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.'"
Re:Whatever happened to orbital solar panels (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.
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: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.
Re:Whatever happened to orbital solar panels (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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.
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.
Re:Wind Energy for Air Conditioners? (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 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. If anything it has increased the price on end users needlessly.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Re:Whatever happened to orbital solar panels (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 improvement, don't get saddled with primitive legacy systems (Space Shuttle...).
Re:High powered micro waves (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:Something to keep in mind (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 be-all, end-all solution, but it is a very big part of one, and although it takes over a decade to build one, if we don't start breaking ground now, in ten years we'll be wishing we had.
Wind, "in contrast" requires more workers per installed kilowatt..to install, let alone maintain, so although an individual plant can be put in much more quickly, over the long term it's a losing proposition compared to large "centralized" plants. It's a very small part of the energy plan, and can only ever be a small part of one. There's energy there, so we should tap it, but to propose wind as a viable alternative to "big power" (coal, nuke, hydro) is a rather laughable position.
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.
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.
Well, gee, sorry then (Score:2, Insightful)
Sorry I didn't write an entire technical construction book in my reply, I was under the impression this is just casual conversation. If you want one of many solutions to the condensation problem, here's one, don't build stick frame in the first place, do solid thick walls, cordwood masonry is sorta nice and good looking. Want another, it is called active versus passive venting and dehumdifiers, real air "conditioning" beyond just heating and cooling, with the superinsulated like I said you have planned air in AND out, and there's ways to go about it. Go partial earth bermed, whatever. I noticed the wiki link had some additional links, it is enough to get folks started if they feel like it.
Like I said, I am out of the biz, not trying to sell folks anything, just provided a bit of a lead and a wiki link so they can go explore further, to see what might could work for them. There is no one size fits all energy solution, situations are different, budgets are different, needs are different, but there are a variety of steps people can take from ten bucks and one hour labor on up to help with the bills. Or, they can hang around and do nothing but kvetch about stuff. Their call, and yours.
Re:Because nights are dark... (Score:4, Insightful)