focusing on an entrance to a tube station (lit) with a flashing emergency sign (powered by electric not hampster power).

Sure, they don't have many feeds into the Tube power supply, so there were areas of London with power but no Underground trains. And once you've decided to evacuate, you can't switch the power back on without electrocuting a few commuters. You have to cold restart by clearing the whole system.