Power Electronics Help to Control Electrical Grids

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

Comments

Control is the key...

[The Eye of the Behol]

Maybe what we need is more control over the power, we need better systems and routines to warn us before something goes wrong. Not after.

Management *is* key...

[neiffer]

The critical point here is that to have "exotic" devices, you have to be able to manage them to make the power grid meaningful stability. Often, the hip environmental crowd (okay, so I am often one of them), complains that there isn't enough use of alternative energy in the mainstream grid. However, if we dedicated a meaningful amount of the grid to energy extracted from yak dung, what happens if there are problems? The grid elsewhere has to make up the slack (often at a higher price and inefficient) or we have problems like last week. The more technology develops, the more we are likely to be able to use alternative energy...goo goo gah joob.

Re:Simple Tweakage

[csbruce]

We either need more power plants, to curb demand, or a fairly efficient way of storing excess power capacity in the winter to be used in the summer.

All you need is a means of storing off-peak supply for on-peak demand. I hear that in British Columbia, they pump water back up into hydro-electric reservoirs during the night. Maybe regular power plants can have big flywheels.

We can blame the environmental movement for there not being enough power plants.

Re:Simple Tweakage

[nhavar]

Bullshit, we can blame ourselves for overconsumption and the NIMBY's (Not In My BackYard) more than the environmentalists.

I hate that knee-jerk response to everything - "It's the environmentalists fault".

Even with all the technology that we've created to make lower power devices we just find a way to get more devices. I saw how they were working on LED's as a better, more efficient lightsource that can do task lighting for about 1 watt of power. I mention this at work and some jackass comes up behind me and says how cool it would be to be able to have a wall full of them and be able to change the color of his walls with his mood - POWER SAVINGS - what power savings?

It's a balancing act. First we have a grid that's just too old and extremely expensive to update. There's a mix of powerplants that are aging, there's poor planning, no incentive to change energy usage habbits, poor city design that promotes heat which in turn increases energy consumption due to airconditioners, extra showers, fans, and refridgerators. Then you have people who don't want a soot belching powerplant in their backyard, or off their favorite camping spot, nor do they want to pay extra for a more expensive cleaner burning plant, or pay extra tax dollars to have research into alternative plans like more efficient solar/wind/water/et al. Somewhere in there you have the environmentalists trying to conserve as much of nature as humanly possible before we end up having to chop down all the trees just to put up oxygen factories because we cut down too many of the fucking trees.

Noone wants to compromise their lifestyle to get to plan X, Y or Z.

My feeling is that we need a decentralized system where power is created in much smaller "nodes" and distributed from those points. Nodes could be created in house basements or in larger buildings and be connected to more evenly distribute power over shorter distances reducing the waste that happens when power has to be transmitted over miles and miles of cable to a destination. Additional efficiencies could be found as nodes throttle based on time of day and demand for their area. Grid failures would be reduced because nodes could throttle based on the failure of other nodes. We need more expensive but higher efficiency (and somewhat safer (no oil fires)) superconductor main lines. We need more incentive and more instructions on how we can save power and reduce use and what power saving products are good and can in turn save us money. We need much more diverse power sources Wind/Sun/Hydro/GeoThermal/FuelCell/Gas/Cleaner-Saf er Nuclear in much higher mix than we do today. We also need more cradle to cradle industries that take waste products and turn them into fuel for the next industry - reducing power consumption and limiting the need to dig more out of or cut more off of the earth.

I want giant catapillar like machines like TBM's that crawl through landfills chewing up trash and spitting out useful products. Sorting all the garbage into recycled materials and fermenting the rest as fuel to continue on in it's job or produce energy for nearby cities.

I want to see someone come up with a plan that doesn't attempt to single out ONE group of people as THE PROBLEM.