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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."
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.
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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...)
Sometimes the wind does not blow at al
RTFA. and read up some more on how wind works. No wind in place A = center of cyclone or center of anticyclone, meaning that a few hundred clicks in any direction there IS wind 100% garanteed. (unless the moon would magically disappear, the sun would magically disappear AND the earth would magically stop turning)
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Once you add in coal and oil subsidies and the negative externalities of their use, they are no longer quite so cheap.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
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).
Coal and oil are plentiful, cheap, and easy to use.
Coal and oil are plentiful, but you know whats more plentiful? The solar radiation and wind, both are unlimited.
Coal and oil are cheap and easy to use because we have spent massive amount of money improving them over the last 100 years. Given enough research it is entirely possible that solar and wind will be as cheap as oil (coal would be tough to beat though). Solar power however will likely end up being easier to use, no fuel, no exhaust, and no moving parts.
... and hurt the eyeline of the cities they are installed in.
Ever heard of smog? I would much rather see a bunch of solar panels and windmills, than a giant brown haze of asthma attack and carcinogens.
And people wonder why environmentalists are considered stupid.
They are called stupid because what they are promoting is bad for business. Switching to these technologies is not efficient yet, but as this article proves they are getting closer. Big businesses and their propaganda machines (eg. Fox News) want to cast these technologies in negative light to avoid having to switch to them, which would cut into profit margins.
Oh and did I mention that these technologies could one day remove the USA's dependence on foreign oil, reduce medical problems, protect the environment, decentralize the electrical system, reduce power lost during transmission (local power generation), and be better suited to installation in 3rd world countries?
Or of course, we could just keep using the current system until our resources run out and then start looking for the solution.
But you also need to transmit _a_ _lot_ of power over hundreds of kilometers. Which is not cheap and easy.
That's why local power storage might be the best way to solve this problem.
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.
One trend I've seen in recent studies is toward distributed, decentralised power generation. We're not talking about one technology taking over, but rather a larger number of smaller generators in a variety of formats coming together to augment the primary generators we have. This is already happening to some degree, and expectations are that it will grow.
So as your city grows - instead of (say) three coal generators, you might add one new coal generator plus a few hundred wind turbines, a few thousand gas fired microCHP generators (similar to the Whispergen Stirling units being deployed in Spain) and quite a few thousand private photovoltaic arrays (in Perth for example, the applications for PV installations are running at better than 3 thousand per month at the moment).
The combination of all these will tend to even out the supply across the grid, but there still needs to be fairly careful power regulation at each end point.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
One trend I've seen in recent studies is toward distributed, decentralised power generation. We're not talking about one technology taking over, but rather a larger number of smaller generators in a variety of formats coming together to augment the primary generators we have. This is already happening to some degree, and expectations are that it will grow.
And why do you think this is happening? Would it be that smaller generators are somehow more efficient than large, high-capacity generating plants? Or do you think that it has been impossible to get a permit to build a large high-capacity generating plant for the last 30 years or so?
We can build all the smaller natural gas "peaker" plants we want, but it will not solve the problem of electric power demand exceeding existing generating capacity. We are rapidly approaching that point. Solar isn't going to help much, even if we paved all of Arizona, Nevada and Southeast California with silicon.
The biggest problem is that if someone got a permit and started building a 4,000 MW coal plant today, it wouldn't be finished for five years. A nuclear plant is more likely to take ten years to go online. So we better hope our base generating capacity - the kind we really need at 6:00 PM when folks have their air conditioners turned on and turn on the electric range to heat up dinner - will meet the need for the next five years until that plant gets online. Only problem is, there are no plants being built right now - maybe we will start soon, but so far nothing.
So we better hope there is a lot of excess capacity in the system so everything can keep growing, like the economy and jobs. Oh wait, there isn't much (if any) excess capacity today. I wonder what will happen?
I love the argument of "hurting the eyelines of the cities". Yeah, now that you can see the mountains right next to your city, instead of just hazy smog, you actually have something to complain about. Me? I think those wind turbines are sexy as hell and show progress in this day and age. Progress is power. Well done gapagos, well done.
I think this comment points reveals a consistent flaw with Slashdot - the score from mod points stops at five. :/
What mountains? The coal mine removed them.
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.
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 ;))
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Coal and oil is not cheap. The problem is that the largest portion of the cost of coal and oil, the damage to the environment, is not paid for my the people profiting for coal and oil but by everyone. We need to charge the coal and oil industry a useage fee for using our environment as a dumping ground for their toxic poison.
"The thing about wind power that I don't really understand is what the long term effects of taking massive amounts of energy from the wind and pumping it into the power grid will have."
The wind occurs in the bottom ~5km of the atmosphere. The largest windmill is ~100 meters tall, covering the entire planets surface with windmills would have about the same effect on wind as covering it with large trees, ie: virtually nil.
People rarely appreciate just how much power the wind has, on the day of the Aussie bushfire disaster last Febuary, I was sitting at home sweltering in 47degC heat fed by a 100km hour wind coming off the desert, native bats and birds were literally falling out of trees dead from dehydration, my punny fan on a stand did nothing to aleviate the discomfort unless I got out of a cold shower and stood in front of it still dripping. Ironically these winds and the blast furnace conditions they bring are created by cold fronts moving in from the Antartic, when the front passed over Melbourne that day, the temprature dropped by 15deg in 15 minutes.
Now to put windmills cumulative effects on the wind into perspective think about running them in reverse and how many you would need to to drag that amount of cold air from Antartica to Australia.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.