Slashdot Mirror
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 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
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
One thing that is done with excess power here in the US is pump
water to a high resevoir, and it can later be run thru the
turbines to generate hydro power as needed.
It is done during the fall/winter/spring at night at Hoover dam.
Lower demand due to less Air Conditioning usage.
The power from the Windmills could pump water to water tanks
on tall hills or even mountains.
The extra pressure could be used for power generation, and then
down pressured sent on to homes.
Here in the US in the mountains some ppl due that for Micro Hydro.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
[sigh]
Yes, it is true that no alternative power source can quickly and immediately replace an infrastructure that took about a century to put in place.
It is also true that the amount of solar energy that falls on the US exceeds our total power consumption by many times, even accounting for the low efficiency of PV and solar thermal collectors. Here's a snippet from wikipedia (where it references a page from Stanford -- you can chase the links yourselves): "The amount of solar energy reaching the surface of the planet is so vast that in one year it is about twice as much as will ever be obtained from all of the Earth's non-renewable resources of coal, oil, natural gas, and mined uranium combined."
It is also true that the available wind power amounts to many times the total amount of energy consumed by the US (you can look it up yourself -- it's also a ginormous number).
Finally, Google's recent investment into Enhanced Geothermal Systems highlights the potential to pull energy from the latent heat within drilling range, using more economical technologies than have previously been utilized. There is a 2006 MIT pdf on Enhanced Geothermal Systems which shows that there also, we find available reclaimable energy capable of satisfying our total energy needs many times over.
If wind power is inconstant, over-build, and generate far more power than we need on average, and use the excess to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen to drive fuel cells during the calm periods. The odds of having a lengthy calm period that extends over much of the US is practically nil. Same thing for solar power -- build out more than you need, and use the surplus to split water (which covers 3/4 of the planet) into hydrogen and oxygen. If a nation the size of Germany with limited resources (compared to the US) can commit to 100% alternative energy, there's no reason why the US cannot do so as well, with our much larger supplies of available energy and much larger economic resources.
But with such a variety of available and abundant energy sources, we don't need to overbuild, the point is to utilize each of them where they can provide the most impact (e.g., solar for peak utilization, which occurs during the day), and build an enhanced distribution grid (again, we're going to need to anyhow) to move electricity from where it is generated to where it is needed, just like we do today.
Wind power generates voltage spikes? So use flywheel technologies (e.g., Beacon Power (BCON)) to spin flywheels, and generate clean, regulated power from the flywheels. This is technology that exists today. It will even serve as a store of energy, to level out brief lulls in the output. New technologies require (and always receive) improvements as we learn how to best utilize them. Our experience with them improves them.
The point is, we CAN replace ALL our existing fossil fuel power generation infrastructure -- we have to anyway, due to obsolescence and planned upgrades -- we just can't do it quickly. It took us about a century to build what we have, we won't be replacing it in only a decade.
But we can gain a decade or so by making it an active conversion, by purposefully moving to alternative power, instead of waiting until it is enough cheaper than coal to make it the selection of choice. According to some sources, wind is already price-competitive with coal, and there is a lot of improvement left in the technologies to extract energy from wind. Not so much from coal.
"Solar panels on every building in America? How do you propose to pay for it?"
That's for the Americans to work out. Meanwhile Germany is pumping ~1GW of EXCESS power from rooftop solar panels back on to their grid. They estimate they have cut their CO2 emmissions by ~100 million tons. This change has increased the average German power bill by about one euro/month.
Continental scale infrastructure is a long term thing for humans, you can't notice it changing until you have lived the several decades it takes to see the change. Nobody is talking about covering every US roof with solar panels before next xmas, even with huge subsidies it would still take decades.
So what is wrong with upgrading/extending the grid as the need from rooftop PV arises? - I'm sure the current grid has seen quite a bit of upgrading since 1958 and I would be surprised if any power plants from the 50's are still operating today, IIRC most plants have a planned lifetime of 30-40yrs.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.