Wind isn't the answer

[wdyasq]

Ed Wallace is one of my favorite commentators. His work is well researched. In the article he makes an observation all of us who fool with wind know:

"8.7 percent reliability for a trillion-dollar investment? Yes. And we would still to have to build more conventional generation plants to cover our future electrical needs -- to cover that 91.3 percent of the time when there isn't enough wind to generate electricity."

One needs a backup system. Unlike those who have lived off-grid and will put up with a little inconvenience, the public demands near 100% reliability for the utility services  they pay for. In reality, they demand 100% reliability even in things they don't directly pay for but 'put up' with the inconvenience if it doesn't cost them.(they still complain).

Article: http://www.star-telegram.com/ed_wallace/v-print/story/761664.html

It is an interesting read. Well it was to me, your mileage may vary. It does get one thinking on how the national power grid of any country should proceed. I'd be happy with power 90% of the time for a good discount, as long as the 'outage' could be somewhat predicted. I don't think many, including the 'greeniez' will tolerate anything but 100% reliable electrical power, 100% of the time.

Ron

[valterra]

Like "The Dans" say on Otherpower, Wind is not reliable as the sole source of power, but makes a nice supplement to solar.

[Tritium]

Well,

Where I live it doesn't matter what the source is. The power is not reliable.

If the wind blows too hard the lines slap and power is down. Ice storm, lines slap and the power is down.

Thunderstorm, power is down.

No real reliability here that is why I am seeking other sources such as wind and solar that are battery backed.

If I control my own power then it will be more reliable although it will be more expensive.

Thurmond

[PeterAVT]

Well, there is a lot of inconveniences that I can live with. Problem is, my city and landlord basically won't allow it. My neighbors are agreeable but there is only so much one can do within the law. I decided to start researching how to save even though I'd rather make my own juice.

[zeusmorg]

 What gets to me, is the fact there is no one answer! Any source of power has it's own unique pitfalls, that's why we need a good overall mix.

 Hydro fails if it doesn't rain, coal pollutes, natural gas pollutes and is getting expensive (won't even comment on nuclear) wind can be sporadic and hazardous. Solar PV

doesn't work 1/2 the time(at night) actually less if it gets cloudy. So why not de-centralize the power sources? smaller generation done in conjunction with larger setups tend to smooth out the "rough spots"

 I would love to see a larger mix of non-polluting sources of energy. In the united states one of the most reliable sources of RE is underutilized. There are rarely hydro setups on smaller rivers mainly because the power that could be utilized is "too small" for a large power company to consider practical. Most smaller hydro setups are usually built and maintained for personal power.

 I could list many other sources of power finally being utilized such as methane in landfills, tidal, and some others. All have their unique qualities, yet none of them in and of itself is the "answer".  

[wdesilvey]

I agree.

I had the opportunity a few days ago to speak with a retired electrical engineer. His take was that it is 3 fold: solar, wind, and backup diesel gen. Unfortunately only those of us that live in rural/sub-rural/absolute STICKS are able to take advantage of this type of proposition, and yer still outta luck if you RENT!

I do support Pickens Plan; at least it is a start. Better than the Feds have done!

The sudden call for the re-awakening of nuke power is a joke; it will take 2-3x as long to get one plant from the drawing board to the grid as it will (per the Feds estimates) to get our own usable oil/nat gas reserves to the (hopefully US ONLY) market. Federal estimates for this are INCORRECT. Some gas wells can be producing in as little as 1 year; some oil wells can be doing the same in as little as 2. (I used to work offshore.)

I am not a greenie, but I do see a balance is needed. We dont need to recklessly endanger our surroundings, but we NEED energy. Open ANWR, East and West Coasts, Rockies for Shale, etc. Quit letting The Chinese et al drill for OUR oil while our OWN companies are FORBIDDEN to do so! Utilize what we can whaile we can as a bridge to get us to the alternative energy solutions that are on the horizon.

Thanks,

Bill

[SparWeb]

Even after considering all that, wind STILL isn't as easy to manage on a utility-size scale.  Consider how you're going to serve all those people whose lights start to brown and motors start to slow when the wind dies.

When building wind generation, you must also provide enough "flexible" generation capacity to fill in for the wind lulls.  For example, there is some hydroelectric capability in Alberta, but the regulators of the utility were concerned that relying on wind too much in southern AB could lead to brown outs or surges, if the hydro dams couldn't be spooled up quickly enough to balance the wind.

For all my fascination with wind poer, I actually prefer utility hydroelectric, because the density of energy is much higher and it's infinitely more controllable, but you take what you can get, depending on where you live.

[electronbaby]

well, wind and PV and diesel back up work for me. Actually, jusy wind and PV are fine.

I never try and get involved in the whole political / social battles that are continuing to come up and the pice of oil rises. In my book, its pretty simple. Distributed generation works. Centralized generation has worked for close to 100 years, but just like the age or oil, it is starting to take a downswing. The answer is that there really is no answer. Well, no single answer, and this has come up before, and it will continue to come up again, and again, and again. I guess what Im trying to say is that every bodies needs are different, and they will have to take an active role in the immediate future to try and get a grasp on just what it means to understand their energy habits and try to curb them.

When the price of oil was cheap, millions flocked to the cities and suburbs and set up home and shop. Things are changing now. Not sure if it for better or worse, but the sad reality is that it is changing.

You have to remember, in the grand scheme of things, 100 years of prosperous oil production and use, is NOT A LONG TIME.

[DamonHD]

Many of us worldwide don't have the option of hydro, or it's practically all in use already.  The hydro/wind combination (with nuclear) works pretty well in the Nordic countries.

I think that one thing that might really help is automatic aggressive domestic demand management, for example see: http://www.dynamicdemand.co.uk/

This already happens industrially, for example.

If, for example, all new domestic appliances had to be able to drop (or at least postpone) a substantial fraction of their load as frequency falls, then quite a lot of extra intermittent supply could be accommodated invisibly.

For example, all 'wet' appliances with heating such as dishwashers and washing machines could near-instantly drop their water heating demand from the typical 2kW--3kW down to (say) 1kW or even lower.  Fridges and freezers could allow their internal temperatures to rise 0.5C (1F) above the usual set-point.  All until the grid frequency pops up to its nominal central value or over.

And of course many countries already do have some of the electric water heating (and space heating) rigged this way or something similar.

I'm trying to get through to the relevant standard-setters in the EU a suggestion that at least initially the A+/A++ top energy ratings shouldn't be available without some element of frequency response (or similar) built in to the appliance to make it 'RE friendly'.  This should in time move down to all 'A' and even 'B' appliances where applicable (eg deferrable peak loads of 100W or more) IMHO.

And introducing mandatory time-of-day pricing and/or grid-stress pricing for all users over 500kWh/month would help a lot too, possibly causing responses on a timescale of minutes rather than fractions of a second of course.

Then wind in particular can be far more of the answer.

Rgds

Damon

[DamonHD]

As it happens I seem to have just within the last few minutes gotten one step closer to the committee that decides these things...

Rgds

Damon

[Aule Mar]

So far no one here has mentioned Nuclear power.  with the Uranium that's already been enriched we have enough fuel for 300 years of power.  If we permit the use of Plutonium to be used as Mixed Oxide (MOX) fuel, Pu from nuclear weapons that have been dismantled, we have enough over 600+ years of this countries needs.  

yes the waste from this fuel is nasty, but if we use the facilities that we already have the fission fragments (ash from "burning" U & Pu) can be removed and stored safely.  The amount of "ash" from a 1000 MWe power plant (that size plant can light up NY city) from one year of operation would fit inside a standard trash can, about 1 CuFt.

Just about all of the 1 CuFt of material will decay into a stable (non-radioactive) element, on approx 3-600 years.  A very small amount, about a thimble full will remain radioactive for essentially forever (1,000,000+ years).  But the radiation from this material can be stopped by a sheet of paper (alpha radiation) it is the same stuff that is in every smoke detector in everybody's home.

Right now about 20% of the power in this country comes from nuclear.  There are no green house gases generated, no oil is consumed, all the waste that is generated remains controlled.  That is the power company does not get to pump it up the smokestack and dump it on the public

[richhagen]

Wind will have to be coupled with some sort of energy storage mechanism if it is to grow beyond a few percent of the national usage.  The cost of storage will make it less competitive with other power sources.  Solar has the same issues.  Still it strikes me as a good idea to proceed with some type of experimental station with multiple sources such as wind and solar and couple it with pumped hydro or some other storage mechanism to refine its reliability and model its performance to see when it becomes economically feasible for replacement of base station generating capacity.  I suspect the cost of natural gas and coal will need to double again for it to compete, but I believe that ultimately that will likely happen.  Rich

[wooferhound]

And what about the demand Electric Cars will put onto the grid system. The cars seem to be very popular and they pull big power like an Air Conditioner when charging. Where will the power come from when there are 100,000,000 more electric cars charging in the garage.

I think there is an idea called CoGeneration. This is basically what we are doing around here. We are making and using as much power as we can, and supplementing it with Grid power. It would be nice if everybody did that on some level.

[DamonHD]

Yes and no.

One feature of wind is that, at least for a reasonably-dispersed on even a medium scale (across counties rather than countries) the slew-rate, ie the rate at which power output ramps up or down, is rather more gentle than (say) when a big nuclear station pops off line as happened here in the UK a few weeks ago (our biggest one in fact).

That means that somewhat slower, cheaper, and possibly more-efficient backup can conceivably be used MW for MW than for conventional plant backup.  And the whole lot won't fail at once, suddenly.

Denmark has ~20% wind penetration and it is predicted that the UK could get significantly beyond that with only a relatively small cost in backup/reserve.

BTW, this is a relatively good use for fossil fuels: as a dispatchable reserve/emergency energy store for when nothing else will cut the mustard.  Not to casually waste in an SUV to drive around town!

Rgds

Damon

[DamonHD]

Simple answer: charge at night when demand is (in the UK anyway) 30% below peak at least.

Even better: charge when the wind is blowing!

Rgds

Damon

[fungus]

"There are no green house gases generated, no oil is consumed, all the waste that is generated remains controlled.  That is the power company does not get to pump it up the smokestack and dump it on the public"

I'll have to disagree with that .. there is a very real amount of oil consumed and emissions from nuclear;

First you have to dig it up out from the ground, not only does this ruin huge areas of land and strip them bare, the ore needs to be dug out with diggers, dynamite etc etc etc, then it has to be transported to the refining facility..

There it has to be melted to a very hot temperature and purified, this takes up a huge amount of energy and emissions etc, also as we take more uranium out of the ground you need more and more energy to make it into usable pure fuel to be used in power stations.

Then you have the decommissioning process after the power station reaches the end of its usable life, this creates a huge amount of low level radioactive waste, this is still harmful and needs to be put somewhere, and it also takes a very long time and huge expense to deal with the materials inside which have to be handled carefully ..

[TomW]

Even better, get off your fat arse and walk.

Tom

[DamonHD]

Betterer and betterer...

[Bobbyb]

Interesting point about electric cars which will divinely be a huge demand on power. And the 30% won't be enough. As far as I know cars use somewhere between 75 and 200KW so that's 50 to 100 times the domestic demand?? But on the + there will be a lot of battery's around that we can use for our RE (Or will the tomorrow car run on hydrogen?¿?).

When I read the reaction of everyone I can't help but notice the small scale thinking. What ever the mix of Re (wind/solar/hydro/wave) will be it will always be somewhat unreliable if u produce for a small aria as a state/province. Even producing for the entire country will not be enough.  It's nice that the "slew-rate" of most of the RE systems is pretty quick, but it seems to me that it's very silly to not harvest the energy when it's available.

So what's my idea?... Seriously upgrade the global power grid so that if there's wind/sun/rain/storm in your part of the world it can be transported to some other part.

I can hear u think: "Yea but transporting power over those distances is not efficient". But running your RE plant at less than a 100% is???

Greeting Bobby

[FuddyDuddy]

Here's an interesting aside. Here in Oregon recently our high water (lots of snow this last winter, which is melting) and a few good windy days and the wind farms in eastern Oregon produced so much power they had to spill water at the hydro facilities because there was too much power....

So they were almost to the point of paying out of state clients to use the power. But, did anyone here in Oregon see lesser bills ??

Not on your tintype. Not going to happen. In fact they say they need a 15% increase in utility rates due to their costs of opereating.....

FuddyDuddy

[kurt]

we have cut our gasoline use down to one tank full a month by walking and riding the city bus. one of the few upsides of living in the city.

[jimjjnn]

China and Vietnam are both drilling offshore right now. Others are also planning to do the same.

Our congress has been allowing this to happen and preventing the USA from drilling.

[jimjjnn]

I use 15 gallons of diesel every 2 months. Have cut usage further now so next 2 months should be even less. Only drive when I have many errands to run rather than just 1 or 2.

[tecker]

Wind is a good performer to circular torque . Of coarse to the 24 7 user it's a bad investment . Packed away in an office one can't enjoy the bond one makes with the moods of the earth and the idea of doing with out . It's kind of like a badge of honor .

 A high rise throwing open the windows ha what windows .It's a fuel economy and that's that .

 It won't be long before we have to work with what we have on the surface and not what was stored for a rainy day .

 I think we could use what's on the surface now and be happy and productive .We just have to stop and re tool and that's that.

We just have to stop for a while and look at what really going on . Little wind a little sun a little water and were back on track at lesser pace but more in sync.

[ghurd]

Thanks Jim.  I wanted to hear that again.

Their record with POWs, "green", rules, etc, should be a good sign?

(could someone pull this fork out of my eye?)

It seems my next import shipment will be carried by environmental-cargo-partners.

Might be nice to save 20% fuel, with 1000BC technology?

http://www.environmental-cargo-partners.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=19&
;Itemid=31

G-

[zeusmorg]

 If everyone did grid tied co-generation in some form, we'd probably have more power than we'd ever use even with all electric transportation!

[tecker]

I read the artical and it could have been a photo copy of every other artical on alteratives ever written . The numbers are posted for investors and banks and the power is not going to the homes  it's sent to a  hub  where there's no way it can be used . The wind power has to stay in the local where it's made not bucked by peak demans .

[oztules]

One more reliable source is tidal power. Where I live, we are commissioning a new tidal power generating fangdangle between two of the islands here.

The 2 islands (Flinders and Cape barron)  block effectively 100km of Bass Strait which itself is a channel between Australia and Tasmania.

Needless to say the tide roars through this tiny (maybe 1km wide) channel every day, twice a day at about 7 knots at it's max down to zero obviously when the tide slacks.

This could provide perhaps 16-18 hrs a day reliable tidal power.

I will be interested in the findings from this pilot project. It seems a no brainer to use tide rather than wind as it is reliable as clockwork. Different parts around the island have wildly differing tidal times as well... by as much as 2 hrs.

However, the fact that there appears to be very very few such projects tells me that there are problems with this I don't forsee. Otherwise there are hundreds of places on the planet where this would be very useful, and where tidal races are perfect for this sort of thing.

But they don't stand out.... maybe I'm not looking in the right places.

.........oztules

[spinningmagnets]

I dont buy the 8.7 percent reliability, just my opinion. If setting up a hydro-electric dam in the Mojave desert (a place I am personally familiar with) you will be disappointed in the output.

As one post pointed out, hydro and wind are doing very well in Oregon. Its my undestanding that wind is fairly good and steady in Wyoming and N. Dakota...

There's also lots of steady wind just off-shore from Massachusetts (12 miles out, not visible from shore) to replace the output of some of the oldest and most obsolete coal-steam electric plants in the USA, but Sen. Kennedy is making sure that no wind-gens ever get built there.

PV is a good partner in the mix for local generation, but high voltage is needed for long distance distribution. As much as we want an easy "silver bullit" answer, I have to ask, whats doable?

Big-wind is going to happen, and I think thats good. But, when theres no wind, there must be a back-up for hospitals and police. (us peasants will start buying USP's for our LED TV's and LED lights.

Before I left California, I read about Hotels, hospitals, and police that were adding rooftop back-up generators (because of the Gray Davis brown-outs). Because of stringent regulations, the most cost-effective solutions most chose were diesel-gens converted to methane with an added sparking system. Only useful in a temporary emergency, not for long term.

Get used to the idea of expensive power, whether its from the grid, or in the form of mobile fuels. There will be a long drawn out re-adjustment in the publics lifestyle expectations.

Coal power can be made clean, but its expensive. Love it or hate it, get used to it because the USA has a lot of it. The more wind we are using the less coal we will be forced to use.

[valterra]

Additionally, I would like to see more tax CREDITS going to Individuals who invest in solar, wind, etc. projects.  Even the little guys who make the stuff themselves.

I agree about decentralized power.  Our local power company has a Green Power program where you can pay additional money to help with their green projects.  The idea is that renewable stuff costs moe.  I fear that with the power monopolies, this will ALWAYS be the mantra, even after the projects are done, and the power is "free" to them.  

It is just another excuse to raise prices.  I wouldn't be surprised if gas goes up higher because people are using less.  Pure economics.

I saw someone who thinks they should have been president flying his private jet all around to preach at us about "carbon."

The Dyson guy was on a commercial talking about how his (carbon) brushless motors in his vacuum lessen "carbon emmisions."

My God.  Really?  Can't we see that this is all a money grab?

That's why I support incentives for INDIVIDUALS who conserve and produce.

end rant for now.  

[valterra]

Great Link, Ghurd!  Are those missiles being shipped TO or FROM the Chinese?  Either way can't be good....

[valterra]

strip mining?  I grew up in Arizona and saw the strip mines for Copper...  you know, that stuff in our wind gens.   :-)  And those NiFB magnets?  Those were dug out of the ground, too!

No matter what we do, we're going to have to consume SOMETHING.  

[valterra]

I like this idea - especially for vehicles.  On some of the other forums, people are mad that the new Chevy Volt will have one of those "evil" ICE's (Internal Combustion Engine) inside.

But wouldn't it be great to have a Choice?  Not just a choice when you buy, but an ONGOING choice?

Gas is $4 / gallon?  Time to use electric.  Electricity is more expensive (summer time) and gas is cheap?  Use gas.  

I wish they could make a car that would run on LP, gas, diesel, vegetable oil, hydrogen, solar, water, pure BS or whatever other source of fuel might be available.  Terribly complicated to be sure.  But wouldn't that be nice for the individual consumer!