too much wind power

[blazespinnaker]

Too much of a good thing: Growth in wind power makes life difficult for grid managers

http://www.oregonlive.com/business/i...ing_growt.html

Suddenly, almost two nuclear plants worth of extra power was sizzling down the lines -- the largest hourly spike in wind power the Northwest has ever experienced.

posting, cause i'm tired of the doom/gloom peak oil news.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: too much wind power

It's a business opportunity.
Someone needs to negotiate to be an on-request big load for the utility, using this unpredictable excess wind power to make something valuable that stores well in inventory. Producing metal or glass; electrolysis turning water into hydrogen and oxygen; things like that. That business might be able to get the electric power for free. I'm told that back in the 1950's electrical utilities would routinely telephone certain industrial customers with huge motors and request they turn on the big machines to manage grid load and frequency for the benefit of the utility, with the power given free as a quid pro quo.

[blazespinnaker]

Re: too much wind power

Yeah, exactly.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: too much wind power

Taking your positive outlook a step further, one of the most serious shortcomings of wind power might be a blessing in disguise.

The shortcoming is that wind turbine farms need to be in remote places generating power that is consumed in distant big cities. The transmission lines often don’t exist, and even when they do the line losses are huge.

So an optimist would work to put industry right by the wind farm, bringing jobs to rural areas and industry back to the US. I presume rural Kansas, Iowa and Montana would like this. Map of windpower potential looks like this:

http://www.windpoweringamerica.gov/wind_maps.asp

us_windmap80m_561w.jpg

[GRG55]

Re: too much wind power

Too much of a good thing: Growth in wind power makes life difficult for grid managers

http://www.oregonlive.com/business/i...ing_growt.html



posting, cause i'm tired of the doom/gloom peak oil news.

The flip side of "too much of a good thing" is those times when there isn't enough of a good thing...when the back-up power systems have to be run to meet the power demand when the wind refuses to blow.

As for the grid, I am quite certain that over time its capacity to handle the fluctuations from wind power sources will steadily improve. In the past Germany has had problems with iits national grid being knocked out completely by wind power, because the wind farms are concentrated in the north of the country whereas the power consumption is more widely distributed. They have made major changes to the control systems and grid network to reduce these problems in recent years.

It's a business opportunity.
Someone needs to negotiate to be an on-request big load for the utility, using this unpredictable excess wind power to make something valuable that stores well in inventory. Producing metal or glass; electrolysis turning water into hydrogen and oxygen; things like that. That business might be able to get the electric power for free. I'm told that back in the 1950's electrical utilities would routinely telephone certain industrial customers with huge motors and request they turn on the big machines to manage grid load and frequency for the benefit of the utility, with the power given free as a quid pro quo.

The best idea I have heard about, even though it has limited application, is to use the excess wind power to lift [pump] water up behind hydro dams and store the excess energy for future retrieval that way. That might work in the hill country of the West, but not much use on the Great Plains unfortunately. The Bonneville Power Authority should undertake a study to use excess wind power to temporarily reverse the flow of the Columbia River during storm periods [just kidding].

Taking your positive outlook a step further, one of the most serious shortcomings of wind power might be a blessing in disguise.

The shortcoming is that wind turbine farms need to be in remote places generating power that is consumed in distant big cities. The transmission lines often don’t exist, and even when they do the line losses are huge.

So an optimist would work to put industry right by the wind farm, bringing jobs to rural areas and industry back to the US. I presume rural Kansas, Iowa and Montana would like this. Map of windpower potential looks like this:

http://www.windpoweringamerica.gov/wind_maps.asp

[ATTACH=CONFIG]3484[/ATTACH]

The problem with installing industry next to wind farms is that the power is not reliable. In almost every instance there has to be a back up power source for when the wind isn't sufficient to move the blades. How do you run your business otherwise? Shut your plant or factory and lay off all your employees on the calm days? At the moment the most flexible back up source seems to be single cycle natural gas turbines. But these are not very energy efficient, and of course burn a fossil fuel which negates one of the supposed benefits of wind turbines.

blazespinnaker is absolutely correct that the doom and gloom around peak [cheap] oil is overdone. There is NO shortage of energy in aggregate in this world. Just a growing shortage of certain forms upon which we are currently [but not necessarily always] dependent. The solution is going to be a gradual shift in the mix of energy that we consume - partly from price signals and partly from government policies, the latter which will no doubt obscure some of the former. I highly doubt that mankind is going to reduce the total amount of energy it consumes globally any time soon.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: too much wind power

The problem with installing industry next to wind farms is that the power is not reliable. In almost every instance there has to be a back up power source for when the wind isn't sufficient to move the blades. How do you run your business otherwise? Shut your plant and lay off all your employees on the calm days? .

Yup, that is the central business challenge. Don’t have fossil powered back up to run steady output. Build a business model that exploits energy which is cheap but both unsteady and unpredictable. The owner/entrepreneur that solves it deserves to get rich.

It seems solvable. When big power is available, run the energy intensive process creating chemicals or metals. In the down times, do lighter low power work to finish, package and distribute. If you think about it, a billet of aluminum is really a stable package of stored energy that leaks out slowly as the finished aluminum product wears and corrodes over years. A business that creates and sells stable packages of stored energy would fit the bill, making them and selling them on an unsteady basis; making hay when the sun shines, or more exactly making energy packets when the wind blows. Ship the energy out on a truck rather than a transmission line.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: too much wind power

The problem with installing industry next to wind farms is that the power is not reliable.

I would argue a fine point of semantics. The wind power is reliable over long time frames of months and years. It is unpredictable or unsteady on the time scale of hours and days. And it's not just semantics; over the course of a year you can rely upon getting your expected MWh and literally take that to the bank as dollars earned.

[gnk]

Re: too much wind power

Too much of a good thing: Growth in wind power makes life difficult for grid managers

http://www.oregonlive.com/business/i...ing_growt.html



posting, cause i'm tired of the doom/gloom peak oil news.

I think alt energy is great for buildings - commercial, homes, etc... when it comes to heating and cooling and cooking and lighting, etc... But we also have to understand oil's many other uses, as well as transportation.

I'll be impressed with windpower or any other alt energy when it can:

-commercially be used in transportation on a large scale
-converted to rubber for tires
-used in agri-chemicals, pharmaceuticals, paints, plastics, road asphalt, roof shingles, petrodollar recycling, synthetic fibers (polyester, etc), detergents, food additives, cosmetics, etc...

Other than that, Oil is still King... and the King isn't looking too good.

(Yes, I'm a doomer)

[Starving Steve]

Re: too much wind power

The San Luis Reservoir routinely pumps water UPHILL during the night and stores that water to be dropped downhill through a turbine during the day when demand for electricity in California is at a peak. Another way to use surplus electricity at night would be to de-salinate sea-water and pump that water uphill to where it is needed.

The eco-nuts like to talk about surplusses of electricity, but those surplusses are quite rare and occur only during periods of high winds, just in the right area for windmills. The sad truth is that solar energy and wind energy are very un-reliable. Anyone who thinks tidal energy is a good source of power need only look at the failure of the Sooke Basin to produce electric power in the quantity needed just here in the Victoria, BC area; so we have to buy power from Washington State to meet demand.

I am so damn tired of listening to the double-talk from the eco-bunch. They lie.

The only answer to reliable and plentiful electric-power is atomic energy, natural gas, hydro-electric power, and even coal. Wind is just window dressing, and solar is a complete joke, even worse than wind power. And those are the facts of life for those who are willing to grow-up and face the facts of life.

We are past peak cheap-oil. So, the alternatives are as outlined above, plus some more conservation. But sad to say, we are probably well past peak gains in energy through conservation measures. The facts may be ugly, but those are the facts.

Yes, one can live closer to work and in apartment towers. But that kind of solution means absolutely outrageous housing and land costs. Vancouver, BC is a case in point. San Francisco is another case in point. So that is the straight-talk, for those who are willing to grow-up and get real.

[we_are_toast]

Re: too much wind power

I would suggest that we might be able to use the excess electricity to bio-engineer organisms who might very well be willing to do production work at lower wages than their Chinese counterparts, thus bringing real production back to American soil. It might also lead to a torches and pitchforks bubble.

[c1ue]

Re: too much wind power

Nothing new in the article which hasn't already been noted in various wind energy threads in the 'Climate Change' section:

1) Unstable wind power generation profiles requiring near equal hydro, coal, natural gas, or nuclear backup
2) Transmission line capacity and efficiency issues
3) Massive subsidies creating entire new categories of stakeholders in power generation
4) Subsidies leading to price increases for consumers

[jimmygu3]

Re: too much wind power

Someone had suggested in another thread a while back that a nationwide fleet of plug-in electric cars could act as a giant capacitor in situations like these.

[blazespinnaker]

Re: too much wind power

Growing up and getting real is realizing we need to drastically cut down on consuming useless crap.

[Starving Steve]

Re: too much wind power

Yes, we do need to cut-down on needless consumption, but how does one cut-down on consumption when one is now driving a small four-cylinder car? How do you cut-down electric consumption when one is now using the bead lights? In other words, conservation has limits too. Investment in new lights and new cars has a diminishing return when measured in energy savings per new dollar invested.

How does one use public transportation when there is no public transportation available to use? How does one move closer to work when the cost of doing so is exorbitant due to housing and land costs? Or how does one move closer to work when there is no work to be had?

Ideally, everyone might have a smaller family so that the birth rate of the world might be reduced. The achievement of this noble goal takes time; it takes public education, and it takes general prosperity, too. Public awareness of the over-population issue in the world has to occur. In some cultures, a C-change in religious-teaching might have to occur in order to reduce birth and fertility rates.

So public education, general prosperity, a social safety-net, and a real and workable energy plan might be part of the solution to the Earth's over-population. Two things are certain: 1.) Wishful thinking by so-called, "environmentalists" may not be part of the solution to the world's population-growth problem; and 2.) reducing the standard of living of the world's people to poverty level is not a workable nor desireable solution, either..... And this is why I oppose Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and the green movement to-day, everywhere.

[c1ue]

Re: too much wind power

Someone had suggested in another thread a while back that a nationwide fleet of plug-in electric cars could act as a giant capacitor in situations like these.

Spoken like a lobbyist for the alternative energy industry.

15000 miles per year per vehicle is a lot, but this works out to 41 miles per day per car.

Given the average electric vehicle range there simply isn't a lot of leeway for 'storage'

http://gas2.org/2010/06/17/uk-electr...e-of-23-miles/

One of the biggest perceived drawbacks of electric cars is the limited range. We are, after all, rather spoiled these days by fuel efficient cars and hybrids that can go 400 miles or more on a single tank of gas. But most people don’t need to go more than a hundred miles a day, especially city dwellers. Hell, most people don’t drive more than 40 miles a day.

In fact, a recent study in the UK proves just that. Project CABLED is using a fleet of 25 Mitsubishi i-MiEVs to study the driving habits of city dwellers. Turns out most of these vehicles were used an average of just 23 miles a day.