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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."
FP!
Steady As She Blows
Power electronics and exotic energy storage devices are making wind power steady enough to compete with conventional electricity sources
By Peter Fairley
In this season of discontent in the electricity business, only wind power seems to stand out as a global success story. While petroleum prices were convulsing in response to war and labor strife, and nuclear plants were stoking controversy in the Middle East and Asia, wind turbines were quietly becoming the fastest-growing energy source in the world. They now provide more than 31 000 MW of power, a total that has swelled by almost 30 percent in scarcely a year's time and that keeps more than 200 million tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere every year. Wind power's ascendance has been so stunning that advocates are now rallying around an idea that would have seemed preposterous just a couple of years ago: that the wind could supply 12 percent of the world's electrical demand by 2020.
Impressive as the gains have been, it isn't quite clear yet that the wind can blow a fat cock up the ass of the developed world's fossil-fuel dependence. One of the most important reasons is that clean, renewable wind power comes with a serious hitch: while conventional power plants yield a steady stream of electricity, wind turbines often ply turbulent gusts and therefore spit out an irregular stream of electricity that is tough for power grids to swallow.
Now, though, high-tech solutions are at hand. Systems based on advanced power-electronics and energy storage devices are massaging and managing power flows from wind turbines, enabling them to contribute mightily to electricity grids without putting those grids at risk. Not only are the technologies making wind power more palatable to grid operators, they are even making it possible for engineers to finally harness wind energy's tremendous potential in wind-swept, remote locales.
Perhaps nowhere is this potential so evident as in the state of Hawaii, whose isolated power grids could not otherwise risk taking full advantage of the archipelago's abundant, renewable resource. In fact, with its lush, endless trade winds and growing commitment to wind power, Hawaii's Big Island is emerging as a laboratory of the future of the technology. As wind power becomes a steadier and more reliable resource, it could help wean power producers all over the state from their dependence on costly imported oil.
But, for now, says Karl Stahlkopf, chief technology officer at Hawaii Electric Co., in Honolulu, even the existing wind farms on the Big Island--putting out just
10 MW, the equivalent of four state-of-the-art wind turbines--make grid controllers hop on days when the palm fronds fly.
The utility and its contractors plan to build what Stahlkopf calls an "electronic shock absorber" to buffer the island's power grids against the wind's worst behavior. It's a development that engineers elsewhere are following closely.
The reason is that the solutions to integrating modest levels of wind power on small, isolated grids today may foreshadow the installation of truly large-scale wind power in mainland networks five or 10 years from now. "What's happening in the Hawaiian Islands is a peek at the future," says Bob Zavadil, an expert on wind power at the Arlington, Va.-based power systems analysis firm Electrotek Concepts Inc. "They're on the leading edge." And that's true not only of the technology but also of the new legal and regulatory conventions between utilities and independent power producers that will be needed before wind energy can truly thrive.
Reactive Power 101
Back on the mainland, wind farms have grown to dozens of turbines and hundreds of megawatts--rivaling the size of conventional power plants. To pave the way for installations like those, engineers had to grapple with the tendency of wind turbines to introduce voltage instability into electrical grids. That tendency follows from the intermittent nature of wind-generated electricity,
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All the rice boys around here drag race. In fact, every month or so a bunch of them get busted on a straight chunk of road by the waterfront, about 3 blocks from my house.
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