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Texas To Build $4.93B Wind-Power Project
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sun Jul 20, 2008 07:19 AM
from the not-just-hot-air dept.
from the not-just-hot-air dept.
Hugh Pickens points out a story in the NYTimes about Texas' $4.93 billion wind-power transmission project. One of the major goals of the project is to improve electrical throughput to the population centers. Current transmission lines are unable to handle all of the power generated by Texas' wind fields. State citizens will be paying slightly more to help cover the cost, though the project is expected to eventually lower the cost to consumers. Quoting:
"The lines can handle 18,500 megawatts of power, enough for 3.7 million homes on a hot day when air-conditioners are running. 'The project will ease a bottleneck that has become a major obstacle to development of the wind-rich Texas Panhandle and other areas suitable for wind generation. The lack of transmission has been a fundamental issue in Texas, and it's becoming more and more of an issue elsewhere,' said Vanessa Kellogg, the Southwest regional development director for Horizon Wind Energy, which operates the Lone Star Wind Farm in West Texas and has more wind generation under development. 'This is a great step in the right direction.'"
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Whatever happened to orbital solar panels (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
...an old staple of science fiction. Why haven't these come to fruition?
I think you just answered your own question.
Re:Whatever happened to orbital solar panels (Score:5, Interesting)
If you gather solar energy that would have missed earth, and send it to earth; aren't you increasing global warming?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Not if all that heat/light is collected and converted into electricity!
Re:Whatever happened to orbital solar panels (Score:4, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
great - I'd love to be continually bathed in really high powered microwaves. That energy transmission must be horribly inefficient.
While I imagine they'd set a geo-synch orbit and beam it down on a tight focus, wouldn't it warm the hell out of that column all the way down?
In short, would there be a climate impact, and if so, what?
Re:Whatever happened to orbital solar panels (Score:4, Insightful)
Thing is, plenty of science fiction technologies have become science fact.
I have a different answer for him: Much like the flying car, it turned out to be too expensive and not efficient enough.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Because it's an old staple of science fiction. The answers in the question.
We already have solar power beaming down to earth all the time. Why not just build a bunch of mirrors to focus it terrestrially if you want to use solar power? To my mind that sounds safer than having a 1.21 Jiggawatt death ray beaming down from the heavens in the hands of the government.
Re: (Score:2)
Great, now you've given them incentive to build the darned thing.
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My first impulse was to be a grammer nazi, but I refrained ;-).
What "immense power?" You would need immense arrays to create "immense power." So big, in fact, that they would greatly interfere with the orbits of other satellites, including communications and spy satellites. No government is going to give up its spying capabilities to provide electrical power for the rest of the world. Besides, think about any poor bird/plane/helicopte
Re:Whatever happened to orbital solar panels (Score:5, Informative)
>..My first impulse was to be a grammer nazi, but I refrained ;-).
Gramm_a_r nazi!
Parent
Re:Whatever happened to orbital solar panels (Score:4, Insightful)
Because everyone freaks out about the "Death ray from space" aspect of it. And at power densities where it's not an issue, it's not really worth it.
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...an old staple of science fiction. (Score:3, Funny)
Well, if we are going to SciFi power sources, then I perfer to hold out for fusion (hot or cold), or perhaps a device that sucks out all of the static electricity in the atmosphere and harnesses that.
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Re:Whatever happened to orbital solar panels (Score:5, Insightful)
42% of the USA's territory is desert. Why even consider a second sending solar panels to orbit when we have millions of unusable square miles right here. Just think of those area of Nevada desert which are covered with craters from atomic bomb tests, there's nothing there worth not being covered by solar panels. Then think about how much it would cost to send to space the same area of solar panels you'd could put down here, not to mention the lesser transmission loss, although on the other hand nights don't last as long in space and clouds are more sparse up there too.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"Then think about how much it would cost to send to space the same area of solar panels you'd could put down here, "
Just the insane maintenance and upgrade costs would make putting the gear in space an idiotic choice. We also have enough junk up there without scattering tons of it deliberately.
Land is cheap and abundant, terrestrial systems can be easily inspected/upgraded/maintained/recycled, and we would not be trapped into the horridly long development and lifecycles of space gear. When you want rapid im
Re:Whatever happened to orbital solar panels (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Sorry - was 100 mile square (Score:3, Insightful)
Thanks for the typo correction - it's actually a square 92 x 92 miles or around 8,400 square miles.
Big, but doable. Estimated cost is around 400 billion dollars - we've probably spent that much in Iraq already. Take away the income from their oil, and that will do a better job of reducing the middle easts power.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Oh! Nice catch. I was thinking about monthly usage when I used 600kWh. 600kWh is what a moderately green household would use in a month (I was reading online about off-grid homes a few days ago), but the average household usage is 920kWh per month. [doe.gov] So daily that's about 31kWh. So that solar array would power 98,923,354 households, about 91% of the households in the US. Thanks for that.
Re:Because nights are dark... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Something to keep in mind (Score:5, Informative)
While I am all in favor of more wind power, here's something to keep in mind: this spring the Texas control area (the organization that manages power flows in the Texas region) had an incident where the temperature stayed warm into the evening and the weather conditions were such that the wind died across the entire state. Of course the wind turbine power went to zero across the entire state as well, driving the system into yellow (risk of blackout/system collapse) and close to red before they could get enough backup gas turbines on-line.
As I said, wind is great but it needs to be backed up with hydro and probably nuclear to have a reliable system.
sPh
Re:Something to keep in mind (Score:5, Interesting)
Or they could have radio controlled shutoff switches on more air conditioners. I have one on mine, and it's great. I pay less for my power, and it only gets shut off at a time like that - there is a contractual arrangement about how often it can be shut off, and it isn't often.
There are a lot of ways that the program could be expanded, not least making it a bigger difference in the amount one pays for power - more people would sign up, the ones who didn't would pick up the cost.
Parent
Re:Something to keep in mind (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Something to keep in mind (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be a lot more work than people are accustomed to. You couldn't just put your clothes in the dryer and press start. You'd have to put in accepted price range, otherwise if the price spiked to $100/kwh you would spend a fortune on that load. That means sometimes your clothes would be wet hours and hours later.
That said, there is a tiny minority, myself included, that would really enjoy having real-time pricing. I would love having power generation and storage at my house, buying low and selling high, only using high-demand applications at rock bottom prices, the whole thing controlled by computer and PLC.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
see what a deregulated energy market combined with smart energy traders can come up with.
Enron. The smartest guys in the room.
Re:Something to keep in mind (Score:4, Informative)
In france, you get a discount on power cost when operating between 10.30pm and 6am or so.
All electrical based water heaters are set to draw power only during this time period (unless set on manual).
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Re:Something to keep in mind (Score:4, Informative)
No, the way it works in practice is that the system automatically shuts off, say 5% of the residential A/C units for 5 minutes, and then turns them back on and turns off a different 5%. Nobody should even notice that it has happened in their home. But when you're talking about hundreds of thousands (or millions) of houses, such minor individual adjustments add up to massive quantities of electricity being freed up right at the peak demand.
Parent
Re:Something to keep in mind (Score:5, Interesting)
While I am all in favor of more wind power, here's something to keep in mind: this spring the Texas control area (the organization that manages power flows in the Texas region) had an incident where the temperature stayed warm into the evening and the weather conditions were such that the wind died across the entire state. Of course the wind turbine power went to zero across the entire state as well, driving the system into yellow (risk of blackout/system collapse) and close to red before they could get enough backup gas turbines on-line.
As I said, wind is great but it needs to be backed up with hydro and probably nuclear to have a reliable system.
sPh
That's probably where the transmission line truly manifested itself. I live in West Texas, and see no less than at least three wind ranches between my house and work.
I've seen almost half an entire field of the generators shut down when the wind is blowing.
Better transmission would avoid the risk of brownouts, because, believe me, there's enough power to be made out here:)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course the wind turbine power went to zero across the entire state as well, driving the system into yellow (risk of blackout/system collapse) and close to red before they could get enough backup gas turbines on-line.
As I said, wind is great but it needs to be backed up with hydro and probably nuclear to have a reliable system.
A good gas turbine can be spun up to almost-full-power in about 2 minutes. If a sudden dip in available power is anticipated, they can also be placed on 'standby' to reduce the startup time to a matter of seconds.
Sounds to me like the turbines are what were having problems here.
Also, like others mentioned, remote-control kill switches could help reduce suerfluous loads.
Re:Something to keep in mind (Score:5, Interesting)
I live in Dallas TX. On 07/06/2008 the Dallas Morning News had a great article on "Debate Flares Over Wind Power" by Elizabeth Souder. The text edition. The critical part is wind in Texas is always fickle. The incident referred to by the original poster occurred in February 2008. Lets look at the DMN chart. 3:15AM wind blows strong; lowest demand for the day, price per megawatt 41.96. Then during the hottest time of the day 3:15PM; wind generates the least amount for the day, price per megawatt 109.80.
Below is quoted from the DMN article.
WHERE THE POWER COMES FROM IN TEXAS
1. WIND Wind turbines almost always go [online] first. While operating the turbines can be costly, the wind is free and operators bid low to ensure they can sell as much electricity as possible.
2. NUCLEAR Nuclear plants are the second cheapest source of power and tend to operate constantly throughout the year.
3. COAL Coals plants to third and also tend to operate constantly. Nuclear and coal plants are known as BASE LOAD GENERATORS.
4. HYDRO/OTHER/DC ties. Texas has a tiny amount of hydro-generated power. Some of the state's power comes from other types of plants such as solar panels. And some power comes through so-called DC ties, or power lines that bring electricity from outside the ERCOT territory.
5. NATURAL GAS The remaining supply is filled in by natural gas plants. That can drive up electricity prices because natural gas is costly. The newest, most efficient plants turn on first followed by older plants that are much more costly to operate. Some of these plants, called peaker plants only operate a few hours each year to fill in supply when demand surges.
6. MARKET RATE. THE LAST PLANT TO TURN ON SETS THE PRICE FOR THE ENTIRE MARKET. SO EVEN IF A WIND OPERATOR BIDS LOW, THAT OPERATOR'S PRICE RISES THROUGHOUT THE DAY AS PLANTS WITH HIGHER PRICED BIDS TURN ON.
Registration may be required.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/industries/energy/stories/DN-wind_06bus.ART0.State.Edition1.4e033eb.html [dallasnews.com]
Thanks,
Jim
Parent
Re:Something to keep in mind (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuclear often comes up but the very long contruction lead time and very high capital cost renders new nuclear capacity irrelevant until the economy picks up. Large coal fired plants take almost as long.
Wind in contrast can be handled in smaller, cheaper chunks which will not give you the economy of scale of large thermal plants but it will give you the electricity this decade.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As long as "building an X" is "irrelevant until the economy pix up," the economy isn't going to pick up. Further, what would you define as a "picked up" economy, anyway? We're still below 6% unemployment, so even if we had jobs for everybody, it'd amount to something like a 1/20 change in GDP.
Further, you want to *build* the plants when labor is *cheap*, because you can't sell the power until after it's built.
Nuclear power might not be the
Re:Something to keep in mind (Score:5, Informative)
The "spinning reserve" relates to keeping some plants available to produce power within 10 minutes to deal with unexpected loads or other generators failing.
While a plant is in this state, it's generally burning far less fuel than if it were actually operating at capacity.
So imagine an oil plant.
Maybe it burns 1000 gallons / hour at max output.
But maybe it only burns 300 gallons/hour at it's spinning-reserve rate.
So if you replaced the power that plant burned by wind, but still had to operate the oil plant in it's spinning-reserve mode in case the wind died, you'd replace 700 gallons/hour.
Parent
Wind Energy for Air Conditioners? (Score:5, Insightful)
There really needs to be a big campaign to wise people up to the idiocy of A/C and to incentivise retrofitting of insulation and to dramatically improve building codes. Working on greater supply of clean energy is an excellent thing, but unless it's balanced by moves to reduce demand for power that for the most part is pissed away warming up the *exterior* of houses, then it's effort and money unwisely spent.
Re:Wind Energy for Air Conditioners? (Score:5, Interesting)
Insulation?
Well, I wasn't able to come up with the number of "Houses" in Texas, but in 2006 they had a population of 23.5 Million people. So lets say there's 8M Houses. That would 612$ per house for insulation. Assuming that's the issue to begin with. But it's not.
Texas has a history of being an energy exporter, mainly oil. If you read the article, you'll see that the problem isn't generating power to meet their needs. It's getting power to where it needs to go. That would include selling it to other states in the US that have been dragging their feet on allowing businesses to build their own wind farms.
Texas may not be prime real estate when it comes to wind power generation, but they sure have a lot of it. Having the Government build up the infrastructure to those places will have the power companies leaping to put up wind farms there.
Using Government power to help create business. Instead of taxing, regulating, and feeing them to death. There's a reason Texas tends to have the highest job growth in the US.
Parent
Re:Wind Energy for Air Conditioners? (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, having grown up near Houston - Texas is hot. I've not yet been to Australia, but summer in Texas regularly is 100-115 or so (~38-46C), with humidity, at least in the heavily populated parts of the state (Dallas, Houston, San Antonio) at 90-100%. That's MISERABLE. I lived in the tropics for almost 3 years and it was much more pleasant there than Texas in the dog days of summer.
That being said -- there's a LOT that could be done architecturally (Dallas, looking at you) to reduce this. Tract housing has this tendency to hack down all the (shade)trees and built nigh-yardless McMansions. Plants are great at absorbing heat, and trees provide shade -- a well placed shadetree over your southwestern exposure can really help cool your house down.
Basically I just want to weigh in -- AC is not an option in Texas; but that doesn't mean we can't reduce the energy draw from it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There's some reason behind that - sometimes you want to lose heat. I live in a house with no insulation at all and use no heating and cooling. It works because the place was designed in the 1920s to lose heat as quickly as possible through the thin wooden walls so that it would not stay hot all night in summer. High ceilings use the air as the insulation and having the living area two metres above the ground uses shaded circulating air as insulation
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Four years ago we bought an older 5500 sq ft ranch house in Texas. When I looked in the attic after my first electric bill, I found virtually no insulation (lots of wallboard visible, with clumps of fiberglass strewn about). How the previous owner paid for a/c and heat is beyond me.
We bought recycled newspaper-based insulation from Home Depot, and laid it in 18-20" deep for about $800. This reduced summer cooling costs by at least $400. We helped a friend blow recycled clothing-based fiber insulation in
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Heh....West Virginia didn't have building codes until a couple years ago and we also don't have zoning statewide. The building codes we do have are so weak it is laughable. That issue aside...
From TFS:
What a load of horseshit. I defy anyone to point me to an occasion anywhere where a utility has decreased prices to consumers once they got the increase they wanted from
Re:Wind Energy for Air Conditioners? (Score:4, Informative)
I defy anyone to point me to an occasion anywhere where a utility has decreased prices to consumers once they got the increase they wanted from the PSC. Hell, I defy anyone to show where any of this renewable powerplant technology has had the effect of lowering the cost to end consumers.
In Texas, consumers choose their electricity generator. A portion of the bill is paid to the incumbent that provides transmission and delivery. The Texas Public Utility Commission (PUC) runs a website that summarizes all of the offers:
http://www.powertochoose.org/ [powertochoose.org]
Cutting to the chase: there's a webpage that shows all the generators offering service for your ZIP code. Enter a ZIP code in one of the big metro areas, and you'll see lots of choices that can be sorted by various factors:
You can also filter on any or all of these factors. I just committed to another year, choosing a plan that was 100% renewable energy content. The generation company offers otherwise equivalent plans with renewable and non-renewable content, and the 100% renewable content is exactly 0.2 cents/kWh more than non-renewable.
The renewable energy is indeed more expensive, but only a bit more than 1%. But in Texas, the problem is transmission: we are on our own grid (separate from western and eastern US grid), with limited interconnection to the others. So, renewable energy must come from within the state, and there's a limited amount of it.
BTW, The Texas PUC no longer sets electric rates, except for the "Provider of Last Resort": the electricity generator that is automatically chosen for a customer if their current generator is unable to provide service.
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Superinsulation (Score:4, Informative)
Few US homes, even new ones, reach superinsulation levels of construction. for one, look at the walls, they just aren't thick enough, don't have enough space for all the insulation needed. You'll need at least, raw minimum, six-nine inches in the walls and at least a foot in the ceilings, something like that. I used to always say R55 all around, that's more or less what we used to shoot for, the linked article says now they call it R40 walls and R60 ceiling, close enough. We don't have exact legally defined codes to qualify it yet (AFAIK), but it isn't 2.5 inches that fits inside of a normal stud wall like is more common. In order to achieve really good levels of insulation you have to have planned air in and planned air out, this is actual ducting and fans and air filters, because all cracks are sealed, and there are a lot of them, and it is done in stages as the different layers of the house are built. You need an active heat exchanger for this planned air intake and exhaust. Your windows are multipane and gas filled and are not cheap, and should be smallish, and usually you would have an insulated tight fitting interior cover for the windows for real cold or hot spells. And so on. A house that achieves really good superinsulation levels can get by most of the time without much in the way of planned heating, even in the winter, as just heat from the humans in there, cooking, running lights and appliances, hot water use, etc is usually sufficient to maintain a decent enough comfort level. Anyway, there's some good engineering to it, I've worked on some, it really does work, the drop in use of air conditioning and heating is just *phenomenal*, strikingly so, I mean they just don't come on that much, you should be able to go a day or days with no activation where before your heating or cooling might be coming on several times a day, that's the difference.. Here is the wikipedia writeup on it, Superinsulation [wikipedia.org].
Parent
Number crunching (Score:2, Funny)
As we're talking about Texas here, can somebody convert that into a unit its governors will understand — i.e., number of electric chair activations?
Cape Wind (Score:5, Insightful)
I am in the middle of reading Cape Wind, BBS, 2007 [amazon.com] which is about trying to put a wind farm in Nantucket Sound. The location is perfect for a wind farm, and the need in NE for clean cheap power is high. But when all the backyards are owned by millionaires, it makes for an extreme NIMBY makeover.
I am finding the book to be a fascinating but horrifying read as to the lengths people will go to subvert the political process to protect what they believe is their right to quietly enjoy a public owned location. A typical example was adding a last minute rider to an Iraq war finance bill specifically aimed at blocking this one project. I'm not pro-war, but even I found tactics like this to be underhanded.
I have been getting interested in wind power from an engineering perspective, but reading this book has been a real eye opener as to how the political process is probably more important than the actual mechanics and cost/benefit/profit analysis. I'd recommend it to anyone as a good read, and while I don't understand the "anti" viewpoint all that well, this book gives some interesting lessons.
BTW I linked to Aaazon, but screw them - I got my copy from my local library!
My Diabolical Plan (Score:3, Funny)
1. Become T. Boone Pickens.
2. Purchase controlling interest in the companies that build and service windmill generators.
3. Persuade government to foot the bill for installing thousands of said expensive windmill generators in open areas of Texas.
4. Snicker behind my hand as I realize that Texas gets every bit as many tornadoes as the so-called "Tornado Alley".
5. ???
6. PROFIT!
My Changed Tune (Score:5, Insightful)
As a former resident of Texas and once a proponent of electric deregulation, I can say that the last five years have been an eye opener. While at the beginning many including myself talked about the possibilities from a theoretical standpoint, the actual execution of deregulation has been a disaster. The WSJ just did a piece on Texas deregulation this past week which you can find here.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121625744742160575.html?mod=googlenews_wsj [wsj.com]
I do believe modernized transmission would go a long way to helping the state like the article talks about, but I also believe Texas should fully embrace the national power grid. Since Texas is not connected in any major way to any other state's grid, ERCOT runs the show and FERC rules need not apply. This gets the double whammy of double set of rules for those who would choose to do business in the state and disallows any load balancing from other grids.
For a state that went from one of the cheapest electric rates to one of the most expensive (I live in NYC now and its only slightly cheaper then Texas), combine this with the folly that was California its a crushing blow against the idea of electricity deregulation. While the WSJ article talks about soaring natural gas prices (most of the state still gets its electricity from natural gas) and congested transmission as being culprits, I think you have to look at the volatility in pricing. Electricity is the most volatile commodity man has created. Unfortunately, no business, market, or participant structure can sustain 10,000s percent moves in intra-day pricing.
As a libertarian leaning thinker I believe in the free economy and as little market regulation as possible, but I am also scientifically-minded individual meaning I will examine the evidence from both sides. Given what we have seen in the markets that have been deregulated, the data and evidence conclude that electric deregulation just does not work.
T. Boone Pickens (Score:4, Informative)
T. Boone Pickens is the guy funding a lot of this. He's a retired oil tycoon (who now runs some hedge funds). Even if you can't agree with his past and his wealth, you can't disagree with the fact that this guy is stepping up and attempting to _do someting_ about the problem. And he's willing to use his wealth to try and make it happen. They are currently constructing the largest wind farm in the world in western Texas.
Check it out for yourself [pickensplan.com] and make your own judgements...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmmm... someone who's investing huge amounts of money in windfarms is trying to convince us to get our electricity from windfarms?
Rugged Individualism (Score:3, Insightful)
Texan's desire to go off in their own direction might place an upper limit on the amount of wind (and other) resources it can harness.
Texas has kept its power grid isolated from the rest of the United States. As a result, they have a smaller load over which to spread a given amount of wind generated power. Looking at this another way, wind power will be a larger share of their total generating capacity. Since wind is inherently a variable source of power, alternative sources will be needed, some of them on line and spinning, to fill in the capacity between wind gusts. Texans will have to finance this on their own, rather than taking advantage of the load and generation diversity an interconnected grid provides.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Even if the peak use of electricity extends beyond the sunlight hours, the PV still does more than "little" to reduce the demands.
For one, as I mentioned, the PV is a better insulator (reflector/absorber) of solar power that makes the heat that air conditioners must cool. That is the peak of the peak, with "double" (or something like it) the effect of just the extra shade, because the shade amount is partly used to power extra cooling. Also, since the standard time zones see the actual solar peak (solar noo