And at the endMid-Winter, maybe cold, miserable but not wet! Who has stolen all our rain?? According to the Met Office, this January has been one of the driest on record. However, as we are blessed with having a Variable Speed Drive at the heart of our installation, we continue to generate power—albeit on some days only enough to boil a kettle of water—which we don’t have! So, another milestone was achieved - 90MWh generated.
A snapshot of the end of Jan key data is shown below: [dial shows 90MWhr to date,]
Snapshot of Performance on Jan 31st [another graphic shows current output 3.2kW at 3 RPM!]
The generating break in the early hours of the morning was caused by a low water level trigger. As a reminder we must retain a cosmetic flow of 6 cm of water over the Weir, if we drop below this level for more than a few minutes we stop generating. This of course has the effect of increasing the weir level and generating restarts (with an overshoot to start). On the above snapshot, we only had one low water level break but on some days in January, these were happening on a quite frequent basis.
One of the visual impacts of low levels is a reduction in the volume of water feeding Archie and therefore the speed is reduced (but we continue to generate). This sometimes causes water turbulence and water splashing out of the vanes into the side channels.
etc
"PS. Stop Press! 100 and still Batting!!! "