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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."
Dutch wind energy is currently being stored in Norwegian lakes (because here it's flat, and they have mountain lakes). Apparently the advantage was worth laying the worlds longest underwater power line between nations.
With my emphasis on the quote above, I reckon that if the Oregon->California electrical lines would be of the same quality, then we wouldn't see TFA on /., would we?
But taking this idea a step further for local power generation: Why convert to electricity in the first place? If you pump water to a higher place [etc.]
Now, as a Dutch you should now that the Dutch windmills were used initially to pump water out, not to generate the electricity.
Where is this relevant? If your main purpose is to generate electricity, then each step of transforming energy in different forms will cost you at the bottom line (efficiency goes down). I'm not saying that transforming wind (kinetic) energy in water accumulation (potential energy) is stupid if you have excess of wind energy But if you don't have excess, then direct transformation into electric energy will offer you the best return.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Pumping water with wind energy insures you can use wind energy as a baseline power supply (although it's actually hydro energy that achieves it). You lose some efficiency in raw power output, but since you can spread the use out to all day wind or no wind you increase the worth of that generated power a lot. The biggest disadvantages of both wind and solar is that they can't supply the base load 24/7. Mitigating that problem by reducing efficiency is a trade-off that can really help renewable energy become more mainstream and reduce our dependence on fossil fuel (which is still used mostly to supply baseline power). Also with scarce wind available this may still increase the value of the wind energy enough to make it worth the trade-off... Maybe not today, but soon enough.
As for the 'as a Dutch you should know'; when you quote someone it helps to also read the part you replaced with '[etc.]' since I already noted that windmills were created originally to pump water...
I could probably quote myself from the comment I made about 6-12 months ago when someone posted an article about the US wanting to buy more green power. But I wont bother to search for the article, so I'll just say:
THIS IS the problem with the currently renewable energy sources. We do not have control over their output. When they produce too little we need to augment, when they procude too much, we need to siphon the excess. The higher the percentage of renewable energy is being used, the more these extremes will vary.
So putting out an economic incetive (like the energy credit in the article), means that societys requirements and needs will be countered by politics (however well intended) when they're told they're overperforming, because the energy shouldn't go to waste.
The exact same thing happens here (where we can't rely on solar during the day, due to heavy clouding during wintertime where powerconsumption is highest), the windmills overproduce heavily at night, where the cost of energy can actually drop to NEGATIVE (yes, you get paid to buy power at certain times of the night on rare occasions in northern Europe). One of the ways to counter this, is actually by tailoring consumption. So if you have a smart house, and an electric car. NOW is the time your batteries will start charging. This is also the idea behind the "better place" http://www.betterplace.com/ Weather you store in a chemical or natural battery (like a lake on the other side of a dam), or you turn down other sources of power, we WILL need a way to regulate that doesn't involve cutting production of the cleanest powersources.
I admit, there WILL be a cost to the energy infrastructure in the future (or as the article suggest, NOW). And as the energy market goes global, we're not just talking sales from state to state. But that investment should have been obvious from the initial planning of the site. If you can procude 400MW, it's no good if the infrastructure is only made to handle a third of that. That'd be like building a 1 lane freeway.
--- To err is human... Am I more human than most ?
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
Pumped-water storage is the current tech of choice for grid-scale batteries. You do need nearby hills, but it works fairly well. List.
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
THIS IS the problem with the currently renewable energy sources. We do not have control over their output.
No : the major source of renewable energy today is hydroelectric dams, whose output can be nearly 100% controlled.
The word is 'feather', people. You feather the blades.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
As another poster in this article noted the term is "feather" the blades, not "fan" the blades.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
Solar thermal also does not face this problem. It has very, very predictable peak loads and any excess can be stored directly as heat in an underground reservoir of molten salt or heated oil for nighttime use, or you can simply turn a valve and direct the steam away from the traditional turbines.
The site you link claims 97%, not 98%.
And that's just storage. In practice, you get 70% efficiency for making the hydrogen from water and around 50% from a fuel cell turning it back into electricity. Inverter losses are typically another 2-3% (98% efficiency) on both ends.
0.98 * 0.70 * 0.97 * 0.50 * 0.98 = 22.6% overall.
Pumped water storage is between 70% to 85% efficient overall.
=Smidge=
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."
Local energy storage with hydrogen, 98% efficiency? HA!
Round trip, it's closer to 50% using ceramic fuel cells, and the capital costs are absurd compared to other options relative to power provided (and only moderate relative to energy stored).
The two most cost-effective storage methods at this point in time are batteries and pumped hydro. In most areas, pumped hydro is cheaper. Pumped hydro does *not* require continuous incoming water (beyond what is lost to evaporation), and the water pumped need not be freshwater (it could be a mining pond contaminated with nuclear waste for all they care). As far as batteries go, there are several techs that are all reasonable and depend on what you need -- lead acid and various flow batteries (most famously, vanadium redox) being the prime examples.
Also, not all energy storage is for *supply* buffering. Worldwide, the overwhelming majority of it is for *demand* buffering. And not all of the demand buffering is even due to power plant limitations; some is due to line limitations. For example, one of the Rattlesnake lines out in Utah has a vanadium redox buffer for voltage support out in Castle Valley. The area is sensitive, so they have trouble building new lines, and a lot of the places that need power are rather isolated, so they can't justify increasing the capacity of their existing lines. So what they did was build a big buffer in the middle of it that stores power at night and releases it during the day.
Energy storage does add a cost, but it's not prohibitive. It's generally a couple cents per kilowatt hour, give or take.
The chloride owes the sodium money.