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Interconnecting Wind Farms To Smooth Power Production
Roland Piquepaille writes "Wind power is one of the world's fastest growing electric energy sources, but as wind is intermittent, a single wind farm cannot deliver a steady amount of energy. This is why scientists at Stanford University want to connect wind farms to develop a cheaper and more reliable power source. Interconnecting wind farms with a transmission grid should reduce the power swings caused by wind variability and provide a somewhat constant and reliable electric power (or 'baseload' power) provided by other power plants."
If I read the article right, this guy has no clue what he's talking about, or is completely misinformed. What does he think the national electrical grid does? The only thing that making an entirely separate distribution grid for wind power would achieve is to ensure that the power being delivered to a particular point was 100% wind-generated. As soon as it enters the common grid, though, it's mixed with "brown power" (fossil fuel generated, as opposed to "green power"). Unless municipalities want to run entirely from one source (no reliability to speak of), this is a useless and horribly expensive exercise.
Just to qualify, I have nearly a decade of experience in the energy industry, specifically electric. Right now I work for a wind power company.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
It's Roland the Plogger again, trying to drive traffic to his blog. It's not like he actually understands what he posts.
Here's the actual paper, Supplying Baseload Power and Reducing Transmission Requirements by Interconnecting Wind Farms. The authors have been crunching on wind speed data to try to figure out if a widespread enough set of wind farms would statistically be able to consistently produce power.
Their definition of "consistently produces power" is 79% to 92% uptime. This figure is based on the uptime for a typical single coal-fired generation unit. But they're using those numbers for a whole collection of widely distributed wind farms. That's not an appropriate comparison.
They have some moderately encouraging numbers for a set of 19 wind farms spread across a thousand kilometers, from New Mexico to Kansas. But look at Figure 3. 92% of the time, at least a quarter of average output is available. The output reliably available 99+% of the time is near zero.
What this paper actually demonstrates is that "baseload wind" isn't going to consistently provide power, even with a big grid. You need peaking plants or energy storage.
It's been mentioned a few times around these parts, British Columbia, that our primarily hydroelectric dam power generation system is a great match for unreliable power generated by wind (and solar). For the most part, hydro dams can literally be turned on and off (and many levels in between) quickly.
The same can not be said about nuclear. I'm not sure, but I think coal and other fossil fuel power plants are not efficient at dynamic adjustments either.
See also my point #5 below that addresses the original slashdot post about scaling/aggregating wind farm output (T. Boone Pickens).
Here is some more info:
1. Texas is the largest wind power producer in the world, now exceeding California and all other countries.
2. western Texas has the majority of Texas wind power, but there is some developing along the 1400 mile coast line as well
3. Texas is the leading state for power deregulation, including a crucial but little-known piece of deregulation that permits a power generating company to market and sell power directly to end users. Why is this important? Because wind power is both economically uncompetitive while being potentially perceived as a "premium product." Thus, risk-taking small and large wind power companies can try their hand at direct marketing to end users using premium pricing, a market exploratory process that the large, incumbent, and previously government-protected-monopoly utilities, have thus far in history proven uninterested in attempting. And it is working - Austin and Texas has the highest rate of voluntary adoption of "green power" (that is, premium-priced) in the nation, and growing.
4. Texas also, (regrettably - but favorably at least in the short term for wind power) still taxes its consumers to subsidize wind power contributed to the grid. Over time, with variable pricing and demand-shifting, wind power may be able to stand on its own. The immediate question is whether, absent voluntary consumer choice (which might make wind viable anyway), a government should tax its poorest energy users to redistribute to its corporations in this manner. Left for the reader to answer.
5. Entrepreneur T. Boone Pickens is one of the world's largest and most interesting wind power and infrastructure visionaries. For example, he is building the world's largest wind farm west of the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex as well as directing hundreds of thousands of acres of water rights into productive use in north Texas. The wind farm is notable because it anticipates the useful conclusion of the Stanford research - basic economies of scale to variable-producing wind farms. This is because Pickens's wind farm may be large enough to exhibit some of the characteristics of output-averaging that is the point of the paper. Also interesting to note is the fact that Pickens must build a brand new mega-transmission capability to get this energy to relevant markets.
6. Unfortunately, no state including Texas has deregulated enough to permit proper competition in transmission. Thus, Texas's transportation grid, while adequate, cannot itself become a creative contributor to ongoing electricity solutions but instead must be dragged forward by Pickens and other entrepreneurs, rather than being owned and quickly updated by them. It is the lesson of the Railroads all over again that were subsidized and owned by governments and ultimately bankrupted and beaten by the non-subsidized competitor (read your Thomas DiLorenzo American history). Further competitive problems and parallels between the corrupted (by state intervention and subsidy) railroads and the electricity grid are left to the reader.
Resources:
Counting vote won't take long / Two hold key to $2.5 billion water pipeline in Panhandle
- http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl?id=2007_4453835
Knowledge Problem
Commentary on Economics, Information and Human Action
- http://www.knowledgeproblem.com/archives/cat_electricity.html
The bird issue stems from a huge, primitive windfarm in Altamont Pass, California. Essentially, hundreds of small turbines built on steel truss towers form the only perches available (and lots of them) on the thin grassland; and thin grassland attracts plenty of mice. It was estimated that any given tower killed a raptor once every 5 years. Non-issue. Newer towers are much bigger(less blade edge per area), and are constructed as monolithic tubes which remove any perch space.
There was a concern with two series' of Appalachian ridgeline towers which were recording significant numbers of bat kills (around 1 a night per large turbine). The bats appeared on infrared to be specifically attracted to the moving propeller, particularly when it was extended to continue moving at full speed in low wind. What causes this is still under investigation, as well as potential ways to ward them off. This may have simply been because of a thriving local bat community, or merely the placement of the towers on heavily forested ridgeline, and a study done on the phenomena recommends that these be taken into account when siting towers.
Suffice it to say, though, that these are useless objections when faced with the alternative - wiping that forested Appalachian ridge clean off the face of the earth to get at the coal underneath, and dumping it into the valley on either side. This is happening now, and when you object to wind you support wind's alternatives.
People in Soviet Russia, however, appear to be afflicted with amusing juxtapositions of the aforementioned situation
greenwashing my ass:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/3182961.stm
"The 85 metre towers with 35m blades which will make up London's first major 'wind park' have also been approved by Havering and Barking and Dagenham councils.
They will provide 100% of the electricity requirements of the new assembly hall being built to produce diesel engines at the plant. "
and that was back in 2003. with electricity prices way higher, it must make even more sense now. Some people are so excitable about wanting to build nuclear power they will say anything to dismiss cheap, zero-emission and zero-waste energy systems that are proven and are much more socially acceptable than sticking a nuclear power station in the heart of a city.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
The short version is that those outages where engineered to drive up the price of energy.
The long version is they were able to do it because there was not enough transmission capacity to import the power to replace the spike in demand from the heat wave and the shortage of online generation capacity.
Enrron was fighting price caps. It was done by selecting an upcoming period of increased demand as a time to shut down several plants for maintenance knowing the transmission infrastructure couldn't carry the load. They were hoping to use the shortage to force their hand. They pushed higher prices to ensure increased generation capacity. It fell apart when the books were examined. Somehow they didn't see that one coming.
look for the movie 'Enron
That's the Hollywood version. They take some facts and then add scriptwriters to make a drams out of it. Often the facts are ignored to make a good drama even though the movie is based on a true story. The movie doesn't have time to educate the moviegoers into the VA limitations of transmission lines, the problems with high power factor loads such as air conditioning putting additional reactive power components on the line. (How many times was MegaVars mentioned?) I'll have to watch the movie just to see if they even mention the Volt-Ampers capacity of the line. I wonder if they simply mention Mega Watts and ignore Power Factor.
The delivery capacity is real. The GP was right. The parent missed some simple homework. Here is a couple items on the capacity issue.
http://www.parapundit.com/archives/001581.html
"The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the agency that oversees transmission, has been trying for years to prod power companies into forming new, multi-state regional grids with authority over planning and system reliability measures. But utilities in the Southeast and Northwest fear that a more wide-open system would allow their cheaper power to be siphoned away from their customers. They have made war on FERC's plans and some members of Congress are trying to block the commission's transmission initiative from going forward until 2005 or 2007."
http://tdworld.com/mag/power_california_bulks_provide/
"The Path 15 upgrade in California represents the first public-private partnership organized to improve a transmission system that has become seriously congested. Pointing out that Path 15 is not the only circuit that has suffered from congestion problems, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI; Palo Alto, California, U.S.), estimates that US$100 billion must be spent to upgrade the U.S. electricity grid."
"When the lights went out in Northern California in 2000-2001, a long-standing transmission bottleneck received national attention. A contributing factor to the crisis was a transmission constraint in Central California known as Path 15, where three 500-kV lines linking northern and southern California narrowed to two lines for 84 miles (135 km) through the Central Valley. The corridor's lack of transfer capacity hampered efforts to move available generation north from southern California and the desert southwest."
California may have enough Santa Anna winds to localy provide much wind power, but in the dog days of summer, the transmission system is not up to the task of importing sufficient power from out of state.
"By late 1998, load growth had become a significant factor for grid operators, who were prevented from moving power across the congested Path 15. The congestion hit hard in 2000 and 2001 when scarce generation forced the ISO to declare stage-three emergencies, indicating reserves were so low that rolling blackouts were imminent and resulting in several days of rotating outages of firm customer load. The emergencies extended into the winter with threats of outages continuing. Between Sept. 1, 1999, and Dec. 31, 2000, consumers spent an
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