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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."
...and will be fought back by european giants like E.ON etc., who even fight private home owners wanting to put wind mills on their own property by simple denial of request.
Coal and oil are plentiful, cheap, and easy to use. Compare this to idiotic technologies like wind and solar that are hugely expensive, unreliable, and hurt the eyeline of the cities they are installed in. And people wonder why environmentalists are considered stupid.
So, Spain has almost made the advance of electrical power to where GE got it over 100 years ago.
This is my sig.
Wind generally changes slowly enough that it doesn't cause massive instability providing you have sufficient backup. However, there are other problems.
Getting the percentage that high occasionally isn't amazing, especially during a time of low demand such as night. The hard part is generating an average of 50% wind overall (e.g. over a year).
Say the baseload demand is 20 GW, then you can have 20 GW of wind power installed without worrying about what to do if too much is produced. So you could even get nearly 100% wind power occasionally. The problem is for the rest of the time when demand is higher or it isn't windy. The capacity factor of wind is about 30%, and baseload is typically about 50% of average load, so that means on average you're only generating 15% of your total electricity by wind power.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Nothing is ever a complete solution, for anything.
But every single Joule helps.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Where's your god now?
45% and 54% for Spain. If you can upgrade the scale, you can bring those 2 numbers very close together.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Whatever happened once in Spain does not change the basic facts.
Sometimes the wind does not blow at all, so you need to keep 100% generating capacity that can be brought on line within 20 minutes.
Now your basic coal plant tends to be large and slow (takes many hours) to warm up. So you need a whopping amount of gas turbine generating plants,
which not only cost a lot but are going to be idle a good part of the time, just sitting around just in case the wind stops. And it will.
So you're going to pay up front for the generating capacity, then again paying for expensive and scarce oil and gas when the wind stops.
Not an attractive financial proposition.
renewable power sources ... can only supply a low percentage of the total power because their unpredictability can destabilize the grid.
As much as I'd like to see more renewable energy, this counter-example probably doesn't help. Spain has a somewhat modern and well maintained power grid. In this year's "Infrastructure Report Card", The American Society of Civil Engineers rated the USA's power grid "D+". (Unfortunately their website is down; here's google's cache. Talk about failing infrastructure...)
Disclaimer: I'm a Spanish citizen, living in Spain.
First of all, I want to remark the great work of the REE company ("Red Eléctrica Española" stands for "Spanish Electric Power Network", the monopoly for electric power distribution), they not only do a great work routing and adapting the production to the user energy demand, but also provide a lot of useful information about power consumption, production/consumption balance, etc.
The dark side of the problem is that although there is a huge amount of "green energy" being generated in Spain (wind and solar), that is, paradoxically, a problem. The problem is because current "green electricity production" is above 20% of total energy production, which sounds great, yes, the problem comes from nuclear power being dismantled from past 20 years, so the electric bill goes up because of the more expensive production (the solar energy production is specially expensive, which has been subsidized ad nauseam). Now the country faces near 19% unemployment rates (almost twice the U.S. figures), paying a huge price for energy, with the country in the middle of its worse recession since the post-war era (40's).
Bah, we shouldn't be using wind for power at all. Solar has more benefits and fewer drawbacks.
Solar can be put in more places than wind, and doesn't fuck up local weather (and potentially global). We have to ask ourselves, where does the energy come from? For Solar it is directly from the sun. For wind, it is much more complex, and much less understood what happens when we pull energy out of that system. We have the Coriolis effect and indirect effects from the sun, and wind drives other things. I don't want deserts expanding because less wind isn't getting moisture to the grasses and trees on the edges of the current ones.
You still need a source of generation that can react quickly enough to stabilise voltage. Currently this is accomplished with fossil fuels (gas turbines, fired boilers / steam turbines, etc). Wind and solar can only supplement other base load sources of generation.
My understanding is that the destabilization talk isn't about overloading a circuit breaker on one day, it's about massive fluxuation in available power over the entire generation time.
Just think of this. You've now made something like 80% of your grid powered by wind. (They all have problems, but let's just look at wind.) You have a doldrum for a day or two, now you've gone for that time period with only 20% of your normal power, that's destabilizing.
What if your windfarms are spead out over vast distances so they tend to have different local conditions. (Something like if you have them all over the USA.) In some ways that will help since no location is expected to be the same as the other, so there is an averaging effect going on. However, that averaging effect is limited by long distance power transmission issues. The grid isn't just a pull & dump system. It uses power to send power, and it needs to maintain what you could think of as electrical pressure, (V.W.A. formulas.) which is why you have all those transformers and sub-stations all over the place, they are one part of that system. So even in the distributed scenario, what if you get a situation like high-wind on the east coast, and calm conditions mid-continent, and dead west coast. Funny thing, the need for power didn't decrease anywhere, but only the east coast is generating enough for their area, some of the mid will be ok, others in brown-outs or black-outs, and the west coast would be mostly black-out conditions, except near the few remaining alternate power sources, assuming the grid demand didn't leach it out completely and blow the circuits. (The entire east coast USA was blacked out by a cascade grid failure, and it might happen again.)
Of course having multiple sources of power helps offset this kind of issue. For instance, solar. But that would only help during the hours of light, and again, it needs to be within a reasonable distance of it's market/users.
All this stuff is why intelligent power managers advocate a number of different generation schemes distributed over the area with clustering (when possible) near high draw locations (like big cities). And no power manager can rationally turn a blind eye to those methods that run 24 hours on demand.
I agree that we need to expand our renewable resources type power generation, as well as move away from fossil fuels, but it's a tricky balancing act with huge penalties for dropping the ball, so don't trivialize it.
Too bad that fucking kike Jew Lieberman would rather protect insurance company profits than human life.
This is why the holocaust was such a good idea. It was just one Jew short of enabling real healthcare reform.
wind is a form of temporary energy storage. sun --> heat --> wind --> erosion.
total input energy (sun) will stay the same. output simply changes a bit. (a tiny bit less energy will be converted into erosion).
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Butterfly effect could rule too much/few windy/sunny days, and software bugs could put the grid on risk. Maybe that we base our civilization on that energy source is a crockroaches plan to make sure that only them survive.
irony_on .. they are interfering with the Coriolis effect."
"Chop of the woods, bomb the mountains
irony_off
Solar is also volatile depending on the weather situation.
Have you ever watched a power curve from a PV-Panel over a longer time, you have spikes - here a cloud, there a diode less, which means the way you switch the panels together is important too.
If bad situation one panel in the black out means
the panel groups output is low
And solar panels are black, even converting ~30% of the light in energy they do heat up .. so they interfere with the atmosphere.
All in all, a mix is a good solution, because
wind and solar power have their weaknesses
btw. the wind forecasts are +90% acurate,
that's not what you can say about a checkered sky.
Regarding the grid.... Getting energy from there to here seems a problem. Isn't the problem with hydrogen fuel cells the fact that you have to have hydrogen in the first place (which takes energy?) I don't know the efficiencies lost via conversion (which would include the economics of transportation), but if solar or wind power was used to generate hydrogen, couldn't the hydrogen then be delivered to where it is needed, for use when wanted?
Ten years ago wasn't there talk about using renewable power to pump water up to higher ground and then release the water to generate electricity at a known rate with a known duration, etc. Turns unreliable power into highly reliable power with a little waste added into the process....
Not if the earth begins to spin slower because we are taking energy out of wind.
how long until everyones favorite superpower starts invading windy countries?
Solarpanels being black only changes the heat if they are replacing previously reflective things. Cities already generate strange weather patterns because of the difference in heating/cooling versus the surrounding area, and you could put solar panels on every roof top in my neighborhood and not change heat signatures because they are already black.
One of the problems with environmentalism is common in any charged topic. You're all or nothing. In this case, your options are:
You don't believe that man-made global warming hasn't been adequately proven: so you're a greedy, goose stepping, capitalistic pig who doesn't care about the environment one bit.
or..
You believe that mankind should take responsibility for its actions on the environment: so pot smoking, brainless, mindless hippy that hates humanity.
Any people wonder why there's so much strife in today's world... Oh, and you can thank the media (sensationalism & controversy sales) and politicians (polarize to make them yours). Of which special interest groups are the bastard stepchild.
idiot. If no energy is taken out of the wind: It would start to blow faster and faster. Furthermore, if it is not taken out by windmills, it will certainly be taken out by houses, trees, mountains.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
The way the information is presented clearly shows the lack of understanding by the author. The data actually proves the instability inherent in wind power.
The figures quoted are once off lasting for hours or days but not months. The next day will be a low wind day and instead of providing 40% of the energy required you only provide 10% or less (Spain has had over 100 days this year with no wind power generation, nada none). That is the instability, over a week, month, year not days.
One other point when wind was "providing" 40% of the electricity during the low load it actually was NOT. What was actually happening was Spain was producing a lot more wind power on top of typical output from conventional plants. We cannot effectively use and store excess power so the excess was wasted. Therefore the installation of wind has lead to wasteage.
This is why Denmark the leader in wind relies on interconnections to other countries, when excess is generated it is sold abroad. However for some reason Denmark has by far the highest prices in Europe for electricity even with the ability to sell excess. Also because Denmark has to export so much wind energy its installed capacity is nameplated to deliver 20% but only delivers approx 10%.
Without a viable and cost effective way of storing energy wind will remain too variable to provide cost effective energy that is carbon neutral. As wind has to be backed up in equal capacity (reason for Denmarks high prices) by conventional systems it cannot be said to be carbon neutral.
LizaRd - In ot4er then disappeared
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 ;))
-
Most gas turbine plants are already peak plants, so they don't run most of the time. Take Texas for example the summer load is typically twice the winter spring fall load due to air conditioning. so there are already a lot of plants sitting idle. Texas has hit 20% wind on its grid a couple of times in the last few weeks since a line was energized to circumvent the bottlenecks in the ERCOT grid. Most places have large demand swings with time of day and time of year so there are a lot of idle plants a good bit of the time. Combined cycle gas turbine plants must be economical when run as peak plants or there would not be so many of them. Since a turbine plant can start in 10 mins or so its a good backup. Also the turbine plant is almost 1/4 the emission of CO2 per kwh of a coal plant. (1/2 is because new plants run at about 60% efficiency , and 1/2 because methane produces 1/2 as much co2 per unit of heat).
All it takes is to fix the nimby attitude of folks. (In Texas the most recent big wind farm was build because the land owners wanted the free money from the turbines, which leave most of their land free to farm or graze cattle on).
Nope, because the system has feed back, when you break the system is when there are problems. Producing a little CO2 is not a problem, producing more than the planet can handle w/o changing the pH of the ocean is.
Just like wind, the world isn't covered in windmills, but, if you had enough wind turbines to produce 100% of the earth's energy, then we'd have a problem.
Clearly energy is already being taken out of wind, I'm arguing against pushing wind as a primary power source, not for clear cutting the planet because I 3 wind.
Hello,
Wind is unpredictable, and cannot supply base load. Item 14 at the following link shows how unpredictable wind is and how it can be essentially zero for many days in a row:
http://www.transmission.bpa.gov/business/operations/Wind/default.aspx
This site gives information about the wind resources in the Northwest US.
If coupled with pumped storage, wind works great. The problem is the environmental community fights pumped storage, making precious few projects in the US viable.
Not if the earth begins to spin slower because we are taking energy out of wind.
Conservation of angular momentum is quite an important principle in physics, I don't think a few windmills will pose a threat to it.
Ahh, math time excuse!
The Earth's rotation already slows by 0.022 milliseconds every year from tidal friction. A simple way to get a handle on the energies involved is estimating from the increase in the radius of the moon's orbit, about 3.84cm/year, which comprises the majority of tidal effects on Earth.
Throw that into the gravitational potential energy of the Earth/Moon system, and you end up with a net energy loss in the neighborhood of 7.59x10^18 joules/year-- about 241GW. (Wikipedia says 2.4TW, but I think the paper they cited slipped a digit.
So, a direct energy drain at around either twice or twenty times the installed wind capacity is making the earth's rotation slow by... less than 2.2 seconds per 100,000 years.
Planets are big. Arguing that a chunk of rock 12500km in diameter is going to be noticeably moved by our technology in the foreseeable future isn't very plausible.
In related news, most of the energy input for wind is solar, not tidal, and net solar energy input into the system is still net solar energy input into the system, regardless of where it goes.
There are plenty of actual obstacles to worry about in implementing alternative energy, there's no need to make up imaginary ones.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
When it's really windy, use the energy to lift huge quantities of weight to the top of a deep shaft. Then when electricity is needed, allow the weights to fall down the shaft, with the cables they are suspended from driving generators on the way down. Won't wear out like a chemical battery, plus it's not toxic and can be made out of almost anything.
There was a paper published a couple years ago by dutch researchers that proposed to give discounts for refrigerated warehouses. They would lower their thermostats a couple degrees, but would be given a signal to stop their refrigeration units when the load gets too high. The couple degrees would be enough of a buffer to last a few hours. They calculated it would be enough to handle wind up to 30% of the total power generation.
This kind of thing is already done, by the way, but on a limited scale. Large industrial consumers of electricity are already given discounts if they agree to cut their use on demand. The new thing here is to displace electricity use in time even more.
... then it's only hardly ever dirty. Especially if you only use it once a decade.
If you have seen or can build wind mills that would slow the Earths rotation in the tiniest fraction of a fraction of a fraction we certainly would like to see them. Otherwise please take your retarded trolling elsewhere.
note that decentralized power does not mean that the U.S. east coast can really use power generated in Idaho, at best power can be transmitted hundreds of miles, not thousands.
Those wind turbines better be build fairly close.
That fact that you even put it that way shows you don't understand what the laws of conservation say. Wind turbines by definition work by slowing down the wind.
Also, I agree, clearly a few windmills don't pose a thread. But:
Annual Energy use in the World is something like 20 Trillion kWH. We would have to cover 1/7 of ALL land in the world to get this.
I'll look at your numbers later (which I do appreciate). But the effects of wind turbines on global weather are not imaginary.
sure it won't be a common occurance that the wind slows down in multuple locations... but thats HOW disasters happen, all the unlikely scenarios line up and you get that perfect storm. and when your talking about the power grid it's an unacceptable risk.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
There's no mechanism for carrying angular momentum away from the earth that involves the wind. Air has a habit of staying on Earth, after all. Therefore, wind turbines cannot affect it.
The only thing that could would be tidal forces, which have nothing to do with the wind.
net energy loss in the neighborhood of 7.59x10^18 joules/year-- about 241GW
This is a power not an energy, but I do get the point.
World Energy Usage: 20 TrillionKWH .6 ms a year. .022
Maximum Windmill->E efficiency is about 30% so tripple that and get 60 Trillion KWH of energy taken out of the system per year.
Relating that to your example system would correspond to a slowing of about
Ok, while certainly non-zero, that isn't that much of a problem. Prove to me that it won't effect the weather and I'll be much happier.
60*10^12/(241 * 10^9 *365*24/1000) *
You, my new friend, need to contrast your belief in the conservation of angular momentum with your blatant disregard for the conservation of energy. If I store energy (in the form of electricity) made from wind energy (kinetic), I have taken that energy out of the system, because energy cannot be created, nor destroyed (at least on this level).
Flywheels.
I'm not disregarding energy at all, it's just not relevant to my point. Yes, you've taken energy out of *something* but not out of the earth's rotation. It would have been dissipated as heat eventually anyway - there's no law of conservation of kinetic energy.
Wind power slowing down the earth's rotation is not consistent with conservation of angular momentum. Unlike kinetic energy, angular momentum is always conserved in the absence of external forces (well, torques), which is why it's a much more useful quantity to work with when considering this problem.
Please try not to be patronising. I do know a bit about physics, what with having a degree and PhD in it and all.
Wind has a high Energy Return On Energy Invested (EROEI) but it's not as high as many people think. Similar to nuclear. Sure: X kilos of U generate gobs of power, but building, maintaining, decommissioning, and dismantling the plant and its waste is very energy intensive.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Its a FALSE argument to claim alternatives can not work because they can't provide constant power.
There is a whole world of power storage solutions out there being completely ignored OR people are simply ignorant. It could be come an industry on some level or be a completely private industry where anybody with the tech could buy power and sell it back later for a profit.
We can leave the market to handle load balancing. Look at flywheel power storage, flow batteries, hydro power storage, or even fuel cells. These and new technologies will provide methods to balance the load and possibly help fund power storage technologies that will end up in other applications.
Its possible there will be smaller scale cheap solutions for use by block or by building. For example:
Heating/cooling is the largest thing we need and while it is not all electric (cooling is almost all electric) it does use a lot of power. We can store hot and cold cheaply and easily as well as insulate against wasting it. I'm not talking about cutting usage like that is another problem, its part of distributing load balancing the load AT THE SOURCE instead of just at the power company. Heat storage, cooling storage refilled when it can be. Sure, electric is a problem NOW but it might not be forever... and if it is, there is still a grid storage industry.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
You are so utterly off base here. The rotation of the earth is due ENTIRELY to the conservation of its momentum from the protoplanetary cloud it condensed from. As the nascent Earth coalesced, its radius decreased; conservation of momentum dictates that for a smaller radius, the mass must rotate at a higher velocity; think spinning on an office chair with your arms and legs splayed out, then bringing them in; you will being spinning faster. That is why the earth rotates. The only forces that are currently acting on the earth that could affect its rotation in any meaningful way is that of gravity; the earth-moon system being the main culprit. As the moon exerts a gravitational force upon the earth, the resultant movement of the oceans (in the form of tides) causes a "bulge" of water on the surface of the earth. The bulge however is not perfectly aligned with the moon due to the relative rotation of the earth. The offset causes a torque (rotational force) slowing the rotation of the earth as well as increasing the distance the moon orbits at.
Wind on the other hand is a result of a heat gradient between two locations on the planet's surface. Seeing as this force originates and terminates on the surface of the earth, there can be absolutely no net impulse given to the earth, let alone its rotational momentum.
Killing birds, disrupting the landscape, and even maintenance are all at least somewhat reasonable critiques of wind power. Claiming it will result in draining the Earth's rotational momentum is just ridiculous and totally incorrect.
We "all know" that socialism is evil, and soaring taxes are the death of our economy. Yet the United States economy was perhaps strongest in the 50s and 60s, and we haven't had tax rates that high ever since. Yes, you heard me right: tax rates were HIGHEST in the 1950's and 60's. They were higher in the 1980's than they are now.
In fact, if taxes were the indicator of prosperity, then actual prosperity is virtually a reverse graph of the tax rates! It's one of those baffling facts that get in the way of the rhetoric for so many. see for yourself...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Wind proven has been proven ineffective in Northern Europe where the most electricity is needed in the dead cold of the dark winter. Usually Wind Power is working under 20% of the time. If we'd have much wind power we'd be sleeping in cold rooms and probably very very dead.
Go nuclear! (and then fusion when it becomes available)
Nuclear is GREEN!
And the typical environmentalist green hippie doesn't understand that Wind Power costs so much more than nuclear that it is insane. To keep the prices near the same for end users the governments invest huge amounts of money to wind power. Without government funding nobody would never ever use it. Its so friggin expensive.
this weekend large portions of Spain suffered extended blackouts as a number of the electric company's network routers were overwhelmed by an unexpected surge of traffic. This was apparently the result of an article about Spain's wind-based electrical program being published on slashdot.org, and the ensuing traffic overload from attempts to access the power generation graphs on the public site...
-- *My* journal is more interesting than *yours*...
Good thing we didnt cut down massive amounts of the worlds forests or we might speed the wind back up..... oh wait a sec..
Congrats on your PhD, but i'm glad they didn't ask you this question on your quals. And as this is covered in physics 101, qualification dropping is meaningless. You can't just hand wave and say, oh it would have been heat. Your assumption that angular momentum is only effected by torques is flawed. Yes that is angular momentum 101, but it certainly fails to describe what is accelerating the blades of the windmill. Or will they turn indefinitly too?
I'm not talking about conservation.
And this: Population increases exponentially ... is bullshit. If it did, it would fill the universe in a matter of years.
Conservation laws are not handwaves, they're a very useful way of considering problems like this as they let you disregard a whole lot of irrelevant detail. Yes, some angular momentum will go into the windmill blades but it won't accumulate over time, as it will be recovered when the blades stop turning.
I read " Tech Allows Stable Integration of Windows In the Power Grid". Almost gave me a heart-attack.
I love how the very article you linked not only mentions the various environmentally detrimental effects, and laws changed to make them even more harmful, but also directly links references detailing the issues. Allow me to make some abridged quotes...
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo
So many analyses seem to compare the potential output with what is now being used, but just look around - especially at night - and you'll see that HUGE amounts of energy are being wasted on poor insulation, lights left on, heating large, deserted spaces, etc., etc. Renewable energy, YES! but we also need to seriously reduce our usage.
I wasn't being sarcastic, I actually agree with you on all those points. It's a fucked thing to do.
I have some background in NucEng and power making in general. The grids need very stable supplies of power. The mere fact that it changes from day to night or visversa TWICE! a day already makes solar unstable enough to be a problem. Forget clouds and all that other stuff. Wind!? Gusts, squall lines, yikes! Trying to add these things to what we got won't work. We need new paradigms to electric power gen, and much broader PHYSICAL distribution of power to really use these sources. The REAL problem of competing with Coal, Hydro, and Nuke is that those sources can turn on and give you a steady 250MW for three+ months straight without a pimple of variation. So, we have electric distribution grids built around that kind of source. We need better grids for real wind and solar.
Ah, my apologies. Was sorta on a drive-by read & retort blitz, as I know the oil trolls love to respond to articles like this with "Blaarhgg, tha lib'rals is a'killin' this couuntry!" or "Green energy is a lie!" etc...
Upon some reflection, there actually is incentive: re-vegetation gets the EPA off the mining co's back, plus they can then sell the now-flat land to a developer. Of course the local ecology is shot, but hey, as long as they're turning a profit, right?
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo