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."
Wind generally changes slowly enough that it doesn't cause massive instability providing you have sufficient backup. However, there are other problems.
Getting the percentage that high occasionally isn't amazing, especially during a time of low demand such as night. The hard part is generating an average of 50% wind overall (e.g. over a year).
Say the baseload demand is 20 GW, then you can have 20 GW of wind power installed without worrying about what to do if too much is produced. So you could even get nearly 100% wind power occasionally. The problem is for the rest of the time when demand is higher or it isn't windy. The capacity factor of wind is about 30%, and baseload is typically about 50% of average load, so that means on average you're only generating 15% of your total electricity by wind power.
Note that the bottom drops below the zero line every now and then. Just before and after that the net hydroelectric power output drops to zero. I figure that's pumped-storage hydroectric plants filling their storage. Spain has at least 3 gigawatt worth of such plants. It doesn't solve the entire problem at this time, but it will sure help raise your baseline-example of 20GW quite a bit.
In addition, conventional hydroelectric dams can save up water and release it when necessary.
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.
I think that is well known. The issue is how many different renewable sources need to be put in place to achieve one joule of energy consistently with no possible variation. What you have is an issue of no meaningful relation between the different renewable sources creating situations where many many different sources of energy could all be producing zero, and other situations where many sources will be producing more than enough. Unfortunately this sort of solution doesn't work because humans demand con
Its a FALSE argument to claim alternatives can not work because they can't provide constant power. There is a whole world of power storage solutions out there being completely ignored OR people are simply ignorant. It could be come an industry on some level or be a completely private industry where anybody with the tech could buy power and sell it back later for a profit.
We can leave the market to handle load balancing. Look at flywheel power storage, flow batteries, hydro power storage, or even fuel cells.
renewable power sources... can only supply a low percentage of the total power because their unpredictability can destabilize the grid.
As much as I'd like to see more renewable energy, this counter-example probably doesn't help. Spain has a somewhat modern and well maintained power grid. In this year's "Infrastructure Report Card", The American Society of Civil Engineers rated the USA's power grid "D+". (Unfortunately their website is down; here's google's cache [74.125.155.132]. Talk about failing infrastructure...)
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.
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.
That is wrong. If you attach more consumers to the line the line will break down (voltage and with voltage current will break down).
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.
Disclaimer: I'm a Spanish citizen, living in Spain.
First of all, I want to remark the great work of the REE company ("Red Eléctrica Española" stands for "Spanish Electric Power Network", the monopoly for electric power distribution), they not only do a great work routing and adapting the production to the user energy demand, but also provide a lot of useful information about power consumption, production/consumption balance, etc.
The dark side of the problem is that although there is a huge amount of "green energy" being generated in Spain (wind and solar), that is, paradoxically, a problem. The problem is because current "green electricity production" is above 20% of total energy production, which sounds great, yes, the problem comes from nuclear power being dismantled from past 20 years, so the electric bill goes up because of the more expensive production (the solar energy production is specially expensive, which has been subsidized ad nauseam). Now the country faces near 19% unemployment rates (almost twice the U.S. figures), paying a huge price for energy, with the country in the middle of its worse recession since the post-war era (40's).
Sooner or later everyone on earth is going to have to bite that same bullet. Unfortunately, virtually every society in the world has chosen to squander their energy resources on building convenient, cheaper, but generally and often highly energy inefficient infrastructure. Reconfiguring everything now that it is built is going to be difficult, expensive, and a kludge to boot. That's what we collectively get for being morons who often don't think beyond the next quarter let alone several generations ahead.
My understanding is that the destabilization talk isn't about overloading a circuit breaker on one day, it's about massive fluxuation in available power over the entire generation time.
Just think of this. You've now made something like 80% of your grid powered by wind. (They all have problems, but let's just look at wind.) You have a doldrum for a day or two, now you've gone for that time period with only 20% of your normal power, that's destabilizing. What if your windfarms are spead out over vast distances so they tend to have different local conditions. (Something like if you have them all over the USA.) In some ways that will help since no location is expected to be the same as the other, so there is an averaging effect going on. However, that averaging effect is limited by long distance power transmission issues. The grid isn't just a pull & dump system. It uses power to send power, and it needs to maintain what you could think of as electrical pressure, (V.W.A. formulas.) which is why you have all those transformers and sub-stations all over the place, they are one part of that system. So even in the distributed scenario, what if you get a situation like high-wind on the east coast, and calm conditions mid-continent, and dead west coast. Funny thing, the need for power didn't decrease anywhere, but only the east coast is generating enough for their area, some of the mid will be ok, others in brown-outs or black-outs, and the west coast would be mostly black-out conditions, except near the few remaining alternate power sources, assuming the grid demand didn't leach it out completely and blow the circuits. (The entire east coast USA was blacked out by a cascade grid failure, and it might happen again.) Of course having multiple sources of power helps offset this kind of issue. For instance, solar. But that would only help during the hours of light, and again, it needs to be within a reasonable distance of it's market/users.
All this stuff is why intelligent power managers advocate a number of different generation schemes distributed over the area with clustering (when possible) near high draw locations (like big cities). And no power manager can rationally turn a blind eye to those methods that run 24 hours on demand.
I agree that we need to expand our renewable resources type power generation, as well as move away from fossil fuels, but it's a tricky balancing act with huge penalties for dropping the ball, so don't trivialize it.
Regarding the grid.... Getting energy from there to here seems a problem. Isn't the problem with hydrogen fuel cells the fact that you have to have hydrogen in the first place (which takes energy?) I don't know the efficiencies lost via conversion (which would include the economics of transportation), but if solar or wind power was used to generate hydrogen, couldn't the hydrogen then be delivered to where it is needed, for use when wanted?
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;))
does that wind prediction system use? Including the manufacture and maintenance of the satellites? Take that value and subtract it from the total energy output.
Wind has a high Energy Return On Energy Invested (EROEI) but it's not as high as many people think. Similar to nuclear. Sure: X kilos of U generate gobs of power, but building, maintaining, decommissioning, and dismantling the plant and its waste is very energy intensive.
this weekend large portions of Spain suffered extended blackouts as a number of the electric company's network routers were overwhelmed by an unexpected surge of traffic. This was apparently the result of an article about Spain's wind-based electrical program being published on slashdot.org, and the ensuing traffic overload from attempts to access the power generation graphs on the public site...
Coal and oil are plentiful, cheap, and easy to use. Compare this to idiotic technologies like wind and solar that are hugely expensive, unreliable, and hurt the eyeline of the cities they are installed in. And people wonder why environmentalists are considered stupid.
Excuse me, but caring about our planet does not make somebody stupid. Caring only about your pocketbook, however, does make you a greedy asshole. And thinking that eveyone must have the same order of priorities as you does make you stupid.
I love the argument of "hurting the eyelines of the cities". Yeah, now that you can see the mountains right next to your city, instead of just hazy smog, you actually have something to complain about. Me? I think those wind turbines are sexy as hell and show progress in this day and age. Progress is power. Well done gapagos, well done.
One of the problems with environmentalism is common in any charged topic. You're all or nothing. In this case, your options are:
You don't believe that man-made global warming hasn't been adequately proven: so you're a greedy, goose stepping, capitalistic pig who doesn't care about the environment one bit.
or..
You believe that mankind should take responsibility for its actions on the environment: so pot smoking, brainless, mindless hippy that hates humanity.
Any people wonder why there's so much strife in today's world... Oh, and you can thank the media (sensationalism & controversy sales) and politicians (polarize to make them yours). Of which special interest groups are the bastard stepchild.
Coal and oil are plentiful, cheap, and easy to use. Compare this to idiotic technologies like wind and solar that are hugely expensive, unreliable, and hurt the eyeline of the cities they are installed in. And people wonder why environmentalists are considered stupid.
Excuse me, but caring about our planet does not make somebody stupid. Caring only about your pocketbook, however, does make you a greedy asshole. And thinking that eveyone must have the same order of priorities as you does make you stupid.
Also, most wind turbines aren't built in or even near cities, they're usually off-shore or on hilltops somewhere out in the countryside.
There is one experimental wind turbine in Sydney, which I could see from my University. I used to love staring out the window at it, I found the slow steady movement to be relaxing.
Coal and oil is not cheap. The problem is that the largest portion of the cost of coal and oil, the damage to the environment, is not paid for my the people profiting for coal and oil but by everyone. We need to charge the coal and oil industry a useage fee for using our environment as a dumping ground for their toxic poison.
"Excuse me, but caring about our planet does not make somebody stupid."
"Caring about our planet" doesn't make you smart, either. And there's ample evidence from history to show that people who substitute zealotry for serious thought usually end up causing more harm than good.
"Caring only about your pocketbook, however, does make you a greedy asshole."
The original poster made some fairly specific points, all of which are arguably true. Sure, the "eyeline" thing is pretty subjective, but the fact that a certa
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.
Coal and oil are plentiful, cheap, and easy to use.
Coal and oil are plentiful, but you know whats more plentiful? The solar radiation and wind, both are unlimited.
Coal and oil are cheap and easy to use because we have spent massive amount of money improving them over the last 100 years. Given enough research it is entirely possible that solar and wind will be as cheap as oil (coal would be tough to beat though). Solar power however will likely end up being easier to use, no fuel, no exhaust, and no moving parts.
... and hurt the eyeline of the cities they are installed in.
Ever heard of smog? I would much rather see a bunch of solar panels and windmills, than a giant brown haze of asthma attack and carcinogens.
And people wonder why environmentalists are considered stupid.
They are called stupid because what they are promoting is bad for business. Switching to these technologies is not efficient yet, but as this article proves they are getting closer. Big businesses and their propaganda machines (eg. Fox News) want to cast these technologies in negative light to avoid having to switch to them, which would cut into profit margins.
Oh and did I mention that these technologies could one day remove the USA's dependence on foreign oil, reduce medical problems, protect the environment, decentralize the electrical system, reduce power lost during transmission (local power generation), and be better suited to installation in 3rd world countries?
Or of course, we could just keep using the current system until our resources run out and then start looking for the solution.
Technically speaking, the most likely thing to happen in that scenario is for the direction of the currents to change. Wind is driven by differentials in pressure throughout the area. It's just about impossible to ever perfectly even the pressure across the entirety of the globe and keep it at a consistent pressure permanently.
At bare minimum you'll always have the ocean cooling and warming at a different rate from the land. Then there's the bits caused by ocean currents. In short, that's a really low pr
The thing you are missing is how tiny a fraction of the wind energy we are capable of removing. Wind energy is caused by the different temperatures in the world equalising in the easiest way possible (by moving the air between the regions). The temperature differences are caused by solar heating, which contributes around 500W per square metre (averaged over a 24-hour period). Wind contains a phenomenal amount of energy and a wind farm only removes a tiny bit of it.
"The thing about wind power that I don't really understand is what the long term effects of taking massive amounts of energy from the wind and pumping it into the power grid will have."
The wind occurs in the bottom ~5km of the atmosphere. The largest windmill is ~100 meters tall, covering the entire planets surface with windmills would have about the same effect on wind as covering it with large trees, ie: virtually nil.
People rarely appreciate just how much power the wind has, on the day of the Aussie bushfire disaster last Febuary, I was sitting at home sweltering in 47degC heat fed by a 100km hour wind coming off the desert, native bats and birds were literally falling out of trees dead from dehydration, my punny fan on a stand did nothing to aleviate the discomfort unless I got out of a cold shower and stood in front of it still dripping. Ironically these winds and the blast furnace conditions they bring are created by cold fronts moving in from the Antartic, when the front passed over Melbourne that day, the temprature dropped by 15deg in 15 minutes.
Now to put windmills cumulative effects on the wind into perspective think about running them in reverse and how many you would need to to drag that amount of cold air from Antartica to Australia.
RTFA. and read up some more on how wind works. No wind in place A = center of cyclone or center of anticyclone, meaning that a few hundred clicks in any direction there IS wind 100% garanteed. (unless the moon would magically disappear, the sun would magically disappear AND the earth would magically stop turning)
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.
Whatever happened once in Spain does not change the basic facts.
Sometimes the wind does not blow at all, so you need to keep 100% generating capacity that can be brought on line within 20 minutes.
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.
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.
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?
We can build all the smaller natural gas "peaker" plants we want, but it will not solve the problem of electric power demand exceeding existing generating capacity. We are rapidly approaching that point. Solar isn't going to help much, even if we paved all of Arizona, Nevada and Southeast California with silicon.
The biggest problem is that if someone got a permit and started building a 4,000 MW coal plant today, it wouldn't be finished for five years. A nuclear plant is more likely to take ten years to go online. So we better hope our base generating capacity - the kind we really need at 6:00 PM when folks have their air conditioners turned on and turn on the electric range to heat up dinner - will meet the need for the next five years until that plant gets online. Only problem is, there are no plants being built right now - maybe we will start soon, but so far nothing.
So we better hope there is a lot of excess capacity in the system so everything can keep growing, like the economy and jobs. Oh wait, there isn't much (if any) excess capacity today. I wonder what will happen?
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
As already said by others, you can reduce the risk by connecting large regions [slashdot.org]. The chance that it there is no wind in Spain, France and Germany at the same time is much lower than in a single country. And even if it takes a day to start up a coil plant, some basic weather forecasting will buy you enough time. And don't forget hydro-electric for fast on-demand power supply. I am not an expert, but it seems to me that you can keep accumulating water during the night when there is no need, and open the pipes
wind is a form of temporary energy storage. sun --> heat --> wind --> erosion. total input energy (sun) will stay the same. output simply changes a bit. (a tiny bit less energy will be converted into erosion).
idiot. If no energy is taken out of the wind: It would start to blow faster and faster. Furthermore, if it is not taken out by windmills, it will certainly be taken out by houses, trees, mountains.
You are so utterly off base here. The rotation of the earth is due ENTIRELY to the conservation of its momentum from the protoplanetary cloud it condensed from. As the nascent Earth coalesced, its radius decreased; conservation of momentum dictates that for a smaller radius, the mass must rotate at a higher velocity; think spinning on an office chair with your arms and legs splayed out, then bringing them in; you will being spinning faster. That is why the earth rotates. The only forces that are currently a
True, but those things don't need to be continually resupplied as coal plants do. The whole concept behind renewable energy sources is that extracting the energy can be done cleanly once you have the facilities in place. Well technically that's more of a pleasant side effect (we'll run out of coal long before we run out of sun), but regardless it kicks the crap out of coal.
The plans are much older than that, in the Netherlands I remember a plan from the 80's called the "Lievense Plan" which consisted of a huge water reservoir into which water was pumped, and then used to generate hydro power. The original plan was to fill the reservoir with any surplus power, wind as well as nuclear (which was looked upon favourably at the time), the idea being to keep less power plants running at capacity 24/7, instead of building more power plants to handle peak hours.
Good, but by no means a complete solution (Score:5, Informative)
Wind generally changes slowly enough that it doesn't cause massive instability providing you have sufficient backup. However, there are other problems.
Getting the percentage that high occasionally isn't amazing, especially during a time of low demand such as night. The hard part is generating an average of 50% wind overall (e.g. over a year).
Say the baseload demand is 20 GW, then you can have 20 GW of wind power installed without worrying about what to do if too much is produced. So you could even get nearly 100% wind power occasionally. The problem is for the rest of the time when demand is higher or it isn't windy. The capacity factor of wind is about 30%, and baseload is typically about 50% of average load, so that means on average you're only generating 15% of your total electricity by wind power.
Re:Good, but by no means a complete solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Well. Just look at the graph linked in the article.
https://demanda.ree.es/generacion_acumulada.html [demanda.ree.es]
Note that the bottom drops below the zero line every now and then. Just before and after that the net hydroelectric power output drops to zero. I figure that's pumped-storage hydroectric plants filling their storage. Spain has at least 3 gigawatt worth of such plants. It doesn't solve the entire problem at this time, but it will sure help raise your baseline-example of 20GW quite a bit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity [wikipedia.org]
Parent
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.
Parent
In before the whiners (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing is ever a complete solution, for anything.
But every single Joule helps.
Re: (Score:2)
I think that is well known. The issue is how many different renewable sources need to be put in place to achieve one joule of energy consistently with no possible variation. What you have is an issue of no meaningful relation between the different renewable sources creating situations where many many different sources of energy could all be producing zero, and other situations where many sources will be producing more than enough. Unfortunately this sort of solution doesn't work because humans demand con
You are missing a whole subject (Score:3, Insightful)
Its a FALSE argument to claim alternatives can not work because they can't provide constant power.
There is a whole world of power storage solutions out there being completely ignored OR people are simply ignorant. It could be come an industry on some level or be a completely private industry where anybody with the tech could buy power and sell it back later for a profit.
We can leave the market to handle load balancing. Look at flywheel power storage, flow batteries, hydro power storage, or even fuel cells.
low and high (Score:2)
45% and 54% for Spain. If you can upgrade the scale, you can bring those 2 numbers very close together.
Manzanas and Oranges (Score:5, Insightful)
renewable power sources ... can only supply a low percentage of the total power because their unpredictability can destabilize the grid.
As much as I'd like to see more renewable energy, this counter-example probably doesn't help. Spain has a somewhat modern and well maintained power grid. In this year's "Infrastructure Report Card", The American Society of Civil Engineers rated the USA's power grid "D+". (Unfortunately their website is down; here's google's cache [74.125.155.132]. Talk about failing infrastructure...)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.
That is wrong. If you attach more consumers to the line the line will break down (voltage and with voltage current will break down).
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.
As soon
There are two sides in that coin... (Score:5, Informative)
First of all, I want to remark the great work of the REE company ("Red Eléctrica Española" stands for "Spanish Electric Power Network", the monopoly for electric power distribution), they not only do a great work routing and adapting the production to the user energy demand, but also provide a lot of useful information about power consumption, production/consumption balance, etc.
The dark side of the problem is that although there is a huge amount of "green energy" being generated in Spain (wind and solar), that is, paradoxically, a problem. The problem is because current "green electricity production" is above 20% of total energy production, which sounds great, yes, the problem comes from nuclear power being dismantled from past 20 years, so the electric bill goes up because of the more expensive production (the solar energy production is specially expensive, which has been subsidized ad nauseam). Now the country faces near 19% unemployment rates (almost twice the U.S. figures), paying a huge price for energy, with the country in the middle of its worse recession since the post-war era (40's).
Re:There are two sides in that coin... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sooner or later everyone on earth is going to have to bite that same bullet. Unfortunately, virtually every society in the world has chosen to squander their energy resources on building convenient, cheaper, but generally and often highly energy inefficient infrastructure. Reconfiguring everything now that it is built is going to be difficult, expensive, and a kludge to boot. That's what we collectively get for being morons who often don't think beyond the next quarter let alone several generations ahead.
Parent
Re:There are two sides in that coin... (Score:4, Insightful)
How's that socialism working out for you?
About as well as capitalism is working out for us, apparently.
Parent
Sorry, Nothing proved with one 3-day weekend (Score:5, Informative)
Just think of this. You've now made something like 80% of your grid powered by wind. (They all have problems, but let's just look at wind.) You have a doldrum for a day or two, now you've gone for that time period with only 20% of your normal power, that's destabilizing.
What if your windfarms are spead out over vast distances so they tend to have different local conditions. (Something like if you have them all over the USA.) In some ways that will help since no location is expected to be the same as the other, so there is an averaging effect going on. However, that averaging effect is limited by long distance power transmission issues. The grid isn't just a pull & dump system. It uses power to send power, and it needs to maintain what you could think of as electrical pressure, (V.W.A. formulas.) which is why you have all those transformers and sub-stations all over the place, they are one part of that system. So even in the distributed scenario, what if you get a situation like high-wind on the east coast, and calm conditions mid-continent, and dead west coast. Funny thing, the need for power didn't decrease anywhere, but only the east coast is generating enough for their area, some of the mid will be ok, others in brown-outs or black-outs, and the west coast would be mostly black-out conditions, except near the few remaining alternate power sources, assuming the grid demand didn't leach it out completely and blow the circuits. (The entire east coast USA was blacked out by a cascade grid failure, and it might happen again.)
Of course having multiple sources of power helps offset this kind of issue. For instance, solar. But that would only help during the hours of light, and again, it needs to be within a reasonable distance of it's market/users.
All this stuff is why intelligent power managers advocate a number of different generation schemes distributed over the area with clustering (when possible) near high draw locations (like big cities). And no power manager can rationally turn a blind eye to those methods that run 24 hours on demand.
I agree that we need to expand our renewable resources type power generation, as well as move away from fossil fuels, but it's a tricky balancing act with huge penalties for dropping the ball, so don't trivialize it.
hydrogen as capacitor for wind/solar (Score:2, Interesting)
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 ;))
how much energy (Score:3, Insightful)
Wind has a high Energy Return On Energy Invested (EROEI) but it's not as high as many people think. Similar to nuclear. Sure: X kilos of U generate gobs of power, but building, maintaining, decommissioning, and dismantling the plant and its waste is very energy intensive.
RS
And in other news, (Score:3, Funny)
this weekend large portions of Spain suffered extended blackouts as a number of the electric company's network routers were overwhelmed by an unexpected surge of traffic. This was apparently the result of an article about Spain's wind-based electrical program being published on slashdot.org, and the ensuing traffic overload from attempts to access the power generation graphs on the public site...
Re:Stupid technology (Score:5, Insightful)
Coal and oil are plentiful, cheap, and easy to use. Compare this to idiotic technologies like wind and solar that are hugely expensive, unreliable, and hurt the eyeline of the cities they are installed in. And people wonder why environmentalists are considered stupid.
Excuse me, but caring about our planet does not make somebody stupid.
Caring only about your pocketbook, however, does make you a greedy asshole.
And thinking that eveyone must have the same order of priorities as you does make you stupid.
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Re:Stupid technology (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Stupid technology (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Stupid technology (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this comment points reveals a consistent flaw with Slashdot - the score from mod points stops at five. :/
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Stupid Way of Thinking (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't believe that man-made global warming hasn't been adequately proven: so you're a greedy, goose stepping, capitalistic pig who doesn't care about the environment one bit.
or..
You believe that mankind should take responsibility for its actions on the environment: so pot smoking, brainless, mindless hippy that hates humanity.
Any people wonder why there's so much strife in today's world... Oh, and you can thank the media (sensationalism & controversy sales) and politicians (polarize to make them yours). Of which special interest groups are the bastard stepchild.
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Re: (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...
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Coal and oil are plentiful, cheap, and easy to use. Compare this to idiotic technologies like wind and solar that are hugely expensive, unreliable, and hurt the eyeline of the cities they are installed in. And people wonder why environmentalists are considered stupid.
Excuse me, but caring about our planet does not make somebody stupid.
Caring only about your pocketbook, however, does make you a greedy asshole.
And thinking that eveyone must have the same order of priorities as you does make you stupid.
Also, most wind turbines aren't built in or even near cities, they're usually off-shore or on hilltops somewhere out in the countryside.
There is one experimental wind turbine in Sydney, which I could see from my University. I used to love staring out the window at it, I found the slow steady movement to be relaxing.
Not everyone thinks they 'ruin' a view.
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"Excuse me, but caring about our planet does not make somebody stupid."
"Caring about our planet" doesn't make you smart, either. And there's ample evidence from history to show that people who substitute zealotry for serious thought usually end up causing more harm than good.
"Caring only about your pocketbook, however, does make you a greedy asshole."
The original poster made some fairly specific points, all of which are arguably true. Sure, the "eyeline" thing is pretty subjective, but the fact that a certa
Re: (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 y
Re:Stupid technology (Score:5, Insightful)
Once you add in coal and oil subsidies and the negative externalities of their use, they are no longer quite so cheap.
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Re:Stupid technology (Score:5, Informative)
Coal and oil are plentiful, cheap, and easy to use.
Coal and oil are plentiful, but you know whats more plentiful? The solar radiation and wind, both are unlimited.
Coal and oil are cheap and easy to use because we have spent massive amount of money improving them over the last 100 years. Given enough research it is entirely possible that solar and wind will be as cheap as oil (coal would be tough to beat though). Solar power however will likely end up being easier to use, no fuel, no exhaust, and no moving parts.
... and hurt the eyeline of the cities they are installed in.
Ever heard of smog? I would much rather see a bunch of solar panels and windmills, than a giant brown haze of asthma attack and carcinogens.
And people wonder why environmentalists are considered stupid.
They are called stupid because what they are promoting is bad for business. Switching to these technologies is not efficient yet, but as this article proves they are getting closer. Big businesses and their propaganda machines (eg. Fox News) want to cast these technologies in negative light to avoid having to switch to them, which would cut into profit margins.
Oh and did I mention that these technologies could one day remove the USA's dependence on foreign oil, reduce medical problems, protect the environment, decentralize the electrical system, reduce power lost during transmission (local power generation), and be better suited to installation in 3rd world countries?
Or of course, we could just keep using the current system until our resources run out and then start looking for the solution.
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At bare minimum you'll always have the ocean cooling and warming at a different rate from the land. Then there's the bits caused by ocean currents. In short, that's a really low pr
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Re:Stupid technology (Score:4, Informative)
The wind occurs in the bottom ~5km of the atmosphere. The largest windmill is ~100 meters tall, covering the entire planets surface with windmills would have about the same effect on wind as covering it with large trees, ie: virtually nil.
People rarely appreciate just how much power the wind has, on the day of the Aussie bushfire disaster last Febuary, I was sitting at home sweltering in 47degC heat fed by a 100km hour wind coming off the desert, native bats and birds were literally falling out of trees dead from dehydration, my punny fan on a stand did nothing to aleviate the discomfort unless I got out of a cold shower and stood in front of it still dripping. Ironically these winds and the blast furnace conditions they bring are created by cold fronts moving in from the Antartic, when the front passed over Melbourne that day, the temprature dropped by 15deg in 15 minutes.
Now to put windmills cumulative effects on the wind into perspective think about running them in reverse and how many you would need to to drag that amount of cold air from Antartica to Australia.
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I hope I'm not the only one who thinks giant windmill farms are visually interesting and slightly artistic
Re:Does not change the basics. (Score:5, Informative)
Sometimes the wind does not blow at al
RTFA. and read up some more on how wind works. No wind in place A = center of cyclone or center of anticyclone, meaning that a few hundred clicks in any direction there IS wind 100% garanteed. (unless the moon would magically disappear, the sun would magically disappear AND the earth would magically stop turning)
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more info :
http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/(Gh)/guides/mtr/prs/lwprs/def.rxml [uiuc.edu]
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.
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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.
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Sometimes the wind does not blow at all, so you need to keep 100% generating capacity that can be brought on line within 20 minutes.
20 minutes? More like several days. That's what Spain just demonstrated.
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.
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Re:Does not change the basics. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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?
We can build all the smaller natural gas "peaker" plants we want, but it will not solve the problem of electric power demand exceeding existing generating capacity. We are rapidly approaching that point. Solar isn't going to help much, even if we paved all of Arizona, Nevada and Southeast California with silicon.
The biggest problem is that if someone got a permit and started building a 4,000 MW coal plant today, it wouldn't be finished for five years. A nuclear plant is more likely to take ten years to go online. So we better hope our base generating capacity - the kind we really need at 6:00 PM when folks have their air conditioners turned on and turn on the electric range to heat up dinner - will meet the need for the next five years until that plant gets online. Only problem is, there are no plants being built right now - maybe we will start soon, but so far nothing.
So we better hope there is a lot of excess capacity in the system so everything can keep growing, like the economy and jobs. Oh wait, there isn't much (if any) excess capacity today. I wonder what will happen?
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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
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wind is a form of temporary energy storage. sun --> heat --> wind --> erosion.
total input energy (sun) will stay the same. output simply changes a bit. (a tiny bit less energy will be converted into erosion).
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idiot. If no energy is taken out of the wind: It would start to blow faster and faster. Furthermore, if it is not taken out by windmills, it will certainly be taken out by houses, trees, mountains.
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True, but those things don't need to be continually resupplied as coal plants do. The whole concept behind renewable energy sources is that extracting the energy can be done cleanly once you have the facilities in place. Well technically that's more of a pleasant side effect (we'll run out of coal long before we run out of sun), but regardless it kicks the crap out of coal.
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Recently scientist
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So ... that software I wrote for E-on to let design windfarms is a figment of my imagination?