Power Electronics Help to Control Electrical Grids

An anonymous reader writes: "IEEE Spectrum magazine has a timely article about how power electronics are proving necessary for the widespread connection of wind turbines to the electric power grid. It explains many issues that currently make it difficult to utilize wind power. Older articles discuss other issues affecting the nation's power grid."

Ha

[pokka]

A little ironic that this article on a world wide power grid was published in the September issue of Wired.

IEEE Spectrum magazine has a timely article

It's kind of funny how articles about the power grid appear in magazines across the world every month of every year, but the ones that just happened to appear this month are "eerily prophetic". :)

WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF are "power electronics"?

Couldn't you at elast have given us some tiny hint, so that upon clicking your links we'd be going into the articles having some vague clue how to parse your summary?

Re:Ha

[LostCluster]

The fact is, a small little trade magazine article that only a few hundred people cared about last week is now interesting to nearly everybody this week.

The problem with power distribution

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with power distribution is the medium: electric power lines. It makes more sense to generate power cleanly and locally, with fuel cells at the core of the distributed power generaters. For fuel you use hydrogen reformed from fossil fuels or hydrogen rich biomass, or hydrogen created from excess wind, solar, or any other source. Then transmission lines don't matter so much, pollution is reduced, and the world is a happier place.

Re:Management *is* key...

[Anonymous Coward]

The key is nuclear power.

Coal power is ok, it is cheap it is cleaner then it use to be, like everything else technology has improved it 300% since the 1970's.

Natural gas/oil is the favorate right now. Unfortunatly our government isn't allowing us to tap the gigantic resources we have so we are running out of it. We have enough oil in our country to last us another 30 years easy(with projected increases in consumption), yet we depend on the dildo's from OPEC, but that is ending with eastern european countries and russia getting into the market.

Hydrogen economy. What a freaking joke. I can't beleive that people fell for this crap. The energy has to come from somewhere, right now it comes from oil. So hydrogen would actually be wastefull and increase pollution. Why don't we just power our cars from rocks tied to ropes on long poles? We lift the rocks up, tie them to cars, drop the rocks and the rope would be tied to a pully attacted to the wheels. WEEE!!!

Water, wind, solar. Most places do not have enough wind/sun/water to power anything meaningfull. Maybe if we kick everybody out of montana and fill the entire state full of wind farms me MAY just have enough power to run parts of californa. Well only during parts of the year.

Nuclear: Lots of power, lots of fuel. We can power a large city for ten years with a handfull of pellets. The waste is insigificant comparied to the waste from other sources of fuel. The only thing standing in the way is ingnorance. Pure and simple. We have thousands of nuclear plants all over the country, they have one minor burp of gas from one plant and people are freaked out for decades. All these plants are running from late 1970's technology at best and they are perfectly safe. Of course unless they are soviet power plants whose "waste" was designed to be nuclear weapons grade-able. Such a freaking joke. Ignorance is what is standing in the way and the vast majority (not all of course) of anti-nuclear freaks are the modern day equivelent of Luddites

Re:Ha

[Anonymous Coward]

I would hardly call the IEEE Spectrum a "small, little" trade magazine. Every IEEE member gets a copy. There are well over 300 000 IEEE in the world. Circulation is at least thus 300 000. Here are the benefits [ieee.org] of such a membership.

Re:Management *is* key...

[neiffer]

True, the anti-nuclear crowd are a bit dogmatic, you forget the real issue with nuclear power. Where do you plan to put the waste, huh? Yucca Mountain? You mean the storage facility on the quake fault line? Nice. :) Nuclear is a good prospect but relying on a single source is what doomed our system in the first place. Variety is the spice of the power grid, my friend.

Re:fuel cell

[DrMrLordX]

The idea would be to make them hydrogen fuel cells. You'd use inconsistant power sources(wind, solar) to generate electricity for the purpose of electrolysis. Split water into its component parts and you've got a nice and(somewhat) stable way to store all that energy you've converted into electricity via solar/wind generators without using expensive batteries, or at least not so many. Then distribute the hydrogen to fuel-cell owners and let them burn off hydrogen to produce local electricty on demand.

Of course there's going to be a lot of loss due to all the conversion steps(wind->electricity->hydrogen->electricity->me chanical energy) but it wouldn't be so bad once all the infrastructure necessary was in place.

The only concern I'd have is building a working facility to use electricity to seperate water that's reliant upon the inconsistant power levels that solar and wind generators would provide. This would almost seem to be more useful for solar facilities. Sunlight is a bit more predictable than wind, or so I would think.

Um, anyone know what happened to polar-solar.com? Was that a hoax or did they just go belly-up due to lack of interest?

Re:Management *is* key...

[LostCluster]

The killer app here is the "large battery" that can take in excess power and give it back when we need it. Of course, real world problems like loss, reaction time, and how you make sure such a thing doesn't explode are standing in the way. It's going to take a lot of science work to solve this problem, but the payoff will be huge once it is solved.

Re:fuel cell

[gordyf]

This would require that not only you had enough wind/solar/etc power to run your home during the day, but also to split water during the day, enough of it to run your home at night.

Would it not be easier to have enough wind/solar/etc power to run your home during the day, selling the excess to the power company and then pulling from the grid at night? You wouldn't have the up-front cost of electrolysis/fuel cell equipment, and you wouldn't pay for the power at night since you were being paid all during the day (at peak rates, even).

Nice to see our patent system working

[Edmund Blackadder]

Towards the middle the article explains how the europeans deal with the problem ... they just use improved turbine designs. After you see the following paragraph:

"The idea has been slower to catch on in the United States, where GE Wind Energy, in Tehachapi, Calif., has deftly defended patents on variable-speed turbines that will be on the books through 2011. "

Nice to see the patent system working again. I guess the Europeans were lucky because GE Wind energy decided not to file their patents in europe (or they were not granted).

But then again, shouldnt patents help innovations ... isnt that how it was supposed to work. Shouldn't variable speed turbines be much more developed in the us because they were patented here?

Frankly i dont know why GE systems does not promote variable speed wind turbines now that they have the protection, and if they cant, why they dont sell affordable licences to companies that can. It could be due to the usual burocratic inefficiency, or it could be something sinister.

Yet this is not the first time i see an owner of a patent sit on the technology and not develop it while other people are perfectly able to do so. We all remember how a company that does not take the trouble to make portable email devices, tried to stop a company that does make them.

Re:fuel cell

[michael_cain]

Lots of stories about home fuel cells powered by natural gas, like this one [visteon.com]. No trucks, since most local codes would not allow you to store two months worth of liquified natural gas in your garage or backyard. Heavy dependence on the natural gas delivery pipes. Some potential problems (all amenable to solution, I believe, just be prepared to spend money):

• In part because so many electric generating companies have decided to use natural gas for their newest plants, there are forecasts of shortages and substantial price increases starting this winter. Such shortages would be worse if there was a sudden large demand for gas to generate household electricity in areas currently using coal or petroleum.
• Overseas transport of gas is much more difficult than petroleum. IIRC, Saudi Arabia produces enormous amounts of gas as a byproduct of their oil wells. Shipping it is so complex and expensive that they simply burn it off at the wells rather than trying to sell it.
• Long-haul gas pipelines are subject to spectacular local failures. Recently saw one in action -- an 18" pipe ruptured and the gas ignited. Flames shooting several hundred feet into the sky. Impressive!
• I do not believe that the national gas pipeline infrastructure has the same degree of interconnection that the power distribution grid has. This might be good -- no cascading failures. This might be bad -- lose one pipeline and large areas run out of gas/power as soon as local storage facilities are exhausted.

Re:The problem with power distribution

[LostCluster]

The power industry would love for everybody to have power natural power generation systems like windmills or solar panels in their yard, and then connect to the grid to either buy more or sell back when the backyard system can power the house with room to spare. It'd be a win-win for everybody, because it's a known fact that the less wire distance you have to move power, the less you end up losing in the transfer process.

The problem is, there's an annoying group of "environmentalists" who call windmills eyesores... and that's why this idea isn't taking off.

The problem is, hardly anybody's willing to go for it.

Re:The Y2K bug... A flashback

[thebigmacd]

I think the parent was more concerned that all that money was spent and there WAS a problem...last thursday! The Y2K fix wasn't just to fix date handling, it was to make sure that if there WERE any date-related outtages, it wouldn't shut the entire grid down. And BOOM here we are, an outtage and the entire NE grid goes down.

Re:Control is the key...

[Edmund Blackadder]

The power companies know very well how much power will be used. They have the necessary statistical data. When all the power use of tens of millions of people is added up, it fits very well into statistical predictions. So nobody is going to need to fill out any forms.

Of course something unusual could happen, and the power companies have to be able to deal with that as well.

But nothing unusual (as far as consumption)happened thursday afternoon. They just did not have their shit together.

So it is completely reasonable to demand that the system be improved. I know it is all very complicated stuff, but i also know that problems like this can and should be prevented.

Re:rock the vote

[baseinfinity]

Sorry, I just don't see how terrorists would be motivated to try to cause blackouts.

Sure, they cause inconvenience and economic losses: but these are people who want to mess with our heads. The lights go out, people walk home, a little miffed, life goes on. A major building blows up and people are quite a bit more afraid of the world.

They managed to get the grid up mostly over the weekend. I'd say for something as complex as the power grid over 5 states that's pretty damn good. It'd cost billions upon billions to retrofit our power grid to something modern using some accelerated schedule, and I don't see how you expect our president to be jumping to spend any more money just because we had a so far isolated incident.

There's already plans in place to upgrade our systems over time, you can easily read about them in these articles. Bush may be a bad president but I don't see how any president should be so swaded policy wise by every incident that happens to a very large and complex country.

Re:Environmentalists Are Dangerous.

[csbruce]

Forget the crappy low-flow toilet that makes dimwits feel oh-so-good but takes 6 flushes to get rid of the Dark Matter. Use a regular toilet which takes 1 flush.

Why not have dual-flush toilets with a #1 handle and a #2 handle. Surely we can muster the technology. Most people don't actually want to waste water.

Re:Environmentalists Are Dangerous.

[joib]

I have such a thing in my appartment. And you know what? I never use the low-flush button. Why? Because if I do, the toilet fouls up so fast that you have to clean it twice a week. Ugh. Another factor being that I don't pay a separate water bill, and where I live the water supply is abundant. The water company even has to run water through the mains pipes sometimes to avoid impuritities sticking to the walls of the pipes.

Anyway, as the previous poster said, a more useful system than these low-flush toilets would be to utilize gray water.

Re:rock the vote

[Anonymous Coward]

How about the fact that this "isolated incident" starting in Ohio will cost billions to businesses in those 5 states and the most heavily populated province in Canada.

Both Canada and the USA need to work cooperatively to rectify this situation, and make sure it doesn't happen again. As a Canadian, if I see my tax dollars being spent on trying to fix this, and there is no real effort by your president to try and do the same, I will be seriously ticked off.

Re:Wind power MAY introduce problems

[maxume]

Your argument has some causation issues. Wind is not some mystical energy force that 'equilibriates'(which btw, isn't a spelling problem, there just aren't any accepted verb forms of equilibrium, try balances) the earth. The wind blows because there is uneven heat absorption across the planet. As different areas absorb different amounts of heat(from the sun), they go into an energy imbalance. For whatever reason(entropy), energy tends to dissapate itself as much as possible, to seek a less energetic state. Wind power works by taking advantage of the flow of energy caused by the uneven absorption, and extracting some of the energy.

Basically, the wind towers, to the wind, end up looking pretty much like resistor does to a battery. So yes, it is likely that local weather in Canada and Mexico would be affected, but not because of a power loss(the harnessed KE), but because of a reduction in the power flow. Numbers are unfortunately hard to come by right now, but it pays to remember that weather is often refered to as a force of nature. Read up a little on the amount of energy released during a hurricane. It's ridiculous.

The effect you are concerned about, the increase of local temperature extremes, could very well happen. I don't have the information to make an educated guess, but my gut tells me that it would be on the order of 1 deg. C. So maybe 2 or 3 deg. C at the most extreme. This would indeed be a problem, but it is not at all clear if the difference would show up in a climatic sort of way, or if it would be more of a one hotter week in July kind of way. On the other hand, it might be so mild an effect that it is imperceptable in the noise of all the other horrible things being done to the weather.

Off the top of my head, here are some things that are probably influencing the weather: concrete and asphalt, airliners(they are special pollution), pollution, reduction in green areas. Ok so a short list, but no research. All the damn concrete and asphalt has a huge influence on intra-day temperatures, as during the night they release heat that they stored during the day, keeping temperatures noticably warmer in cities. Airplanes release lots of nasty things directly into the upper atmosphere, which does things to the jetstream; it's hard to say what, there isn't much baseline information to compare to. Pollution is clearly a bad thing. Lastly, I like trees.

Jet Stream?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can feel the 'north wind' around the changing of the seasons (up here in North America at least) when cold air rushes north or south, depending on whether Canada is heating up or cooling down. Trade winds flow across the oceans, the Jet Stream equilibriates around the globe over land and sea. Vast arrays of wind turbines will extract large amounts of kinetic energy from these streams

I don't see how a wind turbine (or large collections of wind turbines) could interfere with the jet stream any more than a tree (or large collections of trees) would. It seems to me that deforestation and replanting will have at least as much impact on the wind as wind turbines.

Especially seeing as how the bulk of the jet stream is several miles above sea level anyway, and even the largest turbines are only a few hundred feet tall. Hey, so are giant sequoias.