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The Power Grid Can't Handle Wind Farms
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Aug 27, 2008 06:09 PM
from the gone-with-the-wind dept.
from the gone-with-the-wind dept.
DesScorp writes "The Times reports on the problems of adding wind farms to the power grid. Because of the grid's old design, it can't handle the various spikes that wind farms sometimes have, and there's no efficient way to currently move massive amounts of that power from one section of the country to the other. Further complicating things is the fact that under current laws, power grid regulation is a state matter, and the Federal government has comparatively little authority over it right now. Critics are calling for federal authority over the grid, and massive new construction of 'superhighways' to share the wind power wealth nationally. Quoting the article, 'The dirty secret of clean energy is that while generating it is getting easier, moving it to market is not.'"
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Moving it across the country? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a job for... COMPUTOR!
Hydroelectric (Score:5, Interesting)
What do you do in places that don't have sufficient wind for wind power?
Those who do pump water uphill; those who don't, take what they need from said body of water.
Hydroelectric isn't the flavour de jour, but is notable for having the opposite qualities from those of windpower, in that it is able to manage variable demand extremely well, and absorb surpluses on the grid.
Parent
Stored power (Score:5, Interesting)
As of 2000, stored power to the tune of about 2.5% of the US load (19.5 gigawatts) was online in the form of Pumped Storage [wikipedia.org]. The EU had 32 gigawatts.
There's plenty of room to do more of that out in the desert; it can be subsurface, so as to have little or no long-term impact on the environment (obviously construction would temporarily beat up the habitat, though.) All pumped storage requires are wires, pumps, generators, a couple of big storage systems (one uphill, one down), and water. Doesn't have to be fresh water, either. The larger the height difference, the more energy can be stored. It's lossy; but still, it is both clean and effective.
Companies like EEStor that are working to create ultracapacitors with storage capacities exceeding those of batteries may be key to storage; storage can be local, on a per-unit basis which insulates users from the myriad types of grid failures that occur. It also allows them to store power locally if they generate any themselves (solar, etc.) Ultracaps are good for moderate term storage without much loss, and they can be fused in such a way as to prevent huge power discharges in case of accidents, so they're pretty safe.
There are some other contenders - flywheels, for instance -- but do *you* want an aging flywheel, high mass, high speed, coming apart in your basement? Me either. I saw a 4-inch grinder wheel come apart once and chunks of it outright severed a 2x4 in the wall next to the workbench. So those are probably best left in large scale storage farms.
Aside from storage, the thing that has always amazed me is that solar never seems to become really affordable. No matter how many ways they make it, or what tech they use, somehow, I can't buy inexpensive panels that will cope with hot summers, cold winters, and rain. New printing process? Ultra cheap cells? Mass production? Sure, I hear about those. But for SOME reason, all their output is bought up, and I can't buy the stuff. Not to get out the tinfoil, but if nothing else, it is very annoying.
Parent
Re:Stored power (Score:5, Interesting)
the industrial components already exist for salt and it's fairly non toxic and cheap to operate and build.
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Re:Stored power (Score:5, Informative)
See molten salt storage at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy [wikipedia.org]
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Re:Stored power (Score:5, Insightful)
New printing process? Ultra cheap cells? Mass production? Sure, I hear about those. But for SOME reason, all their output is bought up, and I can't buy the stuff. Not to get out the tinfoil, but if nothing else, it is very annoying.
Crumple up that tinfoil hat, because the answer is fairly obvious: cheap solar cells are being bought up by the power industry because... wait for it... they want to use it to produce electricity.
Cheap PV isn't going to come to the consumer level (you and I) until the industrial (solar power plants) and commercial sectors (construction & other volume buyers) get their fill. You have to remember that consumers are one time buyers. We're going to install it in/on/near our property and that's it for the next 10~25 years. Everyone else gets precedence over us.
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Re:Stored power (Score:5, Informative)
The desert is very fragile... When I lived in the desert, a pizza delivery guy drove through our property and the tire tracks were clearly visible 5 years later when I left.
Renewal of cryptobiotic crusts can take from 50 to 250 years. A destroyed ecosystem may require over 3,000 years for complete recovery, say co-authors Jeffrey E. Lovich and David Bainbridge in a 1999 article on the effect of human activity in the Southern California deserts.
I know it's not exactly on topic to parent, but it illustrates how fragile the ecosystem is. source [orvwatch.com]
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Re:Ok... (Score:5, Insightful)
As an example, I know a bright, competent woman who has started putting a lot of time an thought into Boone Pickens's plan for a big move into green energy. I asked her what the plan was for storage and she said (referring specifically to home-based solar production of electricity), "That's no problem, excess electricity gets sold to the power company, who stores it for you." I tried to explain that Georgia Power has no facilities for storing your power and that in fact your minuscule amount of unreliable, intermittent electrical energy was more of a nuisance for them than anything else--until everybody tries to do it, when it turns into a big problem. This wasn't something she wanted to hear.
I would love to hear some good solutions to the engineering (and economic) problems posed by adding wind and solar to the grid, but so far there seems to be a lot of magic involved. For the uninitiated, a quick overview of the difficulties we face can be found here [denbeste.nu].
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Re:Ok... (Score:5, Insightful)
Give houses a large tank of water. In the winter heat the water when there is an electricity surplus, then use the hot water to heat the house. In the summer cool the water when there is an electricity surplus, then use the cold water to cool the house.
That would be a very environmentally friendly and almost 100% efficient way to store the energy. It would be much cheeper than batteries or any other storage method. And when you consider that 80% to 90% of domestic electricity is used for cooling or heating it would go a long way towards dealing with the problems of storing renewable energy.
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Re:Ok... (Score:5, Informative)
Electric Thermal Storage exists: http://www.adamsec.coop/Default.aspx?tabid=107 [adamsec.coop]
however, to do it requires about a 10k initial investment or so. large tanks of water have other problems, you'd need one big tank (or one big temperature differential) to heat or cool most homes, never mind the need for a hydronic heating and cooling system, which suits me just fine as a hydronic heating designer, but realistically only a small fraction of homes in our country have hydronic heating or cooling systems, which are also more expensive than the far, far more common forced air systems here in the US.
so for your 'typical' home, you'd be looking at more like a 15-20k initial investment. more if you need a condenser for cooling as well or if you want a really GOOD heating system.
not a bad idea, just not simple to implement for most people.
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Re:Ok... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Ok... (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah Solar sucks, look at how little power hits the Earth:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_energy#Energy_from_the_Sun [wikipedia.org]
I mean if you were to build a CSP Solar reflector system in the
3.5 million square miles of the Sahara Desert it would barely
power a few Earths, how lame is that.
SEGs gets about 350 Mega Watts out of 2.5 Sq. Miles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Energy_Generating_Systems [wikipedia.org]
Boooooo Solar..... .......
Or not.....
Parent
Re:Ok... (Score:5, Interesting)
[sigh]
Yes, it is true that no alternative power source can quickly and immediately replace an infrastructure that took about a century to put in place.
It is also true that the amount of solar energy that falls on the US exceeds our total power consumption by many times, even accounting for the low efficiency of PV and solar thermal collectors. Here's a snippet from wikipedia (where it references a page from Stanford -- you can chase the links yourselves): "The amount of solar energy reaching the surface of the planet is so vast that in one year it is about twice as much as will ever be obtained from all of the Earth's non-renewable resources of coal, oil, natural gas, and mined uranium combined."
It is also true that the available wind power amounts to many times the total amount of energy consumed by the US (you can look it up yourself -- it's also a ginormous number).
Finally, Google's recent investment into Enhanced Geothermal Systems highlights the potential to pull energy from the latent heat within drilling range, using more economical technologies than have previously been utilized. There is a 2006 MIT pdf on Enhanced Geothermal Systems which shows that there also, we find available reclaimable energy capable of satisfying our total energy needs many times over.
If wind power is inconstant, over-build, and generate far more power than we need on average, and use the excess to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen to drive fuel cells during the calm periods. The odds of having a lengthy calm period that extends over much of the US is practically nil. Same thing for solar power -- build out more than you need, and use the surplus to split water (which covers 3/4 of the planet) into hydrogen and oxygen. If a nation the size of Germany with limited resources (compared to the US) can commit to 100% alternative energy, there's no reason why the US cannot do so as well, with our much larger supplies of available energy and much larger economic resources.
But with such a variety of available and abundant energy sources, we don't need to overbuild, the point is to utilize each of them where they can provide the most impact (e.g., solar for peak utilization, which occurs during the day), and build an enhanced distribution grid (again, we're going to need to anyhow) to move electricity from where it is generated to where it is needed, just like we do today.
Wind power generates voltage spikes? So use flywheel technologies (e.g., Beacon Power (BCON)) to spin flywheels, and generate clean, regulated power from the flywheels. This is technology that exists today. It will even serve as a store of energy, to level out brief lulls in the output. New technologies require (and always receive) improvements as we learn how to best utilize them. Our experience with them improves them.
The point is, we CAN replace ALL our existing fossil fuel power generation infrastructure -- we have to anyway, due to obsolescence and planned upgrades -- we just can't do it quickly. It took us about a century to build what we have, we won't be replacing it in only a decade.
But we can gain a decade or so by making it an active conversion, by purposefully moving to alternative power, instead of waiting until it is enough cheaper than coal to make it the selection of choice. According to some sources, wind is already price-competitive with coal, and there is a lot of improvement left in the technologies to extract energy from wind. Not so much from coal.
Parent
Re:Ok... (Score:5, Insightful)
You're assuming that we can harvest all that energy - solar panels and windmills all over everything. What will happen with the widescale use of geothermal heating? How much will the earth's temperature decrease? Let's slow down all the wind and cool the earth. That sounds like a great way to save the environment!
I don't understand why nuclear is automatically relegated to the back burner. It is the only source of power that doesn't ultimately rely on the sun, and if you're allowed to recycle the spent fuel rods it produces very little waste. France, which recycles, stores all of their waste in a single room. 80% of France's electricity is nuclear.
Also, the amount of radiation produced from a modern nuclear power plant is very, very small. You'll receive less radiation standing in the shadow of the plant than standing out in the sun. For comparison, living within 50 miles of a coal-fired plant will give you about 0.03 millirems of exposure a year, whereas being within 50 miles of a nuclear plant gives you 0.009. A smoke detector gives 0.008, and an airline flight gives about 1 per 1,000 miles flown.
Other than the risk of deliberate damage to a plant (e.g. terrorists), I don't understand why nuclear is so terrible.
Source: http://www.entergy-nuclear.com/content/resource_library/IPEC_EP/ComparisonRadiation.pdf [entergy-nuclear.com]
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Re:Ok... (Score:5, Funny)
I propose that FishWithAHammer pays it all.
Parent
Re:Ok... (Score:5, Funny)
I propose that FishWithAHammer pays it all.
The motion is seconded. Please address all invoices to Mr. F. WithAHammer.
Parent
Re:Ok... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well,
It'd be cheaper than 5-years in Iraq, Yankee. And do a lot more towards keeping you secure.
But as a product of what America calls "education", you might find some dispute with that bright light of reason.
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Re:Ok... (Score:5, Informative)
Really? I thought most modern coal plants crushed the coal into a powder and used it to fire a turbine, much the same as you would with Natural Gas.
No. Coal plants do powder the coal to form a fluid fuel/air mixture, but they use it to fire a furnace which heats a boiler: the steam is used to turn a turbine. It takes time to start one up because you have to bring the water to a boil.
Natural gas turbines burn the fuel directly in a turbine. I'm not sure, but I suspect the reason you can't do this with coal is that the fuel powder particles will raise hell with the moving parts of the turbine.
Parent
Time for a new Interstate project (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Time for a new Interstate project (Score:5, Informative)
In the 1950s the government set about a huge project to link America's cities and states via high speed road links. The investment has paid off well, and a similar project on our power infrastructure (especially if they could build a fibre network alongside) would pay off just as handsomely.
Or the states could step up and do it themselves:
Texas Approves a $4.93 Billion Wind-Power (Transmission) Project [nytimes.com]
Parent
Re:Time for a new Interstate project (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_25/b4089040017753.htm?chan=magazine+channel_top+stories [businessweek.com]
for those who won't read it Pickens has been buying rights to a massive water reserve in Texas and has been having trouble building a pipeline through peoples property, so he is buying the law instead "In January, 2007, the Texas Legislature convened.. helped win Pickens a key new legal right. It was contained in an amendment to a major piece of water legislation. The amendment, one of more than 100 added after the bill had been reviewed in the House, allowed a water-supply district to transmit alternative energy and transport water in a single corridor, or right-of-way." and then "Pickens still needed the power of eminent domain if he was going to build his pipeline and wind-power lines across private land. And by happy coincidence, the legislators passed a smaller bill that made that all the easier. The new legislation loosened the requirements for creating a water district."
Long story short he's creating a new water and power district to sell this and is using public feel good green hype to get subsidy's and push through his new project that will drain a water resource that is very slow to renewal, out from under everyone else around it, to sell at low prices to Dallas, which is one of the most wastfull cites in Texas when it comes to water. Anyone who thinks someone who was part of the 80's raiders and swift boating can actually do something without a hidden con is a fucking idiot.
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Re:Time for a new Interstate project (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Time for a new Interstate project?????????? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Time for a new Interstate project?????????? (Score:5, Informative)
not true.
He needed land grants and money from JP Morgan.
He purchased much of the railroad from failing companies.
There was huge corruption and wall street issues from the trust. Something that required government intervention to break up.
The practically destroyed wall street.
He was able to stay in business by giving an unfair advantage to his other business using the rail road during hard times. Basically shifting money on paper.
He did build 1700 miles of track, but at nearly slave labor rates.
The US government has done many very large and complex projects without corruption.
Nobody in the US has enough money to fix the grid.
The grid must be fixed for us to move into a new distributed system.
It's a perfect job for the government. Not to private contractors. That is where you get corruption, and failed projects.
Parent
The summary doesn't match TFA. (Score:5, Interesting)
The summary is a crock and doesn't match the quoted article.
Transporting large and variable amounts of generated power is the dual of feeding large and varying loads. The power grid can handle it just fine.
The problem TFA alludes to is that, while cities and industrial plants already have fat lines to them from the rest of the grid, windfarms are new construction generally sited in rural areas that don't already have a "fat pipe" available. So (for a wind farm bigger than about twice the local load) you have to run some new lines.
Just like you would if you built a new auto plant or aluminum smelter in the same location.
It's a regular line, just like the ones feeding loads. It just happens to be running the power the other way.
Of course some people would love to get the government to pay for the line to their new wind farm, rather than bearing that expense as part of the project. And some people in government would love to have more authority and a bigger budget. So we get FUD like this.
So? (Score:5, Insightful)
If they aren't going to work together, build new systems that that will. It's that simple.
I realise there's the whole 'but shareholders will object' thing. Well fine, if the well off think they're in a position to survive global warming, then let them vote no.
Then the first company who gets its shareholders to understand that money doesn't provide immunity from extinction if the planet becomes hostile to our species through climate change will generate wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.
Why? Because any such company would be so far ahead of the competition as to be unreachable. At least for long enough to make everyone involved very rich indeed.
Actually... (Score:5, Informative)
One of the advantages of most ways to produce clean energy is exactly that it is easier to distribute the power generation over different locations. You can't put a nuclear plant next to each village, but you can put a combination of windmills, geo-thermal, solar panels, and waste incinerators (with their heat used for both electricity generation and heating industrial or other buildings, rather than just for heating rivers) in or in the neighbourhood of places where the electricity is actually needed.
This both lowers the stress imposed on large scale heavy duty power distribution nets, and reduces single points of failure and associated cascade effects. Of course, when you build massive wind/solar/... farms in certain places, you're going to need massive distribution capacity there just like in case you'd build any other large scale power plant.
Re:Actually... (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't put a nuclear plant next to each village
You can put one near every major city and that'll work just fine. Just have to make them medium sized and standardize on a design or two.
Parent
Peak load vs non-peak (Score:5, Insightful)
I just toured a nearby dam, and was presented some very insightful ideas.
Nuclear and coal power are great for handling base load because they provide consistent power.
But peak load is where the money is; turning on power systems when they're needed to match the load at that second. Solar, wind, and water are all peak-load power supplies because they are not always consistent, vary widely according to weather and time of year and regulations, and can be very unclean with spikes. This is why these power systems cannot replace base load systems yet.
The solution is to even out our peak load systems so that they are more consistent and more like base load systems. Whether that's tying many different types together and hoping they even out naturally, or storing the energy in some kind of battery in the middle.
Since battery technology is nowhere near ready, a viable option is to store water in reservoirs behind dams, using wind and solar energy to pump water up, then releasing it evenly through a generator. This is even being employed in some countries.
Nothing new here (Score:5, Interesting)
If area A has a surplus but area B needs power, and the lines cannot handle the transmission, then the price for electricity in B goes up. This is a complex case of supply and demand. The grid is a lot more fragile than it appears. In many places there is a desperate need for more generation/transmission, but the anti-infrastructure people are driving up the cost of electricity by not allowing infrastructure improvements to be made.
I worked at one plant that had to erect a huge sound wall around the entire plant. It worked great, but cost around $2 million including all the sound studies etc. The people next door claimed they never knew when the plant was operating (clear exhaust). We CAN build large power plants in your backyard, and you won't even know they are there- aside from the plant staff spending it up in local businesses.
Why yes, I do work in the power industry.
cascade overloads possible? (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if the whole north-east grid will fall like it did 2003 each time a cold front move through the region... The big blackout even showed that the conditions to create a cascade of overloads shutting down the whole grid are possible. Could the power surge caused by all wind turbine getting into action simultaneously create similar power pulses through the grid, jumping the safeties like it did in 2003?
If the power can't come to the people... (Score:5, Informative)
Offer cheap power to anyone who moves near the wind power farms.
If electric power can't come to the people, move people to the electric power.
"Right on! People to the Power, man!"
Federal Gov't won't be stopped (Score:5, Insightful)
Like that's ever stopped them before? We have a welfare system, federal highway system, healthcare for underemployed people, and federal guidelines for public schools, none of which is constitutional. Do you honestly think they won't nose into state business again?
Railway Electrification As Political Strategy (Score:5, Interesting)
This is crucial to the wind energy advocates (and all other electrical energy source advocates) as a consequence of the following facts:
1) The main goal of public policy reform of wind energy advocates is to put into place transmission lines to carry electricity from the high wind potential areas (such as the Midwest) to the high utilization areas (such as the coasts).
2) The main obstacle to constructing said transmission lines is the delays suffered by projects subjected to environmental impact litigation following from attempts to obtain rights of way.
3) The main motive for said environmental impact litigation is a misguided environmental movement's tendency to see any increase of capacity in the nation's energy capacity as harmful to the environment. This cannot be addressed directly in legislation (as has already been attempted, btw) due to the fact that the environmentalist tactic is to use legal tricks to get the courts to delay implementation of systems until the time value of those systems has run out.
4) The electrification of railroads is a proven technology -- indeed the largest railroad line in the world, the Trans-Siberian, is electrified.
5) The "conservation only" environmentalists will not oppose going to electrified railroads since they already see decreasing the energy use of railways and increase of railroad utilization -- which would result from railroad electrification -- as a way of reducing the nation's energy utilization.
6) The railroads already have rights of way that approximate the topology and coverage of transmission lines required to distribute wind electricity from sources to destinations.
7) The use of cryogenic transmission lines buried under the tracks would render the transmission capacity of virtually all existing railroad rights of way enormously greater than the possible use by the railways.
The big centralized grid is broken and wasteful (Score:5, Informative)
I really believe that microgrids - peer-to-peer electricity grids wherein many small-scale power sources are used where optimal - are the answer to this. The big conventional grids lose a lot of electricity to resistance, and have to overproduce to get any redundancy at all. We need to revamp our infrastructure anyway, so why not?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4245584.stm [bbc.co.uk]
http://certs.lbl.gov/certs-der-micro.html [lbl.gov]
http://www.ingenia.org.uk/ingenia/articles.aspx?Index=329 [ingenia.org.uk]
http://www.fuelcellmarkets.com/fuel_cell_markets/news_and_information/3,1,1,1,14428.html [fuelcellmarkets.com]
We don't WANT to "share equally"... (Score:5, Informative)
My electricity rates are probably lower than most. But that's because "cheap hydroelectric power" has dammed OUR local rivers, ruining some of OUR recreational opportunities, covering up OUR land, and killing off OUR local salmon and sturgeon and trout and waterfowl...
You east-coasters... go damage your own environment further if you want electricity at the same rates. The fact is, we pay for our power in other ways. "Sharing" equally is not equal. Nor is it equitable.
There is plenty of windpower here, too. But windpower is not cost-free either. There are environmental and other costs, including opportunity costs, that must be paid.
We do not want to pay your rates AND with our environment too. Look elsewhere for a free ride.
Re:Thay said this about nuclear energy too (Score:5, Insightful)
The next time you drive by a nuclear plant take a look at the transmission infrastructure. You might see three different sets of pylons leaving each with a couple of 500kV circuits.
It takes wires to move electricty from generation to load, I don't know why they are surprised that when they build a wind farm in the middle of nowhere there transmission capacity to handle all that extra energy.
Especially since everybody says they have hardly built anything new in the way of transmission...of course there is no spare capacity!
Parent
Re:The Feds (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Scary thought! (Score:5, Insightful)
LOL. The bar is higher than that, buddy!
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Re:Scary thought! (Score:5, Informative)
The federally operated Bonneville Power Administration has done an excellent job for the past 80 years, using zero tax dollars. Their wholesale rates are dirt cheap (~$0.04 per KwH) and the grid reliability has always been top notch. We should extend their reach across the entire grid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonneville_Power_Administration [wikipedia.org]
Parent
Re:Scary thought! (Score:5, Informative)
Given the fact that the NIMBY factor for power lines,power plants, nuke power, roads, dams, whatever is so high, the odds of at least one person objecting is virtually 100%.
Therefore, if you would like to have nuke power, power lines, roads, high speed rail, whatever, you will *need* to force somebody to fucking move for the greater good. Otherwise, you will never get the right-of-way to make your project happen. We have granted our government the ability to force people to fucking move out of the way.
We call this Eminent Domain.
Why anyone wants Federal control of anything is beyond me
Given that large scale projects are impossible without forcing somebody to move, do you feel comfortable granting eminent domain to private industry?
If you say "make it all states rights" given that many of these large scale projects affect multiple states, you'll wind up with heavy federal oversight anyway. Let states do it all, and they'll sue eachother when the other guy builds a huge damn. They'll sue when their state law conflicts with the other state law. You either get federal agencies for interstate projects, or you get a metric assload of federal judicial "weight".
Parent
Re:Scary thought! (Score:5, Informative)
>Why anyone wants Federal control of anything is beyond me.
Yeah, the interstate highway system blows goats. So does the US military. We also need to get rid of all those national parks sucking up prime real estate. And the way the FDA wastes everyones time with all that "inspecting" of the "food supply" for "botulism". And who needs a stable monetary system anyway?
Parent
Re:No! (Score:5, Insightful)
The feds don't need authority. They already have it. Congress just hasn't assigned it to any agency yet. If you think an electrical grid that shares power generated by utilities in numerous states isn't covered by the commerce clause, you are not reading the same Constitution as the rest of us.
Parent
Re:It's about time (Score:5, Informative)
A wire has a given amount of current that can flow through it before it melts. Take a thin wire and connect it to the + and - terminals on your car battery (use thick leather gloves so you don't get burned) and see what happens when you stuff too much power down a wire.
Here [www.ieso.ca] is a link to the outfit that runs the grid in Ontario. When a generator wants to generate but can't due to the fact that there isn't enough transmission capacity to get the power out of their plant they get "constrained off", ie they don't generate. The link talks about how much they get paid for not generating.
Must be nice to get paid for doing nothing.
But anyway, wires do get congested but not the same way your nose does.
Parent
Re:Oh, THAT'S It! (Score:5, Funny)
Grid: I want the wind power!
Windfarm: YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE WIND POWER!
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Re:Oh, THAT'S It! (Score:5, Interesting)
One thing that is done with excess power here in the US is pump
water to a high resevoir, and it can later be run thru the
turbines to generate hydro power as needed.
It is done during the fall/winter/spring at night at Hoover dam.
Lower demand due to less Air Conditioning usage.
The power from the Windmills could pump water to water tanks
on tall hills or even mountains.
The extra pressure could be used for power generation, and then
down pressured sent on to homes.
Here in the US in the mountains some ppl due that for Micro Hydro.
Parent
Reduce consumption to balance load (Score:5, Insightful)
Heaters could work this way. They could pay a lower charge for energy in return for participating in load balancing.
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Re:Oh, THAT'S It! (Score:5, Funny)
"Protected". I don't think that word is appropriate. "Stolen". There I fixed it for you.
What part of Global Military Adventurism in support of Corporate Profits can be construed as the sworn mission: Defending the Nation and it's Constitution?
America is like a giant, sucking leech. With guns.
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Re:Oh, THAT'S It! (Score:5, Funny)
The truth is, we live in a world that needs oil. And that oil has to be protected by men with guns.
Oh I see. So women with guns can't protect oil.
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Re:OT (Score:5, Informative)
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