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Gas Wants To Kill the Wind
RABarnes writes "Scientific American has posted an article about the political efforts of natural gas and electric utilities to limit the growth of wind-generated electricity. Although several of the points raised by the utilities and carbon-based generators are valid, the basic driver behind their efforts is that wind-generation has now successfully penetrated the wholesale electricity market. Wind was okay until it became a meaningful competitor to the carbon dioxide-producing entities. Among the valid points raised by the carbon-based generators are concerns about how the cost of electricity transmission are allocated and how power quality can be improved (wind generation — from individual sites — is hopelessly variable). But there are fixes for all of the concerns raised by the carbon-based entities and in almost all cases they have been on the other side of the question in the past."
When the general attitude of the phone companies was "It's scary, make it go away"
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Gas Seeking to Break Wind
"I'm not a quack, I'm a mad scientist! There's a difference." - Dr. Cockroach
they'd embrace the new tech and get in on it, rather than trying to fight it
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
I'd only call it mildly successful when it can run at least 50% without government subsidies. and fully successful when it is >99%
I don't belive we'll ever be able to get back a US where there isn't government subsidies in everything.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Just wait until LED light bulbs start hitting the fan. Watch the coal lobbiests and their pet politicians scramble then. I was recently allowed to try some 100W LED floodlights that were indistinguishable from the incandescent version, except no heat and a lot less power.
region's wind power too cheap for its members to compete with, unless developers there are made to pay the costs of moving wind power eastward.
To whatever extent the generation companies pay to move the power, I fail to see why wind shouldn't pay its fair share.
demanding that the state's wind developers share the costs of backup natural gas generators
That's stupid. The correct solution is: raise the price of natural gas generation to compensate for the efficiency of scale difference.
proposed to deny federal clean energy grants to wind developers that buy blades, turbines and other components from abroad.
Hey, if you want money from Uncle Sam, you gotta play the game the way it's played. You're always welcome to secure private financing and build it any way you please.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Buying out a small startup player and giving them your established name and relationships with other power companies seems like a big win
Bottles.
Summary:
Wind was okay until it became a meaningful competitor to the carbon dioxide-producing entities
Article:
And last week, four senators representing New York, Ohio, Montana and Pennsylvania proposed to deny federal clean energy grants to wind developers that buy blades, turbines and other components from abroad.
"It is a no-brainer that stimulus funds should only go to projects that create jobs in the United States rather than overseas," Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said, pointing at a proposed Texas wind farm whose backers include a Chinese power company.
They had one paragraph about the natural gas generators complaining about being used as a backup for the unreliable wind farms and wanting to charge more money to act as a backup service.
The majority of the article is focused on international and stimulus politics: Should stimulus funds be spent on foreign technologies, or should they only be used on local (US) companies. How much of the company must be in the US before it is considered a local technology?
Another misleading summary intended to promote controversy.
Actually I know someone that works in the Wind Power part of a major utility company.
He spelled out the problem with wind for me very clearly.
"Companies don't care about carbon offsets because they don't believe that there will be a carbon tax".
"Followed by "Natural gas is dirt cheap right now."
Natural Gas is cheaper and more reliable than wind right now.
Trust me this utility has spent a bundle on wind and my friend is on the road many days a month trying to set up wind power and make deals for people to buy the power. In this case I wouldn't blame the utilities.
What it comes down to is dollars and cents. Gas is cheaper and works better than wind.
Of course I love this comment.
" Among the valid points raised by the carbon-based generators are concerns about how the cost of electricity transmission are allocated and how power quality can be improved (wind generation — from individual sites — is hopelessly variable). But there are fixes for all of the concerns raised by the carbon-based entities and in almost all cases they have been on the other side of the question in the past.""
Notice how in the summary the poster says that they have some valid concerns and then says that there are fixes for them.
Yea sure... But at what price? Read some of the "fixes" and then ask who is going to pay for them? Should the government keep subsidizing wind and the infrastructure.
Don't bother saying that they can just take the money from the Military since we know that will not happen. Are you willing to pay more in taxes and pay more for goods produced in the US by US companies? China and India will not pass a dime of the costs on manufacturing so if you increase the cost to make goods in the US you will be pushing more manufacturing to China and India so in effect you will be shifting the carbon production from US plants burning natural gas to Chinese power plants burning Coal.
Oh and Window power in China? Unless forced to that is just for export. They will produce a few token sites and then sell Windmills to western countries until it becomes economical to replace coal with wind.
So the west will subsidize even more manufacturing jobs going overseas.
I fear this isn't as simple as the summary or what most people on slashdot think it is.
What it all comes down to is that Natural gas is cheap, efficient, and thankfully pretty clean.
While not carbon free it has the lowest carbon foot print of all the fossil fuels. It is MUCH lower in carbon output than coal so it isn't terrible that it is displacing wind. It could be worse, they could be building coal plants instead of wind.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
1) Cover our eyes and let companies do whatever they want.
2) Suffer from energy spikes, speculative bubbles, piss poor infrastructure and a ruined environment.
3) Shovel billions into corporate coffers so they can sock the money away in offshore accounts while simultaneously failing to develop energy alternatives
4) Failure!
You have to subsidize new technologies because corporations cannot justify R&D to their shareholders. BP and Exxon cannot manufacture solar panels unless they can demonstrate higher profits, which one can't do until the technology is sufficiently developed, which one can't do without huge investments.
Technology has thrown the entire paradigm of free market economics for a loop. The amount of technology and science that go into an average product make information asymmetry astronomical. This requires more government regulation, not less.
In other words, all taxpayers get it in the shorts to pay for these shibboleths. Wind turbines, even under favorable circumstances, don't produce even enough power to manufacture wind turbines.
That hasn't been true for at least several years. Direct-drive generation + solid-state power electronics upped both efficiency and durability by wide margins.
Wind turbines, even under favorable circumstances, don't produce even enough power to manufacture wind turbines.
Original citation was probably from director of NREL, in TechReview. But it's old, and not true of recent generations of wind turbines.
The WSJ ran an article about this within the last week or two. The only gripe that traditional power companies had that seemed valid in my opinion is that wind producers get an exemption if they don't meet their production quotas. In a nutshell, this is how it works in Texas (and presumably other states): At the beginning of the day the department responsible for buying power for the state purchases power from utilities. The utilities bid based on how much power they are going to provide, and what the cost will be. Wind power comes in cheaper than gas or goal and gets purchased first. Gas and coal get penalized for not producing as much power as they promise to produce. So if they say they will deliver XXX megawatts, but due to facilities problems or whatever only deliver xxx-y megawatts, they have to pay a fine. If wind fails to deliver their promised megawatts, they are exempted from the fine.
On one hand wind is variable and not easy to predict (although wind based power companies claim that their models are become more accurate and reliable). On the other, wind is easy to come in inexpensively in part because there are incentives in place to make it cost competitive and they also don't have to pay fines for failing to deliver.
I'm of the opinion that the system is fine. Everyone agrees that wind can't provide baseline power. I think the government should reach some sort of compromise between the two. Wind can continue to be cheap and by all means we should be using it when it's available. When it isn't, wind based utilities should have to offset the cost of falling back to gas or coal. It takes hours to bring a plant online and doing so incurs operating costs. If the plant sits idle because the wind stays constant then that's great. The plant operator still needs to be compensated for spooling up the turbines, even if they aren't selling the output. The trick is pricing things in such a way that there is still an incentive to use wind when it's available. Maybe they can trend it, and say over the last five years, wind under-delivered by xx%. Therefore wind needs to adjust their rates upward by xx-y% to offset the irregularity. Y would be an agreed upon value to acknowledge the fact that man can't control the weather, but that when conditions are good, it is in everyone's best interests to tap the wind as a resource.
The thing is Wind is Flaky, Personally I like to have power all the time, even when there is no wind.
There are two solutions to this problems:
1. Giant Batteries/ Flywheels/ Water storage hills
2. Gas Supplement.
The Reason you use gas is it's easier to turn on and off the Coal/Nuclear.
IMHO Nuclear>Gas+wind>coal
Granted this is a simplistic approach, But Gas is coming either way. There is going to be a ton of it on the market soon.
Standard Disclaimer: the company i work for would benefit by me making these statements.
This just sounds hokey. The wind is free. How much cheaper is gas, according to your friend?
Wind is free. If what you want is to have your hair ruffled, you pay nothing.
If, on the other hand, you want to build an energy grid based on wind power, it costs far more than you might imagine. The post you're responding to has some salient points in this respect.
The problem of replacing or upgrading the single most important piece of our national infrastructure has always loomed as the greatest problem with converting to energy alternatives. Wind and solar power have radically different properties with respect to the national grid, and you can't just plunk them in and go on. Doing that leads to unpleasant things like brown-outs that kill the elderly during the height of summer or depths of winter.
These aren't unsolvable problems, but they cost a LOT of money to solve, and no one is yet willing to step up and pay for it, as the advantages are not easily recognized.
The problem is the high voltage transmission infrastructure that no one wants to build. FTFA:
Reaching a goal of 20 percent wind generation in 2024 would require construction of 10 inter-regional high-voltage lines spanning a total of nearly 22,700 miles, at a cost of $93 billion. Such an ambitious goal won't be achieved under a business-as-usual approach, the study concluded.
Not only will it cost an enormous amount of money, but it will have to cross State lines, meaning it will take multiple
regulators, multiple special interests, and multiples of everything else you can think of in order to become reality.
Infrastructure is one of America's top 5 problems for the 21st Century.
Not only do we require trillions in new infrastructure,
there are still trillions in repairs we've been putting off.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
such as the Fed's action to purposely burst the stock bubble of the late 1920's
It couldn't be that everyone had over leveraged themselves... if that were the case, something like the Glass-Steagall Act would have keep the markets free from similar crashes. Oh, that's right... it did for nearly 70 years until it was repealed in 1999.
Keynesian stimulus spending rarely works well, because even if it works in one's theory, in practice governments never save during good times, and when spending happens it is inefficient, slow, and corrupt.
Then why are all states at the top of GDP per capita Keynesian or sitting on top of valuable natural resources?
Now keeping the banking system intact is a separate issue - although I think it will be many years before we know if saving "too big to fail" banks was better or worse than letting them fail.
The sound Canadian banking system holds the real answer: do not led greedy investors lurk in the shadows. Never take cops off the beat. Government oversight and transparency are the only realistic methods to preventing speculative bubbles, among other things.
There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.
- Robert A. Heinlein, Life-Line (1939)
Karma: Can only be portioned out by the Cosmos.
Don't forget how many trillions in debt you are.
you can supply a power grid with _only_ renewable energy
You can also supply the power grid by rigging hamster wheels. The question isn't what we CAN do, but what is the most economically viable.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
They also still have the unlimited lifetime replacement guarantee.
When you strip a socket from a set, or break a wrench, or bend the end of your screwdriver, you can even today just bring in the biggest piece you've got left and they'll give you a brand new one right there.
As a service it is, to say the least, very very cool.
The only downside is that there seems to be fewer Sears stores than there used to be. Too many "real Americans" would prefer to buy the cheap knockoffs of everything for a few cents less at Wal-Mart.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
Gee, if only there were a bunch of people who needed jobs who could do this for us.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Parent makes a good point. We need infrastructure upgrades either way -- wind or nuclear. The thing is, conventional nuclear is here today, and mini nuclear is just about ready to go. Either has substantially better near-term carbon-reduction potential than anything else. Beyond the initial carbon savings that come directly from power manufacturing, given some grid investment and a surge in nuclear output, fully electric cars would actually be practical much sooner than is the case now.
If catastrophic, carbon-fueled global warming is seriously an imminent reality, I don't get why "...Environmentalists are not happy with the President's new trend" on mini-nuclear reactors (as this article asserts, anyway). If environmentalists were clamoring for nuclear power, I would probably believe that they believed catastrophic, carbon-fueled man-made global warming was real. As it stands, I can only think that those who actively oppose nuclear power don't really think so.
Pi Ran Out
Infrastructure is one of America's top 5 problems for the 21st Century.
Why should the public pay for moving electricity from the Midwest to the East coast? Let the East coast electricity get more expensive, and the Midwest electricity get cheaper. People and business will naturally migrate from expensive areas to less expensive areas, not requiring any expenditure at all. Remove the subsidies and tax credits on building anything but pilot projects and research. Provide loans for valid business plans that show a reasonable chance of success to help give a leg up to an industry.
Letting economics drive power sources is a lot more natural than having the government do it and creating tons of regulatory systems that only provide jobs in the legal and political arenas.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Your math is misleading. You give the cost of a wind turbine in quantities of one and then multiply it without taking into consideration volume discount and economy of scale, so your bottom line is probably twice what it would cost. Even so, it's still competitive with building a new nuclear power plant.
Cost of a new nuclear power plant
But then when the wind farm is built, the fuel costs nothing, there is no cost associated with storing and disposing of spent fuel rods, and there's no possibility of a nuclear meltdown and the inadvertent release of radioactive material into the environment.
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Mussolini
Why don't we just breed bigger hamsters?
Properly engineered, nuclear could give clean raw energy on its own, plus giant mutant hamsters. Win win!
Pi Ran Out
Wind and solar power have radically different properties with respect to the national grid, and you can't just plunk them in and go on.
Actually their properties are a good enough match for certain loads that, within appropriate fraction-of-total-grid-capacity limits, you CAN just plunk them in and go on. (Part of the concern is over the push to exceed those fractions.)
Solar and wind both vary wildly at a single-mill or roof-full-of-panels level. But spread them out over a few square miles (do individual clouds, gusts, and storm cells aren't the issue) and multiple sites separated by tens and hundreds of miles (so local weather timing also gets many distinct samples) and the rapid variations average out. They become at least as predictable as the weather - which is very predictable at a 3-day level.
Solar matches the air conditioning load pretty closely - though it leads it a tad. Wind does the same with a slight lag. complimenting solar. It also peaks in the afternoon (due to "lake effect" and tracks the general load peak very well.
Wind also has a component that tracks HVAC load well: Temperature differences drive both wind speeds and need to heat/cool to keep things comfy, while wind speeds drive heat loss-gain through insulation by air infiltration and conduction between surfaces and the air. So higher winds drive both higher geneeation and higher heating/cooling loads to consume the generated power.
So up to a point adding solar and especially wind to the grid - if it's spread out a bit - IMPROVES the grid's ability to handle the cyclic nature of the load and REDUCES the variability that you need to cover with "peaking plants". You still need to keep some other capacity on line to cover the variations. But you needed that anyhow: The load is almost totally UNcontrolled and can vary even more rapidly than the output of a wind farm as a storm cell passes through it. The name of the game is to match the two sides of this equation.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Yes $7 billion dollars.
So... only the cost of about 3 stealth bombers, then?
And you guys bought how many of those? How are they doing in Afghanistan, by the way?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
I don't think that the OP you responded to necessarily meant the public when he/she said "America's ...problem". It might very well be American businesses problem, and the free(ish) market might very well drive the change.
But they are going to need incentive to change, and some guidance during the process. The cheapest solution to power generation right now is the status quo. And it most likely will stay that way for 50 years with oil, and hundreds of years with coal. There has to be an economic motive to change, and that can most easily be created by taxing what we don't like (coal/oil) and giving subs to what we do like (nuclear, wind, sun, etc..).
And as the OP pointed out, this is going to take multiple states, multi power companies, and significant investment in new infrastructure, that is much larger than any one company can handle. It will almost certainly require a 'smarter' grid, and a heck of a lot more power sharing between companies.
How do you think that the Federal Highway system would have turned out without central planning on a National level? We don't need a ton of new regulators or new federal jobs created. We need the existing regulatory agencies to step up and start mandating change, helping to plan it and negotiate the overall system between companies and states, and financial incentives to get the ball rolling.
Cap and Trade, by slowly ratcheting down the allowed carbon in the country, will squeeze companies into action, but I have a feeling that is only going to be passed directly on to customers for as long as humanely possible, until customers are screaming and electric companies are literally forced to start changing.
I'd rather not let pure profit motives drive the change. Lets get some laws in place with timelines and start getting the infrastructure built.
And that's why so many people "need jobs." There is "stuff that needs to get done" so that's not the problem, the problem is that "stuff that needs to get done" is being held up for reasons other than, "not enough benefit for the effort of the stuff that needs doing."
One of those things is financing, to be sure, but one of those things is the regulatory quagmire you have to wade through before you can even break ground on any new project of substantial size. Hell, it'll take you a year to get through all the hurdles (disclaimer:not all of which are regulatory) to renovate an unoccupied building into a restaurant where the former use of said building was also a restaurant.
I don't know what the answer is. One possible answer in this case to go full-federal and dissolve the states as independent bodies, so at least you'd only have to deal with a single monolithic federal morass instead of that plus forty-eight smaller but in aggregate hugely complex systems, but that comes with its own attendant issues.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
> Once the wind system is built, then you're talking marginal gains, rising as the price of oil and gas rises due to their increasing rarity. So there's an initial steep cost for wind,....
From the evidence to date there are also pretty huge ongoing upkeep expenses for wind turbines. There is no free lunch.
> I don't understand what part of of 'one day oil/gas will run out and we'll all die horribly,
Because people who actually have money are smarter than you. They understand economics and know that we won't suddenly wake up one otherwise normal sunny day and find ourselves out of dead dinosaurs to burn. It will happen slowly and the price will rise accordingly as supply declines, which will make alternatives become cost effective.
Democrat delenda est
What you say is lovely... and for the most part, I totally agree. Sadly, in this "The best Government Money Can Buy" American reality, do you actually believe there is any way to actually pass anything resembling intelligent, progressive, meaningful legislation, when any bill that hurts someone with deep enough pockets can simply be killed by investing in the right representatives?
Our nation has just gone through a fiscal melt-down, a financial disaster of epic magnitude. If you look, and have to look, because not a single news source is talking about it, but if you look, you will find that Wall street, the Nations Banks, and all those greedy buggers who almost sunk the country, are now back at it, business as usual, in fact, they're pushing bad paper and derivatives harder and faster than ever before. Making insane bonuses. Taking the hundreds of billions of dollars we gave them to prop up the banks, and spending it on an army of folks in DC, fixing the laws, and ensuring that they won't have to stop playing the games they've become addicted to. Nothing has changed, other than nobody is talking about the new escalation, of the rate at which bankers are now digging the hole we will all eventually have to lay down in.
If our government can't stop the simplest and most obvious case of fiscal rape from happening, knowing full well, that when the dust settles, and the looting and pillaging is done, there will be nothing left of this country. What makes you think for even a moment, that the men and women who populate our centers of government, have either the will or the moral fortitude required to make a sane energy policy?
It is time for us to separate Church and State once and for all, and that must include the Church of the All Mighty Dollar. We need to remove the bankers from our system of government. We will support business. We will empower an environment in which business can flourish, but to do so, we must take the power for business to determine the future of being human away once and for all. Just as a child must be managed or it will eat candy until it is sick, business' only purpose is to make profit, and if it has to do that over the bleached bones of the society in which it exists, it will ultimately do just that (and in far too many cases has), it is up to us, to guide and control business, make it perform our bidding and not the other way. We need to eliminate the entity called Corporation. It was an interesting experiment, but if nothing else, it has proven that human beings have neither the requisite intelligence nor dignity as a species to manage such an entities without doing serious harm to the world and the life in it (including ourselves.)
I'm all for wind power, above and beyond gas and coal. I'm for technology which converts wind into forms of energy that can be stored and used later (perhaps hydrogen.) We need to come up with new ways to power the future without at the same time destroying it. At the same time, we need to overhaul this government, and we need to start by taking back our communication, and keeping the corporations out of our government, or it will not go well for any of us.