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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."
I think the point is that these Stanford guys measured the wind at a bunch of places across the midwest and then figured out how much power could be generated by the aggregation of these places. Then you can use the this data to decide a national policy and to provision the long-distance capacity to get this to where to consumers are - the example they give is California. As for the the national power grid being used - I was under the impression that the US did not have a national power grid with enough capacity to move significant power around. Isn't that why there can be shortages in California while everyone else is fine?
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Nice point about management of power from dams. It got me thinking about power management in general. We can manage load in three ways: managing supply, storing power and managing demand.
Managing supply can be done by carefully choosing when to turn on and off various sources. As the parent mentioned, nuclear, coal and fuel oil are not well-suited for rapid adjustments to power to respond to demand variation and used for base load. I was going to tell you that gas-fired pants did not fall into this category, but Wikipedia tells me that there are two types of natural gas plants. The gas turbine facilities can be brought up to full power fairly quickly. The "combined cycle" plants are used for base load.
As other posters are mentioning, energy storage would be an ideal compliment to wind (or solar) power. Currently energy storage is in the form of "pump storage" where water up pumped up to a reservoir at higher elevation when there is excess supply. This is an especially nice way to store power from wind or solar system, since their power is quite variable and and inefficiency in the pump storage scheme would only be wasting sunlight or wind, not creating excess pollution.
Demand can also be shaped to more readily reflect supply by including a price signal. Many industrial and some residential customers pay different rates depending on time of use. For some energy-intensive industries (think aluminum smelting or hydrogen production through electrolysis) shifting their demand to off-peak times would have huge cost savings if there is a price differential. Perhaps some industrial customers would be interested in purchasing some of their power under a real-time pricing scheme, where they would decide how much power to purchase based on hourly pricing. There are also ways to manage residential demand as well. Customers with time of use pricing can save money by using a timer with their hot water heater so they are not paying to keep water hot when they are at work and the electric price is high or similarly plan their air conditioning load. There is also a scheme where the electric utility can remotely shut off hot water heaters during times of high demand via radio control, and customers are given incentives to participate. (see: http://www.eere.energy.gov/consumer/your_home/water_heating/index.cfm/mytopic=13110)
(Real-time pricing would, of course, might be impractical for many industries whose demand is inflexible (think health care) but could be useful for industries such as smelters. <rant> Hourly pricing for electrical suppliers without any price signal to consumers was part of the cause of the California energy meltdown. Ultimately the suppliers asked for a state bailout to cover the extreme prices the producers were charging because the producers had intentionally manipulated supply by manipulating supply, causing blackouts, halting subway systems and generally causing widespread disruption.</rant>)
The larger point is that we have some technologies available that will help us accommodate a greater degree of variability in our power sources, without having to toss out excess power or have shortages at times of high demand. We will always need base load power, but intelligent management of supply and demand can help smooth out the peaks and valleys of solar and wind power and customer demand.
-Jon