Tech Allows Stable Integration of Wind In the Power Grid 235
diegocgteleline.es writes "One of the most frequently raised arguments against renewable power sources is that they can only supply a low percentage of the total power because their unpredictability can destabilize the grid. Spain seems to have disproved this assertion. In the last three days, the wind power generation records with respect to the total demand were beaten twice (in special conditions: a very windy weekend, at night): 45% on November 5 and almost 54% last night (Google translation; Spanish original). There was no instability. These milestones were accomplished with the help of a control center that processes meteorologic data from the whole country and predicts, with high certainty, the wind and solar power that will be generated, allowing a stable integration of all the renewable power. You can see a graphic of the record here."
Re:Does not change the basics. (Score:4, Interesting)
But you also need to transmit _a_ _lot_ of power over hundreds of kilometers. Which is not cheap and easy.
That's why local power storage might be the best way to solve this problem.
Re:Does not change the basics. (Score:4, Interesting)
One trend I've seen in recent studies is toward distributed, decentralised power generation. We're not talking about one technology taking over, but rather a larger number of smaller generators in a variety of formats coming together to augment the primary generators we have. This is already happening to some degree, and expectations are that it will grow.
So as your city grows - instead of (say) three coal generators, you might add one new coal generator plus a few hundred wind turbines, a few thousand gas fired microCHP generators (similar to the Whispergen Stirling units being deployed in Spain) and quite a few thousand private photovoltaic arrays (in Perth for example, the applications for PV installations are running at better than 3 thousand per month at the moment).
The combination of all these will tend to even out the supply across the grid, but there still needs to be fairly careful power regulation at each end point.
Re:Manzanas and Oranges (Score:4, Interesting)
In the short term ( 1 minute), modern wind turbines have a stabilizing effect on the grid. There's quite a bit of inertial energy stored in the wings when the turbines are running which helps handling unexpected faults (e.g. a power line failure). Also, the electronics can supply as much reactive effect as the peak effect of the wind turbines even when the turbines are completely stopped.
Anyway, in the medium term many countries will have to move towards HVDC lines to help the grid. A completely AC synchronized grid like what is common today is too vulnerable to faults spreading, because each power line can only switch on and off. With HVDC you can say "transport 500MW" and it will transport that amount, and if the consumer end tries to sink 1GW, the line will just keep providing 500MW. With AC the line will be forced to provide 1GW or shut down entirely. To make an AC grid work you need a strong central authority who can tell everyone how much to produce and when, and this is incompatible with both a free market for electricity and a large amount of power producers.
hydrogen as capacitor for wind/solar (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Does not change the basics. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Stupid technology (Score:3, Interesting)
I hope I'm not the only one who thinks giant windmill farms are visually interesting and slightly artistic
Re:Manzanas and Oranges (Score:1, Interesting)
You simply cannot throw out comparisons like Spain vs. U.S. The U.S. power grid is the most complicated controls system in the history of mankind.
Also, U.S. power usage, grid size, and therefore complexity dwarfs that of Spain. Just as Manzanas and Oranges implies, it's a totally inadequate comparison. So what country can we compared with? Therein lies the problem. NO OTHER COUNTRY experiences half of the issues that the U.S. does. China may come closest, and they chose to solve the problem with large quatities of cheap generation (coal plants). Ever been to a major chinese city? That's not the solution.
On the other hand, even as much as 20% of U.S. generation as "green energy" is also not the solution. Everyone's power bill would double. Unfortunately, the government has mandated something close to this. So expect your power bill to double (at least) if the letter of the law is followed.
The answer (in most major usage capitalist countries) is to let the market determine the power mixture. All well managed power companies have a diverse selection of power supply fuels, so as not to make the company vulnerable to drastic market shifts in supply and demand. Gas, Nuclear, Coal, and some "green power" and some oil. Power companies do not like public outcries, and are not the evil greedy poluters that legislators often make them out to be. Millions of incredibly intelligent men and women over 120 years have made the power grid what it is today.
And if you live in the U.S., I don't know where you live, but I know that you have power at least 95% of the time. You also take that for granted.
That being said, way to go Spain. The second biggest problem with wind power is (more or less) solved. Now about the incredibly high prices....
Re:Pump water up a hill? (Score:3, Interesting)
Recently scientists and planners have run the numbers again on this idea. One little change they made is that the system will now pump water out of the reservoir, generating power when it flows back in, so that a serious break in the encircling dyke does not flood the lands beyond (have to keep the eeevil terrorists in mind, you know?)
There is a solution (Score:5, Interesting)
As Danish Oil and Natural Gas (DONG) utilities clearly figured out - put a REALLY big (distributed) battery [betterplace.com] on the grid to soak up the power when it's available and re-feed it into the grid when it's scarce. Not only can they produce more of the baseline power generation from renewable sources, they don't have to PAY the Germans to TAKE their excess power at night when they can't consume it. They can store it instead, use it at peak hour when kilowatt price is insane and drastically flatten the curve. Problem. Solution.
As an OT side-benefit, we get electric cars wrapped around said batteries. For what we already got used to paying for car's fuel, there's enough margin in the operator's plan to subsidize new cars for consumers (think free iPhone on a three-year-plan), we'll get a parallel 1-minute-battery-swap-station infrastructure to petrol stations to enable real (non-golfcart) electric cars to go as far as the stations reach (range limitation is station reach, not battery capacity/petrol tank) without hour-long-charges along the way, remove an entire country's addiction to oil, fix the environment by running every single car in the fleet off renewable, and actually allow everyone in town to plug their car in at 8AM without having the lights in office buildings go down (The 'Everyone owns a Chevy Volt' scenario), while not having to spend tens to hundreds of billions on new power plants to cater to the spike. (But hey, that's just a side benefit ;))
Re:Good, but by no means a complete solution (Score:4, Interesting)
I assume Spain simply builds up as much pumped-storage hydro as needed. They seem to have [wikipedia.org] around as much pumped-storage as they have (wind capacity * load factor).
Anyway, I doubt many countries will face the problem of having too much wind power in the near future. Denmark currently has around 20% wind and sells off any excess to Norway, which in turn has huge amounts of hydro. Note that there is currently no other country that has more than the 15% figure quoted by GP. The US has room for building out 10 x the current capacity without worrying about storage.
Re:Stupid technology (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Does not change the basics. (Score:3, Interesting)
But you also need to transmit _a_ _lot_ of power over hundreds of kilometers. Which is not cheap and easy.
Luckily, because of NIMBY, we have decades of experience doing it. No one "wants" the coal plant or nuke in their backyard, either. Actually I think it would be way cool to have a nuke plant in my backyard, but scared idiots freak out.
Re:Stupid technology (Score:2, Interesting)
Consider this. Harnessing renewable energy is getting cheaper and cheaper as technology matures. With coal, you have to pay for the fuel. With renewables, you do not.
Any questions?
Yes, does any solar panel or wind turbine exist that, if installed on a normal house (ie. at at least 40 degrees north) has an EROI > 0 ? Actually I live at 60 degrees, and my calculations tell me that even with the tax breaks solar panels are still net-negative money generators, and seriously net-negative power generators. I'm talking about the standard stuff (not following the sun).
Since I believe a power engineer told me that the absolute minimum EROI (energy wise) for a power generator to be useful is 10 on a yearly basis (meaning it's got to create 10 times more power than it costs to build/install it in the first year of operation), and renewable energy is at, well, -1.2 or so at 20 years perfect operation (at least standard solar panels are). Meaning it actually costs about double the amount of oil to power a house using solar panels than it would cost to just power it directly on oil. Actually solar panels are defeated by that oldest of joke of a power generator : we have more efficient research fusion generators than solar panels (EROI 0.0 average, 1.01 peak performance vs -1.0).
And this is being generous : those panels are not exactly produced locally, and I don't even count transporting, connecting, installing and servicing them, none of which are free.
By my calculations, btw, solar panel will never be able to deliver enough power to heat a normal house, even if the entire lot were covered in solar panels. Meaning a 100% efficient panel that was dropped by God himself from heaven (ie. free) would not be able to heat a normal house. What, exactly, is your suggestion we do to heat about 20-story appartment buildings ? Please don't say "isolate them well", please keep into account that existing buildings need to be heated too.
Right now we don't use any significant amount of either solar irradiation or wind. I wonder, if we were to use, say 1% of solar power, that would obviously mean the biosphere would not be able to use that same energy. What will be the ramifications of stealing energy from nature ? If we do what needs to be done to power america with solar power, covering 2 "average" states entirely in solar panels, can anything grow in those 2 states ? Or will that be 4% of the united states that contains less life than the surface of the moon ?
Right now we're using so very, very little it obviously doesn't matter. The same goes for wind. Right now we barely use wind power at all, but a lot of natural processes (e.g. moisture collection in dry climates, just to name something) depend on wind. Obviously they will fail to work if we use a significant percentage of wind power in an area. What will be the environmental impact ?
Yes I have doubts about renewable power, and it's supposed "zero" environmental impact. But you could answer these questions in a reasonable manner (something that never seems to be done in any of the publications I read) ... perhaps it would help.
Re:Does not change the basics. (Score:3, Interesting)
And why do you think this is happening? Would it be that smaller generators are somehow more efficient than large, high-capacity generating plants? Or do you think that it has been impossible to get a permit to build a large high-capacity generating plant for the last 30 years or so?
I don't think per-kilowatt cost is necessarily the prime driver. The real gain is in the flexibility that comes from decentralisation of supply. A large scale generator may take 36 months to install, which is cool if you have the mandate and the organisation and the plans. But a single home or business microCHP installation can happen in one or two days, and they're sourced from an assembly line. Volkswagen AG [german-info.com] and Whispergen (NZ) [whispergen.com] are two microCHP makers. They're both powered by natural gas, although the Whispergen is a Stirling design and more flexible in fuel source.
If you can manage growth incrementally, and serve your community needs with smaller, easier to acquire energy sources, it stands to reason that you'd be less inclined to either shortages or expensive oversupply. And in a growth scenario, it's a bit difficult to ask an existing community to pay not just for their own power capacity, but to underwrite the needs of future people too. Small is beautiful, even if it ain't cheap.
Re:Stupid technology (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Stupid technology (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Solar panels are pretty crap by any standard. Cheap thin film panels will come out (about the same time as Duke Nukem 3D), but until then they are only useful in special applications. You can heat hot water with solar panels. I'm not sure if you can heat a whole house. Are you talking about photovoltaic panels generating power to run electric heaters, or using sunlight to heat water (which plugs into the central heating)? Because the second option is much more efficient.
2. Wind generators don't sit "on your house". The performance of a wind generator scales with the square of their blade length (since their power goes up with the flux of the wind that they sweep). A tiny little house sized generator is a waste of time and money. The wind generators that you want to use have blades that are bigger than a 737.
Re:Stupid Way of Thinking (Score:3, Interesting)
I think you'll find that in the US, most of these social/political topics are a lot more polarised than they are elsewhere in the world.
I don't know why that is...