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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, 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.
Towers won't work, you need a lake to be able to store a capacity you can actually use. 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.
:-)
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 you might as well let the windmills pump it directly (that's why the Dutch invented them after all), you have an immediate buffer in the lake so you can never pump too hard, and the hydroelectric generators can be throttled easily. You have the benefits of a buffer and a higher efficiency, as well as a more simple design (no high-tech generators needed in every windmill). Damn great idea, if I say it myself... Must be because I'm Dutch.
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?
That's only true for the electrical efficiency.
The political efficiency of losing 90% of your generated power (probably 150% if you count the construction cost amortized over 20 years) in a way that is called "green" by journalists who don't realize that there is anything behind the power socket ...
The self-masturbatory potential is off the scale ...
(and of course, once everything's factored in, this actually hurts the environment. Not that the dutch have anything remotely resembling a natural environment left. In reality the dutch destroyed the entirety of the original dutch environment several centuries ago, because they wanted to cure malaria by destroying all dutch swamps (holland would normally be a country of swamps and sand banks). In addition they made massive stretches of land areable and inhabitable by doing this. It worked. And it was probably the best public health policy ever, and one of the few doublings of a country's territory that did not involve killing one's neighbors)
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.
I think journalists are slowly becoming aware that for something to be green there is more to it than people telling them it's green... They love a scoop, and an article about 150% loss of the power, which basically makes it an exercise in futility would be a good thing for them..
:)
And the natural environment we had here centuries ago was already fast-changing, the rivers and sea shaped the land constantly. It was not an environment you could live in comfortably, and there weren't any old forests. Human involvement first started by keeping land the way it was, and later adding more land to it. I'd hardly call this 'destroyed', but the original nature is indeed severely reduced and most is shaped into something useful.
As they say: "God created the earth, but the Dutch created the Netherlands"
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,
I didn't say that balancing the input/output and buffering is a bad idea.
I only said that if the energy is needed in the grid, you should deliver it directly instead of storing it in water towers.
Maybe I took wrong your first post when you say taking this idea a step further for local power generation: Why convert to electricity in the first place?: it looked to me as you suggested to always store it as hydro - if that's indeed what you were saying, my argument was against "always" which should be replaced with "when in excess".
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
So, reducing the efficiency plus investing in a hydro buffer does make the energy become mainstream? Something is wrong in my world which, like/agree with it or not, is currently driven by prices. Until the freaking "price on carbon" is not injected into the world's economy (in no matter how: "trade-able emission quota", "penalties for extra emission", etc) I don't think this is going to happen.
Other than that, even buffering an unpredictable input it is not without technical difficulties:
a. in your example, to store the excess in Norway lakes, you need a cable that's currently the wonder of submersible cables. And TFA was saying "the grid is the bottleneck, otherwise the CA people would be happy to suck the energy in". If you need to lay a line to the appropriate lake and build a hydro on it, wouldn't it be cheaper to just enhance the current grid which acts as a bottleneck?
b. what if you don't have enough water around to raise in the tower/lake? The "buffering" solution will still be valid, except that hydro is not the only buffer possible
c. what if the lake you use doesn't have enough capacity for the excess you record? What makes more economic sense: invest in a "bigger lake" or just let the excess go?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
The idea of environmentalism has changed drastically since the late 1960s when people started talking about it. Back then it was poisons in the air and water; In Cahokia, IL where I grew up, the aptly named Dead Creek's water was so polluted the creek caught fire. A mile north in Sauget you could not drive past Monsanto with your windows rolled down or the air would burn your lungs. There were 100,000 fifty five gallon drums filled with toxic waste buried along the banks of the Mississippi river just west of Cahokia. There was lead in gasoline, PCBs in electrical transformers, etc. The environment in the US (at least in Cahokia) was toxic.
After Nixon signed the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water act, these problems disappeared over time. The vegetation is a brighter green now, and you can drive past Monsanto with your windows down and not even smell any bad smells.
Nobody who lived before this environmental legislation, or had a loved one crippled or killed due to an employer's negligence before OSHA, is against government regulation unless they're sociopaths who don't give a damn about other people's health, well being, or livlihood. That includes the BP apologists; I feel for the poor folks living on the Gulf.
I'd rather see windmills than coal, gas, or oil fired generators; I can't see how windmills will poison anything. I really don't care about a few dead birds; the day after the tornados hit here in Springfield in 2006, there were thousands of dead birds everywhere (and far fewer trees for them to live in). The bird population didn't take long at all to reappear.
Free Martian Whores!
Even better would be a means of pulling carbon from the air over at the generation plant, generating hydrogen gas or an alcohol, then pumping that fuel via pipeline to a place near the city, and burning it there.
1) Windmills tend to be in agricultural areas, because the land is cheap and too windy for the average resident anyway.
2) Factory farming / big agribusiness is also located there
3) FF / Big Agro requires fertilizers, in part derived from ammonia, to function
4) Ammonia production via Haber-Bosch requires nitrogen (air) and purified hydrogen (electrolyzed water) and a crapton of energy.
5) Conveniently overreving windmills have lots of air and a crapton of energy. Most windmills are either offshore (surrounded by H2O) or are in a non-arid area. Perhaps Oregon has a lack of water, don't know.
So, the rural areas will make their own fertilizer using excess power. Cool.
Of course stereotypical Haber-Bosch plants are all designed to run continuously so as to maximize capital return, and why the heck not. That having a variable source of power has never been a plant requirement, so plants would not tolerate it, does not mean that its technologically impossible to design and build a Haber-Bosch plant that only runs during low demand hours, or that can tolerate a modest disruption to incoming power.
The main problem is electric power companies are not really fertilizer companies. Oh sure, just like any other major American corporation, their management and marketing people spew out vast quantities of B.S., and B.S. is a great nitrogen fertilizer, but its not their core competency. Some fertilizer company would pretty much have to move out there and set up a plant with Very favorable contracted energy cost rates. But most fertilizer companies are dead set on using depleting natural gas as their H2 source...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Oregon could add "world's biggest flywheel" to the list of sites to see.