In Oregon, Wind Power Surges Disrupting Grid 506
cpm99352 writes "The Oregonian reports gusts of wind cause synchronized power surges, more than the transmission lines can handle. Windmill farms are ordered to fan their blades, despite tremendous demand for 'green' power from California."
Store in a water tower (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFA, wind is fine. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is not wind power, it is an electricity grid in poor condition. Frankly, that is going to be a problem with or without wind power.
Re:Store in a water tower (Score:1, Insightful)
No, the windmills generate electricity which is then used in Norway to fill the lakes as means of storage. When more power is required, this water is then used to generate electricity when it is required. The water is just a storage device. We don't actually pump water to norway :P
Re:explanation about the condition of the grid (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is not in California, it is in Oregon. The demand is in California, but they cannot get the supply out of Oregon. It is not the case of the grid being in bad condition (though it is not in good condition), it is the case of the grid being built for fossil, nuclear, and hydroelectric power which turns on/off predictably and controllably, without major surges, now being used for wind power which surges unpredictably. Water is not a good analogy - surges in the water supply are on a matter of days or even weeks, whereas surges in the wind are a matter of. a second or so.
Because wind power varies, it has to be backed up by another power source which is turned down and up to fill in the gaps in the wind. But most power stations take at least a few seconds for the most agile (gas turbine) to many hours (nuclear) to turn on and off. If the wind varies too fast, this cannot be done and net grid power - the sum of wind and other - varies in a dangerous manner. The solution is for the wind power not to use the highest peaks, wasting the energy that California would like but preventing damage to the grid and equipment attached to it.
Re:From TFA, wind is fine. (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree. Its like a programmer saying "the program works...just don't click there"
Re:From TFA, wind is fine. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it is a grid designed for slow turn on/off generators (coal, oil, nuclear) being fed with fast turn on/off generators. It is like taking a truck off-road. A truck perfectly suitable for is normal job is not fit for purpose on un-metalled road. The grid is not fit for the purpose to which it is now being put.
Re:From TFA, wind is fine. (Score:5, Insightful)
Grid maintenance also means you have to update it when requirements change. More reliance on wind energy means you need more flexibility in where your electricity is generated and how much of it is generated. Leaving your grid the way it was while you change where and how electricity is generated, is rather stupid.
Re:Stop putting it on the grid! (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a pretty large difference between the a power surge over a few seconds, and slowly, over the course of months, building up a supply of water in a reservoir. Dealing with a power surge over a few seconds is very hard. Dealing with a reservoir that builds up near to full is pretty freaking easy... just turn off some other power sources and slowly and predictably drain the reservoir. Unpredictability isn't the issue, rapid unpredictability is.
The problem of course is that the more you buffer something like wind energy, the less efficient (and thus more costly) it becomes. Dumping water into a reservoir will pretty much solve your energy surge problems, but it will make your output and cost crap. I bet the solution is probably more technological. Cleaning up a signal that fluctuates wildly is pretty old hat for signal folks, it just needs some scale up.
Re:explanation about the condition of the grid (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is not in California, it is in Oregon. The demand is in California, but they cannot get the supply out of Oregon.
Sounds to me like a large part of the problem is that Californians are using more than they produce. That in itself is a problem, in fact is the heart of the problem. Californians need to produce more power locally, use less or find a balance of the two.
The same thing goes with California's other budget issue - fiscal-
Re:From TFA, wind is fine. (Score:5, Insightful)
Certainly. But we have a frog-in-hot-water situation here, with political complications. The grid as built can take a small amount of wind power. But as the amount of wind power increases, the limits of its adaptability are reached. And now you have the problem of who pays for the necessary upgrades. The guy who added the last windmill that exceeded the limit? All windmill owners? The Oregon grid, which needs upgrading? The California consumers who want this green power? Everybody says it is not their responsibility and the US, with its dislike of government control, does not have the mechanisms for someone to take charge and decide who pays for it in the short term, and how they are going to get paid back buy the other beneficiaries.
The trouble is that, since this is a huge one-off, market forces don't work very well. Of course, eventually the pain caused will open a market opportunity and business will find a way to solve the problem. But without a so-called socialist supervisor authority to predict and control, business are going to wait until the pain is excruciating before suppling the demand. In the long term the market will work; in the short term the economy and people will suffer.
Re:explanation about the condition of the grid (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't agree. Doing everything in your own back garden is extremely inefficient. Things should be done where they can be done most efficiently - allowing for the cost of transport. You generate wind power where the wind is, solar power where the sun is, wave power where the waves are. Then transport it to where the users are
By your logic, California should only burn oil pumped in California. In fact, why allow a whole state to share - why not require SF to used only oil pumped in SF.
And certainly California should not import water in the way it does. Which would lead to most of Southern California being abandoned - it survives only on water imported from the north.
Re:Store in a water tower (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Store in a water tower (Score:1, Insightful)
Makes me wonder if Europe+Africa could share power with North+South America. You could do it through the water. One conduction path in the south (Africa to South America) and another in the North (Europe to Canada). Maybe run DC through the water. Excess power on either side of the link could be offloaded to a different continent.
Re:Much ado about nothing (Score:4, Insightful)
Wind power is inherently unreliable and completely unfeasible as a large-scale power-generation method. I found the following an interesting read:
Hugh Sharman, – Why Wind Power ‘Works’ in Denmark
http://www.incoteco.com/upload/CIEN.158.2.66.pdf [incoteco.com]
The gist of it is that Denmark exports almost all of the wind energy they generate to neighbouring countries, because most of the time the power generated is in excess of the demand. Granted, that paper is several years old, but it still demonstrates the randomness of wind-based energy-generation pretty well.
Wind can never be used for base load energy generation without some kind of (expensive and impractical) energy-storing gimmicks, so instead of that how about just building a few comparatively cheap nuclear reactors and being set for decades? Perhaps at that point wind energy will be more feasible, but until then throwing money into implementing inferior energy-generation methods seems kind of silly.
Re:explanation about the condition of the grid (Score:3, Insightful)
I think there are limits to how much of a given resource one group of people should be importing.
There are too many people in SoCal to be able to provide them enough water. The problem isn't too little water, it's too many people. Some of them need to leave, and go where there is more water. People have been doing this for thousands of years. Our technology does not eliminate this process, only allows it to happen less often.
Re:hydrogen is a joke (Score:5, Insightful)
Any form of storage will have efficiency problems, and even if pumping water up hills is more efficient it won't be feasible if your having problems with transporting electricity in the first place.
Re:Compressed air storage? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because you need a fragile motor/compressor for the process, and air tanks have to be re-tested yearly? Because storing air at 3,000 PSI ain't easy? It's actually a great idea; you'd eliminate the generator in the wind turbine itself, and replace it with an air compressor. Then the generator gets to live on the ground with the air motor and the generator, and hopefully the mast can be the tank. But that's still adding an air tank, compressor, and air motor where you formerly had none. Cost is the answer.
Re:From TFA, wind is fine. (Score:3, Insightful)
No. In most cases it is not public money that builds transmission, but private money.
Somebody has to convince investors to put their money in transmission projects rather than Google/BP/Pharma/Banks/Apple and so on. That's not easy, especially in the face of regulatory uncertainty.
How does the investor earn a profit on the transmision line? By fees and/or energy market trading. However, in the blink of an eye government can change the rules and wipe out all that future revenue.
Regulatory uncertainty (not the regulations but the uncertainty) results in decision paralysis.
Re:It can be done - Spain example (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, in a country less than 1000Km in extent and with much of the population right in the center. It's farther from Oregon to Southern California than it is from one corner of Spain to another.
Re:explanation about the condition of the grid (Score:4, Insightful)
Californians have been doing this sort of thing for some time, and while we like the money, it really would be better if they stopped behaving like they have the right to export their externalities when folks up here are actually trying to do something about ours.
Re:hydrogen is a joke (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Store in a water tower (Score:5, Insightful)
unless they're sociopaths who don't give a damn about other people's health, well being, or livlihood.
Never assume venality where stupidity will do. There are actually two types of people who are opposed to government regulation: the sociopaths, and the dupes. I know this because I was once a dupe.
The arguments for "the free market" can sound pretty compelling to someone who is naive and basically decent, who doesn't appreciate the depths of human depravity in the wild. We still see libertarians regularly on /. who are so sincerely addled by their ideology that they don't recognize state failures like Somalia and the tribal lands in northern Pakistan and parts of Afghanistan as real world examples of their theories in action. They simply can't believe that people would behave in such obviously idiotic, sub-optimal ways for centuries or longer.
Yet anyone who looks at history realizes that stateless, unregulated societies are unstable against tribalism. If humans were economically rational automatons they would not be, but we aren't.
On the flip side, being "for" regulation doesn't mean that we can't disagree vigorously over what kind of regulation is appropiate. But having that debate means first figuring out that we aren't sociopaths on either the left or the right (and don't kid yourself: at the level of the political leadership the left has always been dominated by sociopaths, just like the right, and for the same reasons.)
Re:Store in a water tower (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree. There needs to be a balance in all things. Let's talk about just the simple things that have improved. When I was a kid and went to the local convenience store the parking lot was covered with pop tops! After going to the beach you checked your feet for tar every day.
There was lead in the gas and no real emission controls on cars.
looking back I am amazed just how much better things are now than back in the "good old days".
Oh and my father worked for a paper mill. They had a car wash at the plant so the fumes wouldn't eat the paint off your car too quickly.
Not to mention that in the 40s and 50s that people actually thought it was okay to play with nukes above ground! Thankfully that was before my time.
I am not an extreme green person but regulation is just like any other from of law. A little bit now and then really helps.
Now back to this wind issue.
I just don't think that wind will work large scale because of these issues. It is not reliable enough. Yes you could use water pumping to store excess but you then have the problem that in the US most wind fields are not gong to be in the mountains. The great plains are very flat.
The other issue is the impact of doing that water storage. Damming up valley's is not environmentally clean. You destroy one ecosystem and replace it with a different one. I still think nuclear is the best solution for now. That I an am really hoping the Polywell reactor will work.
Re:In Texas, the Opposite Problem (Score:3, Insightful)
That gap is only stated to grow
Reason, the power of the kind of groups that will block power lines, if not the wind farms themselves, is MUCH smaller in Texas...
Re:explanation about the condition of the grid (Score:2, Insightful)
At a price... If you don't want your state built over (and I sympathize with you), keep doubling the price. That is the way the market works, and America loves the market...
Does it matter which power goes where? (Score:3, Insightful)
Lots of Californians want to pay extra for green power, but do they really care who gets which power, as long as the green power is generated and used? I would guess that the vast majority of them would be fine with paying more to have green power generated and used elsewhere, but that isn't an option - when you opt into a green power program, it says you are getting that power.
The northwest already has plenty of hydropower that can be interrupted briefly while the reservoirs are allowed to fill, or at least not deplete as quickly. The wind power could be diverted to the aluminum potlines and other big users - there is still a grid issue, but much smaller than getting those big surges down to California.
A lot of this could be solved administratively, if the parties involved really wanted to solve it
Re:From TFA, wind is fine. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Store in a water tower (Score:3, Insightful)
That depends on the losses you're willing to tolerate. Bouncing maser beams off geosynchronous satellites would 'work' in the sense that you'd get some power out at the far end and it would be better than simply wasting excess energy, but it wouldn't be at all efficient (I think around 2% with current technology, 10-20% with some of the stuff that's only in labs and might not work when you scale it up).
This kind of inefficiency would be insane for a fossil fuel or nuclear plant - it would be better to just transport the fuel - but it might make sense for something where you have no control over the output.
Another option, of course, relies on your not caring about latency. There's nothing stopping you from using excess capacity in Europe to produce hydrocarbons (or hydrogen), ship them across the atlantic, and then burn them on the far side (or vice versa). This would work better between north and south hemispheres, so that seasonal peaks in demand can be flattened out.
Flywheel storage? (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing to see here (Score:3, Insightful)
As someone who works in the solar and wind controls business, let me state: this is not a surprise or really even a problem. People who install big wind and solar systems understand, because of the payback horizon of such installations, the limitations of the local distribution system. It is completely normal for big turbines to have to feather/furl/divert themselves during strong wind. The owners and installers design for this. It's factored into the payback time of the project!
The problem here is the sensationalist reporting. Yes, we need better electricity distribution systems for distributed generation, but we in the industry know that. We've known it for years. The guys who financed and installed the system at Columbia River Gorge almost certainly knew it.
So, yes, pump money into building bigger lines in the right places, but that's something we've been doing for more than fifty years. Generation locations are rarely at consumption locations, after all, and that was true for coal, natural gas, etc., just as it is for wind, hydro, and solar. The only problem here is that our 1990's generation locations aren't where tomorrow's generation locations are.
Re:Store in a water tower (Score:2, Insightful)
Nuclear power is nothing but a band-aid. It is not a viable long-term solution. If the world replaced all its coal or oil with nuclear power (as some smaller countries like France have come close to doing), the supply of nuclear fuel would run out even more quickly than the known reserves of oil would.
Do not confuse "non-greenhouse-gas-producing" with "sustainable". Nuclear power doesn't create CO2 as a significant by-product, but it is not sustainable. It can help us generate the energy we need to build sustainable infrastructure, but it is not sustainable itself.
Wind power is sustainable, for as long as we have a sun and an atmosphere. This surge "problem" is a joke, solvable in a handful of different ways. The level of debate is merely indicative of the fact that most slashdotters are not mechanical/civil engineers.