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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."
Can we find some way to harness the power of Roland's blogspam?
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
If only there were some kind of existing infrastructure to do this! A kind of grid that runs nationally and can be connected to by different power generation systems. Even better, what if you used the same grid to distribute power to those using it!
Think of the possibilities!
I think they'd better patent this.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Even then, we just pump the wind power into the grid and ask people on the tail-end to pay for the wind power. This is what Colorado does. The wind is added to the grid, and the extra cost gets dished out to people who pay for the wind generated energy. In the end it is the same result. Although, a year or so back the wind power dropped below the "brown power" and the program was pretty much capped at that point.
You don't need to have any experience to understand the power grid at the level of pump power in, and other generator will smooth out the power generation. We couldn't convert the entire grid to wind, or to solar, but mix those in with a good amount of baseline power (I'd recommend nuclear) and you have a green energy portfolio without crashing everything.
Yeah, this is the most worthless article to make slashdot for nearly a day.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Wow a Beowulf cluster!
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.
This is semi related, but recently on a few trips to Orange County / John Wayne airport from Dallas, we flew over what must have been 500 miles of wind farms in west texas (maybe new mexico?)
Does anyone have any more info? It stretched all the way as far as I could see from the airplane, and we flew for about 45 minutes before they stopped... it's insane.
"The need to build the internet comes from something inside us, something programmed... something we can't resist."
Is there some way I can filter out the articles submitted by roland? I never want to see another one. If that is not possible can I filter Zonk?
Transporting electricity over long distances is expensive. There are better solutions. Deep-freeze warehouses can drop their temperature when there is a lot of wind and then turn off the coolers when there isn't. In Esbjerg (DK) they have both windmills and distributed central heating (small power plant uses exhaust to heat houses). When there is a lot of wind, people turn on their central heating and the power plant has to generate a lot of electricity to be able to supply all those houses with exhaust heat. With the windmills running full power, the price of electricity drops to zero. Now you can transport all that power to Poland, or you can tell some of those Esbjerg houses to switch to electric heating. What do you think is cheapest?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
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.
"Alt energy is such a scam"
really? so all those UK companies that stuck wind turbines in their car parks to power their factories and offices did so as a joke? or is it actually economically viable to do so? I'd guess the latter, as companies with the money to build big turbines normally don't throw money away.
The payback time (at least in the UK) on wind power is pretty long, but still sensible if you are thinking long term. And the payback time on solar AFAIK is way way better. I'd rather stick a solar heating system on the roof and forget about it, than have new nuclear build, and the thought of owning and controlling at least part of my own energy usage appeals to me in a way that huge government-backed but privately profited-from nuclear power does not.
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the guy is clueless.
the biggest factor in matching wind power to the grid is not interconnecting them, the grid does that just fine, but stabilizing power output, and there are some pretty impressive solutions out there involving superconductors. Another problem is that wind power is traditionally generated best where there are by pure coincidence *no* transmission lines at all.
To offset demand you simply need overcapacity, interconnections are obvious, if the power is not brought to the grid you might as well not generate it in the first place.
If anything stabilizing the power using superconductors would be worth an article (or two) because it is one of the few current applications of superconductors in 'normal engineering' that I'm aware of.
I've seen one of these units up close (as close as the fence would let me get), it is packaged in a 40' container and has a bunch of very impressive wiring coming out of it. This was in western canada near the ridge.
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well, if they solely (can) use that wind turbine, you would have a point.
they'll make a profit because they have free power when there is wind (and can maybe even sell some of it back), and when there is no power, they can fall back on the powergrid.
i don't see anything in your post that dismisses the AC's post, nor the original paper, that apparantly even with very widespread windfarms, they're still not anywhere near reliable enough, and will still need something to fill in during off moments...
but i wonder why the fixation of having to put wind energy onto the powergrid? i don't see any reason to make it less reliable by putting such intermittend sources on it. we'll sometime run out of fossil fuels, so we'll probably have to switch to hydrogen fueled cars. now that's where windmills can shine. put at every "gas"station a windmill, have it make hydrogen whenever there is some wind (build some reserves when there is wind, use them when there isn't), and you've got a self providing gasstation that only needs a steady supply of water(shouldn't be hard).
There are two incorrect assumptions in this discussion: a) that we have to make generation fit usage, not the reverse, and b) that we don't know what the wind is going to be doing in a few hours time.
a) Many industries could use power when available, not on demand. Desalination is a great example. The problem is that energy delivery and markets are not structured to work this way. Yet.
b) With short-term prediction of hours to days, you can master the variability by scheduling conventional generation around the wind. The concept of a baseload is not helpful: just plot the wind at the bottom of the chart, and the problem is different.
Not sure what physical grid he's talking about. But there is a model of distributed micro generation where you leave the actual power at the location of generation, but ship the savings over the internet. it would mean that you would "undersize" the micro powerplants (so there's little excess to supply to the power grid, but at least they're cheaper powerplants to install) and always shave a fraction off a household's grid demand, in an asymmetric, intermittent fashion. that is: at one location, some days it's windy, some days it's not. but it is going to be windy...somewhere. but since you as the consumer didn't buy the hardware, it doesn't matter - you'd just pay an average bill. the company supplying the micro-power equipment on people's houses would need to play the averages and spread the units out geographically, hopefully cherrypicking the best locations as they grew the network. but the more people who joined up, the safer the bet would be. kind of like a global, realtime renewable-energy mutual fund for wind or solar. so for a household it's: keep what you generate, share what you save. what's most important is that on-grid consumers (many people) could start generating *part* of their energy bill using sustainable methods, without having to fork out a ton of cash for a full solar or wind solution (which is only helpful on some days anyway). (Although great kudos to those early adopters who can and do install a state-of-the-art system!) anyway the open source experiment based on solar and wind is happening next year, and a preview is here: http://www.solarnetwork.net/
moderation of both people who post and the editor how allow people like RP to post just so they can generate trafic.
I am not sure wether this posting will be moderated insightfull, off-topic or whatever, but at least people have an option to do it. Unfortunatly this is not possible with the obvious abusers.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You've got it wrong on most points here.
Small wind turbines are generally not competitive.
It's the huge, 0.5-5MW carbon-fiber-and-steel constructions placed in ideal wind zones which are competing with other forms of generation. Subsidy can allow you less efficient development, if your country has the money to burn.
The "wind turbines on car parks" are practically decorations - 90% of them are placed in areas with very little wind. Greenwashing.
Positive Energy Return On Energy Invested on wind on a good site is on the order of months from start of operation. For silicon PV, it's still years off even in the best zones, and decades in some places. For solar thermal, I'm not sure - but I suspect (based on the relative costs) it's somewhere in between.
The old points against nuclear power have really, REALLY faded with age. Despite the lack of new plants in the last 20 years, the increase in reliability of existing plants have meant a continuously increasing amount of nuclear power produced in the US in that period. Meanwhile, we've made 4th gen plant designs that are difficult to melt down if you try, which dispose of their own transuranic waste via neutron bombardment, which breed fuel for 98% less mining required, which rely on non-uranium fuel cycles and are scalable to the small-town level.
Chernobyl, and disasters like it, were primarily conscious risks taken at a time when nuclear war was a consequence of failure to breed enough plutonium, and people were expendable (Stalin certainly liked his purges).
People in Soviet Russia, however, appear to be afflicted with amusing juxtapositions of the aforementioned situation
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
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Decommissioning? They started with solid plans to build a network of nuclear plants in 1957, started construction on 5, and after a series of cost overruns and delays, managed to get 1 plant online in 1983. Their failure of management doesn't exactly speak to problems with the nuclear industry, not when entire nuclear weapons programs have been brought to fruition in that timespan.
That 1 plant currently produces 9% of Washington's power, btw. Around 9 billion kilowatt-hours a year. At 6 cents per kwh, that's 540 million dollars a year for your state.
And like I said, this is a design that's half a century old or more. The newer ones have improved significantly.
People in Soviet Russia, however, appear to be afflicted with amusing juxtapositions of the aforementioned situation
Perhaps we could use cow farts to power turbines...
Lemme see... what if we look at the net energy produced? Adding all those towers and wires, it must take quite a bit of energy to refine all that steel and aluminum. How long do the windmills have to turn to make up for all that energy? Until then you're in an energy hole.
The problem, apparently, is that besides pumped hydro, most energy storage techniques don't scale large enough to be used for grid-leveling.
For example, compressed air requires an enormous reservoir such that the reservoir's internal temperature doesn't change significantly during the compression side of the cycle (charging the reservoir). During the expansion side of the cycle (discharging the reservoir), some source of heat is required (like burning natural gas) to counter the drop in temperature as the gas expands. Theoretically, concentrated solar might work for heating, but they would still need a backup in case of bad weather or non-daytime demand.
I actually an optimistic that supercaps might be useful this way one day, but the current cost to manufacture, combined with the energy density, makes them too expensive right now.
*sigh* back to work...
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.
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Actually you have not quite got it. Continent scale wind can provide 60% of demand before you have to figure out what to do with excess generation: http://www.belfercenter.org/files/uploads/Continental_Wind_web_Nov07_opt.pdf.
It is your concepts of baseload and peak which are hindering your thinking. It is obvious that wind is forecastable and has slow variations in availability when many regions are connected. Thus, fuel based plants such as coal plants can be used as infrequent additions to the system but not necessarily as spinning reserve. But, if you think about it, hydro plays a role in flood control, so we don't get all uptight if we happen to let water out of a dam without generating some power. We paid for the dam, not the rain. Similarly, increasing wind capacity to the point where we throw 15% away is not a big deal especially if it is done in a way that extends the life of turbines and towers, just as hydro works to preserve dams. But, the situation with wind is even better than hydro. If you look at Fig. 3, as you mentioned, meeting a constant demand, as can be estimated from the hatched areas, greater geographical diversity leads to substantially less "wasted" generation. Comparison with the up time of a single coal or nuclear plant is entirely appropriate in the context of the exercise. It is just the baseload concept that is limiting because it is so closely associated with fuel use now that is causes us to think backwards. One ought to be using fuel as sparingly as possible rather than wasting it on loads that can be covered without fuel use.
--
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It's a bit like having a bunch of hamsters generating your power, each in a separate cage with a treadmill. At any given time, some hamsters will be sleeping or eating and some will be running on their treadmill. If you have only one hamster, the treadmill is either turning or it isn't, so the power's either on or off. With two hamsters, the odds are better that one will be on a treadmill at any given point in time and your chances of running, say, your blender, go up. Get enough hamsters together and the odds are pretty good that at least a few will always be on the treadmill, cranking out the kilowatts.
That'd be SOOOO cool. I wonder how many hamsters I'd need to run my PC?
Of course, the smell would necessitate location in the (unheated) garage, so it may not work for very long...
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Sine you work for a wind company, then you should know that the grid is really lacking. In particular, we have very large lines from powerplants into cities. Make sense since our approach for multiple decades was one of single point of supply to roughly single point of delivery. In between these points, the grid thins out. What is needed is for an increase in capacity in between these. In particular, we are making somehead way with superconductors. The manufactuering is still expensive, but a line across the USA would help to distribute power across the USA.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Failure of management doesn't speak to problems with the industry? This is our -actual experience- with the industry, not some pie-in-the-sky projection. Reality on the ground.
Weapons production is strictly tax-supported. The nuclear weapons industry is not a market, so the economics don't compare to energy production. And that isn't exactly a shining example of success on the decommissioning front, in fact it has been a huge disaster.
Experience so far shows that nuclear power isn't such a cheap, clean deal if you factor in the total end-to-end life cycle costs.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
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
The truth shall set you free!
When you see a hamster analogy, you just know your dealing with quality journalism.
Attempting to store many multiple MWs of power is extremely difficult. If we had better battery technology, we would have solved the electric car range sufficiency problem already.
Actually we have the capacity - for stationary plants at least. It's called "vanadium redox". Long-lived, low-toxicity, efficient. It's been in initial deployments for several years now - mainly down in Oz and/or New Zeland. It has the interesting property that the energy is stored in the electrolytes, like a fuel cell - so you can store "charged" and "discharged" electrolytes in big tanks and separately size the electrode structures for max power level and the tanks for storage capacity. Further, the electrolyte from multiple cells can be pooled, allowing for some very useful properties. For instance, you can charge and discahrge at different (or even multiple) voltages, just by tapping the stack of cells as appropriate. Bingo: DC Transformer.
Cars are a different kettle of fish: The heavier the battery the more power it takes to move it around, which gives you nasty issues similar to those of rocket vehicles. Automobile applications requrie very low losses at high charge and discharge rates to avoid overheating, "refuel" qiickly, and efficiently scavenge braking power for later re-use. And you need to be safe in collisions, be stable though vibration, G-forces, and at various tilts, and have failure modes that don't take out the whole battery pack and disable the car if a cell fails.
New cells for this are coming along, too. Best one I'm aware of is the carbon nanofiliment electrode lithium-ion cell, also going into production, though there may be others.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Actually, [windmills take] only about half a year [to pay back the energy cost of making them - mainly making their aluminum towers].
Also: The energy output of windmills is high-quality electricity (i.e. the output end of the carnot cycle) but much of the energy of construction is heat. Comparing the two is apples-to-oranges.
On a related note: Solar panels take longer to repay the energy cost. But they are used primarily to provide off-grid power. So they need to be compared to the energy cost of installing a grid at the location: Cutting trees for poles, smelting metal for transformers, wiring, switches, meters, guy cables, bolts,... Melting sand into glass for insulators. Fuel to haul construction workers, clear the brush, dig the holes, install the poles, string the wires. A share of the energy to construct the plant. And the energy going INTO the plant's heat engine to make and transport the energy to the load at far less than 100% efficiency.
When you add this all up the energy costs of the alternative grid power, solar panels can be an energy bargain.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You know, to generate wind so the wind generators will always be running.
Understand it. Having to haul High Voltage AC over 3,000 miles is not ideal. Having to build out (and acquire property for) new point-to-point HVDC lines is crazy expensive. Local, decentralized, regionally grid-tied for backup.
And for those mocking methane and cow flatulence above, there's a 5.66 megawatt power plant running from landfill decomposition gasses in Oregon (since 2005, actually). Seems financially viable, as they just expanded it. http://www.cooscurryelectric.com/webfront/power/facts-coffin.php
Course, I'm personally a big fan of just skipping ahead already to spend INSANE money to sprinkle large nuclear facilities where feasible. As in: desalinization FAST type IIIa/IV high-temperature helium gas nuclear reactors. With integrated reprocessing and thermochemical conversion of a portion of purified seawater to H2 + ½O2 on the first turbine condenser stage (flash desalinization on the second). As a bonus, you end up with free ozone, when can then be used to preserve the clean water on its journey through the REAL series of tubes. I know I'm apparently alone on that one... but we'll all find out soon enough that water is the real priority.
It's what we'll end up doing anyway, why not star the research now? (And more wind farms, yes, are nifty too. Completely unreliable, and nifty.)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Nothing in that article is not obvious. None of the 'solutions' will solve any of the problems; connecting wind farms together to make more use of existing transmission systems requires (you've guessed it) more transmission systems and could well overload the existing systems at peak. Distributing wind farms to gather wind from different parts of the weather system requires putting them further apart, which requires more transmission systems.
The simple point to make is that you need a distributed, highly-connected transmission network, with as much generation as possible as close as possible to consumption, and a variety of sources if those sources are variable. So e.g. each town gets its own wind and solar farm, and methane-from-sewage, and incinerator, and some natural gas micro-turbines. Yes, it'll cost, but you'll make the money back from the savings on transmission lines. And then do some proper investment in R&D e.g. more efficient PV cells, or drilling for geothermal.
In my other reply, I mentioned that Hollywood would have taken liberties with the truth to make a drama. I have never seen the film, but I know Hollywood.
Even after the Clintons left office, they kept the pressure on. When the Enron collapse seemed imminent in November 2001, Robert Rubin called a senior Treasury Department official in the Bush administration and asked him to discourage the bond-rating agencies from downgrading Enron's debt. The Bush Treasury Department refused to intervene on Enron's behalf, and Rubin backed down.
As to Franjo Tudjman, he must have done something right. In November 1996, just months after Brown's death and one week after President Clinton's re-election, Tudjman traveled not to The Hague to be tried as a war criminal, but to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington to have his cancer treated.
Needless to say, none of this - Mozambique, Croatia, Ron Brown, the Hillary connection, the Rubin call, the Bush refusal - makes the Enron movie.
Meanwhile, Gibney chooses instead to implicate both Bush presidents and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in a series of tortuous plots that defy common sense and basic chronology. Indeed, Gibney somehow blames the California energy debacle on George W. and Schwarzenegger even though W took office six months after it flared up and Schwarzenegger took office three years after that.
The spirit of Leni Riefenstahl is alive and well. Hooray for Hollywood!
Taken from;
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=44355
Hollywood makes entertainment movies. If you want the facts, look elsewhere.
The truth shall set you free!