Too Much, Too Little – The Problem with Wind is it is NOT Under Human Control
I love the wind. For many years, one of my very favorite hobbies was sailing on large boats. I was never rich enough to own my own boat. I always depended on the kindness of others to provide the equipment that I needed in order to indulge in my ever fascinating and challenging hobby. By way of confession, the kindness I normally depended upon was yours – if you are a US taxpayer. Most of my sailing excursions took place on specially designed, midshipman-proof, Navy 44’s.
One of the things that kept my attention and interest in this hobby for so many years was the fact that the wind is always changing. That makes it a wonderful power source when you have no real place to go other than around a race course with a simple goal of making it around the bouys faster than everyone else in the race.
Some days were great fun in which we changed the sails a half a dozen or more times and where we buried the leeward rails in the water despite having every crew member hanging hanging as far out as we could on the windward side of the boat.
On other days, we could toss Cheetos into the water and watch them drift past our stalled boat, which was bobbing aimlessly with dozens of others on a calm, glassy surface. On those days, we could be deafened by the “thwacketa, thwacketa” of empty sails banging against the mast, boom and rigging every time we were rocked by the wake of a passing stink boat.
I learned a lot during my sailing days about seamanship, navigation, weather prediction, and leadership. I also learned that I NEVER wanted to depend on the wind if I had to be someplace at a particular time or if I wanted to move a lot of cargo from one place to another. On a similar note, I learned that the wind makes a lousy power source in a system that needs to be reliable.
I just read a great article titled Ontario’s new dilemma: Too much power about some of the challenges that Ontario is having in integrating large amounts of wind into its grid. Don’t let the headline fool you – the story is really about a grid that is at risk of dangerous instability caused by having too little control over the sources of power because the wind blows on a schedule that no human can control.
For some completely unfathomable reason, turbine owners are guaranteed a price of 13.5 cents per kilowatt hour that they produce, even if there is no market for that power. As the grid operators begin to resist the notion that they need to transport whatever the turbine operators can produce, even if there is no willing buyer, the turbine operators are getting nervous.
“We need to integrate the wind generation,” says Campbell. “We want to be able to dispatch wind just as we do other generation.”
Potentially, that means having to tell a wind farm operator that we only need two-thirds of the power it is likely to produce today or tomorrow.
One of the issues Campbell is now discussing with the power industry is how to do that. If someone gets shut out, who is it to be, and what, if anything, should they get paid?
That’s a crucial question for wind farms, says Robert Hornung, president of the Canadian Wind Energy Association (CanWEA).
Hornung acknowledges that as wind power increases, the rules will change.
“There’s always been a strong desire among system operators to ensure that wind ultimately will be treated like other forms of generation.”
But he says his members have to know what the new rules are if their output is put on hold.
“Is there any compensation? If there is, what formula is that based on? Those details really matter,” he said.
My message to wind turbine owners is this. Welcome to market reality. When buyers do not need or want your product, you better figure out how to store it or stop producing it when they say “uncle.” It is simply unacceptable to expect the customers to pay you even if they REALLY do not want what you are selling.
If you liked that, you’ll love this:
Ontario still wants to buy two nuclear reactors from Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. but can’t because the federal Conservatives are standing in the way, Premier Dalton McGuinty said Wednesday.
The province’s efforts to move ahead with the purchase have been stymied by Ottawa’s decision nearly two years ago to put AECL’s nuclear reactor business up for sale, he said.
The problem is that the federal government won’t come to the table, McGuinty said. Last June, he wrote to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and asked him to allow AECL to make a deal with the province, which he said would have enhanced the Crown corporation’s value.
“We’re at a table, and we want to negotiate the sale of reactors with AECL,” he said.
“Well, there’s nobody sitting on that side of the table, because they’re elsewhere trying to make a sale of the entire asset itself to some third parties.
“As long as they do that, they’re putting our discussion in abeyance.”
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2011/01/19/mcguinty-aecl-sale-ottawa.html?ref=rss#ixzz1BdCi3SZd
There’s no free wind. This is a link to BPA. It shows load, hydro, thermal, and wind. http://transmission.bpa.gov/business/operations/Wind/baltwg.aspx
This week the wind has been pretty steady, but there’s still one calm day. I’ve seen plots where the wind was calm for several days at a time.
How is large-scale energy storage R&D coming along? I’ve heard some noise about things like arrays of hundreds (or thousands) of massive, high-speed, magnetically levitated (so there’s no friction) flywheels, in a vacuum chamber (so no air resistance) being used for very efficient and rapidly-responding energy storage for wind farms. I’ve also heard of highly-compressed gas energy storage systems. I’m not a huge proponent of wind, but I do think that, while I don’t believe wind can become >50% of our energy, because of some of the issues that Rod raised in this article, it does seem to me like large-scale storage could make wind energy dispatchable and a bit more reliable (there is still the possibility of extended becalmings that completely stop the flywheels from spinning), but some good storage facilities at the wind farms could go a long way to solving some of these problems. With sufficient storage, I could see Wind, Solar, and other ‘alternative power’ perhaps, becoming maybe 20-30% of the mix.
Personally, I’d think a future where something like 50-70% of our power comes from nuclear, with perhaps 20-30% coming from Wind/Solar/Hydro/Geothermal/Biomass, and another %10-%20 coming from coal and shale gas would probably not be a bad way to go. I’m not sure if reducing coal/gas burning down to 20% would get us to the levels of carbon reduction necessary to meet climate goals, but I would think it might – that would be a pretty large reduction from where we are today.
From what I have read, the problem with storage is that it costs about as much as simply building more generation. The other problem is that a certain amout of the energy is always lost. This is one of the big problems with compressed air storage. Compressing air unavoidably causes the temperature of the air to rise. If this heat were retained, the energy it represents could be recovered when the air is expanded again to spin a turbine. However, this requires insulated storage, which underground caverns are not. And it reduces the capacity of that storage. The heat loss is a big deal. As I understand it, the temperature rise represents more than half of the energy put into compressing the air.
NREL has a white paper on storage technologies (compressed air, pumped water, and batteries) and their cost benefits for wind. They suggest there may be a cost advantage when wind penetration rates reach 20% or higher. Namely because storage capacity helps to boost the capacity factor of wind (by some 16%). “For both the business-as-usual cases and the 20% wind cases, results indicate that the value of storage to wind increases along with amount of wind in the system. However, storage does not become sufficiently valuable to warrant the investment until there is significant wind capacity already on the grid.”
http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/pdfs/43510.pdf
Presumably, the cost benefits of additional storage also applies to other energy sources as well.
The photovoltaic solar power installation in Germany will come to an very “interesting” situation in the near future:
http://www.solardaily.com/reports/German_grid_aching_under_solar_power_999.html
The world can ofcourse run totally on renewables. You just need to apply enough storage capasity and a HUGE supergrid to transport energy over and between continents. Thats it!