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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!
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.
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.
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.
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
The truth shall set you free!
When you see a hamster analogy, you just know your dealing with quality journalism.