Slashdot Mirror
Texas To Build $4.93B Wind-Power Project
Hugh Pickens points out a story in the NYTimes about Texas' $4.93 billion wind-power transmission project. One of the major goals of the project is to improve electrical throughput to the population centers. Current transmission lines are unable to handle all of the power generated by Texas' wind fields. State citizens will be paying slightly more to help cover the cost, though the project is expected to eventually lower the cost to consumers. Quoting:
"The lines can handle 18,500 megawatts of power, enough for 3.7 million homes on a hot day when air-conditioners are running. 'The project will ease a bottleneck that has become a major obstacle to development of the wind-rich Texas Panhandle and other areas suitable for wind generation. The lack of transmission has been a fundamental issue in Texas, and it's becoming more and more of an issue elsewhere,' said Vanessa Kellogg, the Southwest regional development director for Horizon Wind Energy, which operates the Lone Star Wind Farm in West Texas and has more wind generation under development. 'This is a great step in the right direction.'"
The idea of putting solar panels in orbit, whose power could be beamed back to Earth, is an old staple of science fiction. Why haven't these come to fruition? One can't imagine the cost would be very great compared to the immense power you'd get in return. Since all the energy up there is free, less than total inefficient transmission shouldn't be too bothersome.
While I am all in favor of more wind power, here's something to keep in mind: this spring the Texas control area (the organization that manages power flows in the Texas region) had an incident where the temperature stayed warm into the evening and the weather conditions were such that the wind died across the entire state. Of course the wind turbine power went to zero across the entire state as well, driving the system into yellow (risk of blackout/system collapse) and close to red before they could get enough backup gas turbines on-line.
As I said, wind is great but it needs to be backed up with hydro and probably nuclear to have a reliable system.
sPh
new fangles airy fairy ideas!
I'm a rabbit startled by the headlights of life
hopefully they will get it online by the time Bush retires to Crawford. He can power the whole state!
Monstar L
Sounds like a great initiative, but I can't help feeling there is some bizarre logic that says we need to be running all those air conditioners on a hot day. How much insulation could 4.3bn dollars buy? Maybe Texas is way, way hotter than Australia, and it already builds its homes as effectively as possible for thermal efficiency, but here in Oz, the situation is crazy. Building codes do not force proper levels of insulation, and even orientation with respect to the sun is frequently disregarded or misunderstood. The average Aussie home is ridiculously poorly insulated and as a result they boil in summer and freeze in winter. Solution? For many people, it's to rush out and buy a multi-thousand dollar reverse-cycle air conditioner (which are constantly being pushed on TV ads, etc) which costs a great deal to run. Already the government is planning to build more power stations to meet the *summer* time demand for A/C and the lack of progress on sustainable sources means that nuclear is back on the agenda.
There really needs to be a big campaign to wise people up to the idiocy of A/C and to incentivise retrofitting of insulation and to dramatically improve building codes. Working on greater supply of clean energy is an excellent thing, but unless it's balanced by moves to reduce demand for power that for the most part is pissed away warming up the *exterior* of houses, then it's effort and money unwisely spent.
Well, if we are going to SciFi power sources, then I perfer to hold out for fusion (hot or cold), or perhaps a device that sucks out all of the static electricity in the atmosphere and harnesses that.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
As we're talking about Texas here, can somebody convert that into a unit its governors will understand — i.e., number of electric chair activations?
... the next version of Windows. I heard the user-rights' protection is so 1337 one would need at least a 32-core CPU to play back Supremely-High-Ultra-Definition stuff.
Why stop at just air conditioners? Why shouldn't your TV be hooked up to an emergency shutoff switch that can be toggled just in case? Surely that would be OK. Or maybe even your lights - they could be shut off in the daytime to little ill effect, right? There's no need to even limit this proactive sort of 3rd party power management to just emergencies. You probably waste a lot of power on unnecessary things. Why not just let someone else decide what appliances you are allowed to run and when you're allowed to run them. It should be OK, so long as you've got a contract of some sort, right? Hell, I'll bet we could switch over to 100% alternative power then, without even any need for carbon using backups. If a clean, environmentally friendly energy source should happen to become unavailable in a region, central power command could just turn off everyones AC, TV's, computers, lights, etc. until the situation is under control. With proper power rationing we could go green easily. What are we waiting for? Sure, it might be a bit intrusive and inconvenient, but that's certainly a better future than one in which we burn fossil fuels to ensure that we always have as much energy as we want and that we're able to use it as we please, right?
At 18.5 gigawatts, that's not even enough to send 16 Deloreans back in time at once.
And Texas just thinks it's got big ideas. Come on people. Stopping before you get to sweet sixteen? Think bigger.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
At least, Texas in the summer is way way hotter than the parts of Australia where most people live. Most of the Australian population is between the Pacific Ocean and the Great Dividing Range. Most of the population of Texas is out of reach of coastal winds. Houston is a few degrees closer to the equator than Sydney, where I grew up, but Dallas is about the same latitude as Sydney and not any cooler... the distance from the coast and the lack of mountains to keep the continental heat at bay makes all the difference.
But unlimited power corrupts... wait a second...
18.5 gigawatts! thats enough to power like 15 DeLoreans. That is ofcourse if you can afford the gas to even get the car up to 88mph.
Few US homes, even new ones, reach superinsulation levels of construction. for one, look at the walls, they just aren't thick enough, don't have enough space for all the insulation needed. You'll need at least, raw minimum, six-nine inches in the walls and at least a foot in the ceilings, something like that. I used to always say R55 all around, that's more or less what we used to shoot for, the linked article says now they call it R40 walls and R60 ceiling, close enough. We don't have exact legally defined codes to qualify it yet (AFAIK), but it isn't 2.5 inches that fits inside of a normal stud wall like is more common. In order to achieve really good levels of insulation you have to have planned air in and planned air out, this is actual ducting and fans and air filters, because all cracks are sealed, and there are a lot of them, and it is done in stages as the different layers of the house are built. You need an active heat exchanger for this planned air intake and exhaust. Your windows are multipane and gas filled and are not cheap, and should be smallish, and usually you would have an insulated tight fitting interior cover for the windows for real cold or hot spells. And so on. A house that achieves really good superinsulation levels can get by most of the time without much in the way of planned heating, even in the winter, as just heat from the humans in there, cooking, running lights and appliances, hot water use, etc is usually sufficient to maintain a decent enough comfort level. Anyway, there's some good engineering to it, I've worked on some, it really does work, the drop in use of air conditioning and heating is just *phenomenal*, strikingly so, I mean they just don't come on that much, you should be able to go a day or days with no activation where before your heating or cooling might be coming on several times a day, that's the difference.. Here is the wikipedia writeup on it, Superinsulation.
Once again, we are being asked to "sacrifice". I'll bet you all these empty suits that are telling us to cut back, have their thermostats set to 68 degrees, have every light on in the house etc. I love some of the ideas of having a remote control on your AC, and when the all-knowing-all-powerful government thinks we are using too much AC, they will just cuts us off. Who is to blame for this lack of power problem? You can blame the not-in-my-back-yard crowd, along with the (extreme) environmentalist.
Once you build a house made out of wood-sheet-rock and 1ft insulation with itti-bitty windows you expect the central AC to do the rest; right? We are indeed like a virus. Our modern needs require more and more consumption of resources. A family of 3 consumes 10 times the energy that the same family consumed in the 1920.
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
I am in the middle of reading Cape Wind, BBS, 2007 which is about trying to put a wind farm in Nantucket Sound. The location is perfect for a wind farm, and the need in NE for clean cheap power is high. But when all the backyards are owned by millionaires, it makes for an extreme NIMBY makeover.
I am finding the book to be a fascinating but horrifying read as to the lengths people will go to subvert the political process to protect what they believe is their right to quietly enjoy a public owned location. A typical example was adding a last minute rider to an Iraq war finance bill specifically aimed at blocking this one project. I'm not pro-war, but even I found tactics like this to be underhanded.
I have been getting interested in wind power from an engineering perspective, but reading this book has been a real eye opener as to how the political process is probably more important than the actual mechanics and cost/benefit/profit analysis. I'd recommend it to anyone as a good read, and while I don't understand the "anti" viewpoint all that well, this book gives some interesting lessons.
BTW I linked to Aaazon, but screw them - I got my copy from my local library!
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Or they could have radio controlled shutoff switches on more air conditioners. I have one on mine, and it's great. I pay less for my power, and it only gets shut off at a time like that - there is a contractual arrangement about how often it can be shut off, and it isn't often.
There are a lot of ways that the program could be expanded, not least making it a bigger difference in the amount one pays for power - more people would sign up, the ones who didn't would pick up the cost.
Only on Slashdot could sombebody advocate government and/or corporate remote-control of one's home via tele-something and be modded +5 Informative.
a car containing a battery plugged into someone's home or office ads something that has been heretofore missing on the grid -- storage. your car's battery could be charged using inexpensive off peak energy and then when demand is up the electricity could be sold back to the power company at peak-rates. not only could the consumer actually make money doing this, but it would smooth out the intraday cost fluctuations.
That's 5KW per home. If each (or many) of those homes also covered their roofs with solar panels, which protect the home from converting the Sun's rays into heat that must be cooled, and instead convert the rays into power to cool the house that doesn't need long distance transmission, those homes would need closer to 1-2KW max.
A fat "wide area network" for power is better than one too bottlenecked to be reliable. But just like only building too many roads only guarantees congestion everywhere at greater scale, instead of making neighborhoods with local access and easy walking/biking, creating only a fatter grid will just escalate everyone's power consumption by removing inhibitions.
Some of that $4.93B should be spent on local generation that offloads from the grid, as well as a better grid to distribute loads away from hotpoints.
If I were a rich oilman desperate to invest my $billions in something to make sense and not just many more dollars (like T. Boone Pickens), I'd offer free solar roofs to everyone, and split the income from the excess power pushed back into the grid. If I got everyone in Texas (through their taxes) to spend the $4-5B on that grid to make my distributed power corp work, I'd make back the investment in 5-10 years, and then rake in $billions more.
But that would require competing with easy oil and natural gas profits, even with all their problems, so maybe that's why I'm not T. Boone Pickens.
--
make install -not war
Actually, solar PV panels would do little to reduce peak power demands. The peak power use of electricity extends beyond the sunlight hours IMHO, high temperature solar thermal, with its ability to store the heat energy through the peak power requirements has more potential.
1. Become T. Boone Pickens.
2. Purchase controlling interest in the companies that build and service windmill generators.
3. Persuade government to foot the bill for installing thousands of said expensive windmill generators in open areas of Texas.
4. Snicker behind my hand as I realize that Texas gets every bit as many tornadoes as the so-called "Tornado Alley".
5. ???
6. PROFIT!
No mod points, no meta-moderating/Firehose/all the other free work Slashdot wants me to do.
As a former resident of Texas and once a proponent of electric deregulation, I can say that the last five years have been an eye opener. While at the beginning many including myself talked about the possibilities from a theoretical standpoint, the actual execution of deregulation has been a disaster. The WSJ just did a piece on Texas deregulation this past week which you can find here.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121625744742160575.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
I do believe modernized transmission would go a long way to helping the state like the article talks about, but I also believe Texas should fully embrace the national power grid. Since Texas is not connected in any major way to any other state's grid, ERCOT runs the show and FERC rules need not apply. This gets the double whammy of double set of rules for those who would choose to do business in the state and disallows any load balancing from other grids.
For a state that went from one of the cheapest electric rates to one of the most expensive (I live in NYC now and its only slightly cheaper then Texas), combine this with the folly that was California its a crushing blow against the idea of electricity deregulation. While the WSJ article talks about soaring natural gas prices (most of the state still gets its electricity from natural gas) and congested transmission as being culprits, I think you have to look at the volatility in pricing. Electricity is the most volatile commodity man has created. Unfortunately, no business, market, or participant structure can sustain 10,000s percent moves in intra-day pricing.
As a libertarian leaning thinker I believe in the free economy and as little market regulation as possible, but I am also scientifically-minded individual meaning I will examine the evidence from both sides. Given what we have seen in the markets that have been deregulated, the data and evidence conclude that electric deregulation just does not work.
When I think aboot power issues, and what to use to generate it, here are the components I reason about:
1) What is used to generate the power?
2) What is used to store the power?
3) How will fluxations in demand be met or adjusted too?
For solar and wind and currents in the ocean here is some of what I conclude:
1) (Generation) Wind and Ocean currents drive turbine. For Solar, panels generate electricity or Sun's energy is used to heat water.
2) (Storage) None. To differentiate with coal, natural gas, other fuels, and hydroelectric, there is no storage implicit in the system. With coal I can store the energy by just storing the coal - coal acts as its own "battery". Wind, solar and the like do not: you must add batteries to store the generated energy, there is no storing before generation.
3) With coal and the like, I can stock pile the fuel for use later, and adjust the amount I burn to demand. With wind and the like, there is no on damand generation: you deal with what you can get at that moment: there is no predictability beyond the variability of the natural process you are using.
Energy generation is really energy transfer: we are moving energy from one form (chemical, mechanical, photo) to another. Each translation (chemical -> heat, photo -> electric) involves loss. This is measured in the effeciency of the process. Storing energy after is has been generated is a step that adds to the loss of effeciency: you must transfer the energy to the batter (storage), then back to the grid.
In my experience, these elements are some of the keys to reasoning about the costs and practicality, and usefullness, of the different energy production means. Solar, wind and the like cannot easily be compared to coal, natural gas and the like, becuase they do not have the same features: namely they do not act as their own "battery" so you must factor into the cost (enviromental cost as well as others) the fact that storage may need to be created, or some means will be required that is different to handle variances in demand and availablity of the generation reasource.
T. Boone Pickens is the guy funding a lot of this. He's a retired oil tycoon (who now runs some hedge funds). Even if you can't agree with his past and his wealth, you can't disagree with the fact that this guy is stepping up and attempting to _do someting_ about the problem. And he's willing to use his wealth to try and make it happen. They are currently constructing the largest wind farm in the world in western Texas.
Check it out for yourself and make your own judgements...
Even if the peak use of electricity extends beyond the sunlight hours, the PV still does more than "little" to reduce the demands.
For one, as I mentioned, the PV is a better insulator (reflector/absorber) of solar power that makes the heat that air conditioners must cool. That is the peak of the peak, with "double" (or something like it) the effect of just the extra shade, because the shade amount is partly used to power extra cooling. Also, since the standard time zones see the actual solar peak (solar noon) moving within them, the solar supply / power demand peak shifts away from the synchronized office hours, further offloading from the peak time.
For another, solar PV generates more power than is necessary to cool what remains to heat a building. PV, especially in places like Texas (sunny, subtropical) can get something like 20% of the 1KW that strikes each square meter at "solar noon", through nearly the entire year. That's something like 200W:m^2. An insulated building (including UV-shielded windows) doesn't require 200W to cool each m^2, especially in the average low-storey buildings in Texas. And of course lots of buildings don't need cooling while people aren't in them (either the home or the office), but both are generating power for nearby consumption. The extra can be consumed elsewhere in the neighborhood, or stored for later.
That's way more than "little" to reduce peak power demands.
But that doesn't mean that solar thermal doesn't also have its place. In fact, its place is probably higher than the lowest priority grid buildouts, though lower than solar rooftops. If we're going for maximum returns (in money, energy and sustainability), we should do them all, in proper proportion.
--
make install -not war
You answered your own question, "nights don't last as long in space and clouds are more sparse up there too".
Funny coincidence, I had just finished re-reading this book when I saw this article. The Nevada desert you mention is in the dark about half of the time, exactly when people in the US need electricity for their lights. And what about Europe? The Far East? OK, use the Sahara and the deserts in Asia, but you'd still need a lot of power transmission and storage capacity.
Remember, if we knew how to *store* electricity, we would have practical electric cars by now, and laptop computers would have more than a few hours battery capacity. There's a strong economical incentive to develop electricity storage systems, but it's still very far from being a practical reality, therefore solar power is necessarily just a supplement to other sources of energy.
I think Dr. O'Neill's mistake was to assume the time needed for development would be so short. However, if you read his book, you'll see it all makes sense from an engineering point of view. All the objections in the thread to which you replied have been answered in his book, it's not science fiction at all, just future technological development.
As I understand it, you can't put big wind turbines, or big solar panels just anywhere. And you lose a lot of power if you try to pipe it very far.
I am sure a few small regions can benefit, but can this really put a dent in US energy demands?
great - I'd love to be continually bathed in really high powered microwaves. That energy transmission must be horribly inefficient.
..........FULL STOP.
The whole desert floor doesn't have to be covered, so there can be space available between the collectors.
Besides, the CO2 reduction, pollution savings would offset what little impact a 100 square mile patch would have. That's right, using roughly a 100 square mile of desert could supply Americas ENTIRE power requirements. Not too shabby, but a very, very large undertaking. Solar panels have been making some huge strides in efficiencies lately. The nasty compounds used in them are eventually "paid for" by other environmental improvements.
..........FULL STOP.
If you were prohibited from purchasing "restrictive" contracts (read long-term contracts, like buying in bulk to save money), would you call a short-term contract, with a higher fluctuating price, your only option left... deregulation? If you were 'allowed' to sell for any price you want, as long as it doesn't exceed the price cap they dictate, would you call it... deregulation? If you were forced to 'deinvest' your distribution company of any power generation facilities, why would you continue to 'invest' in new power generation facilities... deregulation?
Deregulation == Deregulation
Deregulation California Style == Re-Regulation, with a misleading name in order to confuse voters
Photovoltaics are not the only solar power solution. Concentrating solar power plants work by heating up a transfer substance, e.g. molten salt, and then converting that heat to electricity. That method provides continuous electricity by averaging out the cloudy days & nighttimes.
Someone should come up with a design where a wind powered generator would convert to a solar powered generator during the hottest part of the day. From what i understand this is the problem with the windmills... the wind doesn't blow in the middle of the day and they don't have a means to store the power, so it just stops being available at that time.
The option being proposed is to improve the transmission capability so that more energy can be stored at locations close to the end user or in some central location... which is not a bad idea.
My additional option is that someone design a wind powered generator (turbine or other) which would convert into a solar powered generator during these "dry spells" ie when the wind dies down due to the heat.... seems like a perfect fit.
My draft idea is that there could just be an additional mirror assembly attached to the windmill structure for use in a solar collector array or a sterling engine type generator.If the mirror assembly somehow would block the windmill from working efficiently, then it could be rotated so as to provide less wind resistance during non-solar generating periods.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Texan's desire to go off in their own direction might place an upper limit on the amount of wind (and other) resources it can harness.
Texas has kept its power grid isolated from the rest of the United States. As a result, they have a smaller load over which to spread a given amount of wind generated power. Looking at this another way, wind power will be a larger share of their total generating capacity. Since wind is inherently a variable source of power, alternative sources will be needed, some of them on line and spinning, to fill in the capacity between wind gusts. Texans will have to finance this on their own, rather than taking advantage of the load and generation diversity an interconnected grid provides.
Have gnu, will travel.
Isn't the Texas Panhandle part of Tornado Alley? I'm sure that these windmills are well engineered but can they withstand a category 2 or 3?
Thanks for the typo correction - it's actually a square 92 x 92 miles or around 8,400 square miles.
Big, but doable. Estimated cost is around 400 billion dollars - we've probably spent that much in Iraq already. Take away the income from their oil, and that will do a better job of reducing the middle easts power.
..........FULL STOP.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World
Frederik Pohl is a genius
This novel shows the heat death of the Earth from fusion energy. Your point is as valid. I doubt there is enough stored hydrocarbons to do this but fission, fusion and any off planet energy would do it.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
We did what I would call just a mild retrofit for this lady at her house, complete with before and after infrared imagery. So some days go by after we are finished, she calls up "You broke my air conditioner!!" "What?? sez I" "It's not coming on!" "Is your house still cool, ma'am?" "Well....yes...." "It's working, you got what you contracted for"
Yep, that's it, it is such a profound change that you really can't get it across to folks until they have seen it working. Here's another one I worked on, a home in New England, another retrofit, this one was a little more than the other and we put extra non load bearing walls on the inside and blew in some loose insulation, then some other stuff like resizing the ridiculously large and leaky windows.. where in January and February the heat barely if ever turned on, the guy just skipped the trasditional heat (oil and backup electric resistance) almost entirely and built one small wimpy little mostly ambience fire in a nice woodstove in the evening. Piped in air to the woodstove, none of that just random sucking in air from cracks in the house. Winter fuel bills from lotsa hundreds to a dozen bucks a month or something ridiculous like that. People just don't think it is possible, or think it will quadruple the price of their house or something, or they will be forced to wear birkenstocks and eat only granola three meals a day and have to join the secret club. Nuts. Everything has to always be "more studies needed, years from now...hey look, shiny, hydrogen fusion fuel cells are coming" yada yada. And what is funny is..the future got here, it is the new century, that last big go around with all the bad energy news back in the 70s and 80s popped out some nice rad stuff that was reasonable and actually worked, they came up with some solutions to this or that energy problem, but few if any people are using them. They believe in the exxon and detroit and wallstreet commodities speculators axis of maximum energy profits and propoganda bureau press releases when it comes to possible fuel efficiency and reliability of cars, and heating and cooling their houses, along with getting their science from like rush limbaugh shows. Nuts. Stuff like that.
Doesn't bother me that much other than we are sure globally wasting a ton of energy when there is no outright need for it right now, and we sure have a lot more pollution than we should have right now, we sure are getting closer to more major dangerous freekin resource wars than we need to right now, and I still have a scosh of feelings for my fellow actual real world joe sixpack workers when it comes to being able to afford to live today. The lifestyle bloat and ridicule crowd, nope, they can go bankrupt for all I care. Let them burn expensive furniture in their fireplaces, who cares.
Intellectually, a lot of folks may read the words but they still won't get it..hmm..kinda sorta like folks may have maybe heard something about "linux" when it comes to operating systems but just can't believe something free and cheap can replace the hundreds of dollars of software perpetual vendor lockin model with the associated aggravation with what the current computer "industry standard" is. They go "well, gee, why isn't everyone doing that if it is so good?" Nuts. Always wait for this "they" guy to "do it". Same with a good quality solar PV installation, they think that if you don't go immediately for an entire house solution, that they can't go to any solar, not realizing you can do *one* circuit at a time if you want to. I've seen that a lot, "I can't afford it, it is 10-60 grand!". Well, ya, it is, depending on what you want and how much of the work you want to do yourself, which could be like most of it, but nothing stopping people from using this high tech device called a subpanel and just doing one or two important circuits in the house either, then maybe 5 years later do some more, etc. But it falls under the "either/or" deal for them so they just dismiss it entirely, wait again another coupla deca
Sorry I didn't write an entire technical construction book in my reply, I was under the impression this is just casual conversation. If you want one of many solutions to the condensation problem, here's one, don't build stick frame in the first place, do solid thick walls, cordwood masonry is sorta nice and good looking. Want another, it is called active versus passive venting and dehumdifiers, real air "conditioning" beyond just heating and cooling, with the superinsulated like I said you have planned air in AND out, and there's ways to go about it. Go partial earth bermed, whatever. I noticed the wiki link had some additional links, it is enough to get folks started if they feel like it.
Like I said, I am out of the biz, not trying to sell folks anything, just provided a bit of a lead and a wiki link so they can go explore further, to see what might could work for them. There is no one size fits all energy solution, situations are different, budgets are different, needs are different, but there are a variety of steps people can take from ten bucks and one hour labor on up to help with the bills. Or, they can hang around and do nothing but kvetch about stuff. Their call, and yours.
When I was referencing the reduction in demands - I was referring to the demands on the electric network. Since the peak demand (4 - 6 pm) extends beyond the hours the PV cells would effectively function, then the network would have to still have a very close peak power requirement for generation and transmission whether the power cells are there to lower the demand during the middle of the day or not. Many homes also have radiant barriers which block most of the sunlight radiation effect on the roof top.
Texas is a state. Western Australia is a state. You can't compare a country to a state as you are doing comparing Texas to Australia.
Lets look at Western Australia (a smallish state population wise in as much as texas is population wise compared to California, NY etc etc) and look at the results:
The capital city of Perth (capital of Western Australia with approx 1.5 Million) is hotter than either Dallas or Houston.
Perth:http://www.australiatravelsearch.com.au/trc/climate.html Dallas: http://www.cityrating.com/citytemperature.asp?City=Dallas+-+Fort+Worth [cityrating.com] Houston: http://www.cityrating.com/citytemperature.asp?City=Houston [cityrating.com]
You can't compare a country to a state as you are doing comparing Texas to Australia.
Take it up with the grandparent. He brought it up.
But consider this: there's more people living in Houston than in all of Western Australia. There's considerably more people living in Texas than all of Australia. In terms of energy, Texas and Australia are pretty comparable.
And 80% of the population of Australia lives on the eastern seaboard.
The capital city of Perth (capital of Western Australia with approx 1.5 Million) is hotter than either Dallas or Houston.
Phoenix has a higher average temperature than Houston, but Houston has a much higher per capita use of air conditioning... in Phoenix you'll find quite nice houses with no air conditioning at all. that doesn't happen in Houston. Why? because Phoenix has low humidity... it's a very dry city, like Perth. Houston, well, Houston is anything but dry.
Wonder if Haliburton owns Horizon Wind Energy, which operates the Lone Star Wind Farm?
I'm late to the discussion, but you could be interested in this info.
If you want to know hot to make a thermally efficient house, just ask the people in the coldest climates. The province of Quebec in Canada has a nice program that explains how an efficient house can be build or retrofitted; Novoclimat - google translation
I looked at the wikipedia article, and one major thing is missing from the design. R60 on the roof is OK, but you should have a dead space in there to make the insulation more effective. Take the diagram in the article and cut the pointy part of the house from the rest (imagine a floor where it starts). leave that space empty and insulate the floor of that part. You get space to pack on 2 ft(or more!) of cheap cellulose insulation PLUS the remaining air that serves as more insulation. That's how houses have been traditionally made in Quebec: the insulation has been successively straw, grain, etc. The dead space is super-hot in the summer (hotter than outside because of the radiant heat of the roof tiles) and somewhat cold in the winter (halfway between inside and outside) Just don't forget to put vents in there to keep moisture out!
You're not old until regret takes the place of your dreams.
Why aren't evaporative coolers still being installed there? Australia would seem ideal. I miss living where we had them (they don't work here in the Midwest). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporative_cooling
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Great comments.
The need for spin reserve is an effective tax on every renewable energy source because unfortunately renewable ==> unreliable. Check off rates (if you install an X, we will always charge you less for power) fail because too many people game them.
The big changes in electrical prices in Texas this year mirror the price changes in all energy markets. It is unclear to me how people think that *any* industry, no matter how regulated, can repeal supply and demand for its primary supplies. We have a regulated market structure only because nothing else made sense in 1908 when the current regulated market was created in Chicago. I would not expect slashdot, of all places, to be stuck in the technologies and markets of a century ago.
You can gain reliability by combining a number of unreliable sources, as long as the reliability profiles for the different sources are different. This requires scheduling and wide area service choreography, and perhaps even architectures with full ontologies, as some laughed about yesterday on another thread. Those interested should just google Kombikraftwerk.
There is an interesting combined power generation scheme currently underway in the inland empire area of California, IIANM, that combines remote web control of household systems, including homeowner intervention (Donâ(TM)t regulate anything today â" my wifeâ(TM)s parents are in town and I do not want to listen to my mother in law complain!). What is unique about the system is that it is only installed in house that also have solar panels, and the excess output (beyond each houseâ(TM)s needs) is sold back to the grid at prices as if it was one large distributed solar PV generator, a virtual power plant. This business model, and many others, only works with the extra incentives of live time-of-day pricing.
Live pricing does not work very well with the home and office infrastructure we have. Well, the internet did not work very well with the phone infrastructure we had 20 years ago. (Am I the only one who experienced the joy of setting up X.25 PADs all over New England?). Live prices will be what creates the infrastructure of tomorrow that will work differently.
One difference will be home storage of energy. Energy storage need not be limited to batteries or lakes in the mountains. A tank of icy slush in the basement is a fine energy store if your major energy use is daytime cooling; cool it at night and use it for Air Conditioning during the day. Your heat pump to make the slush is also working more efficiently when it is cooler outside. At a 20% price difference between 2AM and 2PM, that slush might start looking pretty good. At a 50% difference, everyone might have one. We do not know what folks will come up with, and without market information on value and scarcity, we wonâ(TM)t.
It is these new markets that make live pricing important. New business models will change technology decisions.
These all work together. Local energy storage will reduce demand on the grid during peak times. This will become critical unreliable energy sources get added to the grid. The demand for reliability will then increase incentives for local storage and generation. Local storage becomes an additional use for any locally generated power. This increases the benefits for both generation and storage. This continues to make folks less sensitive to grid fluctuations. This ecology of local energy requires live pricing to thrive.
www.newDaedalus.com
good link and info. I have one, low tech, when I was up in Maine I saw a lot of the farms who had hay bank their houses in the winter right up the walls with bales and bales. I mean a lot of them. In the spring it turns into garden mulch. On the one dairy I worked on, the farmer there used over 300 bales a winter on his house (small bales, this was in the years before they had large custom bales). Drop in the bucket to what we hayed though, over 10,000 per cutting, three times a season. Cows are some hungry guys! That farm was neat, designed for cold weather, had seven buildings total all enclosed with enclosed walkways so you didn't have to go outside as much in the winter, the house, a woodshed (15 cords inside!!), a carpentry shop, machine shop, bulk tank barn, free stall/milking parlor barn, then the bunker barn for silage feeding. There were also some odd buildings built off that you could access, a chicken coop for eggs, a big sort of combo smokehouse and pantry, etc. In *real* extreme nasty weather you only had to go outside in the winter to take the bobcat to the silage pile and bring in feed daily, and once a week go to the separate hugemongous haybarn and bring in a big wagon load of bales. That was really a nice farm, he ran around 120 or so head, with around 100 milking at any time.
This Texan says . . . FUCK WINDPOWER! You fucking jackasses in the NE and left coast are ruining our fucking country side. While a few farmers are benefitting form this raping, the scenery suffers and it requires just as much carbon energy because the wind doesn't ALWAYS blow the way you liberal fucktards do.
-You have been modded appropriately-