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.'"
Because it's an old staple of science fiction. The answers in the question.
We already have solar power beaming down to earth all the time. Why not just build a bunch of mirrors to focus it terrestrially if you want to use solar power? To my mind that sounds safer than having a 1.21 Jiggawatt death ray beaming down from the heavens in the hands of the government.
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.
Because everyone freaks out about the "Death ray from space" aspect of it. And at power densities where it's not an issue, it's not really worth it.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Manufacturing. If you want to manufacture the solar panels on the ground and lift them into orbit then you are probably never going to get more than a fraction of the energy you need to build the array out of the system. The only way to do it sensibly is to build the panels in orbit. This requires capture of near-Earth asteroids with the right mineral mixture and orbital factory infrastructure. Once you've got the basic infrastructure up there then it's self-sustaining, but the start-up costs are immense.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
42% of the USA's territory is desert. Why even consider a second sending solar panels to orbit when we have millions of unusable square miles right here. Just think of those area of Nevada desert which are covered with craters from atomic bomb tests, there's nothing there worth not being covered by solar panels. Then think about how much it would cost to send to space the same area of solar panels you'd could put down here, not to mention the lesser transmission loss, although on the other hand nights don't last as long in space and clouds are more sparse up there too.
You just got troll'd!
Thing is, plenty of science fiction technologies have become science fact.
I have a different answer for him: Much like the flying car, it turned out to be too expensive and not efficient enough.
I don't read AC A human right
I think most consumers would prefer to be isolated from energy price fluctuations. Just look at California and Texas to see what a deregulated energy market combined with smart energy traders can come up with.
It would be a lot more work than people are accustomed to. You couldn't just put your clothes in the dryer and press start. You'd have to put in accepted price range, otherwise if the price spiked to $100/kwh you would spend a fortune on that load. That means sometimes your clothes would be wet hours and hours later.
That said, there is a tiny minority, myself included, that would really enjoy having real-time pricing. I would love having power generation and storage at my house, buying low and selling high, only using high-demand applications at rock bottom prices, the whole thing controlled by computer and PLC.
Man, you really need that seminar!
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?
Nuclear often comes up but the very long contruction lead time and very high capital cost renders new nuclear capacity irrelevant until the economy picks up. Large coal fired plants take almost as long.
Wind in contrast can be handled in smaller, cheaper chunks which will not give you the economy of scale of large thermal plants but it will give you the electricity this decade.
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.
"Then think about how much it would cost to send to space the same area of solar panels you'd could put down here, "
Just the insane maintenance and upgrade costs would make putting the gear in space an idiotic choice. We also have enough junk up there without scattering tons of it deliberately.
Land is cheap and abundant, terrestrial systems can be easily inspected/upgraded/maintained/recycled, and we would not be trapped into the horridly long development and lifecycles of space gear. When you want rapid improvement, don't get saddled with primitive legacy systems (Space Shuttle...).
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
great - I'd love to be continually bathed in really high powered microwaves. That energy transmission must be horribly inefficient.
While I imagine they'd set a geo-synch orbit and beam it down on a tight focus, wouldn't it warm the hell out of that column all the way down?
In short, would there be a climate impact, and if so, what?
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
As long as "building an X" is "irrelevant until the economy pix up," the economy isn't going to pick up. Further, what would you define as a "picked up" economy, anyway? We're still below 6% unemployment, so even if we had jobs for everybody, it'd amount to something like a 1/20 change in GDP.
Further, you want to *build* the plants when labor is *cheap*, because you can't sell the power until after it's built.
Nuclear power might not be the be-all, end-all solution, but it is a very big part of one, and although it takes over a decade to build one, if we don't start breaking ground now, in ten years we'll be wishing we had.
Wind, "in contrast" requires more workers per installed kilowatt..to install, let alone maintain, so although an individual plant can be put in much more quickly, over the long term it's a losing proposition compared to large "centralized" plants. It's a very small part of the energy plan, and can only ever be a small part of one. There's energy there, so we should tap it, but to propose wind as a viable alternative to "big power" (coal, nuke, hydro) is a rather laughable position.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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.
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.
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.
Actually at grid scales storing electricity is easy. You just use a reverse flow hydro plant, during the day when excess energy is abundant you pump water up hill, at night you let it fall through turbines. You can even store more than one days worth of electricity for when there is a freak storm over multiple solar sites or for when you have such high peak demand that your solar farm can't deal with it. You will lose some water to evaporation if the plant is near the solar farm, but if it's near a less arid place you might even be able gain some electricity from local rainfall =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.