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The Power Grid Can't Handle Wind Farms
DesScorp writes "The Times reports on the problems of adding wind farms to the power grid. Because of the grid's old design, it can't handle the various spikes that wind farms sometimes have, and there's no efficient way to currently move massive amounts of that power from one section of the country to the other. Further complicating things is the fact that under current laws, power grid regulation is a state matter, and the Federal government has comparatively little authority over it right now. Critics are calling for federal authority over the grid, and massive new construction of 'superhighways' to share the wind power wealth nationally. Quoting the article, 'The dirty secret of clean energy is that while generating it is getting easier, moving it to market is not.'"
The grid can't handle wind power! Now I get it!
It's the gospel truth. I read it in Pravda.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
This isn't like one person standing at the end of a line, and shoving SO HARD that the person at the other end feels it... it's about co-operation: everyone takes one step forwards. You don't have to move mass quantities of ANYTHING over ANY long distance. Local distributors move small amounts, where needed.
This is a job for... COMPUTOR!
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
[/sarcasm]Federal regulation.....what we always need.[/sarcasm]
In the 1950s the government set about a huge project to link America's cities and states via high speed road links. The investment has paid off well, and a similar project on our power infrastructure (especially if they could build a fibre network alongside) would pay off just as handsomely.
So, I doubt that the article is true. I have a feeling the Times got paid by a political party to say so. Desprete times call for desprete mesures.
-- (this is a sig) My Computer Programming Forumhttp://www.programers.co.nr/
Now we need an energy superhighway. Line up the trucks!
Sig this!
Why anyone wants Federal control of anything is beyond me. Think about it, the only thing that thundering herd of dumbass has done in the last 30 years that worked "as advertised" is the Do Not Call List! Put them in the power business and take more money from our pockets for them to waste? I don't think so.
Remember, if you make less than $169,000 a year, you have NO representation in Washington!
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
You want wind power!?
You can't handle the wind power!!!
That is all.
Yes, the grid needs to be changed to handle large power inputs from a more distributed system.
This would require federal tax credits as an incentive, as well as an open design.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The federal government doesn't need authority for this to work. Individual states can collaborate if need be. The article mentions how someone from Texas was able to build new transmission lines and he wants the federal government to assist in some way, but the article isn't clear in how he wants the government to assist. It sounds like the real problem is it is too difficult regulation/legal wise to build more transmission lines. Let's make it easier.
What do you do in places that don't have sufficient wind for wind power?
Completely OT I know, but isn't "The Times" a UK newspaper? It might be better to refer to the NY Times as, well, the NY Times to prevent confusion.
bang goes my karma... again...
Some of those designs look powerful yet expensive to build. We'll need some way to distribute GiW level production.
My parents both work for the local power company and this is a well known problem among those in the industry. I've been screaming about it forever. We can have all of the solar, wind, water and nuclear power in the world but it doesn't mean a thing if it can't be easily transferred from the places it can be generated to places where it's needed. Huge wind farms in the Midwest will only benefit the Midwest. A massive solar array in the Mojave dessert will only benefit states that are near it. Step #1 in the transition to alternative energy has to be to modernize and upgrade the power grid so energy generated in one region of the country can easily be transported to another and this is going to have to be a top down operation overseen by a single federal regulatory body. Leaving it in the hands of the states isn't going to cut it as the states have differing standards and regulatory environments.
I'm generally a libertarian but this is one area where the federal government is going to have to get involved to get everybody on the same page. It's akin to the interstate highway system. Without the direct involvement and oversight of the federal government that never would have happened and this won't either.
The summary is a crock and doesn't match the quoted article.
Transporting large and variable amounts of generated power is the dual of feeding large and varying loads. The power grid can handle it just fine.
The problem TFA alludes to is that, while cities and industrial plants already have fat lines to them from the rest of the grid, windfarms are new construction generally sited in rural areas that don't already have a "fat pipe" available. So (for a wind farm bigger than about twice the local load) you have to run some new lines.
Just like you would if you built a new auto plant or aluminum smelter in the same location.
It's a regular line, just like the ones feeding loads. It just happens to be running the power the other way.
Of course some people would love to get the government to pay for the line to their new wind farm, rather than bearing that expense as part of the project. And some people in government would love to have more authority and a bigger budget. So we get FUD like this.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Looks like the modernization is going to be real grid control mechanism (which is a Federal issue, since it's interstate) combined with something like HVDC to allow for reducing the transmission losses.
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You don't need to move it. California's not getting our wind powere here in Wisconsin! We'll keep it, thanks. If people generate electricity and use it locally, then it doesn't need to go anywhere far away. Why the hell would it? If someone lives in a place where the sun never shines and there's also no wind (and usually it's tipped one way or the other), they can either use nuclear or move. And what's this overloading crap? You know how many turbines it would take to equal a coal plant? When the power plant sees that less power is needed, the turbines spin slower, don't they? So you get 25% electricity from wind turbines, which btw would take thousands in most cities' cases, and it slows down to output 25% less power. What's the problem?
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Transmission lines carrying power away from the Maple Ridge farm, near Lowville, N.Y., have sometimes become so congested that the companyâ(TM)s only choice is to shut down
In the case of congestion, why aren't the turbines the only ones providing local electricity instead of being forced to turn off? Why doesn't a coal plant decrease output? Couldn't the turbines pick up the slack to decrease load and ease congestion?
One maybe is create automatic "plug in/out" for wind generators on main power grid, using as criteria the power load on moment, just like the speed regulator from hydro turbine. Or maybe create a better speed regulator for the wing generator to equalize the wind speed / power output
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
If they aren't going to work together, build new systems that that will. It's that simple.
I realise there's the whole 'but shareholders will object' thing. Well fine, if the well off think they're in a position to survive global warming, then let them vote no.
Then the first company who gets its shareholders to understand that money doesn't provide immunity from extinction if the planet becomes hostile to our species through climate change will generate wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.
Why? Because any such company would be so far ahead of the competition as to be unreachable. At least for long enough to make everyone involved very rich indeed.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
One of the advantages of most ways to produce clean energy is exactly that it is easier to distribute the power generation over different locations. You can't put a nuclear plant next to each village, but you can put a combination of windmills, geo-thermal, solar panels, and waste incinerators (with their heat used for both electricity generation and heating industrial or other buildings, rather than just for heating rivers) in or in the neighbourhood of places where the electricity is actually needed.
This both lowers the stress imposed on large scale heavy duty power distribution nets, and reduces single points of failure and associated cascade effects. Of course, when you build massive wind/solar/... farms in certain places, you're going to need massive distribution capacity there just like in case you'd build any other large scale power plant.
Donate free food here
Rig up a whole bunch of these babies in parallel and they can take sudden spikes and even it out. They're great for things like bicycle powered generators where the pedaling speed makes it inappropriate for things like TVs and computers. Say if you've got to charge a bank of Lithium-polymer batteries really slowly, but your power comes in suddenly, you can buffer it with ultracaps and trickle it out to the batteries. Great stuff.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
It's a series of tubes!! You can't possibly fit more in than the tubes can carry. /facepalm
Or you could just, you know, not use the FREE electricity that was produced. I know its not the most efficient use, but come on...
Its not like there aren't windy places all over the country. I can bet everyone can think of such a place near to them. So just build a bunch and waste some power. Then work on upgrading the system and have a whole crap ton of extra power to export to whomever later.
Says hello! I'm not too familiar with the software but I believe that SCADA base software is widely used. On top of that if their isn't already there should be some sort of mechanism or protocol to transfer between lines owned by different entities while recording the amount transferred for billing later.
I know that Slashdot has a lot of people working in the electrical industry because of previous comments I've read but from my VERY LIMITED knowledge it seems like if you have robust software tracking all this you could get the power from point a to b on the lines without having to immediately invest in massive architecture changes.
Anyone have more on this?
I just toured a nearby dam, and was presented some very insightful ideas.
Nuclear and coal power are great for handling base load because they provide consistent power.
But peak load is where the money is; turning on power systems when they're needed to match the load at that second. Solar, wind, and water are all peak-load power supplies because they are not always consistent, vary widely according to weather and time of year and regulations, and can be very unclean with spikes. This is why these power systems cannot replace base load systems yet.
The solution is to even out our peak load systems so that they are more consistent and more like base load systems. Whether that's tying many different types together and hoping they even out naturally, or storing the energy in some kind of battery in the middle.
Since battery technology is nowhere near ready, a viable option is to store water in reservoirs behind dams, using wind and solar energy to pump water up, then releasing it evenly through a generator. This is even being employed in some countries.
Every county moving a megawatt one county west from coast to coast is the exact same thing in terms of transmission capacity needed as moving a megawatt across the country, only more complicated and expensive.
was that the majority of farms produced less than 20% of their rated power per year.
Amazing that Pelosi likes them, wait, no its not, she's invested in them, in particular that guy from Texas.
I am all for a super transport system but I want it backed by nuclear to handle base loads and allow us to truly get coal off line. If its good enough to have Germany switch gears what is our problem?
I am so sick of a Congress more concerned about piss ant groups, having to many to satisfy, that we get the shaft.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
This has been the case for years and isn't an inherent problems with wind farms. Many areas (California, Connecticut) are full of NIMBY people and large amounts of power must be imported. Quebec and New Brunswick Canada, have been exporting to us for a long time. One of the biggest problems is that some generation companies are also in the transmission business.
If area A has a surplus but area B needs power, and the lines cannot handle the transmission, then the price for electricity in B goes up. This is a complex case of supply and demand. The grid is a lot more fragile than it appears. In many places there is a desperate need for more generation/transmission, but the anti-infrastructure people are driving up the cost of electricity by not allowing infrastructure improvements to be made.
I worked at one plant that had to erect a huge sound wall around the entire plant. It worked great, but cost around $2 million including all the sound studies etc. The people next door claimed they never knew when the plant was operating (clear exhaust). We CAN build large power plants in your backyard, and you won't even know they are there- aside from the plant staff spending it up in local businesses.
Why yes, I do work in the power industry.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Sure, it's damn inefficient right now. But we have an almost unlimited (in terms of longetivity, not necessarily amperage) supply of rays from the sun. Right now, it's the only source of energy that comes from outside the planet. Everything else causes problems somewhere else in the world. Either directly, like from pollution, or indirectly, as in damming a river causing weird results downriver. We're now finding that windfarms have a similar effect on birds' migratory patterns, seed migration, similar things that rely on the wind that have happened for thousands of years.
/end completely uninformed rant about the future of energy.
I think tidal energy has some potential for greatness, but not necessarily the way it's being used now, as it has similar effects on the environments where it's being used now. Fish, underseas plant life, etc. are affected. (There's also the dangerous potential (very hypothetical at this point, I realize) for someone to develop some kind of tidal energy harness system that's so efficient (think 90-100% efficient) begins to affect a>the moon's orbit, b>the earth's orbit. That's a lot of energy.) But If we could figure out a way to harness the gravity without messing with the water that's moving around, there could be potential there for another energy source outside the planet.
Wind solar and other alternative forms require some means of levelling out their output.
Even if all they could do was hydrolize water and then burn hydrogen at a reliable rate they'd be miles ahead.
Spikes are a pain for any grid to handle and most power demand spikes occur later after people come home from work.
Without a way to level output alternative energy will remain mostly on the fringes.
Some solar projects are storing heat in liquid sodium as a way to level things out. One MIT proposal is to hydrolize water and they apparently have found a good catalyst to make this process less difficult.
I wonder how much of this is sour grapes. People always poo-poo ideas so what's new? When drag racers were struggling to break the 170mph barrier in the 60's doctors told them the human body could never survive the g-forces necessary to hit that speed in 1/4mi. Now they do 300mph. I'm sure when Ma Bell built all those old desk phones they never dreamed they a) last this long and b) withstand the incredible power surges they have over the years. Yet, these phones can handle a ton more than new sets can handle.
I wonder if the whole north-east grid will fall like it did 2003 each time a cold front move through the region... The big blackout even showed that the conditions to create a cascade of overloads shutting down the whole grid are possible. Could the power surge caused by all wind turbine getting into action simultaneously create similar power pulses through the grid, jumping the safeties like it did in 2003?
They already did. It's called "railroads". James Hill (Great Northern) even proved you could build a transcontinental railroad WITHOUT government help, without the huge corruption government funded projects on that scale inevitably create.
Europe has the beginnings of a DC grid for long haul transmission of electric power (over very long distances AC losses add up). Looks like Edison was right, after all!
This consideration makes the prospect of upgrading America's power grid even more daunting, but I'd venture to say we'll be better off making the changes sooner rather than later.
I just found this on BBC News:
"Bats are at risk from wind turbines, researchers have found, because the rotating blades produce a change in air pressure that can kill the mammals."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7581990.stm
This is a softball. We don't need to just make electricity, we need to run a big pipeline and a little one all the way from the Mojave to the Pacific Ocean. Then, pump in Seawater and pump out brine. Use the electricity to desalinate and make hydrogen, which is then liquefied and used to power hydrogen vehicles. This can generate fresh water, electricity and hydrogen, which can power the future. Of course, much smaller and lighter cars too--almost like golf carts.
If the goal is making hydrogen, we can make the industry here and the fuel here. We can reduce pollution--which everybody agrees is a good idea.
"Captain! I don t'ink she can handle any more pow'rrr!?"
This is really a shame. Just think of how much wind will be generated at the national party conventions in the next weeks. And none of that can be plowed back into the Grid.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
... couldn't they just store up all the energy and release it consistantly?
If someone makes $$$ off of this, please send me some.
What will be needed are superconducting lines. Some are being layed now in the New York area initially, to help with grid distribution. They are available now, and have about 10x the capacity of conventional lines.
If we imagine the combination of say, superconducting continent-wide backbones and smart, distributed-control, adaptive, switching,
then as long as the wind is blowing, waves are rolling, or sun is shining somewhere in some parts of your continent, then you have a pretty stable power source (delivering some portion of the total combined rated capacity of all those widespread generators.)
The old saw that these alternative, renewables are whimsical, unreliable sources is purely a myth, predicated on a brain-dead dumb grid.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
This really blows.
(Apologies to all who are sick to their stomachs right now.)
It is not a revelation that the grid has to be upgraded, I read long ago it was a required investment. The problem is that it seems to be in none of the major players realm of interest or responsibility. Even as the grid stands, conventional power is not distributed efficiently.
Several months ago there was a big article on the need for new grid infrastructure to carry power from solar facilities in the Southwest (some via dc transmission) to areas of high demand. Moreover, did it escape the informed scribes attention that Pickens was in D.C. to get the feds to fund new investment in the grid? He needs it for his investment in wind power in the Texas panhandle to pay off. With all the business reporting it has, how was that missed? Too obvious?
This article meets the current low standards of reporting that has become endemic at the NYT. As they advised the recently former governor of New York state, you have screwed up so badly you should be gone! Well by the same standards, they too should follow the same example. Both by its actions and inactions, the NYT should exit too. Or more kindly, at least those at the top encouraging this type of reporting should remove themselves so that the vaunted reputation of the NYT may be regained.
Why couldn't a wind farm hook up some kind of huge battery to store wind power in excess of whatever the grid could handle? And then once the wind died down, they could basically bleed off the battery into the grid?
Maybe there's a reason that this is a dumb idea, and I'm sure you'd need one hell of a battery system to hold that kind of power, but it seems like a reasonable idea to me...
How is our grid not smart enough as it is?
It may have limited capacity, but what more do you want it to do! It already disconnects circuits with faults on them to protect itself...what else is there (other than controlling demand, which is maybe more smart loads than smart grid)
adaptive: if there is a path for electricity to flow it will, no adapting required
switching: every Tx line has circuit breakers and reclosers etc...no shortage of 'switches' there.
When people say smart grid I never know what they mean. Some people are talking transition from analog to digital and I get that but to be honest I've not seen a whole lot of analog electro-mechanical gear ... it is being replaced by new digital relays rather quickly
This doesn't seem to be a problem with the massive offshore wind farms in Europe. The UK, Denmark, etc, all are using more and more wind power each month from wind farms in the North Sea. No-one's ever said that the power grid can't handle it.
The feds don't need authority. They already have it. Congress just hasn't assigned it to any agency yet. If you think an electrical grid that shares power generated by utilities in numerous states isn't covered by the commerce clause, you are not reading the same Constitution as the rest of us.
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
Federal power grid = feds have the power to give a non-compliant region "power failure."
Keep it to the states, folks. Read your tenth amendment and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
We coulda had wireless power all along.
Oh boy! I just had an images of another few volumes added to our already byzantine tax code; for which there will be some loopholes put in by lobbyists that will allow some big corp to get some easy money. And then when or if wind or solar or whatever becomes the dominant power source, the tax incentives will still be there to further distort the economics of said power source and god forbid if anyone suggests that the tax incentives should be removed.
But hey, Washington is all about compromise.
As oil an gas gets more and more expensive, there won't be any need for tax incentives - the markets will take care of it. Maybe not as fast or as efficient as some would like it, but it sure beats a legislative solution any day.
It seems to me that the "spikes" in output from sudden wind changes at wind farms could be converted into heat, and stored for a short time in underground, insulated heat sinks. When the spike calmed down, or as usage increased, that heat could then be converted back into electricity (steam turbine?) for release onto the grid.
Am I missing something here?
Another thing that occurred to me is that this entire article and all it represents are merely a ploy on the part of Big Oil to put the idea of wind power in a bad light.
not true.
He needed land grants and money from JP Morgan.
He purchased much of the railroad from failing companies.
There was huge corruption and wall street issues from the trust. Something that required government intervention to break up.
The practically destroyed wall street.
He was able to stay in business by giving an unfair advantage to his other business using the rail road during hard times. Basically shifting money on paper.
He did build 1700 miles of track, but at nearly slave labor rates.
The US government has done many very large and complex projects without corruption.
Nobody in the US has enough money to fix the grid.
The grid must be fixed for us to move into a new distributed system.
It's a perfect job for the government. Not to private contractors. That is where you get corruption, and failed projects.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Offer cheap power to anyone who moves near the wind power farms.
If electric power can't come to the people, move people to the electric power.
"Right on! People to the Power, man!"
Solar thermal can be a base load power station.
I am not anti-nuclear. It's just that solar thermal plants are cheaper to make, have a fixed cost, less environmental impact, cheaper to maintain, and can be placed in a lot more locations.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If I was an evil enforcer faced with lazy minions claiming that the boss was tasking them with the impossible, I'd just just say, "You can tell him yourself when the Emperor arrives...."
-FL
Throw birds at them fan blades. To slow the blades down.
Just kidding. I was referring, of course, to ugly birds that nobody gives a rat's ass about.
The old saw that these alternative, renewables are whimsical, unreliable sources is purely a myth, predicated on a brain-dead dumb grid.
... they are whimsical and unreliable. That doesn't mean they can't be useful however. I agree with you there, but we're talking about a trillion-dollar investment for a nation that's teetering on the verge of economic collapse. I don't see it happening any time soon.
Well
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I suspect that DC transmission will have to play a role for long distance transmission. Since all wires (even straight ones) have at least some inductance, AC transmission suffers from voltage reduction over long distances, since the current is constantly changing direction. This is similar to the back-emf observed in motors. The inductive properties of long distance transmission lines are the ultimate limiter of how far energy can be transmitted by AC. Direct current on the other hand virtually eliminates this problem.
I can see long distance high voltage direct current being especially useful in transmitting electricity created by giant solar plants in the southwest desert. The amount of energy hitting the desert around Las Vegas is staggering; and yet when I recently flew out of Las Vegas I couldn't see ANY solar plants (they are easy to see due to their reflectance). Such a waste.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
What do you do in places that don't have sufficient wind for wind power?
Those who do pump water uphill; those who don't, take what they need from said body of water.
Hydroelectric isn't the flavour de jour, but is notable for having the opposite qualities from those of windpower, in that it is able to manage variable demand extremely well, and absorb surpluses on the grid.
Wikileaks, no DNS
"I am so sick of a Congress more concerned about piss ant groups, having to many to satisfy, that we get the shaft."
I'M a piss ant, you insensitive clod!
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
You'd use flywheels instead. Bury some huge buggers in the ground in vacuum sealed containers, weighing many tons, and spin them up when the grid can't handle the load. When the wind dies, slow them down and keep sending energy to the grid.
It's a reliable way to store energy that's almost completely recyclable since made out of inert materials, and it uses the same concepts used in hydroelectric dams that have been running for decades. They've even put it in a bus or a tram somewhere in England instead of using batteries.
Well that blows...
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
Like that's ever stopped them before? We have a welfare system, federal highway system, healthcare for underemployed people, and federal guidelines for public schools, none of which is constitutional. Do you honestly think they won't nose into state business again?
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
"a similar project on our power infrastructure (especially if they could build a fibre network alongside) would pay off just as handsomely."
Furthermore, as long as it wasn't just for wind power, this is something that both parties could get behind. A truly large scale national infrastructure improvement project, with a more robust national grid connecting to new or improved coal plants, nuclear plants, hydro, solar facilities, and wind farms (and any other viable sources we could use), something like this would probably get support from virtually all our political sectors, save the ultra-small government faction, which doesn't have much real power anyway.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
This is crucial to the wind energy advocates (and all other electrical energy source advocates) as a consequence of the following facts:
1) The main goal of public policy reform of wind energy advocates is to put into place transmission lines to carry electricity from the high wind potential areas (such as the Midwest) to the high utilization areas (such as the coasts).
2) The main obstacle to constructing said transmission lines is the delays suffered by projects subjected to environmental impact litigation following from attempts to obtain rights of way.
3) The main motive for said environmental impact litigation is a misguided environmental movement's tendency to see any increase of capacity in the nation's energy capacity as harmful to the environment. This cannot be addressed directly in legislation (as has already been attempted, btw) due to the fact that the environmentalist tactic is to use legal tricks to get the courts to delay implementation of systems until the time value of those systems has run out.
4) The electrification of railroads is a proven technology -- indeed the largest railroad line in the world, the Trans-Siberian, is electrified.
5) The "conservation only" environmentalists will not oppose going to electrified railroads since they already see decreasing the energy use of railways and increase of railroad utilization -- which would result from railroad electrification -- as a way of reducing the nation's energy utilization.
6) The railroads already have rights of way that approximate the topology and coverage of transmission lines required to distribute wind electricity from sources to destinations.
7) The use of cryogenic transmission lines buried under the tracks would render the transmission capacity of virtually all existing railroad rights of way enormously greater than the possible use by the railways.
Seastead this.
Probably the biggest problem, aside from the investment required, is the public education that would be needed. Unless there is a significant change in state's rights and other aspects of law in the US, it would be impossible to do this simply as a federal mandate. You are going to have to get the states to buy into the plan and get the people behind it.
Unfortunately, there is a considerable following to the idea that power lines, especially those of high capacity, are dangerous to be near. They reputedly cause all sorts of mysterious health problems. This means that construction of any high capacity power line is going to run into community resistance whenever it crosses a populated area. Most people in state and local government are far more in touch with the feelings of the people they represent than those at the federal level - which is the way it is supposed to work. That means that the state and local governments are highly likely to resist any plans to build high capacity power lines in their area. Fiercely.
The result of this pretty much dooms any plans to build new power lines of any sort, smart or dumb. Environmental impact studies can be drawn out for years and years, all the while increasing the cost. Just plain "never near me" protests will dog any attempts even to upgrade existing infrastructure. And because most of the supposed problems have no rational basis you can't use science to disprove them. It is like disproving the invisible Easter Bunny.
I seriously doubt the ability of any large-scale engineering works in the US today. It isn't that we do not have the engineering skills, we do. We do not have the ability to muster the people behind such projects.
Another thing that occurred to me is that this entire article and all it represents are merely a ploy on the part of Big Oil to put the idea of wind power in a bad light. [emph. added]
Only 1.1% of US electricity is from oil, and that is as a stopgap when a coal train is delayed etc., and the rare use of petroleum coke.
Why do people think we burn oil for electricity? The research is very easy to do:
eia.doe.gov
I've got it memorized just for these occasions. EIA dot DOE dot GOV
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/epm_sum.html
Electricity comes from coal, nuclear, and natural gas in that order.
I guess it's just easier to make up a conspiracy theory that fits political prejudice than do any actual research or thought.
As of 2000, stored power to the tune of about 2.5% of the US load (19.5 gigawatts) was online in the form of Pumped Storage. The EU had 32 gigawatts.
There's plenty of room to do more of that out in the desert; it can be subsurface, so as to have little or no long-term impact on the environment (obviously construction would temporarily beat up the habitat, though.) All pumped storage requires are wires, pumps, generators, a couple of big storage systems (one uphill, one down), and water. Doesn't have to be fresh water, either. The larger the height difference, the more energy can be stored. It's lossy; but still, it is both clean and effective.
Companies like EEStor that are working to create ultracapacitors with storage capacities exceeding those of batteries may be key to storage; storage can be local, on a per-unit basis which insulates users from the myriad types of grid failures that occur. It also allows them to store power locally if they generate any themselves (solar, etc.) Ultracaps are good for moderate term storage without much loss, and they can be fused in such a way as to prevent huge power discharges in case of accidents, so they're pretty safe.
There are some other contenders - flywheels, for instance -- but do *you* want an aging flywheel, high mass, high speed, coming apart in your basement? Me either. I saw a 4-inch grinder wheel come apart once and chunks of it outright severed a 2x4 in the wall next to the workbench. So those are probably best left in large scale storage farms.
Aside from storage, the thing that has always amazed me is that solar never seems to become really affordable. No matter how many ways they make it, or what tech they use, somehow, I can't buy inexpensive panels that will cope with hot summers, cold winters, and rain. New printing process? Ultra cheap cells? Mass production? Sure, I hear about those. But for SOME reason, all their output is bought up, and I can't buy the stuff. Not to get out the tinfoil, but if nothing else, it is very annoying.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I really believe that microgrids - peer-to-peer electricity grids wherein many small-scale power sources are used where optimal - are the answer to this. The big conventional grids lose a lot of electricity to resistance, and have to overproduce to get any redundancy at all. We need to revamp our infrastructure anyway, so why not?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4245584.stm
http://certs.lbl.gov/certs-der-micro.html
http://www.ingenia.org.uk/ingenia/articles.aspx?Index=329
http://www.fuelcellmarkets.com/fuel_cell_markets/news_and_information/3,1,1,1,14428.html
Ok, fine, and as long as we're bending physics by imagining Arazona summer temperature superconductors, why not throw in cold fusion just to top it all off? Suddenly each and every house could convert water into enough power for a whole neighborhood! Talk about distributed renewable clean power!
Because without your superconducting backbone long haul transmission IS a problem, and without effecient long distance transmission, things like wind and solar REALLY ARE at the whims of the weather.
Grow up, if problems were so easy to solve that you could do it by yourself in a thought experiment, they'd have been solved before you were born.
Recent advances improving the efficiency of electrolysis make it feasible to store the energy generated by a wind farm in chemical form, by producing methanol, say. No grid required. Methanol can be transported where it's needed to run engines using existing infrastructure. It can also be used to drive fuel cells. No eminent domain required. Converting private property into the right of way required for high power transmission lines covering the entire country to reach every hill and dale with a little wind or a little sunshine will turn this country into an ugly mess. Totally unnecessary.
Now that's some real spin.
(I failed a vital saving throw against making that joke)
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
I can't believe this. I have worked on several wind energy projects over the years. The large scale utility turbines are huge; some have blades so large that they require an oversized load semi trailer to transport them. They are also not terribly light, even though many are made from composite materials. Spikes? Give me a break. First of all, you do *not* want to extract power from every gust of wind, and turbines and their associated management systems are tailored to that. The speed of the turbines is well regulated by the inertia of the blades and blade pitch adjustments. The objective being to provide the most stable power output possible. When there are spikes (such as when one turbine is more directly pointed into the wind with regard to others in a farm, for example) the spike can be bled off in several ways, the simplest of which being heat. Grid-tie systems do their job very well. I'm pretty sure if this was as big of a problem as it is made out to be, England (with dozens of wind farms and several nuclear reactors) would surely have had an infrastructure nightmare on its hands.
Well, we might actually have the (economically) right amount of transmission. Lots of problems with building transmission in a free market. The projects are hugely expensive, take years to build, and run a lot of regulatory risk. There's the risk that construction get's stopped by a NIMBY problem, but even bigger, there's the problem that transmission has a 50 to 75 year lifetime, and there's just no way to know what the markets will look like that far out. Once you've built a transmission line, you're stuck with it, and it's pretty tempting thing for a state politition to go for cheap votes by regulating your payback out of existance and saying he's helping Joe Sixpack.
All told, except in places with the worst siting problems or strictest environmental codes, it's a lot cheaper to build a new powerplant than new transmission.
Wind makes everything worse, because it's an interrmitment resource. You have to build transmission to support the wind farm at peak output, but a typical wind installation has a capacity factor of 20-30%. So, you've got to build 3-5x as much transmission as you actually use, making all the financing problems 3-5x worse. By comparison, a coal or nuke plant is going to average better than 90% of its rated capacity. It's really hard to get someone to lend you a few billion dollars to build something that's only going to be used at a fraction of its capacity.
IAITEI (I am in the energy industry)
Of course the grid can handle wind and solar. Denmark and Germany has done it for some time. There are some simple ways to use our existing grid with minor tweaks and it will preform just fine. There are some large industrial interruptable loads such as ice and cold storage plants that can go on and off line very quickly while slow to fire-up sources can come on line. The Nuc and coal industries spend a ton of cash on shaping public opinion - do not listen to it. Get informed and do the math on you own. Sure our grid is old and needs upgrading, but that needs to happen even more so if we stick with centralized mega nuc and coal plants. The need to reinvest in infrastructure never goes away.
Just use pumped-storage hydroelectricity next to wind farms.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Stability is the point here, achieved by distribution. The odds of it being both cloudy and calm across the entire country are decidedly low, so you'll always have power available somewhere. If you can shift power around the entire country, you'll have a pretty stable supply.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
The power grid is both dynamic enough to handle spikes and is national already. Energy traders can and do move power from one spot in the country to the next without much difficulty. The problem is losses that occur as power is moved across larger distances... and, the problem in fixing that is eminent domain to build new grid stuff, and a desire to get the taxpayers to pay for the wires.
The bigger problem, in getting new power lines for rural areas, is actually in building transmission. Here, environmentalists make absolutely no sense. In several states, they have already killed projects to build transmission from windmill sites to areas where the power is needed.
This is my sig.
"You're power grids can't handle various wind power spikes of that magnitude!"
So the grid is a series of tubes and they are getting full?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
it can't handle the various spikes that wind farms sometimes have, and there's no efficient way to currently move massive amounts of that power from one section of the country to the other
Flywheels? Superconductor storage units? Both are in use in the commercial sector, most notably semiconduct processing plants, which lose tens (or more) of millions of dollars in product if there's any power problem.
Also, regarding state vs. federal regulation- nothing precludes states (gasp) cooperating with each other. Also, nothing precludes the grid being maintained with an eye towards solving this problem. Also, as you have more distributed generation that windfarms allow, regions become more self-sufficient.
People trying to work this out may find it helpful to start meetings with, "the fate of the planet hinges upon us finding a way to make this work."
Please help metamoderate.
It's ironic that the argument is being made that the power grid is ill-designed for wind farms. That's like saying an automobile is poorly designed for an engine that randomly revs up and sputters out to a halt. One might want to reconsider which part of the infrastructure is less-than-optimally designed for the service being rendered.
got to start thinking globally about this stuff
if the US would just get on board this could work
they are the only one blocking this from happening
back in the day we didnt have no old school
After the second world war, the energy grid of France was a mess: plenty of small companies everywhere producing various type of electricity. It was impossible to rebuild the country on this base.
So the state did bough ALL of them, and unified them into a single enterprise : Électricité de France (EDF). The state was then able to coordinate all the various productions (water, gaz, coal, etc) and to deliver the same electricity to every part of France.
Indeed, this was a huge success that required planing on several dozen years, and it was setup for making benefices at the end.
After that, EDF and her twin sister Gaz de France (GDF) were strong enough to bootstrap the nuclear industry on there own. The state was piloting the research and development through its various ministers, and a regulated price market ensured affordable electricity for all (even for free, in fact, for poor families).
Currently, EDF and GDF have been switched to private companies because of European regulation (monopole is bad, remember), but the main share holder is... the French State, so it can still oversee the development and regulate the price of energy.
Everybody is (kind of) happy : all members of the the European Union can now buy and sell energy in France, and the French government can still protect the citizens from high prices.
He needed land grants and money from JP Morgan.
He built the railroad with the intent of making money. He's not going to turn down money build it, and given that he's enough of an entrepreneur to build it in the first place, he'd fight for it if he could get it. If this was really worth doing, than he'd get money from venture capitalists instead.
He purchased much of the railroad from failing companies.
...or just join his with other people's. Naturally, it works out better if he buys it.
There was huge corruption and wall street issues from the trust. Something that required government intervention to break up. The practically destroyed wall street.
Let me guess: he made more money off of this than he strictly needed. If it wasn't still worth while, people wouldn't be using his railroad. They'd be no worse off than they would have been had it not been built.
He was able to stay in business by giving an unfair advantage to his other business using the rail road during hard times. Basically shifting money on paper.
I don't know what you mean here. If it wasn't for the last sentence, I'd say that you're referring to horizontal monopoly practices that help him and hurt others. Again, if his practices made the rail road not worth using, people would be no worse off than they would be had he not built the rail road.
He did build 1700 miles of track, but at nearly slave labor rates.
If the work wasn't worth the money, they wouldn't have worked for him.
The US government has done many very large and complex projects without corruption.
I can't really argue that point without you actually listing some such projects. It's probably better this way, as each of my counter-arguments would have to be as long as your post. All I can tell you is that if you can find any situation in which a large bureaucracy (which would include pretty much all governments besides dictatorships) that managed to do a large project without large amounts of corruption or incompetence, I will find it surprising.
Nobody in the US has enough money to fix the grid.
You don't need one person to fix the grid. Just make it so people can charge a toll on their power lines, and if it's worth building ones between cities, they'll be built.
The grid must be fixed for us to move into a new distributed system.
I think we all agree on that.
It's a perfect job for the government.
Honestly, I don't think it's so much that there are things that are perfect for the government as just things that are worse for everyone else. There are things that capitalism just won't do, but that doesn't make the government better at it.
Not to private contractors. That is where you get corruption, and failed projects.
So, not even private contractors working for the government? If the government does it on their own, they won't be able to get rid of the people when the project's over.
All the more reason a lot more power should be generated near where it's consumed. Which is one reason solar is good, and why a mix of various alternative power sources is essential to a reliable energy future.
It's always been like this. We've wasted a lot of power we've generated in transmission losses, and especially under Enron's leadership (into crooked debt hell) we've wasted a lot on redundant market manipulation. Many of the grid bottlenecks we're stuck with are good excuses for power barons to restrain supply in order to raise their prices.
We should have a better grid. After that huge 2005 Northeast Blackout, we didn't even bother to reinvest in that infrastructure, though we could see our danger as clearly as we couldn't see our noses on our faces. But we shouldn't just give yet another $billions handout to these spoiled, reckless power barons. Either they should invest in their own distribution, or the people should do for electricity what we did for the Internet, and the electic grid before that: build, own and protect a grid that doesn't just get written off as an insurance loss.
But really the end-run around these power misers should be better power networking, which means better local distribution. We've learned a lot about networks and grids since we built any of the several that changed the world. We can get the next version even more right, and avoid repeating the history that causes these crises.
--
make install -not war
The popular conception of wind power is fast-paced windmills cutting birds in half as they twirl through the air whenever the wind happens to blow. I was just in Germany and saw many windmills turning so slowly through the air that if a bird hit one, it was either not paying attention or drunk. I've seen the same thing on the hills of Crete overlooking Heraklion. One point is that you needn't have hurricane force winds to make wind power effective. All you need is an area of 'prevailing winds' that are more or less predictable--just like the trade winds that predictably blew sailing ships across the oceans for centuries. There are many areas like this all across the USA. For example, the Dalles area on the Columbia River, well known for its prevailing winds. Here's a wind map for Oregon, for example: http://www.eere.energy.gov/windandhydro/windpoweringamerica/maps_template.asp?stateab=or
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
That's just the thing - they don't build new auto plants or aluminum smelters out the hell in the middle of nowhere for just that reason.
I guess you don't remember the Saturn plant, eh? (Just for starters.)
ANY time you build a new plant - unless it's on the site of an old one - you'll need to string a new high line and a bunch of other infrastructure. The sites where the land is cheap enough to make it economically feasible will not normally have it already available. And the cost of installing it is small compared to the difference in land price between building in an existing urban area and building in something more open.
Ditto with building a new power plant, of course. (Even for a new peaking plant in an urban area you still have to string something. The chunk of the grid that powers a warehouse won't handle even a tiny power plant. If you're in the SF Bay area think about the miles of high-line they ran along I-880 to support the plant near the CA 237 intersection, just for a little gas-fired plant.)
Wind farms are just a special case of this. Like hydropower dams, they have to be put where the resource is. And this will be somewhere that the existing power transmission lines aren't big enough to handle the energy harvested.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
why not just have a local station that makes hydrogen? Rather than moving the power during spikes of wattage, just switch on the watter seperator.
just place a wind farm anywhere near a large group of politicians, that should solve the spiking issue. their constant blowing of hot air could solve so many problems (power, heating and fertilizer).
Isn't there some kind of interstate commerce thing in the constitution thing to cover that? Just a sperm of the moment thought...you know.
What?
What a LAME excuse for dissing wind power. I'm sure all of the incumbent power companies could afford to add a few thousand huge capacitors at the outputs of each wind farm to even the load on their networks. It would cost less than the lunch money for all of their executives on any given day.
Or maybe I'm conflating my AC load stuff with my DC load stuff; I'm not an EE by training. Whatever. They can do it, easily. Anyone who's complaining is just trying to get in the way. God forbid that decentralized power generation gets a foothold anywhere.. that might enable the lower classes ('riff-raff') to delay their fall back into serfdom.
Irony: CAPTCHA for this was 'ETHNIC'
Store the power in Energon Cubes. Then let me know where you put those >;-)
Thanks,
Megatron
Ok. For me the idea is that you generate all the power you can at the wind farm. You don't try to limit the speed of the spinning blades so that the ac generator produces 60 cycle power. Second, you convert the energy to hydrogen and oxygen (electrolyze water). Store mentioned hydrogen and oxygen in a storage tank. Same tank different end, convert hydrogen and oxygen into electricity via a fuel cell. Turn DC into ac with a transistor power inverter. Put as much (or as little) power into the grid as you wish. You can't put any more in when the tank has only water. You can get slammed with huge amounts of power during a hurricane or bad windstorm. The energy will still be going to the grid in the calm that follows.
I am sure Texas will love to have the Feds control their
grid.
You are already paying for it. It just shifts who gets the cash and who gets to own the means of production. If you are more than happy to have a perpetual open ended contract where you have no idea what you will be charged in the future for the product delivered...well...doesn't that just sound dumb? In essence, signing up for grid supplied power as your only source is just that. You're going to be paying that bill the rest of your life anyway (assuming like most people you will probably want electricity forever), so the question then changes to something more directly to the point now that this money issue is resolved, do you want to buy something you can eventually pay off and own and enjoy (solar PV does this in most cases, it can be as little as 7 years on up to 20 years at today's prices, but it does get paid off at some time), or just perpetually rent forever with no fixed price to look at? Do you want to build your own equity, or just keep building your electric landlord's equity? That money is leaving your wallet no matter what.
As to the issue of windpower and the grid, again, a much larger shift to smaller and more decentralized means of production means we won't have to rebuild the entire grid infrastructure so much. A *lot* of folks who have already gone full alternative energy run both types of systems now, because in the winter months the winds usually pickup as solar gain drops, vice versa in summer. Not everywhere, but it is exceedingly common now in those circles.
I look at this energy issue the same way as I do my big garden and this "eating" thing that seems to be as popular as using electricity. Ya, I could work more, make more money, then drive to the store and buy expensive organic stuff...or..just produce it onsite, eliminate several expensive middleman steps and use a lot less energy into the bargain, and not contribute so much to excess carbon emissions and so on.
When I look how much I get out of that garden (and my other stuff, dinner tonight home produced burgers with my own tomatoes and other stuff in a salad, topped off with my own watermelon for dessert) compared to hours worked and production costs involved, it is a rather well paying "job" to just do it myself. Tradeoffs, everyone gets to pick what they want to pay for and everyone gets a choice to pick if you want to own "it", "it" meaning any number of life's necessities or things you *really* want like back to the electricity, or help someone else own it and they might turn some over to you for a price to be constantly adjusted probably not much in your favor forever.
And that's it, along with economies of scale. Computers never got cheap until it went from thousands of home PCs to millions, then the market exploded and now look at it. Same deal will happen with alternative energy, and even though the earlier adopters pay more, they still get the benefits immediately, and it just keeps getting better from that point on.
choices-it's nice to have them
no choice and vendor lockin-not so nice
This is the crap that G.W. Bush has been pushing... to "share" our electricity rates equally. Well, I have this to say about that: "NO!!!"
My electricity rates are probably lower than most. But that's because "cheap hydroelectric power" has dammed OUR local rivers, ruining some of OUR recreational opportunities, covering up OUR land, and killing off OUR local salmon and sturgeon and trout and waterfowl...
You east-coasters... go damage your own environment further if you want electricity at the same rates. The fact is, we pay for our power in other ways. "Sharing" equally is not equal. Nor is it equitable.
There is plenty of windpower here, too. But windpower is not cost-free either. There are environmental and other costs, including opportunity costs, that must be paid.
We do not want to pay your rates AND with our environment too. Look elsewhere for a free ride.
And in rare cases, can act as the Executive Branch, and "sign executive orders", publish "findings" and claim executive privilege when necessary.
In my wildest dreams, it would be outside of the Red vs. Blue dimension of politics. Yes, it would have it's own politics, but not fettered by what we have now. Among the first cases it would hear, I would imagine would be:
Ha ha ha :-D :)) ROFL... you think I'm kidding.
It's a perfect job for the government. Not to private contractors. That is where you get corruption, and failed projects.
Yes, government is where you get corruption and failed projects.
I don't understand why we are obsessed with regenerating back into the grid.
Localized wind power and solar for individual houses is the right answer.
I mean, I saw it on that "Off the Grid" show on the Green Channel.
Kriston
I am someone who works in the power industry. I actually operate a high voltage transmission system. Moving power over long distances is not physically possible. Look up information on load flow studies and info about basic circuit analysis. When you try to move power over long distances, you introduce instability into the system. The best way to build a power grid is to build the generation next to the load. The main problem we are dealing with is impedance of transmission lines. The impedance of lines tends to make the generators and loads pull out of synch. When the system begins to pull out of synch due to power transfers, the system becomes unable to handle disturbances. Then, when there is a disturbance, you get a cascading outage(think dominos). Blackout is the result. Alternative energy is a great idea, just build it close to the loads. Also please go to www.nerc.com to see all the standards on how power companies operate.
It may be overkill - but WORM (Write Once Read Many) disks are probably the way to go. They are designed for archival purposes and enough big companies use them specifically for archives, so you probably won't have any trouble finding some way to read them 25 years down the road
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/tip/1,289483,sid5_gci912648,00.html
Why not just store the energy for awhile or so and then release it later?
Not that I'm an expert here, but couldn't wind mill energy be transfered to the grid in controlled burst of energy?
When I say this, I mean, that instead of the wind mills being directly tied to the grid, maybe a buffer/temporary storage area could be created to store the electricity and when that buffer has reached the proper levels which matches the specs of the grid, (amp/volt/etc...), then it could unload itself into the grid?
Does that even make sense?
You're both right. Corruption is common in government AND private projects. The problem isn't the people corrupting, that's inevitable. The problem is that we don't have a good system of accountability set up to put all this corruption in the public eye.
NR wrote a much more in depth article about why wind was largely impractical. The NYT seems to have left out the part about back-up/stabilizing nat-gas capacity that would be needed, and that the nat-gas generators that would need to be used are not very efficient. If the NYT was going to rip off a NR column they could at least have the courtesy to do it right.
...is add some wind turbines to the mix.
-- Boycott Shell
I have come to be much more skeptical of wind. Owing to the chance of weeks of becalmed weather over a continental landmass, every kilowatt of wind generation needs to be backed up somehow with fossil generation. In other words, wind power does not replace any fossil fuel generation capacity, it merely supplements it to reduce the total amount of fuel burned. And given the variability of wind, wind needs to be sized for peak rating some multiple -- 5 times? more according to European experience? -- of the average amount of power and fossil fuel replacement you can expect. So what degree of CO2 reduction can you expect with a wind-power supplement to your fossil power plants -- maybe 20 percent? Both from a global warming perspective and a fuel-substitution perspective to move stationary users of oil to electricity, you need much more than 20 percent.
It seems that wind is popular and getting various kinds of support, monetary and otherwise on account of its "zero carbon" nature, but I no longer see it as zero carbon, merely as carbon reducing for the fossil power plants, and there must be other ways than filling the landscape with wind turbines to get similar levels of carbon reduction.
I see the "green marketing" of wind power where your power company offers to charge you more "to get your power from wind" as a kind of carbon-offset scam. You pay more for power with the assurance that your power is "carbon neutral." If wind received the widespread application to make a real difference in carbon emission, and the people who sign up for wind power regard themselves as early adopters of what is believed to become a much larger scale operation, you are perhaps at best "reducing your carbon footprint" from electricity by 20 percent, which is much more cost effective to achieve through household energy efficiency than through wind power.
I am someone who operates a high voltage transmission system. The real problem is that it is not physically possible to move large amounts of power over long distances. We use high voltage transmission to help (138kV to 765kV), but you still have impedance. This impedance between generators and loads and between generators and generators causes instability as power transfers increase. The effect is to cause the system to move into a region of instability. Once the system starts to become unstable, it can't handle disturbances. This is what causes blackouts. The most reliable way to build a power system is to build loads and generators close to each other. The problem is basic physics. For more info, go to www.nerc.com, or look up info on load flow studies, power system stability, and basic circuit analysis.
When the supply of wind power collapses send a message through a network to appliances which can be switched off for a few minutes without causing too many problems.
Heaters could work this way. They could pay a lower charge for energy in return for participating in load balancing.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
High voltage DC is the only solution to this problem. A HVDC backbone would allow power to be transmitted at lengths exceeding the limitations of AC. We at the University of Wyoming have done multiple studies on transmitting Wyoming wind and coal power to Chicago, Texas, and California to name a few. Nothing has been acted upon because of the immense political inertia involved.
The biggest 'easy' alternative energy projects are
wind on the plains states and grid it to the east and
west coast.
Solar energy in the western deserts and grid it to the west coast.
California is the biggest economy state, and biggest power user
so it should work pretty well.
Some of the hard alternative energy ideas are tapping the
Florida current, and the Jetstream.
Whoever figures one of those two out is a Trillionaire.
1% of the world wide Jetstream could power the whole world:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_stream#Future_power_generation
The Florida Current passes about 30 times all the rivers of
the world in water in that area.
Tapping that current with underwater Aquanators would make
insane power for the Eastern part of the US.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Stream#Normal_behavior_of_the_Gulf_Stream
Aquanator:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/09/26/1096137100758.html?oneclick=true
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
screw 'the grid'.
think outside the grid.
The grid is the outside controlling you.
Imagine no grid at all
There is one flaw in your argument.
You don't have to send more current through a wire to get power from A->B. You can raise
the voltage. Double the voltage => double the power, but at the same *current*. The wire
size can be the same. The only problem with higher voltages is increased chance that the voltage will jump through whatever is being used to insulate the + and -.
For long distances -- it would be cheaper to up the voltage, use smaller wires (less copper), with more 'cheap' insulation between the + and -.
OTOH -- maybe what we need is a better power-over-IP protocol -- and just make it a broadband capacity issue...
For many reasons, wind power is not very good. I'll cite just a couple; When do you need it the most? when it is hottest. When is there the least wind?.... It is also maintenance intensive. A single 1000 Mw Generator needs far less maintenance (and is less susceptible to failure) than 1000 single Mw units. Wind power is unstable and simply surges and falls constantly. The regulation ends up decreasing efficiency by an amazing amount as well as wreaking havoc on systems controls. As for renewable energy in general, getting it on the grid for long distance and sustained periods is NOT the issue. There are already plans announced for localized solar usage, a "mini grid" if you will, that is self sustaining for periods of high demand and simply draws excessive demand from the grid. Remember we are NOT trying to replace the generation facilities (at this point), just supplement the peak demands. Sure, you can power your home but the main thing that renewables can't replace is the industrial requirements, which is by far the biggest usage of electricity.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Here's a useful briefing paper on dealing with intermittency in wind power. It's a UK document, and has some hard numbers about wind plants in Europe.
When wind power is covering less than 10% of the load, the UK study says no special arrangements are necessary to provide extra capacity to cover periods of low wind. I've seen 15% mentioned in US discussions. There's enough excess dispatchable generating capacity ("dispatchable" means you get output when you ask for it) to provide backup power for 10-15% wind. Above that, it becomes more of a problem.
I've seen some US studies which indicate that even if wind power is averaged across a 1000 mile area (most of the Midwest and Southwest US), about 5% of the time, the whole collection of wind farms is generating very little output. So just running transmission lines around won't solve the problem. You need extra dispatchable capacity.
That dispatchable capacity is usually natural gas, hydro, or pumped storage. Dispatchable capacity of this type is typically a source where the installed equipment is relatively cheap but the fuel is expensive. In practice, this means gas turbines. If you have dams around that collect water but don't have enough continuous flow to be full-time hydropower sources, they can be effective intermittent sources. The California Water Project uses some of its reservoirs that way; they generate power during peak periods, but not all the time, because that would drain the reservoir. Some California Water Project sites pump water uphill at night, when electricity is cheap, and profitably run it back down during peak periods in the daytime. Pure pumped storage plants are rare; the US has two.
Solar, of course, is not dispatchable. Nuclear plants are normally run full time, since they're mostly capital cost; the fuel cost is small.
The Fed's have already assigned the authority to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Energy_Regulatory_Commission
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Electric_Reliability_Corporation
Interstate commerce links to federal highway funds and is used by the Federal Government to force agendas upon the States. I'll use laws regarding alcohol and speed limits for examples.
Rural states, like Montana, had a legal drinking age of 18 until 1987. Kentucky and several other states had a BAC limit of .10 until 2002-2003, when it changed to .08. In 1974 or so, the speed limit was changed to 55 MPH nationally. All of these changes were mandated, in a round about way, by the federal government to the states. The states made the changes if they wanted to receive federal highway funds, which they needed to build and repair highways in the states. I never heard of a serious effort to refuse the federal mandate and the state refuse to have its citizens pay that portion of federal tax. So, you would pay and then not receive if you did not change to the federal rule.
Whether these agendas are good or bad is not my point, only who controls them. Federal control of the electrical power grid could be good, or it could give more control over our lives to those who know nothing of them. Urban areas are not the same as suburban or rural, at least not for the small stuff like 55 MPH versus 65 MPH.
Should California, which pays a lot a federal tax and needs a lot of electricity, be able to control via congress what someone in North Dakota uses electricity for, or how much, or when?
"What luck for the rulers that men do not think." - Adolph Hitler
Just use the wind turbines to charge the capacitors, the capacitors to charge the batteries, and the batteries could be shipped by truck anywhere in the nation. Problem solved! ;-)
Haven't we learned enough already? The Feds keep getting jurisdiction and the red tape gets worse. The Feds are FORBIDDEN by the Constitution from dealing in this, and most other matters. A short list of Federal agencies that are in violation of the Constitution:
Department of Education
Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (would make a great convenience store)
DEA (except for drugs crossing state lines)
Department of Family and Children
Department of Labor
Actually, almost all of them that begin with "Department of" are a violation of the Constitution.
To clarify what I'm say. Here's what the Constitution says:
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
That means that unless the Feds are specifically given a power in the Constitution, it doesn't have that power. Our trillions of dollars of dept are the result of the Feds sticking their noses in places it doesn't belong. Our erosion of Rights is a result of them poking around where they aren't wanted. How is this happening? You let it happen. You think that laws you like should apply equally in California and Kansas. Why? Pass your local laws and be happy. If they want to teach creationism in Kansas, so fucking what. Let them live in ignorance because it isn't any of your damn business!
Now when local governments are violating the Constitution (e.g. civil rights and voting), I want the Feds to come down hard on the local yokals. The Feds do have a legitimate purpose. Let's keep them focused on that.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Apparently wind turbines cause bats to die from a variation of the bends: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/08/08
I tried submitting this last week, but eh, /. hasn't been showing much interest in my stories.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
We need to get away from thinking that nuclear power is magic and can break all the constraints everthing else is stuck with. Nuclear power is a thermal power generating technique, so you want to make the units as large as is safely possible (to get some sort of decent efficiency out of the things) and site them somewhere with large amounts of reliable cooling water. The next thing is you need the infrastructure to get the fuel in, simple in major port cities but not elsewhere. It makes a lot more sense to have a few half decent plants and a large transmission infrastructure than expensive, inefficient plants scattered all over the landscape that may need to be shut down every time there is a drought. The final factor is that it is really a very specialised and mainly military industry which would make it very difficult to find the people to run a large number of sites.
The solution is so simple, I'm baffled as to why nobody figured it out yet. Build a second parallel grid. Let the other old crumbling grid do its thing. Let the new wind-enabled "green" grid do its thing. At the electrical stations that serve relatively small areas, pump both grids into a huge ass inverter (hell, put some solar panels and a windmill at that station while you're at it) and churn out power to the neighborhoods. Problem solved. Yeah, it'll cost a trillion bucks, but when's the last time you heard of the government not spending money on something because it was too expensive?
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
You're making baby Jeebuz cry.
You don't get it, do you?
The problem is dispersion of sudden spikes in power.
Electricity cannot be stored like water or air.
You can't use the sudden spikes taper it down and spread it over a week or so. A 10,000 volt electric spike can't be tapered down to 110 volts and spread over 91 days.
Your alternate grid or parallel as you call it will do what with the spikes? Send it ground? Use it to dig up earth worms (like in Godzilla movie)? Charge a few batteries? Are you crazy? That spike will stay for 10 seconds or so and even if capacitors can be somehow adapter to use it to charge instantly (highly unlikely) how do you discharge them?
If we accomodate spikes from wind farms we would have been farming electricity from lightning by now, and the biggest wars would be fought in the wettest of places on Earth and not in Iraq.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
The large base load generators already built, steal the show. Any new source for electric power generation, must be paid for, and just adding nuclear power plants means nix for the rest. I mean who will pay for that nuke...let alone the rest of the new sources of power? That's the unmentioned catch 22. Unstabilized spikes of power, will soon render demand, due to malfunctioning(consumer) equipment. The Integrated Transmission System(ITS), was declared at full capacity in the mid nineties. Nimby's don't just happen in some states...every new line or line upgrade, whether it be transmission(high voltage) or distribution(low voltage) line generates stark terror in the communities, and believe me, they don't care about down-line neighbors! And then you have the "good-ole boy" co-ops selling the stupid idea of "owning your own lines & poles," but not providing routine vegetation management(the cause of most winter & summer storm outages), and crooks like the TVA under $25billion dollar debt. Living in Tennessee, I miss Georgia Power...Great paying contractors, few outages, low energy bills...They have their act together!
Don't you think...? Or don't you?
I'm afraid that it's not entirely true, granted the power spikes would be an issue, but the main problem is that of frequency variation within the Supergrid. Currently it varies much less than 1% (from 50hz or 60hz depending on your country) in large grids.
Once wind power gets over a certain percentage of the grid input (IIRC approximately 22%) then this frequency variation can become unacceptable, throwing all of the other conventional turbine based generating stations out of whack, which would be bad.
...uh...right. You've never worked on a government project, have you? Perhaps you should learn a little before you make such absolute claims.
What a fool you are to think that government is immune from corruption. It's not like they make the laws and there is no competition. No, nothing like that...
not true.
He needed land grants and money from JP Morgan.
^ Not the government.
He purchased much of the railroad from failing companies.
^ Not the government.
There was huge corruption and wall street issues from the trust.
^ Please define and elaborate on this corruption.
Something that required^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H government intervention [was used] to break up.
^ Fixed that.
The practically destroyed wall street.
^ Not the government. Please define "destroy" and elaborate.
He was able to stay in business by giving an unfair advantage to his other business using the rail road during hard times. Basically shifting money on paper.
^ Please define "unfair" and elaborate.
He did build 1700 miles of track, but at nearly slave labor rates.
^ I'd like to point out that slaves, in fact, do not earn wages.
The US government has done many very large and complex projects without corruption.
Nobody in the US has enough money to fix the grid.
The grid must be fixed for us to move into a new distributed system.
It's a perfect job for the government. Not to private contractors. That is where you get corruption, and failed projects.
^ I dispute all of above points, except the first, which I consider irrelevant.
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
More localized generation. You don't need to worry about sending power across the country when it is being produced on your own roof.
The French have done reasonably well with their plants, but even they have problems when the rain decides not to fall and the rivers do not provide enough cooling water. And France has a Western marginal climate...plenty of water on the West and Northern coasts. Much of the US is far inland, rainfall is variable and abstraction for human use is depleting a lot of rivers. Part of the US problem is that the best places for nuclear plants may have high population density, and may also be well suited to wind power - which gets us back to the infrastructure issue.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The people who are screaming now for wind power will be the same people screaming "NOT IN MY BACK YARD!" when the power companies try to build more power lines in their area to get the power to them. Regardless of the source of energy there will always be large groups of people opposed to it. They will scream and shout to get the power shut down then scream that they have no power. Idiots.
The government solves most problems (including the interstate system, etc) using private contractors these days.
We have a welfare system
"The Congress shall have power: To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States".
federal highway system
"To establish Post Offices and Post Roads".
healthcare for underemployed people, and federal guidelines for public schools, none of which is constitutional.
I'll grant that the others are iffier under the commerce clause.
I hear you can take a very simple relativistic effect like synchrotron radiation and strip atoms of their electrons to create a plasma, separate the charges, and store it in magnetic containment until needed. Worst case, you could transport plasma to where it's needed or else just build another mini-synchrotron anywhere you want. It's basically the same physics used in the pulsed-plasma fusion generators(although inherently easier to contain). The science and technology are out there but there's some kind of resistance to it from within academia and the government.
For god's sake, ethanol? How retarded.
US grid has extremely low capacity in high-voltage lines. Any decently run power company would never allow that. But that is long term investment (lines and transformers last 40+ years) and no-one wants to put money there, esp. for some exotic feature called "redundancy". Last black-out in NYC (2003) was due to lack of redundancy in high-voltage lines.
No sig today.
the high cost of electricity is not due to lack of generation, it's due to lack of transmission.
A hand up and a foot on every chest...
BLOWS!!!!
Your federally-subsidized wind power generator may well "turn the meter back" and thus lowering your electric bill. But the electric company wants nothing to do with the spiky, voltage-sagging excess power home wind turbines put out. Thus, your excess power does not go on the grid and is wasted. The costs to clean up the wind power are in excess of $50,000 per site, an economic non-starter.
So, in 2010 GM delivers Volt, the electric-gas hybrid that charges off a 110/208 volt home circuit. The load-leveling idea is that you plug the car in when you get home and the car is recharged during the grid's low-load overnight hours. But wait, your state has not allowed the electric company to lower overnight electric rates, and you don't have a new multi-rate electric meter. That means you come home at 5pm and plug in your electric-gulping car during the peak load hours, causing the electric company to power up standby generators that cost ratepayers up to $4,000 per megawatt hour (Source: Texas grid, June 2008). What a fiasco.
Meanwhile, individual states like California are cleverly out-sourcing pollution; forcing power companies to build new electric plants and their pollution out of state. But NIMB detractors of transmission lines (aluminum helmets on!) keep that power from getting to the growing economic areas that need the power.
In short, we are screwed by a total lack of foresight, common sense, and grid Balkanization. Without a much better grid, and better/cheaper ways to hook up eco-power, we are economically doomed. Any idea what electricity rationing (e.g., blackouts) would do to your lifestyle?
There is only one solution: nationalize the grid!
Unfortunately, superconducting grid-capable cables are produced at the rate of 100Km per year (Source: American Superconductor Inc.) and a national grid would take millions of killometers (and thousands of tons of silver and other rare metals), not to mention the supercooling system. Won't happen in the next 25 years.
Fuel prices quadrupled in the 1970s. Everybody was in a big panic about the oil shortage. For a short time, there was a big buzz about windmills and solar panels. Then Americans got over it, and went right back to the gaz-guzzlers.
It's no dirty little secret. If you're unable to wheel the power where it needs to be, or store it, it does no good.
I'm so sick of all these green whits saying putting solar in the deserts and windmills on the mountain tops and we'll all be hunky dory.
Forget it. These small-scale generetors need to be close to the users to be of any effect.
amazing how the corrupt congress and corrupt oligarch defense contractor/oil tycoon driven executive branch have done all these major projects recently without corruption (Iraq war, War on Terror....)
Funded of course by central banking cartel, the mothers of all corruption, brought into existence by corruption.
...we can invent nano tech EVERYthing...but our grid cant handle a "power surge". You cant convince me this issue cant be fixed in a VERY short amount of time.
Joe Investor
We'll never know. Dick Cheney had his meetings on energy policy in 2001 - which probably include the pre-9/11 'invade Iraq plan' - classified forever.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Where did I say dump the grid? I said add in a lot more solar so we won't have to massively upgrade the grid so much, because we can add to local production, directly for homes and businesses onsite, no grid required. And solar is more than just electricity, we have solar thermal as well, which could be used for a lot more hot water heating and space heating. The article is about the wind farms and not being able to use the power, my counter is a slightly larger emphasis on local production means we won't have to bump up the grid so much. Personally I would prefer an "all of the above" approach with energy, that and a much greater emphasis on dropping demand via better insulation in buildings and better and more efficient appliances and so on. All of the above, we are going to need all of it.
Solar as a stand alone source is very practical and thousands of people just in the US already use it, with battery banks. This isn't exotic or very rare anymore, man, this is 2008, the tech is solid and is out there working. When solar PV was first invented and used it cost thousands of dollars a watt, it is now down to full retail at some outlets under 4 bucks a watt, and getting better all the time.
Properly sized home battery banks can last for years, mine are ten years old this year and still work fine, despite any number of internet experts assuring me they might only last 2-3 years and need to be replaced. I heard the same thing when Priuses first came out, all sorts of internet experts claimed the batteries wouldn't last, but so far, very few people who own those cars have replaced them, many are well over one hundred thousand miles and still working.
As for leeching off the neighbors, well personally my panels weren't subsidized, regular plain full price retail. Hell, for the longest time home owners just in general terms were "leeching" off their usually poorer renting neighbors because they got a mortgage deduction and the renters didn't.
Governments offering incentives for this or that are common, it's beyond common, it is normal, it is exactly how this system works right now, the tax code is slap full of deductions or other ways to lower your taxes for this or that, so really, where's the beef? Local property taxes going to public schools, even single people and elderly with kids long gone out of the schools still pay that, because we the people folks decided it was a good idea for the commons. Corporate deductions for big business dudes to sit in a fancy and expensive restaurants and eat, and to travel around and show each other power points??? To own and operate private jets?? What the hell... Solar PV credits right now are such small potatoes compared to other forms of what could be called "tax payer leeching" it ain't funny.
And most other forms of energy delivery have been subsidized. The grid, just in general terms,centralized delivery, that whole idea, all those transmission lines are just put there, they cross private property all over, no one gets a rental check for that, the government mandates access. That's a huge subsidy that's an artificial subsidy worth who knows how many billions going to benefit private companies, but they deemed it a good enough way to benefit the "commons". Same with natural gas delivery and so on, or how about municipal water supply? The public roads? How far do you want to go with this?
Development of most forms of energy people get delivered have all benefited from tax monies or special grants like granted access, look at nuclear, untold huge big number billions in tax money went into developing it, and even today not a single plant out there has their own full private insurance, they all make use of the government-tax money-as the ultimate last insurer. If they had to pay full private rates, that would sure bump up that price to the end user.
We have a DOE, they do continual research work on all forms of energy, you name it, coal to hydro to e
As if the government isn't corrupt. The government would just take bribes to sub out the work to the private contractors, just like every other big government project. Don't be so fucking naive.
Why can't we just start doing this on a "piecemeal" basis with individual states forming coalitions or agreements to have interstate lines and then eventually link them all together? If the concerns are about power leaving your area, who better to share with than your immediate neighbor. An agreement with a bordering state seems much easier to accomplish than coming to an agreement on how to run a new power line through 10+ states.
in a figurative sense...
Thank you, captain obvious. Now consider you have a battery (fossil fuel) at point A powering a load (a house, for example) at point B. What happens when you add another battery in parallel (say a solar panel on the roof of said house) also at point B. What happens to the current between points A and B? Hint: it does not increase...
This is a common misconception about how the grid works. People think the generators are batteries waiting to be used, and all we have to do is turn a light on.
Wrong.
The grid is a complex machine that anticipates when you are going to turn the light on, and attempts to start a generator at the same time so that they can produce the electricity you need, when you need it. For example, here is Ontario's guess about how much power they will need today.
The problem is the generators can take a while to start. Take for example a steam powered turbine. The operator assumes (from past history) that by 3pm 10MW will be required by the grid and so in anticipation of that, he starts burning more fuel at 2:30 to heat more water.
However, at 3pm when he is burning enough fuel to produce 10MW, the wind in the area changes direction, and those wonderfully green wind generators now put out an extra 3MW. The total power being generated is 13MW, however, the demand is only for 10MW. For sake of the argument, it will take 1/2hr (in my example) for the turbine to slow down to 7MW (due to built up energy in the boiler - nuclear is even slower to react). There is an excess of 3MW on the grid that MUST be consumed or bad things will happen. By the way, this is why Manitoba Hydro can offer such great rates to the locals. They purchase cheep excess power from the states all night, then sell expensive power during the day. (Thank you, btw. As a result its cheaper for me to heat my house in -30C with electricity then natural gas.)
Here's where the thin wire problem starts to come into effect. Next door, they have hydro power, which can very quickly be dialed down and they would be glad to purchase the 3MW of excess power we have (since its excess, the market price will be low). The line connecting us can handle 5MW. However, there is currently (sorry) 4MW already flowing from us to them. Adding the 3MW puts us over the 5MW limit and again bad things happen.
The only option left is for the wind mills to feather their blades and reduce production. The steam turbine keeps burning the fossil fuels. All because we could not export our excess.
I'm in my right mind and I have the answer to everything!
Look for an endless list of rationalizations, excuses, evasions and circumlocutions from the power cartel about why a large number of small independents producing power would just not be the right thing.
We heard similar bullshit years ago from the telco giants and from AT&T (the Picture Phone that Never Was!!) about how they were a national "resource" and deregulating telecommunications
would be harmful.
In the paradigm shift to come, widely available cheap energy at low cost will be easily obtained from mother nature and the big behemoth power plants will be relegated to the same fate as the companies that produced ice prior to the advent of the refrigerator.
It was many years ago, but I used to work as a contractor for the Western Area Power Administration, aka WAPA ( http://www.wapa.gov/ ). This is part of the Department of Energy, and has sister organizations that cover the entire United States. IIRC, they don't build new transmission lines per se, but they help manage them with all of the involved owners. Perhaps the DOE is a good place to start. Has anyone even bothered to look if they are working on this issue?
Oh hey, look at that: http://www.wapa.gov/newsroom/pdf/WCIOpenSeasonOutcome82608.pdf
- Necron69
It is not entirely the governments fault. As with any business the path to responsibley serving the customer is greased only by how much this will increase the profit of the business concerned. In other words to keep costs down and profits high, new technical improvements to supply must increase sales and not drive down the profit.
What do you do with a 10,000 volt electric spike? Install a mechanical governor on the wind collector to integrate changes in its speed. Use the collected power to turn very heavy flywheels (further integration), which then turn traditional generators through a conic drive transmission controlled electronically. The result is the mechanical equivalent of a variac -- a variable transformer. In fact, a large variac could be installed on the output of the generator. A large contactor present on the wind collector could break the circuit if output jumps beyond a reasonable limit. With the circuit broken, the collector will spin freely for a few moments, while the flywheel will prevent an immediate drop. An algorithm could be designed to control the variacs and other devices to produce very stable output.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
"Cap'n, me poor wee bairns can't handle the power!"
"Damn it, Scotty, I told you to upgrade from the coal fired turbines!"
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
"The problem is that we don't have a good system of accountability set up to put all this corruption in the public eye."
That's only a part of the problem. The other part is scale/scope. It's easy to find and deal with small issues of corruption, but nearly impossible to deal with larger scale corruption.
That's why it's important not to put our energy eggs into one federal basket. We should let this happen at local levels, with many competing forms of energy production, and let the market find the best ones.
-Jeff
Please learn the difference between a dissenting opinion and a troll before you moderate.
That's why we need to make a massive investment in infrastructure in this country. Only thing is that I don't hold out much hope for that ever happening.
In answer to your question, it's because I've seen what power utility monopolies do. Where I live National Grid is the monopoly in both power and natural gas.
We just got hit with a 21% price increase for electricity and numerous nickle and dime increases for natural gas.
What irritates me about the natural gas side is that they already charge us for distribution, and it's a significant sum. So why do they have to hike our rates on that side so they can pay to upgrade the lines. Shouldn't they have been doing that all along?
The most recent one has them wanting to pass advertising costs to it's customer base in order to attract more people to use natural gas to heat their homes.
So there you see the reason.
1. With things like solar power, by the time you own the panels for 20 years (and from the quotes I've obtained locally, it's at LEAST 20 years of ownership to pay off the cost of the panel and installation), you're a good 2/3rds. or more into the "expected lifetime" for the panel.
2. The "perpetual, open-ended contract" you refer to for electricity provided by a utility company doesn't really work quite like that. It's a month to month service with NO contract. You can cancel at any time with no penalty. If the power companies jack the prices up too far, people will quickly decide that generating their own power has suddenly become a better option, and will invest more heavily in it. The utilities HAVE to keep costs below a certain threshold to avoid losing their customer base.
3. One of the big "pros" to your garden example is the fact that we generally agree that home-grown food tastes "better" (fresher, etc.). Another benefit is the idea that it's organic, so you know what you're eating. Neither applies to power generation. The electricity you'd generate yourself is not "better" for your electronics than what you get off the grid, nor does it make any of your devices or appliances give a better "user experience".
Your going to need a *lot* of citations for all of that, it just doesn't jibe with what I have seen, especially near a half a million folks starving because of US corn growing. Latest stats from two weeks ago they are going to have an additional billion bushels this year over what was already a near record spring estimate forecast, and no way did or will all that extra go into ethanol. Besides that, the US is under zero obligation to feed the world, that is up to individual nations, any exports are gravy, and that's it. If we have extra, fine, sell it, if we don't, their call why they don't have food. I look around and see a lot of stupid asshole nations who have their own weird policies that contribute to their own peoples miserty. Look at zimbabwe, used to be the alrgest food exporter in africa, nowe a basket case with the people there eating leaves and mice and bugs. That isn't my fault nor anyones but their own fault at this stage of the game. Same with any of the huge population nations, jeebus crap, zip the pants up now and then, they should buy a clue theyu need to maybe watch that population level. Not trying to be a hardass about it, but I am not an immediate blame the US first always on every issue. national food production is a national level security issue, ALL nations should make sure whatever they do they can be able to feed themselves before they buy dictator palace one or tank or stupid jet fighter. How many tractors could you make with the resources in one tank? See?
Anyway, back to the immediate, I know a lot of folks who have solar, none of them have any sort of 30 plus year payback, it is much less than that unless you are paying some really ridiculous amount for labor to do the install, if you do the bulk of it yourself, which you can if you are any kind of normal tool user, you can save a lot.
And for that matter, no law says you have to grid tie, you can run a sub panel and just run a few circuits, and use a battery bank for storage. Nice when the grid goes down after a hurricane or storm to keep the freezer working and maybe a fan, yes? Power the home office so the whole room is one big UPS protected system? It never has to be either/or, that's the biggest fallacy about solar PV out there, and nothing scales for the homeowner like solar PV, one panel to whatever. heck, I went two years near with just one panel as my sole electricity source, so I really don't want to hear about people's overblown expectations of what they need or deserve or can't live without. I am far from being rich or wealthy, and if I can afford it, I reject claims from people making a lot more that it is "unaffordable". they jsut want to spend money on other things, that's all. I don't own any sort of large TV, an old used 19 inch CRT is it. If people want to drop a grand on a stupid television, or buy jetskis or whatever, well, that's the choice they make. What is the ROI on a 42 inch LCD TV? A home theater system? having an extra bathroom? Buying a new car as opposed to a well used one? A "gaming" computer? Apply that to any number of things people buy. The money is there, people just have different priorities and don't take into consideration how much they drop on stuff that has zero ROI.
As to batteries, just a random tip, buck for amphour, the cheapest way to get lead in the garage is a forklift traction battery pack, it isn't that expensive relatively speaking to the alternatives and especially to any batteries that have "solar" stamped on them, and doing shallow cycling and good water maintenance it should last a long time. And perhaps when it is time to upgrade then we'll have better batteries. The global demand for better batteries is HUGE and tons of places are working on them now, I see nothing but good coming from that quarter. It's already a lot better now than it was 10 years ago. Look at what cordless drills cost ten years ago and replacement batteries for them. I can waltz into the local B&D store here right now and walk out with a drill and *two* batts
with all this proven green technology around... Right? Anyone, anyone...
I dropped by http://www.pickensplan.com/theplan/ just now, where it says that wind energy can provide 20% of the U.S. electrical needs.
This will just about replace the nuclear reactors, which are pretty much being run past their design lives.
What the hell are we thus accomplishing with this trillion (thousand billion) dollars of windmills and $250 billion of new grid?
(1)Welp, we're depending on the weather for our energy, for one thing. (hunh?)
(2) And we're mounting four hundred foot propellers in Tornado Alley. (what?)
(3) And I dare anyone to say with a straight face that they can get around North Dakota to do maintenance during the winter.
Do these things even work at 50 below zero (F) ? And do they work when loaded with ice?
Allow me to propose the much, much less expensive David Small variant of the Pickens Plan. (Call it the Slim Pickens plan if you like old movies).
We could feed vultures with a much less expensive "Line Of Death" by selling hunting licenses in the Great Plains. Hunters could blast away randomly at birds, something like prop tips. In most states licenses like this completely pay for State Game and Fish departments.
We could do the 1950's SF Movie Sound Effects with big speakers emitting a low frequency "WAUM-WAUM-WAUM" sound to keep people up at night. And we could periodically have big cargo planes dropping huge fragments of propellers randomly out of the sky to simulate fractures.
Thus, we have all the pains of propellers, but none of the actual hassle, and an income source!
Thanks,
Dave Small
Ha! On the contrary, the normal solar PV installation electricity is usually a lot cleaner than the grid supplied. the term "brownout" exists because the grid will ship you that stuff. More exact voltage regulation, less spikes or surges, better sine wave, etc, is a consideration. It's akin to you want your home computer to be fed through a good UPS system rather than just slap it into the wall socket, your home UPS box does a similar job as a whole house or whole circuit solar PV rig. I just like the idea of taking it as far as possible until all your power is filtered through that sort of reality.
As to those prices, I will repeat, most homeowners who can do some normal carpentry and wiring can save a ton by doing most of the install labor themselves, and *especially* on this board I would expect any slashdotter to be able to do the bulk of that sort of work. And I don't care what wage people make, you are a geek and tool user or not. doing something that important I would think most geeks would want at least some of the hands on part. It ain't rocket surgery, might as well pay yourself.
And sure, you can opt out of getting grid supplied..and how many people do that as compared to just sucking it up and paying the bill? That's around a classic strawman right there, the way houses are now and family reality, you'd go one day and the spouse and kids would be whining "pay the dang bill, we want electricity!". Unless you got some alternative, your expensive house ain't worth much to live in with out electricity.
And that *is* the point right now, for tons of folks the moment *has* arrived, it is becoming more and more economical and practical as a form of future proofing and tangible insurance to do it yourself, at least as a decent adjunct for those critical circuits you want all the time, say your furnace blower, your freezer, etc. I don't know how it is where you are, but where I live we lose mains power a lot, having a backup is no longer just a nice thing to have, it is a necessity if you want to save your stuff from melting, or at least be able to run a fan during a heatwave, etc.
Modern homes without electricity become very uncomfortable and expensive tents pretty quickly without electricity. There's a peace of mind/tangible insurance aspect there that is hard to exactly quantify in terms of dollars, but it certainly does exist. It can become a life or death health issue with the very young and elderly if the power goes out for any length of time during extreme weather conditions, and it certainly can get into the very annoying level for regular healthy folks to have nothing when it is in the 90s out or below zero or like during an ice storm. They evac old folks as fast as possible out of their houses in the summer heat when the grid goes down, because they can croak fast. They have no excessive heat tolerance. How much is that worth to have some backup? Backup/self generated power is a really spiffy thing to have, beats the pants out of that marvelous foyer and electric chandelier *when you need it*. When you don't need it and everything is working fine it seems expensive, when that stuff poofs or something happens to your job or income or any other out of the ordinary situation, then that backup power looks likes a smart investment.
Different strokes, be happy with your purchases and decisions!
Personally, I want backups for my necessities, and I consider a reliable and redundant electric supply to be a modern necessity. I lived quite literally without running water or electricity for years, I am fully aware of what that takes and what that entails, much more so than most people here especially the developed world folks who have never experienced that outside of a week camping someplace. That is why I appreciate it so much now and why I find it eminently affordable to have redundancy for both my water supply and electricity, as well as for my food and heating and fuel. I *don't* take it for granted it will always be there, or tha
Ah, you seem to think I am against wind power, I am not. I am just for home produced power as much as possible. I think wind farms are great, I just don'
t want to be all of it. I own a small wind genny myself. It just doesn't work well here, solar PV does. I think something like the Pickens plan has a lot of merit to it, as well as home solar PV, better insulation, etc. I like "all of the above" with practical solar fusion being the best of the long term solutions.
I'd go so far as to encourage a ten year national plan, you get whatever you want, whatever works for you, 100% credit as long as it is an active system that works and the cost stays stable to what it was three months before the law got signed, so there's no price bumping or gouging. The last time we had good tax credits we were solving the energy crisis, unfortunately they went poofarama in 85. that was also around when we had the best mileage cars being common. We've gone downhill bad since then.
We haven't had good credits or incentives since then, just tiny credits and deductions.
Anyway, I don't care, I am doing what I can here on the cheap. I make US poverty level, close enough anyway, if I can afford it, so can a lot more folks. If they don't care about themselves, why should I? As to the foreigners starving and so on, their call, learn to grow food better or not, control population or not, get rid of medieval tribalism or not. Evolution works. I do farming, it is hard work, I do the sort of work 99% of born here Americans won't do, for real cheap money, the BS they claim we "need" illegal aliens for, so I can relate better to them foreign folks who work hard for cheap than I can to most people in the US. If those foreign folks got some dipsqut junta that is making them live in poverty, they need to be proactive about changing that, parse that as you might.
As to the US exporting, I could care less, wall street has borked it and it's going down for some years now, inevitable, and until we are energy independent and get back to being food independent, that should be our number one concern, not bailing out billionaires in investment banks. I'd just as soon wall street floated away into the ocean, waste of resources, parasites. (the US now imports more than we export FYI with regards food). Change that first, we can worry about the other folks later. Ya, it might suck, but also not my business. I neither want to exploit them unfairly, none, zero, just leave them alone to sort their own matters out, nor subsidize them. give a man a fish or teach him to fish, that choice.
I am a rather strict non interventionist when it comes to those matters, I don't want to fool with other folks business. Now I have no control over our foreign policy or monetary policy, so the best I can do is live how I preach, to put my money and my energy and time where my mouth is. If people want to live in high rise termite cities with no way to get food or water if something happens, not my call, they go way out of their way to choose that lifestyle and pay for it, usually a lot more than suburban or rural living. Their choice, evolution works. They trust the system, I don't, man, I don't, I think it is fragile as heck, I can see it crumbling fast right now. I guess they don't, or don't know what to do about it other than hope those wall street pirates who have ripped them off royally can fix things.
I am not betting on that happening, the opposite, just more ripoffs are coming, I think they screwed up way too bad the past few years, it's gone, or going soon, put it that way. So...I want to be where the food and water come from, not "maybe" gets delivered-to. The great heist of 2008 isn't over yet, and will continue to get real bad in 2009. Prices right now for most things are a deal, because most things, most stuff, in the US get imported. All bets are off for next year. I can't prove that, it is only my opinion, and we'll see how close or far off I am next year.
One word for ya: FERC
What do you think the dams were built for? Just us locals? NO! You have been getting the benefit, too. You may not have thought so, but the fact is that if it were not for the "cheap hydroelectric" in the West, electricity rates would be even higher in the East (and California).
The difference is, WE paid in OUR federal dollars, too, PLUS our environment. If you want cheaper electricity now, it's your turn.
There is no irony! Just simple numbers.
Backups are really practical. I had a bad accident at work once, really impacted my takehome income. My food stores helped a lot, one thing I didn't have to sweat. Here on the farm without backup generators we'd be hosed, bankrupt, the broiler houses all have big diesel gennys and they get used. We can't take more than 10 minutes without power or the chickens could croak inside the houses, they need active venting to keep the air moving in there, and the power goes out often enough so those gennys get used.
I got into this way back when I was a teen and we had a blizzard that shut everything down for two weeks. 4 feet dumped in one storm then drifts, and this was in the days without a lot of snowmobiles so most people were just stuck. heck, a lot of folks got stuck in their cars, my dad had to walk the last several miles home when he evacced from work, he about froze his feet though, only had regular shoes on.
Luckily I made it home on the school bus when they shut everything down at around 10 or so in the morning,(8 am no snow, by 10 going on two feet deep!!! Never seen anything like that before or since) but a couple of my younger siblings got stuck in school and didn't get home until the next day, I had to go get them with the snowshoes and tobaggon. My folks ran out of fuel oil and no deliveries could be made, but we had a fireplace, so that kept us from freezing. We had enough food, but a lot of people locally didn't, the national guard dropped food stores from helos and a friend and I took turns with the same snowshoes and his tobaggon and got the food and went around and delivered it to people near us and checked on them. It was a bad storm, really intense, the accumulation was too much even for all the big snow plows and stuff. Drifted over our two story house, that sort of bad (of course being a kid we all thought it was nifty cool) Ever since then I have been into "practical preparedness" or survivalism, backups for most everything and trying to be as independent as possible. Cool thing from that storm, a freekin arctic owl showed up on the lines connected to the pole in our backyard! I got super 8 movies of him, a big birdie! heheh, he was sagging that telephone line bad!
Compressed air is super efficient too.
Look up the compressed air powered car.
Like pumped water, but where
there is not water, I'll bet there is some air.
Air is every where.
The power companies are here to make money. Worry about getting enough solar or wind power, so you don't have to buy that much from them. As soon as enough people start selling back to the grid, they will figure out a way to make you pay anyway. 8-).
amazing how the corrupt congress and corrupt oligarch defense contractor/oil tycoon driven executive branch have done all these major projects recently without corruption (Iraq war, War on Terror....)
Is this some sort of sarcasm? Or have not you not actually heard the Halliburton stories?
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
Just California with the Million Roof Initiative. And California contains about 20% of the U.S. Population. It wouldn't take "decades": more like "a decade".
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
[snip]
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The government can't save you.
Nuclear power isn't terrible *in itself*: it's just a little controlled fission heating up some water. It's just that it requires -- on one hand -- a ginormous capital investment *per plant* and -- on the other -- the Price-Anderson Act to indemnify the electric generation companies against the costs of a potential nuclear accident. So, you're right, in a way: the government can't save *you* -- but it can save *your local electric generation company*. Thus, it is the *political bargain* that was struck long ago that causes nuclear power to be "so terrible". If anything happens (Remember [1979] Three Mile Island? Remember [1967] "We Almost Lost Detroit"?), and thousands or millions of taxpayers die (immediately, or -- agonizingly -- later), the supreme irony is that taxpayers end up bailing out the nuclear power industry in the *biggest corporate welfare giveaway EVER*. And don't even get me started on the inevitable truck accidents that will happen when we starting shipping nuclear waste from all over the United States to the single, earthquake-fault-ridden sarcophagus of Yucca Mountain -- which may never happen. (And if it doesn't, there will be little nuclear radiation leaks *all over the United States* as the "temporary" storage casks now containing dangerous nuclear waste start getting 'eaten through' and leaking into the air and water.) All of your scientific "proof" as to how "safe" nuclear power is will be swept away before the rising storm of the environmental cancers epidemic. People caught up in the emotional process of dying are rarely comforted by logic.
The failure to take human emotive factors into account is often the cause of failure of a purely technocratic solution. Your little isle of logic is surrounded by the vast sea of emotion: don't think you can walk on water just because you can stride across the land. People don't *like* nuclear power, because they intuitively analyze the risks involved and don't like the answers they come up with: "logic" loses hands down.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.