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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
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?
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.
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!
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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.
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.
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make install -not war
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!
There are several long wave microwave bands in which the atmosphere is practically transparent - about 1m would be a nice wavelength to use if i remember correctly.
Because of the ability to build a tuned antenna to just the 1 frequency you don't need that high power densities - direct solar energy is up to 1000w/m2, so if you beam down at 200w/m2 you can easly catch most of that, powering a city of a sqare km, while maintaining a low enough energy density that you could walk through it and not even notice. [[citation needed]]
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.
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.
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.