Tech Allows Stable Integration of Wind In the Power Grid

diegocgteleline.es writes "One of the most frequently raised arguments against renewable power sources is that they can only supply a low percentage of the total power because their unpredictability can destabilize the grid. Spain seems to have disproved this assertion. In the last three days, the wind power generation records with respect to the total demand were beaten twice (in special conditions: a very windy weekend, at night): 45% on November 5 and almost 54% last night (Google translation; Spanish original). There was no instability. These milestones were accomplished with the help of a control center that processes meteorologic data from the whole country and predicts, with high certainty, the wind and solar power that will be generated, allowing a stable integration of all the renewable power. You can see a graphic of the record here."

Comments

There is a solution

[MikShapi]

As Danish Oil and Natural Gas (DONG) utilities clearly figured out - put a REALLY big (distributed) battery on the grid to soak up the power when it's available and re-feed it into the grid when it's scarce. Not only can they produce more of the baseline power generation from renewable sources, they don't have to PAY the Germans to TAKE their excess power at night when they can't consume it. They can store it instead, use it at peak hour when kilowatt price is insane and drastically flatten the curve. Problem. Solution.

As an OT side-benefit, we get electric cars wrapped around said batteries. For what we already got used to paying for car's fuel, there's enough margin in the operator's plan to subsidize new cars for consumers (think free iPhone on a three-year-plan), we'll get a parallel 1-minute-battery-swap-station infrastructure to petrol stations to enable real (non-golfcart) electric cars to go as far as the stations reach (range limitation is station reach, not battery capacity/petrol tank) without hour-long-charges along the way, remove an entire country's addiction to oil, fix the environment by running every single car in the fleet off renewable, and actually allow everyone in town to plug their car in at 8AM without having the lights in office buildings go down (The 'Everyone owns a Chevy Volt' scenario), while not having to spend tens to hundreds of billions on new power plants to cater to the spike. (But hey, that's just a side benefit ;))