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."
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]
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.
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Just need to turn some stuff off (Score:2)
There was a paper published a couple years ago by dutch researchers that proposed to give discounts for refrigerated warehouses. They would lower their thermostats a couple degrees, but would be given a signal to stop their refrigeration units when the load gets too high. The couple degrees would be enough of a buffer to last a few hours. They calculated it would be enough to handle wind up to 30% of the total power generation.
This kind of thing is already done, by the way, but on a limited scale. Large ind
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Not this conservation crap again. Simple mathematics shows that conservation is not a "solution" to our energy crisis. It's not even close.
Population increases exponentially, and power demands must therefore increase exponentially as well. If we add in quality-of-life improvements, power demand will increase even faster than population growth.
Now, on the other hand, all conservation can do is shave a constant factor off our current per-capita energy costs. It won't do anything for the asymptotic increases.
A
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I'll add a bit more. Since around the 1960s things that change no more rapidly that a large mining dragline scooping out another shovelful shouldn't cause instability. Also consider that entire large coal fired units drop out without warning at times but the lights stay on. Control systems can handle fairly large and sudden changes.
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Yes, pumped storage is good for rapid response to demand or supply variation. However, if you want it to allow a large fraction of electricity generated by wind, you need a lot of it, and it all adds to the cost.
In any case, I don't think that even Spain has a large enough fraction of wind power for this to be required - 11% according to wikipedia, below my original 15% estimate.
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Compressed air storage is only about 50% efficient. It's very hard to find a good use for the heat generated when you compress a gas. Even worse, natural gas is used to offset the cooling that occurs as the air expands when the power is drawn out, so there is still some reliance on fossil fuels. Nonetheless, it's still one of the best options where pumped storage is not practical.
There is good hope that better storage methods will be found. The US government just announced funding for liquid metal [mit.edu] batte
In before the whiners (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing is ever a complete solution, for anything.
But every single Joule helps.
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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
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Unfortunately this sort of solution doesn't work because humans demand consistent energy not just a total or average.
Luckily, many industrial uses do not necessarily require constant energy, and can tolerate "total" or "average over certain intervals" power contracts.
For "total" or "very long term average" power contracts, we have copper refineries, and electrorefining in general. "Lights out manufacturing" style numerically controlled machine tools can toggle their motors on and off more or less as power is available (but never interrupt the control computers power...). Desalinization plants simply fill water tanks wit
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.
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Also, the electronics can supply as much reactive effect as the peak effect of the wind turbines even when the turbines are completely stopped.
can you expand on this? Is it a synchronous machine inside a wind turbine? They can be used as a synchronous condenser to supply reactive power when the turbine is stopped?
What electronics can do this?
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can you expand on this? Is it a synchronous machine inside a wind turbine? They can be used as a synchronous condenser to supply reactive power when the turbine is stopped?
What electronics can do this?
It's typically induction or permanent magnet generator inside the wind power plant. As far as I know synchronous machines are not used because wind cannot rotate the blades at a constant speed. The power is supplied to grid with frequency is converter. Frequency converter can supply the grid with reactive power during the disturbances.
see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_voltage_ride_through
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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
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That is wrong. If you attach more consumers to the line the line will break down (voltage and with voltage current will break down).
With HVDC you have power electronics at each end. Those can limit the power drawn to whichever amount you want, to protect the producer end.
The rest of your article is about all the management an AC grid needs -- which is why it works better when supplemented with HVDC lines.
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Come on now. This delusion common in my fellow Americans, that we're still the best in the world at certain things, is preventing us from managing our problems and actually rejoining the rest of the civilized West. Boasting is no substitute for infrastructure building.
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your post about grid is very interesting and very true.
the problem in the USA is the management and maintenance of the power lines
right now, based on the little knowledge I have, it looks like
the power line sharing agreements between NJ and PA are the base line
model for the rest of the USA.
the agreement goes something like this. both states produce electricity for
there respective clients, both states help each other in keeping power lines
running at the best level possible, both states tell each other when t
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.
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Most of the subsidies have been cut (which is why the install rate of solar power stations has plummetted), and the money paid is not all a subsidy (to start with, the government doesn't pays it and the taxpayers money is not touched). In spain solar and wind power is 0 in the "power market", and the power distribution companies have to pay solar and wind energy at a prices the government has set. If there was a free market there wouldn't be any price set by the government, but the owners of solar and wind
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wait, "red" translates to "power network"?
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2) The low price you point is because it is subsidized, so in the end, paid by the taxpayers. Do you know the debt because of subsidizing the electricity? About 30 billion USD (19 euro billions [elpais.com]), for a country of 45 million people, that's 666.66 USD/citizen of debt, growing and paying interest year by year (!)
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Your per-capita debt seems pretty darn low - are you sure it is correct? These folk peg Spain at $26,799.72 per capita in 2007, number 21, well below the US ($40,678.76 per capita) France, Germany, Sweden and near the top, the UK at $171,942.20 per capita.
Or do you mean that of the $27,000 almost $700 is because of electrical subsidization? If so, with such a moderate overall debt, perhaps that is not such a bad economic policy?
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Whoops - forgot the dept link: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_deb_ext_percap-economy-debt-external-per-capita [nationmaster.com]
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Spain total per capita debt is 83.333 USD/person (2.5 trillion euro -2.5*10^12 euro, 3.75*10^12 USD-) is the private and public combined debt). Spain is one of the countries with most debt per capita (total debt it is not "world wide known" because of huge private debt, so it is somewhat masked).
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.
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But nice job of trying to pin it on capitalism. Next thing you'll be trying to tell us that Sici
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About as well as capitalism is working out for us, apparently.
That's too bad since it usually works pretty well. For example, in my country, the US, capitalism worked pretty well even during the bubble/burst cycle we had this decade. Maybe you are mistaking some non-capitalist phenomena like government regulation for capitalism? That seems to be a common error on Slashdot.
Socialism is a four-letter word? (Score:2)
We "all know" that socialism is evil, and soaring taxes are the death of our economy. Yet the United States economy was perhaps strongest in the 50s and 60s, and we haven't had tax rates that high ever since. Yes, you heard me right: tax rates were HIGHEST in the 1950's and 60's. They were higher in the 1980's than they are now.
In fact, if taxes were the indicator of prosperity, then actual prosperity is virtually a reverse graph of the tax rates! It's one of those baffling facts that get in the way of the
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We can thank our dear president for both the unemployment rate and the nuclear hate. Gotta love politics.
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)
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Pump water up a hill? (Score:2)
Ten years ago wasn't there talk about using renewable power to pump water up to higher ground and then release the water to generate electricity at a known rate with a known duration, etc. Turns unreliable power into highly reliable power with a little waste added into the process....
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Recently scientist
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what you are describing is known as pumped storage and it has been around for a long time but it isn't cheap and suffers from the same issue as regular dam based hydro (indeed it's usually done in combination with it) which is that there are relatively few sites that are both techincally good and politically acceptable.
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 ;))
whats their plan when the wind stops? (Score:2)
sure it won't be a common occurance that the wind slows down in multuple locations... but thats HOW disasters happen, all the unlikely scenarios line up and you get that perfect storm. and when your talking about the power grid it's an unacceptable risk.
One word: (Score:2, Funny)
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...
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stupid technology (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Stupid technology (Score:5, Funny)
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. :/
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.
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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---
Wind Power [feeddistiller.com] Feed @ Feed Distiller [feeddistiller.com]
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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
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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 i
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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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We should also work on getting pricing signals into the market place in regards to external costs such as pollution and CO2 emissions. Most economists seemt to think that pollution and carbon taxes are the most efficient ways of doing that, but of course politically, anything called a "tax" is a hard sell.
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Kinda like how spammers reap enormous profits in spite of the resources they waste for free.
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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The problems with renewable are not all lies, certainly the coal companies have an agenda but so do the hippies who routinely ignore the economic costs of building solar panels and wind turbines. Our best solution is a combination of Nuclear and renewable. Renewable can't provide the volume of electricity needed on it's own, it also uses allot more resources to produce solar panels and wind turbines than it does to build a nuclear power-plant (for the energy produced).
Renewable has along way to go before w
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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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RT another FA:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/03/wind_power_needs_dirty_pricey_gas_backup_report/ [theregister.co.uk]
(or download the full report - but that is payware).
Historical analysis shows regular five-day long calm periods across the whole of europe - ten day long calms every couple of decades. Oh, and typically in winter - so high demand time. That is across an area much more than "a few hundred clicks".
"Clean" peak load tech, like pumped storage hydro, simply doesn't have the capacity to cover that kind of gap.
If it's dirty and you don't use it (Score:2)
... then it's only hardly ever dirty. Especially if you only use it once a decade.
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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.
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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power generated locally is worth more too. wholesale prices generators get paid are 3-7 cents /kwh without fancy government contracts while power delivered to a customer's house is worth 20-30 cents/kwh. so while it is expensive to permit and build a big plant, transmission and distribution are also expensive.
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Ten years for a nuclear plant to go online seems high.
For example, check out the Westinghouse AP1000 [westinghousenuclear.com], they claim:
"The AP1000 design saves money and time with an accelerated construction time period of approximately 36 months, from the pouring of first concrete to the loading of fuel"
That's not bad. I imagine it would take at least a year or two to get funding and approval, but even then it would only take 5 or at most 6 years for a new plant to start producing power.
Once a company has approval and a line of
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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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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 in just a few minutes instance when there is urgent demand.
Not just that, you can use pumps to run the system backwards, turning the dam into one large rechargeable battery. This can definitely help to accommodate intermittent renewable sources such as solar and wind.
Supergrids can also help, but in many cases large regions are already connected and distribution over large distances is expensive. Demand management is another option, but we should be doing everything possible to remove coal from the generation side - and nuclear is currently the most viable alternat
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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.
In an local area, yes! But not over an area like USA or Kanada or Europe.
Germany also has a high percentage of wind power meanwhile approaching 30% of total production. High wind outuput is used to pump up water into the storage sees of water driven generators, general fluctuations in demand and production are equalized by water power plants anyway.
Gas turbines are only used fo
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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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Not if the earth begins to spin slower because we are taking energy out of wind.
Conservation of angular momentum is quite an important principle in physics, I don't think a few windmills will pose a threat to it.
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That fact that you even put it that way shows you don't understand what the laws of conservation say. Wind turbines by definition work by slowing down the wind.
Also, I agree, clearly a few windmills don't pose a thread. But:
Annual Energy use in the World is something like 20 Trillion kWH. We would have to cover 1/7 of ALL land in the world to get this.
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There's no mechanism for carrying angular momentum away from the earth that involves the wind. Air has a habit of staying on Earth, after all. Therefore, wind turbines cannot affect it.
The only thing that could would be tidal forces, which have nothing to do with the wind.
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I'm not disregarding energy at all, it's just not relevant to my point. Yes, you've taken energy out of *something* but not out of the earth's rotation. It would have been dissipated as heat eventually anyway - there's no law of conservation of kinetic energy.
Wind power slowing down the earth's rotation is not consistent with conservation of angular momentum. Unlike kinetic energy, angular momentum is always conserved in the absence of external forces (well, torques), which is why it's a much more useful qu
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Effect on Earth's rotation? Implausible. (Score:2)
Ahh, math time excuse!
The Earth's rotation already slows by 0.022 milliseconds every year from tidal friction [physlink.com]. A simple way to get a handle on the energies involved is estimating from the increase in the radius of the moon's orbit, about 3.84cm/year, which comprises the majority of tidal effects on Earth.
Throw that into the gravitational potential energy of the Earth/Moon system, and you end up with a net energy loss in the neighborhood of 7.59x10^18 joules/year-- about 241GW. (Wikipedia says 2.4TW, but I
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Solarpanels being black only changes the heat if they are replacing previously reflective things. Cities already generate strange weather patterns because of the difference in heating/cooling versus the surrounding area, and you could put solar panels on every roof top in my neighborhood and not change heat signatures because they are already black.
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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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
So ... that software I wrote for E-on to let design windfarms is a figment of my imagination?