Making Wind Energy Work

I recently attended a presentation at the Innovation Centre in Belfast by an organisation called The Spirit of Ireland (http://www.spiritofireland.org/). These guys are pushing their solution to the inherent problem with wind energy, namely the fact that no one can control the wind, so the power that wind generators produce fluctuates uncontrollably which is next to useless for supplying a grid where supply must dynamically match demand to the point where conventional thermal power stations know to increase their output during television commercial breaks because that’s when loads of people switch their kettles on.

Their solution is simple if ambitious. Build a large array of large (3MW) turbines but don’t connect them to the national grid. Instead they exist on their own networm whose sole purpose is to pump seawater into enormous reservoirs. These are then used as the source for a more conventional hydro-electric power station capable of providing (if memory serves me correctly) a 600MW base load and a 1600MW peak.

Of course there are all sorts of interesting problems unique to this approach, such as preventing seawater from leaking through the substrate and contaminating the surrounding land, and ensuring that marine life doesn’t get sucked in and mashed up, etc., but none of this is insurmountable and this team have been working for a year to address all the issues that people can identify. Not only that, all but the commercially sensitive stuff has been openly published online throughout, in order to receive and be able to address as much prectical criticism as possible.

Seemingly all that stands in the way now is planning legislation, which as it currently stands makes a project like this impossible due to the fragmentation of planning applications that would be required for all the different bits of the project, but even that is apparently being worked on in both north and south jurisdictions.

I’m no expert on power distribution so I’m not qualified to provide my own assessment of their proposal. I was however impressed and excited at the possibility. I’m looking forward to seeing what ultimately emerges from their effort and hoping it’s positive.

Just back from MIX Essentials ’09

This year Microsoft Ireland’s annual web technologies event moved from CineWorld to the Hilton on Charlemont Place. Coming from Belfast I personally found the move to be a complete pain in the butt. It meant driving further into Dublin, I missed the turnoff from the N1 for O’Connell Street and ended up in a much slower traffic queue heading east along the Liffey to get back on course. Then the one way system transpired against me – ended up spiralling my way in to the hotel rather than driving straight there. Almost didn’t get parked. Microsoft had arranged a great parking rate in hotel car park of just €5 for the day, but the hotel car park is very small – I only got parked because someone else drove out of a space just as I was driving in.

But enough of the sour grapes. The conference itself was of the standard we’ve come to expect with a good variety of topics covered. And the free food and drink weren’t to be sneezed at either. I was very impressed with Sabrina Dent who appears to have very successfully transposed the UK government’s anti drugs initiative over to customers – her message essentially being that it’s OK to “just say no” when they ask for something stupid – very, very refreshing.

Thanks to Ronan Geraghty I finally determined that the Windows Azure platform isn’t a technology that customers can purchase in order to host their own cloud services but is in fact purely for use within Microsoft’s own data centres. This is one of those bits of information that someone must have thought was obvious since I have never seen it explained in any of the marketing collateral.

It will be interesting to see how well Azure catches on. Customers won’t be slow to realise that using this architectural approach locks them in to the system in a way that other Microsoft technologies don’t. Also Microsoft themselves are likely to hit a problem with the rollout of their datacentres. Their plan appears to have a very few very large data centres dotted around the globe – they’re creating batteries of those “datacentre in a lorry container” units. But these have been shown to suffer from a major contstraint, which is that electricity grids are becomming maxed out trying to supply them. I can see Microsoft having to revise its plans to use a lot more smaller datacentres more widely distributed – whether such a change would pose a management problem I don’t know.

There were a couple of good talks relevant to Silverlight. This is a technology that I have dabbled in some time back and for which I wish I had more time because whilst I’ve never had much interest in flashy user interfaces (I’d rather have something fast to use that gets to the point), it’s great to have the additional architectural option of running .Net code client side via the Web.

The day finished off for me with a talk by Leeanne Lowe who has just launched her web design business Lovely within the last few weeks and here she was straight away presenting the methodology that she has developed to help budget-limited clients during her career to date. Again this was a refreshing departure from the norm, and hats off to Leeanne for having the balls to jump straight into something like this.

This year’s event didn’t seem to be nearly as well attended as in previous years – the feedback that Microsoft got was that companies couldn’t afford to release their staff for a day in the present conditions. Let’s hope things pick up again next year – MIX Essentials is a highlight of the year that I always look forward to and it would be a shame for it to fade away. There are still a lot of people out there who like to knock Microsoft, but I can’t think of any other supplier who supports their customers and partners the way that Microsoft do. Long may it last.