First Town In US To Become 100% Wind Powered

gundar99 writes "Rock Port Missouri, population 1,300, is the first 100% wind-powered city in the US. Loess Hill Wind Farm, with four 1.25-MW wind turbines, is estimated to generate 16 gigawatt hours (16 million kilowatt hours) of electricity annually. 13 gigawatt hours of electricity have historically been consumed annually by the residents and businesses of this town."

Comments

Re:Unless they're off the grid it isn't 100%

[Marcika]

They could be relying solely on wind power -- it's perfectly possible using pumped storage.
(They aren't though, so your point of needing other auxiliary sources of energy still stands.)

Re:Unless they're off the grid it isn't 100%

[Anonymous Coward]

If you draw a box around a year and this town and measure the inputs and outputs, the town is a net producer of electricity, assuming their forcast of consumption holds true. Ergo, by Jedi logic, they are 100% wind powered. Your commentary on the matter elegantly illustrates the difference between erudite and pedantic for the rest of us. Thank you, not everyone could have done so as gracefully.

Re:Unless they're off the grid it isn't 100%

[istartedi]

I knew there would be a post like this. This always comes up when people discuss wind and solar. First, if they were not on the grid they could use "peak storage". There are a number of ways to do that. In areas where water and elevation are available, you can pump water back up a hill into a holding pond and re-cycle it through a turbine--augmented hydro power. Other methods of peak storage include: flywheels, batteries, and even compressed air pumped into abandoned mines that have been properly sealed to hold in the pressure. Choice of method depends on a variety of factors of course.

Now, since they are connected to the grid, the peak storage issue isn't very important. They just feed the grid when they have excess, and draw from the grid when they don't. Therefore, they are actually *over* 100% since they are expected to feed the grid more often than they draw from it. If everybody did what they did, then peak storage would be required because it is possible for calm conditions to persist over fairly wide areas--perhaps wide enough to make transmission impractical. The only difference here is that they are using the grid as a virtual peak storage system.

When wind power is sent to "town B", they can idle one of their fossil-fuel generators. The fuel un-burned by said generator is another way to account for peak storage.

Using the grid as peak storage just makes better econonmic sense than building your own peak storage and declaring independance like some kind of cult or something.

Wind power has other issues though, mostly aesthetic.

Re:Yay for wind, uh...not?

[mrchaotica]

I'm not a civil engineer either, but I am training to become one. I think you're worrying way too much here. Yes, you need a reasonable foundation for the thing, but then you can put soil for farming on top of that.

But even that is overthinking the issue; just look at this picture. See the space each turbine tower takes up? Now see the space between towers? Is the former significant compared to the latter? No. Are they, in fact, growing some kind of crops between the towers? Yes. If this weren't true, the picture wouldn't exist!

Even still you couldn't put them denser than the falling distance from one to another or a slight engineering snafu turns your billion dollar windfarm into the worlds most expensive set of dominos.

You don't want to put them close together anyway, because

1. the turbine needs to rotate (in the X-Y plane) so that it's always facing the wind and you don't want blades of adjacent turbines to hit each other, and
2. if they're too close behind each other, the wake turbulence from the turbine in front reduces the efficiency of the turbine behind.

Oh, and by the way: assuming you arrange the turbines in a square grid, they would have to fall in one of the four cardinal directions to risk creating "the world's most expensive set of dominos." If we assume that the zone where this would happen takes up 1 degree of arc for each direction, there's a (4/360) ~= 1% chance of that happening, assuming a tower fell over in the first place. I'd call that negligible risk.