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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.'"
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.
Or the states could step up and do it themselves:
Texas Approves a $4.93 Billion Wind-Power (Transmission) Project
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
A wire has a given amount of current that can flow through it before it melts. Take a thin wire and connect it to the + and - terminals on your car battery (use thick leather gloves so you don't get burned) and see what happens when you stuff too much power down a wire.
Here is a link to the outfit that runs the grid in Ontario. When a generator wants to generate but can't due to the fact that there isn't enough transmission capacity to get the power out of their plant they get "constrained off", ie they don't generate. The link talks about how much they get paid for not generating.
Must be nice to get paid for doing nothing.
But anyway, wires do get congested but not the same way your nose does.
Given the fact that the NIMBY factor for power lines,power plants, nuke power, roads, dams, whatever is so high, the odds of at least one person objecting is virtually 100%.
Therefore, if you would like to have nuke power, power lines, roads, high speed rail, whatever, you will *need* to force somebody to fucking move for the greater good. Otherwise, you will never get the right-of-way to make your project happen. We have granted our government the ability to force people to fucking move out of the way.
We call this Eminent Domain.
Why anyone wants Federal control of anything is beyond me
Given that large scale projects are impossible without forcing somebody to move, do you feel comfortable granting eminent domain to private industry?
If you say "make it all states rights" given that many of these large scale projects affect multiple states, you'll wind up with heavy federal oversight anyway. Let states do it all, and they'll sue eachother when the other guy builds a huge damn. They'll sue when their state law conflicts with the other state law. You either get federal agencies for interstate projects, or you get a metric assload of federal judicial "weight".
The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer is not just slow to renew, it is not going to renew naturally in our lifetimes. People need to know about this because the aquifer covers 8 states including corn growing ones where ethanol projects are literally pumping the aquifer into their gas tanks at the expense of drinking water.
Don't know how the distribution system in the US works, but a fair bit of deatil on the UK's national grid is available on wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_the_National_Grid_(UK) and pages referenced from there.
Short term fluctuations in power generation and consumption are compensated at both ends of the chain - the clever part being the combination of (very inefficient but reasonably fast starting) distributed 'standing reserve' generators in conjunction with the automatic switching off of appliances called the Frequency Service ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_the_National_Grid_(UK)#Use_of_the_Reserve_Service_and_Frequency_Service_in_practice and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_the_National_Grid_(UK)#Frequency_Service )
The nice part is that the consumers using the frequency service automatically detect the discrepancy in supply / demand from the power supply itself and can be automatically switched off with logic purely on the consumer's premises (cf. the generators which need to be told from a central control when to start / stop)
There is also of course hydro / pumped-storage generation that can be switched on / off at pretty short notice (though the wikipedia article doesn't mention how that works in conjunction the diesel generators)
As our supply changes to incorporate more unsteady sources (wind, solar, tidal-stream etc) this system will have to be extended by rolling out frequency-service to smaller consumers (though there are not that many things it can be applied to in its current large-scale industrial form - theoretically it could work on as small a scale as the domestic fridge/freezer) and building more of the efficient energy storage systems - although we've already built reservoirs in most of the obvious locations, many of them are currently only used for the supply of drinking water.
Flywheels - That's the ticket!
And UltraCapacitors....
Both of those can take VERY high in-rush currents...
And then can output at what ever current you tell it to.
It's a similar solution to regenerative braking in Electric Vehicles: There is much more current coming off the "brakes" than a battery pack can handle. ie more than 100 AMPS! coming from the electric motor temporarily converted to an electric generator.
OK, here's some important things to note:
1: more wind does not mean more wind power. The generators are each computer comtrolled, and some wind turbines are spun up and down depending on the current damnd the grid can handle, in cooperation with other local power stations. We can DIRECTLY control how much wind energy we make and don't make.
2: equally, When wind falls back, most of the turbines are actually spinning with brakes having slowed the blades to slightly less than full spinning potential. The systems calibrate for light wind by releasing those restrictions, and the blades still spin at speed for multiple seconds, and even then, due the the weight of the blades, don't slow down very quickly... Local power companies have pleanty of time to spin up additional power.
Now, we do still need both wind and local power in a wind power environment. Some of the windo power can be used to push water uphill for on-demand hydro power later, but that's both expensive and limited in scope.
Also, wind power in the west, and across texas can't power all of america unless we add to the grid. They are correct, our current grid can't handle it, but anytime we're talking about adding power generation, we're also including in that the idea that we'll be expanding the grid as well. A superconducting line has been running on Long Island since April. The technology is proven, we somply need to deploy a few east-west and north-south lines, and some junction points, and we can distribute wind power across the whole nation.
Now, all that said, the braking systems, preventing over and under power, long distance transmission costs, and more, mean that we loose at least 15% efficiency on wind power generation. Why not let the turbines run full tilt all the time, producing direct current for electrolysis and make H2, which does NOT have to be grid balanced power. Instead of storing the H2, and trying to spend trillions building a new infrastructure for cars million dolar fule cells to run on it (read, you and I will NEVER drive one of these), we instead takle the H2 and run it to a local mixing plant and through an RFTS process using reclamated CO2, and we can make liquid fuels, on-site, and pipeline those fuels easily and safely using our existing infrastructure and keep driving our existing cars.
Doty Energy (www.dotyenergy.com) can do this TODAY. Costs for gasoline will be about $60/bbl, half what we're paying now. The CO2 we sequester from coal burning in current power plants will go to fuel the process in combination with H2 and some water. The byproducts are limted (and less than we get from making existing fuels). Eventually, new coal plants will also be capable of using liquid fuels in place of coal, so we'll be able to use WSindFuels to make power, then sequester it, recycle the CO2, and using free energy, make more fuel, in a process that will release 75% less CO2 total (since the car's won't be sequestering it's not completely CO2 free), release fewer byproducts, and allow us to continue using technology we already have, and to be free of foreign oil.
To run the whole country on WindFuels, including grid overhauls, pipeline upgrades, windfarms, and more, will cost about 40 trillion over 30-40 years. Fortunately, building this infrastructure is PROFITABLE, and since it can be deployed gradually, with much of the profit going back to system expansion, we should be able to get a great start on it with about 100 billion invested total.
It's also nice that ANYONE can built an RTFS plant, for about $50 million, and can make and sell fuels, lubricants, and just about any other hydrocarbon, directly to the open market. This means big oil won;t be able to control and corner the market, and fuel prices will remain in proportion to costs, not in proportion to demand.
If you want to know more, check out dotyenergy.com. The site is quire detailed already, but they're actually willing to share their reseaarch and numbers, and hope you'll find fault with the solution. A co
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
Actually, since wind power only ever degrades locally, and even then typically does not degrade across the whole wind farm, wind mills across the rest of the USA can pick up the slack easy enough.
Any talk of building a nationwide wind system simply includes the costs of superconducting HVDC lines, like the ones we've already broaght online in Long Island, and the ones being strung up across europe as well.
Also, turbines do NOT run at 100% at all times, even in good wind. The computers control each windmill individually, and adjust farm wide to make sure no windmills run too fast, and that others, even with wind blowing, don;t spin at all. When winds slow, brakes are released on other turbines, and even though wind is slowing, power can continue evenly. It's only when long term weaknesses in blowing occur that subsequent power is needed.
Part of the issue with wind power is that people don't understand 2 things. 1 is how the individual windmills are tied together, as I described above. 2 is that typically only 80% of the mills are spinning at any time (by choice) so we have 20% more power we can generate at will. A nationwide grid will follow that norm, and even if some farm in kansas is only producing 40% of it's norm, the another 30 farms would each only need to spin up an extra 2% of their reserve. Winds do not fail across an entire nation at once, and in level 7+ wind zones, rarely fail at all.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.