Posted on 07/25/2008 8:23:14 AM PDT by twistedwrench
The article points out that the wind generated power is sold abroad at a loss. Wind turbines are a subsidized industry in Demark
Nukes are required by law to bank money during their life time for decommissioning. If the plant is sold the money for decommissioning goes with the plant.
Power control, power distribution and energy storage will be the primary drivers in any alternative energy scheme.
Actually, there "is" a way to solve the problem. It's called the "hydrogen economy" and it is the answer to using energy sources with inherent variability. It is also a pretty good way to handle the long distance transmission problem as well.
The Danish wind turbines only output 600kW at optimum wind speeds. It would take one thousand of these to offset a single 600MW plant, and only when the wind is blowing optimally.
Actually that is not a problem because of digital controls on the generators and the wind turbine generators are not tied directly to the grid but are passed through an inverter.
Hydrolysis is pretty inefficient and Hydrogen is dangerous to work with (and what do you do with the oxygen which is also dangerous.). On the other hand if your turbines are very far from the grid it may be a feasible storage medium. But I think batteries are probably more efficient and safer.
When I lived in Alabama the biggest power demand was on hot humid days.....when all the air conditioners were operating. And that was when the wind wasn't blowing.
No, that is not the way it works. Keeping nuclear reaction and quantum physics for another discussion, energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. Chemical energy (fuels) can be burned to make heat to turn turbines to turn generators to make electricity. But the electricity does just pour out and get stored on the lines or vanish if not used. In electrical grids, generation will equal loads plus loss, always. When more power is delivered to the shaft than electrical demand exists on the system, very undesirable things happen in the electromagnetic fields in the generator and voltage levels. You won't generate surplus energy, but you can damage equipment.
Do you have any idea what his expected pay back period might be. That sounds like a huge investment.
Gas is quite able to go from off line to full load in a few minutes, but don't discount coal-fired plants. For decades, utilities have regulated their output to match demand by varying the output of coal-fired power plants. While they cannot change as rapidly as gas turbine, they can move quite freely over a band from about 1/2 load to full load. Most of the older, smaller units can move very quickly, while the very large base-load units take a bit more time to cover a large range. They all can vary 5-10% quickly and with ease.
But the electricity does NOT just pour out and get stored on the lines or vanish if not used.
One of the things that’s been discussed with Electric cars is that having a bunch of them plugged into the grid could be, in effect, a large battery bank. If you charged yours overnite you could provide power to the grid during the day. If there were proper meters on the car and places to plug them in everywhere we would have a place to store any excess energy that is produced.
Enough turbines spread over a large enough geographic area should, conceivably, increase the total amount of dependable electrical power on the grid. After all, while the wind may not be blowing in any given area at any given time, it surely is blowing in other places. The real question is whether the amount of conventional generation capacity they can displace is enough to offset their expense. I suspect the answer is no. Even leaving aside the need for convential plants to back them up, their total cost of generation per KWh is pretty high.
Electrical utilities can also buy electricity from other suppliers on the grid, but that is usually an even more expensive proposition.
It is my understanding that, if there is a bank of wind turbines creating electric that is pumped back on the grid, the power plant does not use less fuel because of it. Nuclear power aside.
And on a hot, windless cloudy day you come out of your air conditioned office get into your electric car and find out the battery is dead because it has been running your air conditioner all day. Yeh that’s the ticket.
An what if the wind doesn’t blow that night after the sun goes down, how do you recharge your car battery without pulling power from the grid, which is hopefully backed up by a reliable conventional power source.
Mr. Gore notwithstanding we do not live in OZ or some other fantasy land. We live in the real world with real laws of physics that need to be considered.
Wind in the CA Bay Area was run by a company call US Windpower, in the early 90’s. I did some business with them, toured their facility and met their senior officers. They were a very slick group and spent money very freely. I couldn’t believe there was that much money in power generation, but there were subsidies at the time for wind, so I figured they must be pretty generous.
Later, the founders I met all were busted in a stock fraud case. Something about concealing major problems with new, x-tra large windmill design they were marketing. The company went into receivership and I’m not sure who owns the mills and property now.
There is long history of hype in power generation overall.
Now, any utility executive who proposes generating facilities with a capacity factor in the 5% range would be stood up against a wall and shot for incompetence. But since it's the "green", politically-correct wind power, they'll get a pass.
If wind was somewhat predictable near hydroelectric plants, they could use the pumps to move water back into the lake when the wind is kicking up — it’s a pretty cheap storage solution.
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