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In Oregon, Wind Power Surges Disrupting Grid
cpm99352 writes "The Oregonian reports gusts of wind cause synchronized power surges, more than the transmission lines can handle. Windmill farms are ordered to fan their blades, despite tremendous demand for 'green' power from California."
Why not use the energy during these peaks to pump water up to the top of a tower, then gradually release it as required. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
The problem is not wind power, it is an electricity grid in poor condition. Frankly, that is going to be a problem with or without wind power.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
As in, "Sit in front of the turbines, flapping a big feather fan to generate more electricity?" Great idea!
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
Ok this is to do with govenors for generators, intertrip settings and active network management.
The extent of a "surge" depends on weather the turbine has a synchronous or asynchronous govenor. Synchronous are becoming more common, because then the power generation frequency is already synchronised to the grid, but restricting the possible slip means the gearbox has to be able to cope with jolts, and you get higher tranisent voltages.
It is becoming more common to attach wind-farms to transmission linesull at anal that cannot meet their peak-power requirements and this is a good thing. In the 60s we used to build massively overengineered grids on the public dollar, now with more private sector involvement we're more careful at analysing the cost/benefit ratio and have a leaner system.
The solution is to either just trip the generator off the network (a dump load may be required) when generation grows too large, or to dial it back. The second option is preferable but the technologies to do this are being deployed remarkably slowly. Everyone has agreed that we need smart grids for about the past 40 years, and yet still no-one has really done much. The U.S. system is streets behind the European modeal and diffrent state guidelines break the system up into a barely connected set of islands governed by diffrent rules. It's retarded. This is one problem that shart-grids would address, and it's not futuristic technology, it's actually quite rudimentary, just the industry moves so slowly. Thought car manufacture was slow and bound by regulations check out Power transmission.
Green energy is destroying things. Let's go back to burning things just to be safe.
Why, technically speaking, is your power grid in the CA area in such poor condition? Were there missteps in its construction or maintenance? Why isn't capacity being increased? Is it a problem of deciding responsibility for organising interstate builds, and if so why don't other states suffer the problem? Spain has this on-and-off problem of autonomous regions with lots of water not providing to areas with less water; the ("federal") government of the day can determine the outcome.
I live in Almere, a town in the province of Flevoland, The Netherlands. We have power surges all the time from all the wind generators that are based around the city of Almere and Lelystad, which the Dutch government put there because of all the wind that is there, to prove that wind power is a real alternative. The grid simply can't handle the peaks of power that it delivers and can't cope with it if the wind goes away and the wind generators are simply doing nothing...
I thought due to the sporadic nature of renewables that few of them are plugged directly into the power grid and instead the energy is used to, for example, pump water from a lower storage tank/lake into a higher one? That way they know exactly how much power will be generated by the release of the water and it is entirely predictable.
McPhy claims to be able to store energy at 98% efficiency with hydrogen in solid containers,
which are precisely aimed for solving such problems.
http://www.mcphy.com/en/products/iso-containers.php
If I were investor I would look more closely to such technological advances.
So the wind turbines had to reduce production for a few hours. Is it really worth doing massive build-outs to fix that? It's sad to see energy go to waste, but on the other hand you can go outside and watch all the energy going to waste because there isn't a wind turbine to catch it in the first place!
As long we're wasting less than 10% of power (and right now we're below 1% at least in wind-farm-filled Denmark) I don't see the problem. I bet planned and unplanned maintenance accounts for several percent anyway.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
There's better solutions than this! (Score 1) on Monday July 19, @11:15PM Comments: 1 by Kanel on Monday July 19, @11:15PM (#32956500)
Attached to: Wind power surges disrupting grid
This is a well known problem but the article dosn't even beginn to discuss the solutions. Which is very convenient for the windmill owners.
There's basically two solutions: Either you store the extra power for later in some kind of battery, or the grid has both windmills and some other kind of renewable power that can quickly step in or out with swings in windmill electricity. The textbook example is hydro power. The output from a hydro plant can be planned in advance since you have a reservoir you'r tapping from and how much electricity you produce can be changed by the flick of a switch. Unlike coal and nuclear powerplants, hydropower can in principle respond to an unanticipated demand in a matter of seconds.
Fascinatingly, a hydro power plant can also act as a battery. When windmills are producing excessive amounts of electricity at low prices, the electricity can be used to pump water back up into the reservoir, to be depleted later when the price is higher.
If you don't have a hydro power plant nearby, it's possible to store electricity in other ways, both in special batteries designed for windmills, pressurised air in underground caves, e.t.c. But this article only mention one solution: Build more grids. Why is that? So that grid owners will have to make the needed investments and the consumers will ultimately have to pay for it, while the windmill owners get all the benefits.
Hey, if it avoids synchronous bandwidth surges for TCP/IP, it's worth a try for power transmission.
Reversed polarity? Rerouted power through the main deflector dish? huh? Huh?? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pbou_r7ODs&feature=related
I've suggested this elsewhere for other wind farms. How about having a hydrogen electrolysis plant nearby where water can be turned into Hydrogen that can be turned back into electricity during non-peak wind (tidal, or whatever) periods. Hydrogen can be burnt turning it back into water easily and produces heat that can be turned into electricity cheaply and easily. The most expensive part of the whole unit would be the hydrogen storage. This can safely be placed underground to avoid leaks and explosions if required.
Wouldn't fanning the blades generate even more power? Maybe I'm missing something.
so smart, but unable to do anything to do anything about it because they're stuck there with their fingers in a dyke
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It can be done. Just check how Spain manages to cope with a 41% wind energy electricity production: https://demanda.ree.es/demanda.html Check January 14th, 2010 (January = Enero).
Please google and research "peak oil" a bit. You will discover this crisis is a lot worse than they have told you
The windmills are in holland, the water in norway. THat would be one hell of a drive shaft.
Electricity is simple, you can have one system that puts it out and another that takes it in and do all sorts of stuff with it in the meantime.
Say for instance the windmill brakes, with your solution, so does the pump. One system after all, same as your car won't move with a broken engine. But if the windmills fall down, the train still run.
Take the average windmill itself, FAR simpler to run a power cable down then a drive shaft which would already need to be 100 meters just to reach the top, then bend. COMPLEX.
Elec is simple, you can bend it around corners, get it from somewhere else, store it, discharge it easily.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
In the not-so-distant future, we may see a large number of electric vehicles on the road, with increasing policy support. The batteries in these vehicles could provide a very good distributed storage solution through an intelligent charging infrastructure.
One of the biggest arguments against wind power has been intermittency and the inability to tailor demand to supply volatility. An on-site storage can provide stability of output from the wind farm to the grid, but the options are either too ecologically-damaging (normal lead-acid batteries), or too radical (underground compressed air storage), or too debatable (hydrogen, in terms of efficiency of electrolysis, transport / storage and reconversion) and in all cases too expensive and unproven. A high capital cost of the wind farm itself ($1.5 - 1.8 mUSD / MW) and low capacity utilisation factors (27% - 35% at Class I windy sites) mean that given the current utility offtake rates in the US make the project barely viable by itself, and no developer would want to add a hugely expensive backup facility.
On the other hand, the anti-EV lobby opposes the claim of a reduced carbon footprint by a switchover to electric, by calculating the emissions related to power generation, whether through coal or gas. In this case, it would make imminent sense to use renewable sources to generate electricity for charging EV batteries. This still does not solve the issue of a limited range, which is the chief criticism of EVs.
Companies like Better Place (http://www.betterplace.com) have started lobbying hard, tying up with governments in Denmark, Israel, Australia, and local bodies in places such as San Francisco and taxis in Tokyo, to establish an EV-charging and battery swapping network to provide an innovative and seemingly practical solution to the range problem. The network they are proposing to build will keep talking to the car (such as the Nissan Leaf) to keep track of the charging status, the vehicle's position and availability of nearby swapping stations.
Further, in order to address the issue of peak demand, they also propose to charge intelligently, especially during non-peak hours. This can be done for both the battery in the car and the stock in the swapping station. Better Place also talks of buying power from renewable sources to keep the carbon footprint low.
In India, the wind power producer need not be a dedicated utility. Power can be generated by an industrial unit, fed into the grid, and a credit in terms of kWh supplied is available in the industrial unit's power bill, with banking facilities to help adjust excess generation and excess consumption. In some places, time of day metering and credit mechanism is also used to reward generation during peak hours. Similarly, a wind farm can sell power to an unrelated industrial unit too. Such a system could be introduced in the US and elsewhere.
Continued...
Chat with other atheists http://secularchat.org
Is there any particular reason why Compressed air storage is not more widely used?
No, the problem is not magnitude, it is rate of change - the derivative. It is perfectly safe to brake to a halt from 60 to 0, but it is not safe to do the same by hitting a wall. This is like a plane hitting turbulence.
Because there are millions of consumers, demand can be predicted. Either they are not co-ordinated, in which case their various actions roughly cancel out and changes are smooth, or they can be predicted (power surges in breaks in major sporting events). The problem with wind is that a sudden unpredictable increase can cause hundreds of windmills over a huge area to suddenly increase or decrease their input. We don't have an oversupply - as stated, California is begging for the energy. But it cannot be delivered to them in a safe manner.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
So, does this mean Futo is shutting down?
Yeah, not like I expect anyone on /. to give a shit about Rider, but I had to say it...
Digging a big hole is much easier/cheaper/safer then building a large tower (which would have to be massive to store a useful amount of water).
Even better, use the dirt from the hole to build a hill and get double the height. Tada!
No sig today...
people please stop talking about hydrogen
it wastes too much energy in electrolysis and then burning. plus its a nightmare to store and handle. there's far more efficient energy storage mediums that are far easier to manage
i wish people would just forget about hydrogen, but it seems to have entered the public conscience and will be a long time in banishing from consideration. hydrogen is not a serious green energy contender, and never will be
its too wasteful to convert to, and then convert back from, and too messy to handle. please understand these simple obvious facts that make hydrogen a complete waste of your time
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If you can't handle surges, what happens when the superbowl starts? A large surge on the demand side would then be catastrophic, causing at least a blackout in some parts.
Anyway, I tihnk that there are plenty of places in the world where they have more wind power than in Oregon... so all they have to do is copy someone else's idea.
Also, Oregon is in the Rockies, isn't it? The must be some hydroelectric dams there?
First they complain about us burning up the planet, so we build them these bird killers. Now they complain that the infrastructure cannot handle what they asked for.
First -- upgrade your stupid infrastructure! You want it, you better be able to handle it. You get too much energy, store it somewhere (a lot of great ideas have been posted here).
Frankly, forget all of this crap and really go clean -- nuclear. Since the byproduct can be neutralized and used for other products it's a win-win power source.
Heard of power demand spikes?
And the continual complaint about renewables is that it is "impossible" for it to generate enough electricity.
Now you're saying it's not that? Why the change?
Is it because you just want to say "no" so have to keep changing your "reasoning" to keep saying no to?
... tidal. Build a dam across the entrance of the SF bay and capture the power from the tidal flow going in and out every day. Oh, and you could build a roadway across the top of it and get rid of that ugly bridge right there.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
This post gets at what seems like the obvious solution to me: "batteries".
Is battery tech so far behind generator tech that each windmill can't, say, charge a local battery for a few hours at high RPM, and then have that energy bleed out into the grid over time? This is a serious question - I have no idea what state-of-the-art battery technology is but it seems pretty obvious that these things should go together, just like they do in a car (alternator/battery).
I get that a fleet of electric car batteries and substations could serve that purpose, but then (once again) the inability of the grid becomes an issue, unless the cars/substations are right there at the windmills.
So, are large capacity batteries attached to each windmill just not feasible?
This shouldn't be a "shock" to anyone. It took the power crisis in CA back when we had the rolling blackouts to finally get a second "trunk" line ran from N to S California to handle the increased possible loads going back and forth depending on where the demand was.
Sounds like they need to build another major path between OR and CA to get the power down here, or up there as the case may be.
Usually it takes this happening a few times before something is done though.
And is the grid disrupting wind power surges everywhere else?
What a non-story - electrical generators can produce too much electricity if spun too fast. Big freaking surprise.
And the what they do to the fan blades is called "feathering", not "fanning".
I think we used mills for grinding grain before we used them for pumping water. That is why the earliest mills were "rotatable houses" that could be directed at the wind. The grain was lifted up and ground high up in the mill. The first watermills resembled that design, but needed a "kings axis" that went through the directional axis (which was now replaced by a roller bearing) and reached all the way to the waterline. Only later the design was changed to a fixed tower-like structure with only a small movable top.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
You mean to tell me all this talk about we should do our part and be more energy efficient and all that , and the power co. is copping out with a ...we are getting too much energy back, you really mean, oh we are losing too much money so please let's use another excuse and say we can't handle all this extra energy...buggers!
Seriously though, I'm surprised. Seems to me that the Dam authorities are getting greedy. After all, are we not in need of more energy these days? Why not hook up to other states and send the power to places that might really need it?
There are several ways that variable wind generation loads can present challenges. Texas, which has a large concentration of wind generation facilities, experienced an incident in early 2008 in which a sudden dropoff in wind triggered a grid emergency. A cold front came through, generation dipped, and utilities had to implement power shaving strategies, primarily reducing service to large customers who trade lower rates by being "interruptible."
No, you said it was the magnitude. You ARE changing your tune to suit the reason of the day, aren't you?
This failure was an overload. In this case the supply side. As in "too much current going over the lines".
In the case you're saying "they predict this fine", the overload is in the demand side. As in "too much current going over the lines".
The current load is higher in both cases, one if it fails to manage brings blackouts. The other, it brings... oh... blackouts.
What happened here in Oregon was they COULD have sold that power to California, but they couldn't get it there.
Do you blame the road planners or the drivers when you're stuck in rush-hour traffic?
Planners, yes? After all, the drivers have to start work too.
Here the blame relies on the power companies not managing to sell energy to other states. If they'd done their planning correctly, TFA wouldn't be here.
But still, the evidence here is that you DO change your argument based on what is expedient to continue your preconceived bias.
There is a reason Texas has eclipse California as the #1 US wind producing state
Power line NIMBYism, is as bad, if not worse, than power-plant NIMBYism
The green weenies want wind farms, just not in their backyard or off their private beach, and nothing more than residential power lines within 50 miles of their house...
This just exacerbates one of the biggest so-called knocks about wind power: "well, what if the wind isn't blowing".
The truth is that the wind is always blowing somewhere. If you do it right, wind power and other "inconsistent" renewables can make up a large part of the energy mix without creating a consistency issue.
The consistency problem is largely manageable with:
...a) some overcapacity (okay since their footprint is relatively benign)
...b) a highly flexible grid that can send power from the "blowing" places to the "not blowing" places..
...c) Some baseline and backup power sources, like Natural Gas, nuclear, or whatever.
for thinking that the surplus energy should be stored as efficiently and as easily manageable as possible
(rolls eyes)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
but they are all esoteric and boutique. for the problem of most cases of surplus energy, hydrogen is very low on your list of good solutions
my problem, and perhaps i'm guilty of hijacking the conversation with a side concern, is that too many people think of hydrogen as a valid solution in too many green energy schemes. when the truth is that hydrogen has serious use case scenario weaknesses, in terms of thermodynamics of creation/ combustion, the majority of the time. plus its just a real pain in the ass to handle safely and easily
hydrogen should not be taken seriously as an energy storage medium, that's my point, sorry if i'm hijacking the conversation
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Just like it was fifty years ago there are peaks and sudden changes (such as bringing hydro online) - it's just not being managed very well in this case. There is a reluctance to use the windmills as spinning reserve mostly due to stupid short term financial games in a corrupt power industry - more money can be made this week by doing things in stupid ways so that's what happens.
Lots of Californians want to pay extra for green power, but do they really care who gets which power, as long as the green power is generated and used? I would guess that the vast majority of them would be fine with paying more to have green power generated and used elsewhere, but that isn't an option - when you opt into a green power program, it says you are getting that power.
The northwest already has plenty of hydropower that can be interrupted briefly while the reservoirs are allowed to fill, or at least not deplete as quickly. The wind power could be diverted to the aluminum potlines and other big users - there is still a grid issue, but much smaller than getting those big surges down to California.
A lot of this could be solved administratively, if the parties involved really wanted to solve it
increase capacity of the power grid.
Or the wind farmers should invest in some megaVA capacitors
Line losses are the reason why it's not really sane to use any power source at the end of a incredibly long wire - not much makes it out the other end.
How would that stop a power surge in Oregon?
Honestly, HOW???
What would have happened is that if California had built all those nuclear power stations
a) they'd run out of water every summer
b) Oregon would not have someone looking to buy the surplus energy in California
neither of which stops the Oregon issue with their power supply surge.
But maybe you can explain...
PS for every single ditto who says "the grid is not designed for surges, please check out the demand curve. IT IS NOT FLAT. GET IT?
That would be a good stimulus project: upgrading the grid.
The real power problem has always been storage and movement of the power. Nuclear power plants are dangerous mainly because we have to build them near a population center. If we moved them to the Nevada Atomic Weapons testing ground, it wouldn't really matter if they melted down but, the power would be too far away to be usefull. This article displays the similar problem with wind and hydro power - excess and underages depending on time combined with the location being pre-determined by existing geography. What we really need is a super-battery. Something relatively cheap to build that stores energy at very high efficiencies. Relative size is also important - as if they were small enough it would solve 90% of the electric car problems. But we don't need incremental advances, we need revolutionary sized ones. Laptops and cellphones have been pushing the technolotgy forward at the incremental level, but it is not enough.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Also, if they can run a DC line from Holland to Norway (580km) why not have Iceland run something similar (twice as long?), maybe via the Faroe Islands, to Scotland so they can sell their cheap/green leccy to Europe?
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
It's a big problem. Grid operators are concerned about "dispatch ramp rate", the rate at which power sources can be ordered to increase or decrease output. Ramp rate from idle to full power is minutes for gas turbines, tens of minutes for hydro plants, and hours for coal plants.
Live data on this is available. Here's PJM's dashboard, with the details of the power grid in the northeastern United States. Once the dashboard (a Flash program) comes up, pick one of the graph panes, and use the drop-down menu at the upper left of the window to select "Wind Power". At the lower right of the pane, use that drop-down menu to select "All Data". The green line is total, actual wind power output for the entire PJM control area. Note that today's low is about 80MW, and today's high is about 925MW. That's how variable wind power is; over a 10:1 range in a single day. That's not just one wind farm. That's the entire northeastern US. It's not a big deal for PJM, though; their peak load today is about 130,000MW. Wind power is not yet a significant fraction of their capacity.
Wind power is not "dispatchable"; the control center can't call for more output. Current thinking is that power grids can tolerate maybe 20% to 30% wind power, maximum. There will be periods of low wind, even over very large geographical areas. Huge reserves of "dispatchable" power are needed to back up the wind turbines. Typically, that comes from natural gas fueled turbines. The backup power isn't needed very often, so the capital cost of the equipment per kilowatt hour produced is high.
Likely no one will even see this comment (there are over 300 already), but: Would it make any sense to build flywheels for energy storage on-site at wind farms, to smooth the output as well as not waste excess power generated?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Similar to a manual car? So, if the wind turbine(s) start turning too fast for the grid to handle the output, have a few of them disengage from the generator, and just spin freely.
Its actually perfect for a car analogy: If your prius starts accelerating wildly, rather than die, slip it into neutral and let the engine rev all it wants.
Pumped storage is fine, but all you are left with is electricity. Sooner or later you have to turn that electricity into work. Why not use cheap electricity to make hydrogen? Or make widgets or build data centers.
It is probably quicker to build a manufacturing facility closer to the source than it is to get approval for the transmission lines or pumped storage. It would also creates jobs in, typically, desolate places hungry for work.
As someone who works in the solar and wind controls business, let me state: this is not a surprise or really even a problem. People who install big wind and solar systems understand, because of the payback horizon of such installations, the limitations of the local distribution system. It is completely normal for big turbines to have to feather/furl/divert themselves during strong wind. The owners and installers design for this. It's factored into the payback time of the project!
The problem here is the sensationalist reporting. Yes, we need better electricity distribution systems for distributed generation, but we in the industry know that. We've known it for years. The guys who financed and installed the system at Columbia River Gorge almost certainly knew it.
So, yes, pump money into building bigger lines in the right places, but that's something we've been doing for more than fifty years. Generation locations are rarely at consumption locations, after all, and that was true for coal, natural gas, etc., just as it is for wind, hydro, and solar. The only problem here is that our 1990's generation locations aren't where tomorrow's generation locations are.
So you're saying we should avoid energy loss from wire resistance by pumping liquid fuel in pipes instead? You're joking right?
Sewage Treatment Facilities - "Our duty is clear."
National Geographic Magazine did a recent article on the US power grid. Apparently it is way older and sensitive to fluctuations than I thought. It's really not set up currently to handle the erratic nature of 'green' power.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2010/07/power-grid/achenbach-text
The problem with water is that it requires LARGE area to hold the water. In addition, it requires HEIGHT. As such, it is limited to relatively little area of the US (in fact of the world). Instead, if we were to develop thermal storage units and push these, then they could be sold and installed all over the USA (and world). Make the thermal units run at around .5 MW to 5 MW in size. That would allow a new form of a business unit: electrical storage. The interesting part of the thermal storage is that it can be supplemented with solar thermal to add heat to it. Another place for this next to any business that dumps loads of heat. That way, you can pre-heat the oil/salt.
Likewise, pushing ultra-caps makes good sense.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I think another solution to using excess capacity is to produce energy intensive products. For example ammonia is like the second or third most produced chemical because the fertilizer industry buys mass quantities of it. You could think of ammonia as a nifty way of storing hydrogen because it's very easy to compress it into a liquid. For a windmill farm you would probably want to start by eletrolyzing water into O2 & H2. Then take the H2 and Air and produce your ammonia. A windmill farm might build a small mostly automated ammonia plant on site that can be switched on when the wind is blowing hard and be able to store the product for later transportation by truck.
BTM
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
How about dumping the responsibility of controlling the output onto the generators by installing a fuse, or circuit breaker, which requires manual reset (reset by the generator, not the people operating the grid). That way, you limit grid input to some pre-defined value and you don't have to worry about large surges. The generator will realise that it is in their best interests to make sure that the fuse isn't tripped, so will set up their own storage, or learn to feather.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Ahh, don't you just love the unintended and naive consequences of government getting involved in things? Way to inflate the unnatural demand for wind energy! Never under-estimate how ignorant and power hungry (pun intended) politicians are.
-> Sometimes, you just gotta break free from the shackles of proprietary code.
Pumping water to storage will work where there is :
A - enough water around to pump
B - enough land to drown (or existing dammed lakes)
C - enough altitude discrepancy for water to run with enough energy for electrical generation
However, in many areas 1 or more of the above are not available.
Another not too costly solution might be to use flywheels to store the energy locally (to the wind turbine), and in times of no or low wind use this stored energy to generate power.
Additionally, if instead of horizontal axis turbines (HATs), we used vertical axis turbines (VAT), it might be possible to reduce some of the detriments of wind power :
- noise, VATs dont spin faster then the wind (horizontal blade tips do) and so reduce/eliminate noise from the blades.
- access for repair/maintenance - VATs normally place the generating equipment at the base of the tower - this should ease access for repair and maintenance
- bird/bat kills, VATs are not 'invisible' when spinning, as they are often a solid object (see here for an example : http://www.helixwind.com/en/)
- generally VATs spin up (produce power) in lower wind conditions then HATs. They do also reach peak power production in lower wind speeds. This may help smooth the power spikes (not eliminate) related to wind gusts.
- the above idea of flywheels is even easier to implement with VATs as the generating equipment is already at ground level, where you would also want the flywheel.
Network the damn things up, use them to run Power Over Ethernet switches then get everyone to plug in USB batteries to their cable modems whenever there's slack time.
Win-win.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
Never assume venality where stupidity will do.
Yes. More generally, don't assume evil where stupidity will do.
We still see libertarians regularly on /. who are so sincerely addled by their ideology that they don't recognize state failures like Somalia and the tribal lands in northern Pakistan and parts of Afghanistan as real world examples of their theories in action.
Hi, I'm a libertarian.
You paint an overly simplistic view of the world. There are a bunch of people who consider themselves libertarians, and not all of them are stupid or dupes. The core idea of libertarianism is simple, but people can and do take it in different directions.
stateless, unregulated societies are unstable
I agree with you on this point.
There are some libertarians, the anarcho-capitalists, who believe that we don't need any sort of government at all; that the free market can and will solve all problems, right up to and including the national defense. Like you, I don't think Anarcho-Capitalism has been proven to work in the real world, and indeed you have listed some sobering counter-examples.
Then there are libertarians like me, the minarchists, who believe we do need a government but it should be small and do little. The "government is like fire: a useful servant but a terrible master" libertarians. The libertarians who believe that government should do only what people cannot do for themselves, and little more. (I'm not opposed to government funding for advanced research into space flight, fusion power, and other advanced new technologies.)
But having that debate means first figuring out that we aren't sociopaths on either the left or the right (and don't kid yourself: at the level of the political leadership the left has always been dominated by sociopaths, just like the right, and for the same reasons.)
A libertarian would tell you that the real problem is that the government is too powerful. People who want to exert power over others are drawn to government because it gives them that power. If the government were cut way back, people might be less drawn to it; certainly if government were less powerful, large companies wouldn't be so compelled to make huge political donations or spend huge sums on lobbyists.
And most importantly, if government were really small and did very little, it wouldn't matter so much whether our rulers were sociopaths or not. If our rulers were perfect angels, and perfectly wise, we could give them unlimited power; since they are just people, and politicians at that, we don't dare trust them with any more power than we must.
[libertarians] simply can't believe that people would behave in such obviously idiotic, sub-optimal ways for centuries or longer.
Some of us can. But let's flip that around. Can you believe that a government would seriously enact a budget that plans to average almost a one trillion dollar deficit per year for the foreseeable future? That's not paying down the debt at all, and adding almost a trillion dollars to the debt each year. Can this continue indefinitely? Will the USA be able to get these planned loans on schedule?
You may not be a fan of the free market, but this is scarier. Under the free market, if a company makes bad decisions, it will be forced out of business by the uncaring feedback of the market: other, better-run companies will beat it. But there is no way for a bad company to wreck the entire economy. Government can do it, though.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Welcome to slashdot ha. The whole thing is a bit ridiculous to be honest, most turbines are built with adjustable blades anyway, and if they spin too fast they just turn them off. This should have been foreseen and planned for, and it wouldnt have been hard to do.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Wind power is inherently unreliable and completely unfeasible as a large-scale power-generation method.
Look up the European supergrid concept.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Mod parent up.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Have these engineers never heard of them? Every automotive alternator has one built in to keep from overcharging the battery.
How about this? Have carbon scrubbers/converters that will operate during overload. Instead of wasting the energy, use it for something beneficial, something that can run on automatic.
Partly due to the title of the original post I think a lot of people are misinterpreting the issue here.
Sudden surges in wind capacity are not "disrupting the grid." nothing is broken, there are no alarms at the control station. What's happening is simply that during brief bouts of strong wind, the wind turbines are generating so much electricity that the Pacific Intertie (which carries power from Oregon to California) cannot carry it all. Power schedulers are feathering the blades of wind turbines, meaning the blades are being turned to parallel with the wind so that the turbines generate less electricity.
What does this really mean? To be honest, it's not a big deal. Frankly, I think it's cool - at times we're generating so much power with our wind capacity that it's exceeding the capabilities of the Pacific Intertie, one of the United State's largest long-distance direct-current transmission routes. From the perspective of the Bonneville Power Administration and wind capacity owners in the Pacific Northwest this is annoying, because feathering wind turbines is like opening the spillways on dams - they're effectively letting power flow by uncaptured, which means they can't sell it. If the Pacific Intertie were expanded, they could sell all of the power even during large surges, which means more money for them.
Really, though, nothing is wrong. We're saturating the intertie, which is a good thing, because that means more power for power-hungry Los Angeles, and more money for money-hungry wind turbine operators. All we need to do now is advance storage technologies (Bloom Boxes, anyone?) so that we can saturate the intertie more often.
As a note, I'm very interested in bloom boxes for storage of power from unreliable sources. The efficiency numbers Bloom Energy has published are incredibly promising.
According to the CIA World Factbook, Spain uses about 276 billion kW-hr per year. According to Wikipedia, wind in Spain generated 36 billion kW-hr in 2009, which is growing at around 10% per year.
That's 13%, which although I don't read Spanish competently, I think is what your link says. It's still one of the highest shares of any nation, but definitely not 41%.
I'm sure you got that 41% number from a recent story about during a time of unusually strong winds and the low demand period at night, wind made up 41% of the generation for a couple hours.
Spain can handle this because huge regional overcapacity like the Pacific NW does, they don't have a large fraction generated by dams that are required by the EPA to keep flow rate through the turbines at minimum levels for salmon protection, and around half of their generating capacity is from natural gas, which can quickly adjust output to meet changes in supply or demand.
At the same time, they pay on average about twice what we do in the US, partially because wind and gas are expensive.
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Good point - just like millions of power consumers smooth each other out to where the power demand is somewhat smooth, hundreds (a couple in every state) of wind farms would result in somewhat smooth wind power supply.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
This is simply highlighting the inadequacies of the grid itself and the limitations in the methods of alternative energy source inter-ties. The grid is "tuned" to a particular generator characteristic which alternative energy doesn't possess. Very simply, the grid expects a lower frequency generator variance than alternative energy sources exhibit. This is literally like an op amp with a high frequency instability that hasn't been compensated but has always had only low frequency, band-limited inputs that never "tickle" the point of instability. It can be fixed.
Theres a lake near chatanooga tennessee, up in the hills. water is pumped up there for off-peak power storage. You can take a tour of it. This is not new technology. Depending on the nearest place they could store water, it might also work in Oregon. When they let the water back down, I'm pretty sure the pump become generators.