The rap on wind energy has been you can't depend on it. Maybe not.
How many times have you heard this: Renewable energy is the wave of the future. And how many times have you heard someone retort with something like: Renewables are great but they'll never replace good ole fossil fuels. The sun doesn't always shine, the wind doesn't always blow, and highest wind speeds tend to be strongest at night.
This intermittency problem has so far proved a big stumbling block for upgrading our energy system. Who wants to forgo their favorite TV show or do without air conditioning when the wind goes south, so to speak? Few if any, and so, the argument goes, only something like a fossil fuel plant can provide the dependable, continuous electricity we demand -- wind energy is just too intermittent to provide the baseload of electricity that underpins our energy system.
The bottom line to date: build all the wind turbines you want, but forget about doing without traditional fossil fuel plants.
 A new science paper offers up some solutions to wind's intermittency problem. (NREL) |
The intermittent nature of renewable power seems like a powerful argument against over-reliance on it.
But wait a second. Any meteorologist will tell you that while it's true winds wax and wane, when they stall in one location, they're certainly blowing somewhere. So why can't we just create a grid that connects wind turbines over a large geographical region and draw energy from them all? When winds are weak in one part of the region, wouldn't there be sufficient winds in another so that on balance the combined system would provide a fairly stable, constant source of electricity?
That's the question Willett Kempton of the University of Delaware and co-authors addressed in a paper published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. The authors considered a hypothetical interconnected system of offshore wind turbines extending along the U.S. East Coast from Maine to Florida. Using five years of wind data, they then estimated the amount and variability of electricity that the system could generate.
Their analysis shows that such an interconnected regional system can indeed provide a relatively stable electricity source, mimicking the kind of baseload that one typically gets from a networked fossil-fuel plants.
It's a simple idea. If you connect wind farms situated far enough from each other that they experience different large-scale weather patterns, you increase that likelihood that when one area has poor wind, a distant wind farm will have better wind. This is just what Kempton et al found: more specifically, while the outputs of two distant stations could change by more than 50 percent in an hour, the combined capacity along the Eastern seaboard changed by only by 10 percent. Such performance mimics fossil-fuel baseload power in two important ways:
As to the intermittency problem, the authors found that over the course of the study's five years, while wind output was not continuous at every station, wind output never dropped to zero over the entire system. This is an interesting observation, especially considering that individual fossil-fuel plants do not run continuously either -- what makes them reliable is that they are connected via a grid so that when one plant goes down, power can be produced elsewhere.
Orientation could also maximize power output. Kempton et al found that weather patterns along the East Coast tend to move in an east-west direction, so having wind farms spread out along such a vector would enable them to capture more wind over more days than if they were aligned solely in a north-south pattern.
An interesting implication of the Kempton et al work is that while the current strategy for siting wind turbines is to look for the windiest sites in a given location regardless of its wind diversity, the authors point out that it might be more effective "to optimize grid power output by coordinated meteorological and load analysis of an entire region."
So the solution to a perplexing and complicated problem -- supplying continuous energy from a variable source -- could have a fairly simple solution: make connections, create a network, share the resource. Sound familiar?
Crossposted with www.theGreenGrok.
Follow Bill Chameides on Twitter: www.twitter.com/theGreenGrok
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We support the efforts of developing countries to alleviate their energy poverty, but dirty coal power is not the pathway to a sustainable economy. The World Bank must do much more to help.
This is typical of the claptrap that is produced when civil engineers and weathermen claiming peer reviewed status producing a study with major electrical engineering content without any electrical engineers involved.
It has been documented that tens of thousands of hackers are already in our grid, lying in wait. All it would take is one or two of them to cripple a centralized system. Conventional terrorist have an easy target with all those lines and plants, whereas it would be essentially impossible to shut down a localized grid system with generation dispersed throughout. Ice, wind, fire, earthquakes, floods - all of these will destroy a centralized system but will only knock out very small sections of a localized point of use system. Manipulations of supplies and pricing (Enron, Chevron, etc.) are inevitable. Then you have the problems with eminent domain, SF6 emissions, predators and blight.
Think "internet" not "freeways" if you want a model for the future. The internet is hugely DECENTRALIZED which is the only reason it is possible. Cellphones, not landlines. PCs not Mainframes. PV on rooftops, not Industrial Wind 2500 miles away.
We all want to do the right thing - let's insure that democracy, not Big Energy Monopoly prevails in the Renewable Revolution.
The benefits you describe for the internet are much more analogous to our interconnected grid anyway, than they are to an every man/community for themself mantra.
Thorium reactors were proven in hundreds of tests at Oak Ridge from the ’50s through the early ’70s. But thorium hit a dead end. Locked in a struggle with a nuclear- armed Soviet Union, the US government in the ’60s chose to build uranium-fueled reactors; in part because they produce plutonium that can be refined into weapons-grade material and Thorium does not. The course of the nuclear industry was set for the next four decades, and Thorium power became one of the great what-if technologies of the 20th century.
After Thorium has been used as fuel for power plants, the element leaves behind minuscule amounts of waste. And that waste needs to be stored for only a few hundred years, not a few hundred thousand like other nuclear byproducts. Because it’s so plentiful in nature, it’s virtually inexhaustible.
Renowned climatologist James Hansen specifically cited Thorium as a potential fuel source in an “Open Letter to Obama” after the election to prevent climate change.
India, China, Russia and France are moving fast on Thorium reactors (liquid fluoride thorium reactor, or LFTR). The USA should be leading both because we invented it here and because we don’t want to be importing our future power plants. We need to keep the lead, and the jobs, here.
Read more:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/all/1
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/19758
"India, China, Russia and France are moving fast on Thorium reactors" really?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle#List_of_thorium-fueled_reactors
India is particularly interested in Thorium because they have 25% of the worlds reserves of Thorium, and Australia another 25%.
In the MIT and Wired articles, Thorium Power is US company but all research is done in Russia, they will share technology. The Wired article discusses France in research stage, but France wants to be a Nuclear Tech exporter and burn up waste.
As your link points out, we invented it in the 1960's, we should get the jobs and money from exporting it.
"Thorium reactors were proven in hundreds of tests at Oak Ridge from the ’50s through the early ’70s. But thorium hit a dead end. Locked in a struggle with a nuclear- armed Soviet Union, the US government in the ’60s chose to build uranium-fueled reactors; in part because they produce plutonium that can be refined into weapons-grade material and Thorium does not. The course of the nuclear industry was set for the next four decades, and Thorium power became one of the great what-if technologies of the 20th century."
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/all/1
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/19758
https://lasers.llnl.gov/about/missions/energy_for_the_future/life/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m09vkAIJBXQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgXcHzi2t4s&eurl=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKkTUY2slYQ&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4N4HQv-UyUo&feature=related
with a Comprehensive Plan to build a Train system to do just what you are saying, and using those new Mag Train tracks to connect all states with a smarter Electrical grid
No, it hasn't. It's been a huge rhetorical point against renewable energy, but not a problem at all for actual implementation so far.
Sunshine is most plentiful when demand is highest. Electricity generation from natural gas is varying to meet demand, all the time, by far more than the amount of wind power we're using now. Lots of options exist for energy storage, from heat storage at solar thermal power plants, to pumping compressed air into underground chambers, to charging and discharging electric-car batteries with a smart grid -- to making and burning hydrogen as they thought in the 1980s that we would wind up doing. (All of them add to the cost somewhat, but they're clearly feasible.) And we've known for decades that much of the variability in wind is canceled out by combining energy from wind farms in different locations. It's good news that this will help a little more than we thought, but it's not big news.
well, it did not work for England and Denmark. They thought that the distances between Denmark's windfarms and England's windfarms (eastern and western coasts) is large enough that decreased input in one area is compensated by increased output elsewhere; they were incorrect.
So during wind surges, Denmark had to sell the excess energy (otherwise the grid will burn up) at
low prices to Sweden (having hydroelectric which is easily controlled). During periods of low wind,
Denmark had to buy energy at high prices from Sweden where nuclear contributes 40% of the country's energy needs.