The Power Grid Can't Handle Wind Farms 681
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.'"
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]
HVDC FTW? (Score:3, Informative)
stupid much? (Score:2, Informative)
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:Time for a new Interstate project?????????? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Time for a new Interstate project (Score:3, Informative)
We'll know it's paid off if the Ruskies ever attack from behind their iron curtain. Then we'll be able to mobilize our military much more effectively than we could without the interstate highway system.
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.
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!"
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]
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.
Re:Ok... (Score:2, Informative)
It isn't about lossless transmission. It is about transmission capacity. The California energy crisis was caused not by a lack of generation around the country but due to bottlenecks that prevented transferring the power into California. It is tough to explain but I'll try. Think of it like transporting water. In California there are a lot of high capacity power plants (pumps) and most of the high capacity transmission lines (big pipes) are between the production and the use inside of California. There are also some smaller pipes that connect to Washington and Canada due to seasonal trading. When several of the high capacity power plants shut down, those big pipes had plenty of room for transmission but they were limited by the small pipes that were used for trading. Thus, there was plenty of capacity in the Western Grid to power California, but there was no way to transmit without operating the transmission grid beyond capacity.
The same applies to wind power. Line loss isn't the big issue. The issue is that it costs about $1 million per mile to build a 500 KV power line and those lines have limits. In order for wind power to become feasible, we are going to need to spend a lot of money building up the capacity to be able to transmit the power to customers.
Re:Battery? (Score:4, Informative)
Because the battery fairy doesn't drop off batteries for free.
There is one form of large-scale energy storage in wide use; pumped-storage hydroelectricity. Essentially, this involves pumping water from low to high places when there's surplus power, and running it back through a hydro turbine when there's a shortage. To make this work, you need the right geography, and there's only so many places with the right geography.
Conventional batteries cost a fortune to store energy. Get the price on some deep-cycle lead-acid batteries off the internet and do the sums yourself.
There is a lot of research going on at the moment into better ways to store energy. Aside from better battery chemistries, and the long-standing dream of the "hydrogen economy", the more realistic proposals involve storing energy as heat or mechanical energy. For instance, using wind power to compress air, which can be stored in a network of pipes connecting the wind farm, or, if you're lucky, a salt mine or some other sealed underground spot. The compressed air can then be used to run a gas turbine (much of the energy released in a gas turbine is used to compress the air for combustion anyway). Alternatively, for solar thermal power, you can just run the hot pipes through something convenient (molten salt is a popular one), and then when the sun goes down you connect the pipes to the steam turbine through the heat storage rather than through the solar field.
Your idea is sound in principle. Making it work is hard.
Re:The summary doesn't match TFA. (Score:4, Informative)
DC lines can be higher voltage than AC lines. one line is +345 kV while the other is -345kV and so you have a 700kV line without all the funny [tmgnow.com] things [pupman.com] that start to happen when you have AC lines that are 700+ kV.
higher voltage means more power for the same current or less losses for the same power if you want to look at it that way.
Then also since it is DC there is no capacitance and I think you get further reduction in losses from that.
Here [mathworks.com] is a model for an AC transmission line showing all the capacitance etc
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]
Re:The summary doesn't match TFA. (Score:3, Informative)
Throwing the Bullshit Flag (Score:2, Informative)
I can't believe this. I have worked on several wind energy projects over the years. The large scale utility turbines are huge; some have blades so large that they require an oversized load semi trailer to transport them. They are also not terribly light, even though many are made from composite materials. Spikes? Give me a break. First of all, you do *not* want to extract power from every gust of wind, and turbines and their associated management systems are tailored to that. The speed of the turbines is well regulated by the inertia of the blades and blade pitch adjustments. The objective being to provide the most stable power output possible. When there are spikes (such as when one turbine is more directly pointed into the wind with regard to others in a farm, for example) the spike can be bled off in several ways, the simplest of which being heat. Grid-tie systems do their job very well. I'm pretty sure if this was as big of a problem as it is made out to be, England (with dozens of wind farms and several nuclear reactors) would surely have had an infrastructure nightmare on its hands.
Re:Throwing the Bullshit Flag (Score:1, Informative)
Hi, I think by 'spikes' the Times might mean dealing with times when the farm is running 100%...you can't have enough spare transmission lying around for that, since you're usually running at a CF of, what, 30% or so?
Of course, good day-ahead forecasts make everything about wind better...
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".
Re:Time for a new Interstate project (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It's about time (Score:2, Informative)
And anyone who buys products produced in the Midwest using electricity, such as: everything produced in the Midwest.
And everyone who breathes air that comes from the Midwest, such as: Mexico? Canada? I don't really know. But really: everyone.
It kind of sucks that wind power won't be directly available to everyone, and that could even be an argument against federally-funded research into it, but it's still a good, useful resource that will benefit large portions of the country directly and all of us indirectly.
Energy management in France (Score:1, Informative)
After the second world war, the energy grid of France was a mess: plenty of small companies everywhere producing various type of electricity. It was impossible to rebuild the country on this base.
So the state did bough ALL of them, and unified them into a single enterprise : Électricité de France (EDF). The state was then able to coordinate all the various productions (water, gaz, coal, etc) and to deliver the same electricity to every part of France.
Indeed, this was a huge success that required planing on several dozen years, and it was setup for making benefices at the end.
After that, EDF and her twin sister Gaz de France (GDF) were strong enough to bootstrap the nuclear industry on there own. The state was piloting the research and development through its various ministers, and a regulated price market ensured affordable electricity for all (even for free, in fact, for poor families).
Currently, EDF and GDF have been switched to private companies because of European regulation (monopole is bad, remember), but the main share holder is... the French State, so it can still oversee the development and regulate the price of energy.
Everybody is (kind of) happy : all members of the the European Union can now buy and sell energy in France, and the French government can still protect the citizens from high prices.
they're not that fast (Score:4, Informative)
The popular conception of wind power is fast-paced windmills cutting birds in half as they twirl through the air whenever the wind happens to blow. I was just in Germany and saw many windmills turning so slowly through the air that if a bird hit one, it was either not paying attention or drunk. I've seen the same thing on the hills of Crete overlooking Heraklion. One point is that you needn't have hurricane force winds to make wind power effective. All you need is an area of 'prevailing winds' that are more or less predictable--just like the trade winds that predictably blew sailing ships across the oceans for centuries. There are many areas like this all across the USA. For example, the Dalles area on the Columbia River, well known for its prevailing winds. Here's a wind map for Oregon, for example: http://www.eere.energy.gov/windandhydro/windpoweringamerica/maps_template.asp?stateab=or [energy.gov]
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.
Re:HVDC FTW? (Score:3, Informative)
It's often dealt with by putting a DC link between two independently-synchronized AC grids.
I heartily recommend a book called "Infrastructure" by Brian Hayes http://www.amazon.com/Infrastructure-Field-Guide-Industrial-Landscape/dp/B001CB2A2W/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219886141&sr=1-1 [amazon.com]. It's a coffee table book that goes into moderate detail about a lot of the modern infrastructure, including power generation and transmission, railroads, highways, phone network, oil and gas production, and much more. I'm still working my way through it. Fascinating reading for armchair hacker wanna-bes.
Re:OT (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Stored power (Score:5, Informative)
See molten salt storage at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy [wikipedia.org]
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: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.....
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]
Re:Time for a new Interstate project (Score:3, Informative)
Emphasis mine. When does a particular usage of language become part of that language? A hundred years is more than enough for me. I think "when all the original critics are dead" is a good enough time frame for language change.
Re:Ok... (Score:3, Informative)
Some areas get too much rain/overcast, its best to build
solar power where the land will not grow food, and little
to nothing lives there animal wise.
In other words, the harsher deserts.
Great basin is 200,000 sq. miles, not all of it usable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Basin_Desert [wikipedia.org]
Mojave Desert is 22,000 sq. miles, not all of it usable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojave_desert [wikipedia.org]
Sonora Desert is 120,000 sq. miles, not all of it usable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonora_desert [wikipedia.org]
Total for just those 3 = 340,000 sq. miles roughly.
Use 20% for about 68,000 sq. miles, use SEGs array as a guideline
and you get 140 Megawatts per sq. mile.
In other words about 9.5 Tera Watts.
The entire Earth uses about 15 Tera Watts constant on average
of all forms of power including oil, gas, wind, solar,
nuclear etc etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_resources_and_consumption [wikipedia.org]
So just with that section we could make 2/3rds the world's
needs. With another 10% we could do it all minus the
obvious insane transmission lines and loses.
The point is thou, it would be more than enough for the US
for Electricity alone, could likely get by on 10% of those
regions just for Electricity.
As I posted in the other post on Solar, the Sahara is
3.5 million square miles of Solar Power.
North Africa & Middle East are sitting on a Solar "gold mine".
Just the Sahara is 10 times the size of the 3 US Deserts.
SEGs does not require pricey photovoltaic cells.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEGS [wikipedia.org]
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?
Re:Time for a new Interstate project (Score:3, Informative)
I live in Oklahoma, and the above poster is underestimating
the shittiness of Oklahoma roads.
I'd say at least 3 or 4 more shitty's were needed.
LOL
And yes, they really are that bad, ppl have tried to sue
the local government over damage done to their cars.
Some potholes are so big they have blown out tires,
and the driver lost control on the wet road and KILLED
ppl or themselves because they hit a tree or oncoming car.
It is "THAT" bad.
Re:Scary thought! (Score:4, Informative)
Things that the Federal government does well.
1 The National Weather Service.
2. The US Coast Guard.
3. The FAA. Yes for all it's faults the FAA does really well. I am not talking just about the Air Traffic control system which works a lot better than most people think but things like nav aids and regulation.
4 The CDC.
And I am sure a lot more that I can not think off the top of my head.
Should they take over managing the Grid? I don't know but blanket statements like the one you made are just not helpful.
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.
Up to about 10% wind, no problem. Then... (Score:4, Informative)
Here's a useful briefing paper on dealing with intermittency in wind power. [bwea.com] It's a UK document, and has some hard numbers about wind plants in Europe.
When wind power is covering less than 10% of the load, the UK study says no special arrangements are necessary to provide extra capacity to cover periods of low wind. I've seen 15% mentioned in US discussions. There's enough excess dispatchable generating capacity ("dispatchable" means you get output when you ask for it) to provide backup power for 10-15% wind. Above that, it becomes more of a problem.
I've seen some US studies which indicate that even if wind power is averaged across a 1000 mile area (most of the Midwest and Southwest US), about 5% of the time, the whole collection of wind farms is generating very little output. So just running transmission lines around won't solve the problem. You need extra dispatchable capacity.
That dispatchable capacity is usually natural gas, hydro, or pumped storage. Dispatchable capacity of this type is typically a source where the installed equipment is relatively cheap but the fuel is expensive. In practice, this means gas turbines. If you have dams around that collect water but don't have enough continuous flow to be full-time hydropower sources, they can be effective intermittent sources. The California Water Project uses some of its reservoirs that way; they generate power during peak periods, but not all the time, because that would drain the reservoir. Some California Water Project sites pump water uphill at night, when electricity is cheap, and profitably run it back down during peak periods in the daytime. Pure pumped storage plants are rare; the US has two.
Solar, of course, is not dispatchable. Nuclear plants are normally run full time, since they're mostly capital cost; the fuel cost is small.
Re:Ok... (Score:2, Informative)
Actually some of the large cooling systems in skyscrapers and Vegas casinos do that. They make big ice blocks that are made in the early morning when the power is cheap and then use it the rest of the day.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/07/24/ice.cooling.ap/ [cnn.com]
Re:Reduce consumption to balance load (Score:2, Informative)
The South African govt is considering this for water heaters (on a mandatory basis) to deal with the lack of capacity (caused by their lack of planning).
Re:Reduce consumption to balance load (Score:5, Informative)
Don't know how the distribution system in the US works, but a fair bit of deatil on the UK's national grid is available on wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_the_National_Grid_(UK) [wikipedia.org] and pages referenced from there.
Short term fluctuations in power generation and consumption are compensated at both ends of the chain - the clever part being the combination of (very inefficient but reasonably fast starting) distributed 'standing reserve' generators in conjunction with the automatic switching off of appliances called the Frequency Service ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_the_National_Grid_(UK)#Use_of_the_Reserve_Service_and_Frequency_Service_in_practice [wikipedia.org] and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_the_National_Grid_(UK)#Frequency_Service [wikipedia.org] )
The nice part is that the consumers using the frequency service automatically detect the discrepancy in supply / demand from the power supply itself and can be automatically switched off with logic purely on the consumer's premises (cf. the generators which need to be told from a central control when to start / stop)
There is also of course hydro / pumped-storage generation that can be switched on / off at pretty short notice (though the wikipedia article doesn't mention how that works in conjunction the diesel generators)
As our supply changes to incorporate more unsteady sources (wind, solar, tidal-stream etc) this system will have to be extended by rolling out frequency-service to smaller consumers (though there are not that many things it can be applied to in its current large-scale industrial form - theoretically it could work on as small a scale as the domestic fridge/freezer) and building more of the efficient energy storage systems - although we've already built reservoirs in most of the obvious locations, many of them are currently only used for the supply of drinking water.
Re:Oh, THAT'S It! (Score:5, Informative)
Flywheels - That's the ticket!
And UltraCapacitors....
Both of those can take VERY high in-rush currents...
And then can output at what ever current you tell it to.
It's a similar solution to regenerative braking in Electric Vehicles: There is much more current coming off the "brakes" than a battery pack can handle. ie more than 100 AMPS! coming from the electric motor temporarily converted to an electric generator.
Re:Oh, THAT'S It! (Score:5, Informative)
OK, here's some important things to note:
1: more wind does not mean more wind power. The generators are each computer comtrolled, and some wind turbines are spun up and down depending on the current damnd the grid can handle, in cooperation with other local power stations. We can DIRECTLY control how much wind energy we make and don't make.
2: equally, When wind falls back, most of the turbines are actually spinning with brakes having slowed the blades to slightly less than full spinning potential. The systems calibrate for light wind by releasing those restrictions, and the blades still spin at speed for multiple seconds, and even then, due the the weight of the blades, don't slow down very quickly... Local power companies have pleanty of time to spin up additional power.
Now, we do still need both wind and local power in a wind power environment. Some of the windo power can be used to push water uphill for on-demand hydro power later, but that's both expensive and limited in scope.
Also, wind power in the west, and across texas can't power all of america unless we add to the grid. They are correct, our current grid can't handle it, but anytime we're talking about adding power generation, we're also including in that the idea that we'll be expanding the grid as well. A superconducting line has been running on Long Island since April. The technology is proven, we somply need to deploy a few east-west and north-south lines, and some junction points, and we can distribute wind power across the whole nation.
Now, all that said, the braking systems, preventing over and under power, long distance transmission costs, and more, mean that we loose at least 15% efficiency on wind power generation. Why not let the turbines run full tilt all the time, producing direct current for electrolysis and make H2, which does NOT have to be grid balanced power. Instead of storing the H2, and trying to spend trillions building a new infrastructure for cars million dolar fule cells to run on it (read, you and I will NEVER drive one of these), we instead takle the H2 and run it to a local mixing plant and through an RFTS process using reclamated CO2, and we can make liquid fuels, on-site, and pipeline those fuels easily and safely using our existing infrastructure and keep driving our existing cars.
Doty Energy (www.dotyenergy.com) can do this TODAY. Costs for gasoline will be about $60/bbl, half what we're paying now. The CO2 we sequester from coal burning in current power plants will go to fuel the process in combination with H2 and some water. The byproducts are limted (and less than we get from making existing fuels). Eventually, new coal plants will also be capable of using liquid fuels in place of coal, so we'll be able to use WSindFuels to make power, then sequester it, recycle the CO2, and using free energy, make more fuel, in a process that will release 75% less CO2 total (since the car's won't be sequestering it's not completely CO2 free), release fewer byproducts, and allow us to continue using technology we already have, and to be free of foreign oil.
To run the whole country on WindFuels, including grid overhauls, pipeline upgrades, windfarms, and more, will cost about 40 trillion over 30-40 years. Fortunately, building this infrastructure is PROFITABLE, and since it can be deployed gradually, with much of the profit going back to system expansion, we should be able to get a great start on it with about 100 billion invested total.
It's also nice that ANYONE can built an RTFS plant, for about $50 million, and can make and sell fuels, lubricants, and just about any other hydrocarbon, directly to the open market. This means big oil won;t be able to control and corner the market, and fuel prices will remain in proportion to costs, not in proportion to demand.
If you want to know more, check out dotyenergy.com. The site is quire detailed already, but they're actually willing to share their reseaarch and numbers, and hope you'll find fault with the solution. A co
Re:Reduce consumption to balance load (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, since wind power only ever degrades locally, and even then typically does not degrade across the whole wind farm, wind mills across the rest of the USA can pick up the slack easy enough.
Any talk of building a nationwide wind system simply includes the costs of superconducting HVDC lines, like the ones we've already broaght online in Long Island, and the ones being strung up across europe as well.
Also, turbines do NOT run at 100% at all times, even in good wind. The computers control each windmill individually, and adjust farm wide to make sure no windmills run too fast, and that others, even with wind blowing, don;t spin at all. When winds slow, brakes are released on other turbines, and even though wind is slowing, power can continue evenly. It's only when long term weaknesses in blowing occur that subsequent power is needed.
Part of the issue with wind power is that people don't understand 2 things. 1 is how the individual windmills are tied together, as I described above. 2 is that typically only 80% of the mills are spinning at any time (by choice) so we have 20% more power we can generate at will. A nationwide grid will follow that norm, and even if some farm in kansas is only producing 40% of it's norm, the another 30 farms would each only need to spin up an extra 2% of their reserve. Winds do not fail across an entire nation at once, and in level 7+ wind zones, rarely fail at all.
Re:well, here's an alternative way to look at it (Score:3, Informative)
Solar PV payoffs, unsubsidezed (let's be real, if we're all doing it, the government can't afford to subsidize it) can be paid off for the average home, in a level 5 or higher solar area (aka, not the northeast, where most people live), in about 20 years. This does NOT include upkeep, storm damage replacement, or the degredation of cells over time. This also assumes your local grid will ALLOW you to connect to it for overflow/underflow, which in SC they do not, and assumes that when connected, you get market rate equivolent for the power you submit vs the power you use later.
I had BP analyze my home in Myrtle Beach, SC. 1st note that 50% of my roof DOES face south, and I am considdered a prime candidate for solar power. The size of the system to provide me 100% power (overproduce during day, but back at night, net yearly gain neutral), would have been 40% larger than my roof could accomodate for my 1700sqft single floor home. I would need to add panels to a secondary grid in the back yard. Next, since SC neither subsidized, nor does the power company buy overused poewer (they let you run the meter backwards when producing, but at the end of 30 days, if the meter reads less than the previos month's reading, you are NOT compensated the difference, and the new LOWER number is used to measure next month's bill, not your previos number, so you're actually giving them free energy as a result and further getting burned higher bills in the winter months. NOW however, the new digital meters they required us to upgrade to DON'T EVEN RUN BACKWARDS!)
Based on a 2% annual degredation in solar performance, the cost of the system, increased insurance costs, increased mortgage balance and interest charges, overproduction losses, and more, my estimated return on investment was 36 years. If I put in a smaller system that would never overproduce more than I used idly during daytime hours, my return would have been 24 years. Either way, FAR oonger than the estimated 15 year life of the panels... Even expecting a 5% increase in electricity costs anually, this system would not have paid itself off in less than 15 years anyway I looked at it.
Instead, I looked at hot water generation, which could have paid itself off in 6 years, but with that, I would have had to settle with cooler showers in the morning, or using grid power to suplement hot water anyway, so I just gave up...
As for wind and the grid, all estimates for wind power implemetation on a national scale already include an overhaul to our grid (which incidently, we're GOING to do one way or the other for a NUMBER of reasons!). Since wind across the nation as a whole does not fail the way it does locally, and using superconducting HVDC with near 0 loss, it's no issue to have power criss-crossing the continent, and we have so much wind potential, we can overproduce enough to make both electricity ANY WindFuels (see www.dotyenergy.com).
Home grown produce? Sure, about 8% of americans have land to do that on, not to mention the costs involved, and energy wasted with you doing it at home is actually MORE than doing it in large fields (once you considder that you're only getting food from your personal farm a few months of they year, plus everyone else still needs a supermarket anyway). Further, the fertilizers you use are much worse than commercial ones, and the damage you cause to the groundwater in your community is actually pretty impressive if everyone was doing it.
Also, Organic foods are MORE dangerous than non-organic acording to hundreds of leading nutricianists. Home gardening is a nice pasttime, but the time investment alone is more than most of us can commit to, and as far as pay? the typical home garden produces less than $200 of produce anually, for about 50 hours labor, so that's REALLY BAD pay in my book... I;'d rather work a seperate job (I actually HAVE a home garden, but it;s for pride and hobby reasons, NOT food production or savings).
We're already making windmills on a large scale. They're not getting much
Re:Ok... (Score:1, Informative)
Just try to make those megawatt turbines start up and spin down multiple times a year... The heating/cooling cycles will have you replacing them very soon. I'm sure the manufacturers will love you.
Fact is, a lot of the baseload generators and such can't be stopped and started at on a whim.