Posted on 06/08/2006 8:22:08 PM PDT by neverdem
The National Wind Technology Center sits at the foot of the Rockies just south of Boulder. Although within sight of Denver, the swell of the land hides the city, making you feel as if you’re in the middle of nowhere.
The site is well chosen. Generally you need good proximity to mountains to take advantage of wind energy. The best sites in America are in the High Sierras, the Rockies, and the Appalachian Mountains. The other “Saudi Arabia of wind” is the upper Midwest, where the Dakotas, western Minnesota, and northwest Iowa catch the jet stream barreling down from Canada.
Unfortunately, all of these sites are far from human habitation. Hooking them into the electrical grid will mean building extensive transmission lines across hundreds of miles of landscape. After a couple of hundred miles, the power losses begin to mount. And that’s just one of the impediments facing the broad expansion of wind technology. The main difficulty arises because—like it or not—the wind doesn’t blow all the time.
Wind energy is now the hot “alternative energy,” on the verge of breaking into the mainstream. “Wind is the fastest growing form of energy in the world, increasing 28 percent over the last five years,” celebrates E Magazine. “Installed capacity doubles every three years. Some 6,000 megawatts of wind capacity—enough to power 1.5 million homes—are added annually.” World capacity is now approaching 50,000 MW, the equivalent of 50 major coal or nuclear plants, with 75 percent of this capacity in Europe.
U.S. subsidies, which drove a wind boom in the 1970s, were rescinded by Ronald Reagan but are now back in place. Every windmill gets a 1.8-cents tax credit for each kilowatt-hour produced—the same incentive being offered to the first 6,000 MW of new nuclear construction. In addition, individual states are revving up the engine by adopting “renewable portfolios”—legislation that requires utilities to draw a fixed portion of their power from renewable sources by a certain date (usually 10 to 20 percent by 2010 or 2015).
Such renewable portfolios are an “unfunded mandate”—the kind the states have long complained about from the federal government. They shift the risks and cost burdens to private industry. Rather than “priming the pump,” such laws may be pushing utilities into a technology that won’t pan out. The costs could be staggering, as California found out when it legislated over-reliance on renewable energy before the electricity shortage of 2000.
Still, the energy experts in Boulder are optimistic. “Wind has been the subject of a lot of misconceptions,” says Michael Milligan, a consultant for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory since 1992. “There’s been a certain amount of resistance from the people who run the grid, but some of that is now clearing up.”
Indeed, over the last decade there has been virtual guerilla warfare—completely out of public view—between the wind enthusiasts and electrical engineers over whether the grid can absorb large contributions of wind energy. “The grid is one of the most complex machines ever devised by human beings,” admits Eduard Muljadi, an NREL staff engineer who sits a few doors down from Milligan. “But we’ve made a lot of progress.”
Running an electrical grid is a delicate task that involves balancing supply and demand on an instantaneous basis. Modern computer networks require voltage reliability in the “high 9’s,” meaning 99.99999 percent. Any small surge in the system can destroy loads of data. Most large components on the grid—including most power stations—are designed to trip out if there is a sudden surge or voltage drop in the system.
When you start adding to this a large power source that is by nature variable and unpredictable, it can only spell trouble. This is why grid engineers have usually been less than enthusiastic about wind power.
The engineers’ objections have been fourfold:
The debate became so intense that last December Power & Energy, the bimonthly magazine of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers, devoted an entire issue to the problem. The five major articles tried to put these issues to rest, although there is still room for debate.
“We’ve pretty much showed that wind doesn’t need backup megawatt-for-megawatt,” says Milligan, who co-authored one of the articles. “Wind farms are dispersed over a wide area, sometimes dozens of square miles. The wind does not blow the same in every location. When averaged out, a wind farm does not act terribly different from any conventional power plant.”
The North American Electrical Reliability Council (NREC), which represents the perspective of the grid operators, has indeed accepted the idea that wind can be factored onto the grid—but only by defining it as an “energy source” rather than as “energy capacity,” which is just another way of saying that wind won’t always be available.
This raises another sore point—namely, how much a windmill’s “nameplate capacity” is worth. The biggest windmills, now taller than the Statue of Liberty, are being advertised as generating 1.5 MW (as opposed to 1,000 MW for the standard coal or nuclear plant). But research has now determined that this 1.5 MW is available only about one third of the time. Since each giant windmill costs $1 million, 2,000 or so windmills needed to match output quickly match the costs of a coal and nuclear plant. Capital costs are what make wind power so expensive.
Nonetheless, “Wind Power Integration,” the article co-authored by Milligan, goes on to dismiss most of the grid engineers’ concerns:
"Wind works best in conjunction with natural gas,” says Milligan. “You can use the gas turbines to make up for lulls in output. You save a lot of natural gas in the process.”
America now burns huge quantities of natural gas for peaking power, and it would be nice if wind could contribute there as well. Unfortunately, the biggest lulls in wind power occur precisely at the time when peak power is needed most: during hot summer days when air conditioning stretches the grid to its limits. The seasonal low in wind capacity occurs from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. in June, July, and August. The annual peak is from 10 p.m. to 8 a.m. in December, January, and February—a time when nobody uses much electricity.
Storage of vast amounts of electricity, currently a technological impossibility, could solve the problem—but then storage would work just well for nuclear plants, which churn out huge amounts of spare nighttime electricity all year ’round.
Wind enthusiasts like to point to Europe, which now has 75 percent of the world’s capacity, but there are reasons for skepticism.
First, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and Ireland have been able to locate large windmill facilities along coastlines near major cities. Ocean winds are much more reliable, producing as high as 30-40 percent capacity as opposed to 10-20 percent on land. But efforts to duplicate that in this country may be frustrated, as illustrated by the Kennedy family’s recent defeat of a windmill farm off Nantucket Island.
Second, no European country has plans to take wind above 20 percent of the grid. It is sometimes claimed that wind provides 100 percent of Denmark’s electrical power during off-peak hours, but this is a purely theoretical figure. Denmark is plugged into the much larger European and Scandinavian grids, where its consumption is only a small percent of the total.
Third, European wind power is being driven solely by the combination of government subsidies and laws mandating that utilities buy wind power regardless of cost. This is a risky strategy that could push the technology beyond its limits. In Ireland, the National Electrical Supply Board finally called a moratorium on new wind facilities in 2003 because the system could no longer handle them.
Even the most enthusiastic advocates of wind power acknowledge its limitations. “You’ll never be able to run the whole grid on wind,” says Milligan, surveying the Colorado landscape outside his window. “Right now 20 percent looks like a reasonable target.”
William Tucker is a weekly columnist for The American Enterprise Online.
Put a bunch of turbines in DC, right in the Senate and House buildings....there's lots of wind (hot air) there!
I didn't read anything in the entire article that could recommend wind as a source of power beyond boutique status.
A power plant in Michigan, (I think), has a magnificent "battery" to store excess energy while it is producing power during non-peak hours. Energy is converted from electrical to potential energy. The thermodynamic laws are not violated!!!
A man made hill with a lake on hits top was constructed. When electrical demand is below grid needs water is pumped uphill. When the power plant is running at full capacity during the day and additional grid demands are felt, the water is allowed to flow downhill and the turbine pumps are now generators and the potential energy is converted back into electricity.
FDR once worked on a tidal basin plan which would capture the tides between Nova Scotia and Maine which can vary from 15 to 20 feet. Again water flowing down hill would produce the electricity. In that case, the Moon would have performed one half of the cycle.
Fact, 90% of the elctricity produced in North Dakota is exported to Seattle and Minneapolis.
Any Questions? There WILL be a test.
FDA approves cervical cancer vaccine
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
For storage, we could have two lakes (at different levels) with a hydroelectric generator between. Pump the water up at night (low demand) and have the water flow down through the generators during the day.
Storage as potential energy somehow doesn't seem to appeal to electricity generators. It appears they just want to sell to the grid. I think you might need a government mandate for that solution, or why didn't they sell it to the shareholders already?
The difference between the present and the future is that the basket of energy sources is going to have to grow. Wind is going to have to be part of it as will nuclear, coal gasification, solar, ethanol and as much as many here hate to admit it, conservation.
Most of the cheap oil left is in the Middle East and the geopolitical risks make it not so cheap.
The markets will take care of the problem, but the United States will have to play catch up in the development of the technologies and their implementation unless incentives are put in place that accelerate the process (i.e. the government itself promising the purchase American renewable/conservation technology).
Otherwise, Americans will be buying their technology from the Germans and Japanese (and probably Koreans), just like their cars.
Please do. The simplicity of this idea is downright elegant.
As for wind power, if it ever gets developed I wouldn't be surprised to see various scare stories about how upwinders are stealing cheap cooling from the downwinders, leading to wind rights legislation even crazier than water rights are now.
This WEBTV STINKS....
Try this...
http://www.consumerenergy.com/content/hlermenugrid.aspx?id=34 - 34.7KB
I hope this works. If not select the one of the topics that says Ludington welcomes power storage facility or something like that. I'm getting a little frustrated with my WEBTV Trash.
I'm starting to lose my mind about now, so I grabbed my meds and maybe I'll get you there this time. Once you get to the Consumers Energy Site, go to search and type in:
Pumpback storage welcome
This will bring you directly to the web site that has the pictures and info. If you have any trouble finding it, GOOD Luck.
Pumpback storage welcome should be
pumped storage welcome
I'm unplugging myself brfore I go into meldown. I hope this makes you very happy, I have totally ruined my life tonight with this frustration. AAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHHH.....
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