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."
explanation about the condition of the grid (Score:4, Interesting)
Why, technically speaking, is your power grid in the CA area in such poor condition? Were there missteps in its construction or maintenance? Why isn't capacity being increased? Is it a problem of deciding responsibility for organising interstate builds, and if so why don't other states suffer the problem? Spain has this on-and-off problem of autonomous regions with lots of water not providing to areas with less water; the ("federal") government of the day can determine the outcome.
Re:Store in a water tower (Score:5, Interesting)
But taking this idea a step further for local power generation: Why convert to electricity in the first place? If you pump water to a higher place you might as well let the windmills pump it directly (that's why the Dutch invented them after all), you have an immediate buffer in the lake so you can never pump too hard, and the hydroelectric generators can be throttled easily. You have the benefits of a buffer and a higher efficiency, as well as a more simple design (no high-tech generators needed in every windmill). Damn great idea, if I say it myself... Must be because I'm Dutch.
Wind Power blows. (Score:1, Interesting)
I live in Almere, a town in the province of Flevoland, The Netherlands. We have power surges all the time from all the wind generators that are based around the city of Almere and Lelystad, which the Dutch government put there because of all the wind that is there, to prove that wind power is a real alternative. The grid simply can't handle the peaks of power that it delivers and can't cope with it if the wind goes away and the wind generators are simply doing nothing...
New efficient energy storage with hydrogen (Score:4, Interesting)
McPhy claims to be able to store energy at 98% efficiency with hydrogen in solid containers,
which are precisely aimed for solving such problems.
http://www.mcphy.com/en/products/iso-containers.php [mcphy.com]
If I were investor I would look more closely to such technological advances.
Much ado about nothing (Score:5, Interesting)
So the wind turbines had to reduce production for a few hours. Is it really worth doing massive build-outs to fix that? It's sad to see energy go to waste, but on the other hand you can go outside and watch all the energy going to waste because there isn't a wind turbine to catch it in the first place!
As long we're wasting less than 10% of power (and right now we're below 1% at least in wind-farm-filled Denmark) I don't see the problem. I bet planned and unplanned maintenance accounts for several percent anyway.
Re:Store in a water tower (Score:2, Interesting)
The efficiency of such a system is low.
See my other post on local energy storage with hydrogen
which reaches 98% efficiency.
Re:Store in a water tower (Score:3, Interesting)
That's only true for the electrical efficiency.
The political efficiency of losing 90% of your generated power (probably 150% if you count the construction cost amortized over 20 years) in a way that is called "green" by journalists who don't realize that there is anything behind the power socket ...
The self-masturbatory potential is off the scale ...
(and of course, once everything's factored in, this actually hurts the environment. Not that the dutch have anything remotely resembling a natural environment left. In reality the dutch destroyed the entirety of the original dutch environment several centuries ago, because they wanted to cure malaria by destroying all dutch swamps (holland would normally be a country of swamps and sand banks). In addition they made massive stretches of land areable and inhabitable by doing this. It worked. And it was probably the best public health policy ever, and one of the few doublings of a country's territory that did not involve killing one's neighbors)
There's better solutions than this! (Score:1, Interesting)
There's better solutions than this! (Score 1) on Monday July 19, @11:15PM Comments: 1 by Kanel on Monday July 19, @11:15PM (#32956500)
Attached to: Wind power surges disrupting grid
This is a well known problem but the article dosn't even beginn to discuss the solutions. Which is very convenient for the windmill owners.
There's basically two solutions: Either you store the extra power for later in some kind of battery, or the grid has both windmills and some other kind of renewable power that can quickly step in or out with swings in windmill electricity. The textbook example is hydro power. The output from a hydro plant can be planned in advance since you have a reservoir you'r tapping from and how much electricity you produce can be changed by the flick of a switch. Unlike coal and nuclear powerplants, hydropower can in principle respond to an unanticipated demand in a matter of seconds.
Fascinatingly, a hydro power plant can also act as a battery. When windmills are producing excessive amounts of electricity at low prices, the electricity can be used to pump water back up into the reservoir, to be depleted later when the price is higher.
If you don't have a hydro power plant nearby, it's possible to store electricity in other ways, both in special batteries designed for windmills, pressurised air in underground caves, e.t.c. But this article only mention one solution: Build more grids. Why is that? So that grid owners will have to make the needed investments and the consumers will ultimately have to pay for it, while the windmill owners get all the benefits.
Re:Fan the Blades? (Score:2, Interesting)
No, you put the fan behind, so it goes against the wind. It not only reduces the generated power, but in addition removes some of the generated power directly at the generation place, so it doesn't hit the grid. As added bonus, the article mentions that the renewable energy credits are only generated when the blades are spinning, however it doesn't tell that you may not use that power yourself (and if there's some regulation to that effect, you simply found a second company to put up the fans, and sell the required electricity to that second company).
store as Hydrogen (Score:5, Interesting)
I've suggested this elsewhere for other wind farms. How about having a hydrogen electrolysis plant nearby where water can be turned into Hydrogen that can be turned back into electricity during non-peak wind (tidal, or whatever) periods. Hydrogen can be burnt turning it back into water easily and produces heat that can be turned into electricity cheaply and easily. The most expensive part of the whole unit would be the hydrogen storage. This can safely be placed underground to avoid leaks and explosions if required.
Re:Store in a water tower (Score:5, Interesting)
And the natural environment we had here centuries ago was already fast-changing, the rivers and sea shaped the land constantly. It was not an environment you could live in comfortably, and there weren't any old forests. Human involvement first started by keeping land the way it was, and later adding more land to it. I'd hardly call this 'destroyed', but the original nature is indeed severely reduced and most is shaped into something useful.
As they say: "God created the earth, but the Dutch created the Netherlands"
Re:store as Hydrogen (Score:2, Interesting)
I've suggested this elsewhere for other wind farms. How about having a hydrogen electrolysis plant nearby where water can be turned into Hydrogen that can be turned back into electricity during non-peak wind (tidal, or whatever) periods. Hydrogen can be burnt turning it back into water easily and produces heat that can be turned into electricity cheaply and easily. The most expensive part of the whole unit would be the hydrogen storage. This can safely be placed underground to avoid leaks and explosions if required.
They are doing this in some locations. I know that this is what's happening for British Columbia's first wind farm. However, the incentive is not grid stability, but power lines that are too far away. It's cheaper to truck hydrogen than it is to extend the power grid to the farm.
Re:Store in a water tower (Score:5, Interesting)
Pumping water with wind energy insures you can use wind energy as a baseline power supply (although it's actually hydro energy that achieves it). You lose some efficiency in raw power output,
I didn't say that balancing the input/output and buffering is a bad idea.
I only said that if the energy is needed in the grid, you should deliver it directly instead of storing it in water towers.
Maybe I took wrong your first post when you say taking this idea a step further for local power generation: Why convert to electricity in the first place?: it looked to me as you suggested to always store it as hydro - if that's indeed what you were saying, my argument was against "always" which should be replaced with "when in excess".
Mitigating that problem by reducing efficiency is a trade-off that can really help renewable energy become more mainstream and reduce our dependence on fossil fuel
So, reducing the efficiency plus investing in a hydro buffer does make the energy become mainstream? Something is wrong in my world which, like/agree with it or not, is currently driven by prices. Until the freaking "price on carbon" is not injected into the world's economy (in no matter how: "trade-able emission quota", "penalties for extra emission", etc) I don't think this is going to happen.
Other than that, even buffering an unpredictable input it is not without technical difficulties:
a. in your example, to store the excess in Norway lakes, you need a cable that's currently the wonder of submersible cables. And TFA was saying "the grid is the bottleneck, otherwise the CA people would be happy to suck the energy in". If you need to lay a line to the appropriate lake and build a hydro on it, wouldn't it be cheaper to just enhance the current grid which acts as a bottleneck?
b. what if you don't have enough water around to raise in the tower/lake? The "buffering" solution will still be valid, except that hydro is not the only buffer possible
c. what if the lake you use doesn't have enough capacity for the excess you record? What makes more economic sense: invest in a "bigger lake" or just let the excess go?
A very steady source of green power is ... (Score:3, Interesting)
... tidal. Build a dam across the entrance of the SF bay and capture the power from the tidal flow going in and out every day. Oh, and you could build a roadway across the top of it and get rid of that ugly bridge right there.
Re:Store in a water tower (Score:3, Interesting)
Even better would be a means of pulling carbon from the air over at the generation plant, generating hydrogen gas or an alcohol, then pumping that fuel via pipeline to a place near the city, and burning it there. This sounds Rube Goldberg-ish, but doing something like this would mean more energy gets to the grid from the generator because it is not lost to wire resistance over the long distances.
The only disadvantage would be needing a source of water near the generation plant, and the fact that vandals and kooks are not deterred from messing with it like they are with high voltage power lines (for the most part).
Re:New efficient energy storage with hydrogen (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure this technology is really necessary though. Magnetic flywheels achieve similar efficiencies and they've been around forever. What improvement does this offer?
Re:Compressed air storage? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
The key problem here is storage you don't have to store locally. airbladders at the bottom of a lake/sea or storing the air in a disused saltmines [nytimes.com]
Re:Store in a water tower (Score:5, Interesting)
The idea of environmentalism has changed drastically since the late 1960s when people started talking about it. Back then it was poisons in the air and water; In Cahokia, IL where I grew up, the aptly named Dead Creek's water was so polluted the creek caught fire. A mile north in Sauget you could not drive past Monsanto with your windows rolled down or the air would burn your lungs. There were 100,000 fifty five gallon drums filled with toxic waste buried along the banks of the Mississippi river just west of Cahokia. There was lead in gasoline, PCBs in electrical transformers, etc. The environment in the US (at least in Cahokia) was toxic.
After Nixon signed the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water act, these problems disappeared over time. The vegetation is a brighter green now, and you can drive past Monsanto with your windows down and not even smell any bad smells.
Nobody who lived before this environmental legislation, or had a loved one crippled or killed due to an employer's negligence before OSHA, is against government regulation unless they're sociopaths who don't give a damn about other people's health, well being, or livlihood. That includes the BP apologists; I feel for the poor folks living on the Gulf.
I'd rather see windmills than coal, gas, or oil fired generators; I can't see how windmills will poison anything. I really don't care about a few dead birds; the day after the tornados hit here in Springfield in 2006, there were thousands of dead birds everywhere (and far fewer trees for them to live in). The bird population didn't take long at all to reappear.
Re:Store in a water tower (Score:5, Interesting)
Even better would be a means of pulling carbon from the air over at the generation plant, generating hydrogen gas or an alcohol, then pumping that fuel via pipeline to a place near the city, and burning it there.
1) Windmills tend to be in agricultural areas, because the land is cheap and too windy for the average resident anyway.
2) Factory farming / big agribusiness is also located there
3) FF / Big Agro requires fertilizers, in part derived from ammonia, to function
4) Ammonia production via Haber-Bosch requires nitrogen (air) and purified hydrogen (electrolyzed water) and a crapton of energy.
5) Conveniently overreving windmills have lots of air and a crapton of energy. Most windmills are either offshore (surrounded by H2O) or are in a non-arid area. Perhaps Oregon has a lack of water, don't know.
So, the rural areas will make their own fertilizer using excess power. Cool.
Of course stereotypical Haber-Bosch plants are all designed to run continuously so as to maximize capital return, and why the heck not. That having a variable source of power has never been a plant requirement, so plants would not tolerate it, does not mean that its technologically impossible to design and build a Haber-Bosch plant that only runs during low demand hours, or that can tolerate a modest disruption to incoming power.
The main problem is electric power companies are not really fertilizer companies. Oh sure, just like any other major American corporation, their management and marketing people spew out vast quantities of B.S., and B.S. is a great nitrogen fertilizer, but its not their core competency. Some fertilizer company would pretty much have to move out there and set up a plant with Very favorable contracted energy cost rates. But most fertilizer companies are dead set on using depleting natural gas as their H2 source...
Re:hydrogen is a joke (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Much ado about nothing (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem is that wind cannot be reliably used for any kind of power generation (except with some means of energy storage). You will still need to provide the exact same amount of peaking power plants whether or not you had any wind-based energy production. In effect this means that wind power will not decrease the amount of conventional power plants at all, and I am pretty sure that the amount of fuel savings they manage for fuel-consuming peaking power plants (by having them run less) during their operational life cycle will not be that much compared to the resources it takes to build the wind turbines and maintain them.
Re:Store in a water tower (Score:2, Interesting)
The view from the power grid (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a big problem. Grid operators are concerned about "dispatch ramp rate", the rate at which power sources can be ordered to increase or decrease output. Ramp rate from idle to full power is minutes for gas turbines, tens of minutes for hydro plants, and hours for coal plants.
Live data on this is available. Here's PJM's dashboard [pjm.com], with the details of the power grid in the northeastern United States. Once the dashboard (a Flash program) comes up, pick one of the graph panes, and use the drop-down menu at the upper left of the window to select "Wind Power". At the lower right of the pane, use that drop-down menu to select "All Data". The green line is total, actual wind power output for the entire PJM control area. Note that today's low is about 80MW, and today's high is about 925MW. That's how variable wind power is; over a 10:1 range in a single day. That's not just one wind farm. That's the entire northeastern US. It's not a big deal for PJM, though; their peak load today is about 130,000MW. Wind power is not yet a significant fraction of their capacity.
Wind power is not "dispatchable"; the control center can't call for more output. Current thinking is that power grids can tolerate maybe 20% to 30% wind power, maximum. There will be periods of low wind, even over very large geographical areas. Huge reserves of "dispatchable" power are needed to back up the wind turbines. Typically, that comes from natural gas fueled turbines. The backup power isn't needed very often, so the capital cost of the equipment per kilowatt hour produced is high.
Re:Store in a water tower (Score:3, Interesting)
but if we run the power lines all the way around the earth we'll turn the earth into a giant magnet and start attracting asteroids and stray UFS will crash more regularly into our planet.
NGM Power Grid Article (Score:3, Interesting)
National Geographic Magazine did a recent article on the US power grid. Apparently it is way older and sensitive to fluctuations than I thought. It's really not set up currently to handle the erratic nature of 'green' power.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2010/07/power-grid/achenbach-text [nationalgeographic.com]
Re:Store in a water tower (Score:3, Interesting)
What on Earth are you talking about? Pumped hydro storage has a 70-85% round trip efficiency. Energy payback for wind and hydro is a couple years. HVDC has only a couple percent losses over long distances So what are you talking about?
Really, what's up with this article in general? What, to say "wind turbines have to be feathered during storms"? That's why they make them so that they can be feathered. That's the whole point. Are they trying to point out the "little known fact" (note the sarcasm quotes) that the amount the wind blows in a given area varies? Why not point out *actual* little known facts, such as that HVDC can haul huge amounts of power on proportionally small amounts of conductors over huge distances with losses of about 3% per 1000 miles? Or that by spreading wind out geographically, a sizeable chunk of it can be counted on to be as reliable as our current standards for baseload reliability? Or perhaps they could bust that bird-kill myth that just won't die? Or perhaps that stupid "wind turbines just mean more spinning standby, so they don't actually produce any power" myth?
Nah, it's an article all about, "OMG! You have to feather blades in a storm, and the wind doesn't blow all the time in a given place!