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.'"
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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?
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:)
Re:Something to keep in mind (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Something to keep in mind (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
Re:Wind Energy for Air Conditioners? (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 below. It works well in summer just as the Greek idea of very thick white painted walls made of pumice works there for the opposite extreme. Winter is a bit of a pain but it is the subtropics.
Nuclear was on the agenda in Australia as a political distraction to try to split one party instead of a serious proposal. We dig the stuff up but don't have the infrastructure of China, the USA or Russia to go any furthur without a great deal of expense. The proposal to build a very large number of plants was to try to get value for money out of the required infrastructure - and it was expolited for the NIMBY value of making everyone think a plant wuld be in their backyard.
Re:Pickens vs Solar Local Area Power Network (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Pickens vs Solar Local Area Power Network (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 noon) moving within them, the solar supply / power demand peak shifts away from the synchronized office hours, further offloading from the peak time.
For another, solar PV generates more power than is necessary to cool what remains to heat a building. PV, especially in places like Texas (sunny, subtropical) can get something like 20% of the 1KW that strikes each square meter at "solar noon", through nearly the entire year. That's something like 200W:m^2. An insulated building (including UV-shielded windows) doesn't require 200W to cool each m^2, especially in the average low-storey buildings in Texas. And of course lots of buildings don't need cooling while people aren't in them (either the home or the office), but both are generating power for nearby consumption. The extra can be consumed elsewhere in the neighborhood, or stored for later.
That's way more than "little" to reduce peak power demands.
But that doesn't mean that solar thermal doesn't also have its place. In fact, its place is probably higher than the lowest priority grid buildouts, though lower than solar rooftops. If we're going for maximum returns (in money, energy and sustainability), we should do them all, in proper proportion.
Re:T. Boone Pickens (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?
Re:Whatever happened to orbital solar panels (Score:4, Interesting)
Waiting for perfection (Score:2, Interesting)
We did what I would call just a mild retrofit for this lady at her house, complete with before and after infrared imagery. So some days go by after we are finished, she calls up "You broke my air conditioner!!" "What?? sez I" "It's not coming on!" "Is your house still cool, ma'am?" "Well....yes...." "It's working, you got what you contracted for"
Yep, that's it, it is such a profound change that you really can't get it across to folks until they have seen it working. Here's another one I worked on, a home in New England, another retrofit, this one was a little more than the other and we put extra non load bearing walls on the inside and blew in some loose insulation, then some other stuff like resizing the ridiculously large and leaky windows.. where in January and February the heat barely if ever turned on, the guy just skipped the trasditional heat (oil and backup electric resistance) almost entirely and built one small wimpy little mostly ambience fire in a nice woodstove in the evening. Piped in air to the woodstove, none of that just random sucking in air from cracks in the house. Winter fuel bills from lotsa hundreds to a dozen bucks a month or something ridiculous like that. People just don't think it is possible, or think it will quadruple the price of their house or something, or they will be forced to wear birkenstocks and eat only granola three meals a day and have to join the secret club. Nuts. Everything has to always be "more studies needed, years from now...hey look, shiny, hydrogen fusion fuel cells are coming" yada yada. And what is funny is..the future got here, it is the new century, that last big go around with all the bad energy news back in the 70s and 80s popped out some nice rad stuff that was reasonable and actually worked, they came up with some solutions to this or that energy problem, but few if any people are using them. They believe in the exxon and detroit and wallstreet commodities speculators axis of maximum energy profits and propoganda bureau press releases when it comes to possible fuel efficiency and reliability of cars, and heating and cooling their houses, along with getting their science from like rush limbaugh shows. Nuts. Stuff like that.
Doesn't bother me that much other than we are sure globally wasting a ton of energy when there is no outright need for it right now, and we sure have a lot more pollution than we should have right now, we sure are getting closer to more major dangerous freekin resource wars than we need to right now, and I still have a scosh of feelings for my fellow actual real world joe sixpack workers when it comes to being able to afford to live today. The lifestyle bloat and ridicule crowd, nope, they can go bankrupt for all I care. Let them burn expensive furniture in their fireplaces, who cares.
Intellectually, a lot of folks may read the words but they still won't get it..hmm..kinda sorta like folks may have maybe heard something about "linux" when it comes to operating systems but just can't believe something free and cheap can replace the hundreds of dollars of software perpetual vendor lockin model with the associated aggravation with what the current computer "industry standard" is. They go "well, gee, why isn't everyone doing that if it is so good?" Nuts. Always wait for this "they" guy to "do it". Same with a good quality solar PV installation, they think that if you don't go immediately for an entire house solution, that they can't go to any solar, not realizing you can do *one* circuit at a time if you want to. I've seen that a lot, "I can't afford it, it is 10-60 grand!". Well, ya, it is, depending on what you want and how much of the work you want to do yourself, which could be like most of it, but nothing stopping people from using this high tech device called a subpanel and just doing one or two important circuits in the house either, then maybe 5 years later do some more, etc. But it falls under the "either/or" deal for them so they just dismiss it entirely, wait again another coupla deca
Re:Sorry - was 100 mile square (Score:3, Interesting)