Texas To Build $4.93B Wind-Power Project 250
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.'"
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: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).
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!
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].
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.
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.
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:Wind Energy for Air Conditioners? (Score:3, Informative)
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 into his attic - looked like snow, simply beautiful, even easier to install and fewer settling problems.
Add attic insulation to at lease R39. It's readily available, cheap, easy to install yourself, and reduces energy use significantly.
Re:Whatever happened to orbital solar panels (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:High powered micro waves (Score:2, Informative)
Because of the ability to build a tuned antenna to just the 1 frequency you don't need that high power densities - direct solar energy is up to 1000w/m2, so if you beam down at 200w/m2 you can easly catch most of that, powering a city of a sqare km, while maintaining a low enough energy density that you could walk through it and not even notice. [[citation needed]]
Re:Something to keep in mind (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Whatever happened to orbital solar panels (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.