From Salon.com (http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/05/17/wind_power/index.html):

A stunning new report just issued by the Bush administration finds that for under 2 cents a day per household, Americans could get 300 gigawatts of wind by 2030. That would:

# Reduce carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation by 25 percent in 2030.
# Reduce natural gas use by 11 percent.
# Reduce cumulative water consumption associated with electricity generation by 4 trillion gallons by 2030.
# Support roughly 500,000 jobs in the U.S.

Malse (or anyone), how significant is 300 gigawatts? I don't really have a good feel for the absolute scale of our consumption.

Divide it by 1.21 and find out how many times you could time travel!

Divide it by 1.21 and find out how many times you could time travel!

/spittake

Well, I'm pretty skeptical of scientific claims off Salon for one, but 300 gW, by itself, is not a particularly meaningful number because of the high variability of wind power. Aside from taking up really large amounts of land and being extremely inefficient on a per turbine basis because of said variability and the losses aggregating many small generators into a source:

300 gW is "a lot" of power, however I can only assume they actually mean 300 gW/hours annually excluding reactive power loss, which is not how generators are usually rated -- a normal generator might by rated at say, 900 kW, but that's prompt/instant available power to contribute to a grid. Real power contribution depends on load and tranmission/switching loss which is fairly complex engineering math requiring a fairly hefty number of variables.

There are single plant installations on major rivers that probably do near 300 gW/hour annually. I'd have to actually sit down with confidential information and a calculator to tell you, but I'm reasonably sure the instant-available capacity of any of the four grids are in the teraWatt range.

Wind turbines are great for known high-wind areas on local distribution, like small coastal towns, but aren't likely to make a huge dent in the electric grid any time soon.

As a comparable example, there are a lot of landfills that are trying to convert their wasted methane production by biodegradation into power. Sticking a generator on top to suck up and burn off that methane has been their smallest problem -- they're usually in the middle of nowhere or near large scale distribution lines. You can't plug a modest, but nice 100 kV generator into the nearby 425 kV distribution lines (of which there are 3-12 in 3 or 6 phase arrangement), or god forbid you're near hvDC (hello 20 megavolt single lines). Wind power has the same basic problem, combined with variability.

Salon was just reporting on a DoE study (http://www1.eere.energy.gov/windandhydro/pdfs/41869.pdf), not making it up themselves.

Offshore windmill farms?!!

http://www.mlive.com/news/chronicle/index.ssf?/base/news-14/1209134706316120.xml&coll=8

We have a small windmill farm going in around were I live. People are getting $4,000 a year if they put one on there property per mill.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l22JYtoGmFE

As pretty much as far as the eye can see they are on the horizon.

Solar is also the way to go imo (in addition to wind), at least as far as power for houses.

With time panels should cost less, maintenance is minimal for solar grids, and soon film-like panels will be integrated into everyday objects aside from the roof.

Homes could still be hooked up to a conventional power source if needed, and according to the power company's policy even sell back unused, generated electricity.

Sure, many alternative power sources currently cost more than standard means, but I'm willing to bet that will change in the future.

Wind, solar, use'em all!

There is a company making a electric car called a Tesla. They are going to start selling solar pannels with the cars that actually produce more power than the car can use (based on 100mile per day avg).

Solar Penals HAVE to be cheaper than they used to be.

Off course the Tesla sports car costs 100k and the sedan they have in development will be around 60-70k

I read the DoE survey in some depth, if the new "superhighway" transmission infrastructure changes they recommend goes in I could see it being a big deal (page 75-101 details the problems and what they want to do), however given nobody has paid for infrastructure in 30 years and our economy is only getting worse, I'd be hedging my bets much more on the side of local wind/solar grids for outlying high-return areas that can peer with the main grid at hundred kV substations and offload substantial mWattage from the main lines during the summer.

There is also what I see as a fairly serious environmental sciences problem that really hasn't been studied in depth, and that is all that wind represent atmospheric temperature gradients moving around that local climates are expected to have. Every wind farm is effectively taking energy out of those and if you're putting in umpteen thousand of them, how much as you affecting surface wind movement and what does that do? I'm hoping we look into that a bit before the cool, wet winds of some lake being cut in half at the shoreline turns in an inland prairie into a borderline desert. Section 5 briefly touches on this but is mostly concerned with how many birds these kill and whether or not people like how they look.


Now, for places like Caribbean islands or coastal towns, a wind/solar grid would be great, because you just don't have the major urban areas with prompt multi-hundred megawatt loads year round and the infrastructure necessary to power that.


Solar Penals HAVE to be cheaper than they used to be.


Solar panels are a lot better and less expensive than they used to be. However, the reason you will start seeing more and more solar adoption is that they finally changed the laws about electric grid regulation to allow places like your house to be generators (if your house is generating more energy than it is using, net power flow across the line from the street transformer to your house REVERSES, meaning you are now contributing prompt power and not load to the grid). This was a fairly hairy legal issue related to power trading and safety that is getting worked out, and there is new metering technology in the works that will extend the current utility SCADA infrastructure all the way out to individual meters for more precise control of power flow. You can expect to see a lot more in that direction in the next decade.

I was actually there shooting this press conference for the Dept of Energy last week, highlights should be on their website. They claim 40 percent of US's energy demands will be wind powered by 2030 at an increased cost of half a cent per kilowatt hour to US consumers. Take in the cost of gas prices skyrocketing its actually some serious savings.

At the presser they discussed large wind farms like in Arizona, but even small turbines mounted on city building rooftops to power city blocks.

There is going to be a government partnership with companies like GE to research, develop, and manufacture these new turbines.

At the press conference they were unable to address environmental impact on birds and any other airborn wildlife though, and I've heard horror stories about these things hacking migrating flocks to pieces. Another reporter asked about distribution issues since wind isn't necessarily steady and apparently this is one area wind power is flawed.

Windmills and birds are a concern.


Key wind resources

At the Horicon refuge, the hills that climb east are a mix of native grasses and farmland. And as they rise, they offer some of the best sustained winds in the state and postcard views of a major U.S. wetland. The terrain is known as the Niagara Escarpment, which was formed by erosion millions of years ago and runs from eastern Wisconsin to Niagara Falls, N.Y.
The wind farm would be built in strategically positioned rows across 32,000 acres of the escarpment in Dodge and Fond du Lac counties.
"There are few areas in Wisconsin where there are adequate air resources," said Neil Palmer, a spokesman for the Forward Wind Energy Center. "You've got to stay on the escarpment. We aren't just arbitrarily putting turbines there."
But opponents worry about the effect that so many windmills would have on the huge number of birds and bats that visit the marsh and surrounding countryside each year.
More than 1 million Canada geese alone fly into the marsh annually - 200,000 or more geese during peak periods in the fall.
During the summer, many of the geese live above the tree line on Hudson Bay in Canada. Then, as they have for thousands of years, they use the Horicon in the fall as a landing strip and food depot before heading as far south as Tennessee or Arkansas.
Sometimes they stay for days, other times for weeks, blackening parts of the sky with their comings and goings, drawing birdwatchers and hunters alike. It's during their hiatus at the 14-mile long marsh that opponents fear the turbines will kill birds, especially at night or during periods of fog.
"I can see 10,000 birds flying through a meat grinder," said Joe Breaden, a Mayville High School ecology teacher and president of Horicon Marsh System Advocates, a group opposed to the project.
Breaden said his group supports wind power. "We're against the placement of them," he said. "You don't put them next to something like the Horicon Marsh."
One local supporter of the wind farms is Myron Ehrhardt, who has signed an agreement that will place a turbine 300 yards from his home.
Ehrhardt, 70, considers himself an environmentalist. In 1982, he and his wife moved out of the family's Victorian farmhouse and built an earth-covered home next door.
The clean power from wind is a big attraction - and so is the $4,200 annual payment for each turbine on a landowner's property, he said.
But he thinks a threat to birds is unlikely. "My gut feeling is that I have lived all of my life in nature, and sometimes we don't give animals enough credit," he said. "They can navigate pretty damn good."
The decision on whether to build the wind farm will be made by the state Public Service Commission in Madison in July.
Both local opponents and the Fish and Wildlife Service said they want more study on the effects of wind turbines before they go up.
A big concern: low-flying birds that biologists think could fly directly into the path of the 28 turbines closest to the refuge.
"The service is concerned that these birds in particular, including large numbers of geese and cranes, are in danger of collisions with turbines in the proposed westernmost rows," said Charles M. Wooley, acting regional director with the agency, in a Feb. 8 letter to the PSC.
Agency biologists raised questions about a study from the wind farm's consultant, which it says played down the potential of blades killing birds - something that developers reject.
Wooley said his agency was troubled that much of the consultant's work was not done during peak periods of waterfowl migration and did not adequately account for other species.
But Palmer said consultant Paul Kerlinger, of Cape May Point, N.J., studied geese, ducks, songbirds and raptors long enough during the migration cycle - 12 days last spring and 33 days last fall - to conclude there would be little harm.
In addition to birds, the Fish and Wildlife Service is worried about potential harm to bats.
The proposed wind farm would be 10 miles from the shuttered Neda mine - the largest hibernaculum in Wisconsin and one of the largest homes to hibernating bats in the Midwest.
Another proposed wind farm, Butler Ridge, which would sell 54 megawatts to We Energies of Milwaukee, is two miles from the former iron ore mine.
The Fish and Wildlife Service said it is concerned that bats are more susceptible to turbines than most birds. In its letter to the PSC, officials worried that the two wind farms could kill thousands of bats annually.
"It's an 'all-your-eggs-in-one-basket situation,' " said David Redell, a bat ecologist at the state Department of Natural Resources, adding that disturbances such as vandalism, a flood in the mine or mortality from turbines could affect ecosystems far away.
Redell has spent considerable time around the Neda mine. Between 2000 and 2002, he used infrared light beams, a video camera and mathematical models to calculate the population. He estimates that about 140,000 bats are hibernating there.
In the spring, he found that bats leave the mine in dribs and drabs, and they immediately fly as far as hundreds of miles away. In the fall, the returning bats fly in and out of the mine - passing through the proposed wind farms - and feed on insects at night before eventually hunkering down for the winter. Biologists are closely watching the Mountaineer Wind Energy Center, a ridge-top wind farm in West Virginia, where 2,092 bats were killed in 2003 and thousands more in 2004.
"With proper siting, bats and turbines can co-exist," Redell said. "We're still on the fast track of learning here. This is really a recent issue. And it's gotten real big, real fast, and both sides are trying to figure this out."
Criticism of the wind farm is overblown, said spokesman Palmer. Less is known about the effect of wind turbines on bats, but studies to date show that mortality in most cases is not significant, he said.
What's lost in the debate, he said, is that renewable energy means less pollution, which would otherwise harm humans, fish and game. Mercury from power plants falls on water and converts to its more toxic form.
Palmer emphasized that in the worst scenarios, the number of waterfowl killed would pale in comparison with the number of geese that hunters shoot in the marsh annually. DNR figures show that hunters killed an estimated 19,500 Canada geese in Dodge and Fond du Lac counties in 2003.
According to Forward's consultant, Horicon geese will fly above the sweep of the rotors and sandhill cranes will fly below them.
"There's no significant biological impact" from the project, Palmer said. "That's really our bottom line. If it's beneficial to have renewable energy, yes, there might be some impact. But on balance, is it worth it? We contend that it is."

I've been trying to think of a good analogy for the variability problem and this is as close as I can get since most people have at least a passing understanding of plumbing:

Electric power moves analogously to water. It moves from high pressure (highly negative) to lower pressure (less negative/positive). The way cities have dealt with variable water intake and usage is to have reservoirs and local water towers. This means the whole water system has a reserves, and every local distribution system will keep pressure for a while and get water to all the houses and schools, etc, in it for some planned number of gallons/hours even if there is a major failure in the larger distribution pipes.

If not for that, you would wind up in cases of backpressure in the lines where you had more water downstream than upstream, resulting in all kinds of big problems for the people who want water and the people who are trying to get it to them.


You could build really huge capacitors and batteries to do that for wind power, but unlike water, electricity doesn't "stay" someplace very well. That is a big problem for wind power, you can't plan around a power source if you don't know what it will be on a reliable basis, and have to put very expensive and inefficient infrastructure in place to safely isolate it from a "high pressure" grid. Incidentally, the blackouts you see are a result of that exact same situation -- the one in Florida for instances resulted in a technician making a very bad decision and removing safety breakers and then accidentally crossing lines those breakers were protecting, resulting in power flowing the wrong way and a few dozen generator's protection system sensing that and disconnecting the generation equipment from the grid.

http://205.243.100.155/frames/longarc.htm

Some good images and movies about what happens when high voltage electricity doesn't go where it's supposed to.


As impressive as this huge arc may be, the air break switch was really NOT disconnecting a real load. This arc was "only" carrying the relatively low (about 100 amps) magnetizing current associated with the line reactor. The 94 mile long transmission line associated with the above circuit normally carries over 1,000 megawatts (MW) of power between Boulder City, Nevada (from the generators at Hoover Dam) to the Lugo substation near Los Angeles, California. A break under load conditions (~2,000 amps) would have created a MUCH hotter and extremely destructive arc. Imagine a fat, blindingly blue-white, 100 foot long welding arc that vaporizes the contacts on the air break switch and then works its way back along the feeders, melting and vaporizing them along the way. Still, you've got to admit that this "little" 33 MVAR arc is certainly an awesome sight!

That's a single gW+ line running from Hoover Dam. Just one of the lines running from Hoover Dam. If you want to try to put 300 gW nationally into perspective.

http://www.howtorunyourcaronwater.com/?bid_keyword=runmycaronwater&campaign=1rg&ad=3r

Wasn't that product busted pretty hardcore by MythBusters?

And our car usage is nominal compared to building energy usage ... which wind power would address if they can figure it out. I still say its nothing compared to solar.

There's no reason why wind power (and solar, and geothermal, and other renewable energy sources) can't contribute to our energy needs, in locations where each source makes sense. Nuclear power could fill in the gaps whether due to location, time of day, system outage, etc.

There's no reason why wind power (and solar, and geothermal, and other renewable energy sources) can't contribute to our energy needs, in locations where each source makes sense. Nuclear power could fill in the gaps whether due to location, time of day, system outage, etc.

I think you've got the basis and what's filling in the gaps backwards. Power engineers define types of generation as base load, load following, and intermittent.

Base load is what always has to be there. Wind and solar and even tidal simply do not qualify because there is no realistic way to "store" the energy you get from them for when it's not there. They're not even second best case, load following, which is a generation source you can ramp up or down with minimal effort to fit needs -- hydroelectric is often used for this.

One nifty idea is to use solar/wind energy to fill "gravity batteries" -- for example, you have a hydroelectric dam in between two lakes. As solar/wind energy is available, you pump the water from the lower back up into the power reservoir lake. It's fairly inefficient, but still better than not having any power in poor weather. There also some people trying to figure out a way to get a solar grid to power a Tokamak-style fusion generator, again largely inefficient but possibly desirable because the solar energy is effectively free after initial capital investment.

Yes, they will be a larger contribution to energy over time, and that's a good idea, but to presume they will ever meet the needs of first-world level energy use is completely unrealistic. Now, if you want to be in a rolling-brownout scenario half the year, that's a different case, and we may very well end up that way eventually. The petroleum free ride is going to end, and will only further strain energy resources.

I guess the main question I have is, to what extent can nuclear reactors scale their energy output? Isn't it simply a matter of inserting and removing control rods?

Maybe it's not possible or practical to make rapid adjustments in response to the varying energy levels (from other sources) and energy needs. I don't know; I'm not an engineer.

I'm not sure I understand the question. Nuclear reactors typically operate at whatever their most efficient thermal output is relative to load. They have the advantage that, once started up (this can take days) you can vary their thermal output (and thus end electrical output) much more granularly than a coal boiler down to whatever their minimum criticality level is (which varies widely by reactor), but there is no particular advantage to running them at below peak thermal efficiency other than saving fuel for later. Most reactors in actual use are base-load for their grids where-ever possible, because they are largely "power up and forget" as opposed to coal plants that require much more intensive maintenance and constant refueling, and even hydro because it is seasonal and there are immediate environmental impact concerns related to flood-control.

Nuclear reactors are preferable to coal boilers in every way, from a power engineering perspective, and an environmental one too, really. My greatest hope for our future energy infrastructure is a reinstatement of fast breeder reactors at generation sites -- you can run on a shockingly tiny amount of uranium for literally centuries with most designs if you allow for re-breeding, and end up with a tiny amount of waste (granted, said waste is very bad, but significantly less overall radioactive simply due to amounts of waste mass relative to how bad it is).

If the question is, how much can you vary the output of a nuclear reactor, the answer is "about 80% of its capacity range in the general case for modern reactors" and how rapidly you can do it safely is "measurable in hours," but how often is it done is "not very" and how desirable it is to do so is "not very."

Interesting. Ok, that explains why energy storage would be necessary when using wind power as a supplement to nuclear power. I wasn't thinking about how a nuclear reactor's efficiency might vary with its energy output, and how it might take hours to increase power output (even though it can be decreased quickly, I think).

And yeah, I agree that fast breeder reactors are the way to go for the bulk of our energy requirements.

While i'm a huge advocate for green power in all of it's forms. nothing is really gonna work well untill we learn to reduce our Base Load requirements. large urban buildings are tremendous energy suckers since the HVAC systems never truly power down even when the buildings ar all but empty.
Here something i'm curious about and maybe you can get the data Malse. how much energy would be saved if you could turn off every street light in the city of portland for just one night?

If you didn't know about it in advance you wouldn't save anything (this is why the "don't turn on your X Y Z" days are really silly, the base and peak expected generation has to be online anyway and will be based on short and long-term load forecasting models -- making these models better is actually one of the big deals in the "back end" of utility efficiency these days).

If you knew in advance, since lights are a purely resistive load, you could multiply the number of lights times their wattage times the 9 or so hours they're in operation times about 1.3 to account for transmission loss. I don't know what sort of lights they use for streets these days, I would assume it's some sort of halogen, but if you want to do some basic estimates for any given area those would be good starting numbers. Just find out the average wattage of the lights, and you could curtail that much fuel-based generation. Out-of-my-ass-numbers I would say street lighting is probably lbetween 1-5% of the base load for any given area. A 160 watt lamp would consume 1440 watts per night, if you had a thousand lights (no idea what actual numbers are for Portland, that's probably way low) plus transmission loss {1} you're probably looking at about 2 megawatt/hours per night.

I can't get the data you wanted primarily because my control system doesn't deal with the majority of metro Portland, I can probably dig up something on Salt Lake, but you can usually expect in the neighborhood of 1.5 gW of prompt capacity required per million people with actual utilization being in the 60-80% range. Just FYI, since we have multi-state grids, power is not necessarily lost if your local capacity is unused -- both Oregon and Texas send huge amounts of power to California.

I know one thing civil engineering has been looking into is getting all sorts of relatively low, known power installations like lights, freeway cameras, emergency call boxes, etc, on local solar cells with batteries and switching gear to hit the main lines if they run out. Predictable, small loads like that are prime candidates for shaving a little bit off the top.

{1} -- Transmission loss is a fairly big deal. Both distance and number of transformations are a factor, but you end up using 1.2-1.4 times your actual power in generation load due to loss on long-haul lines and transformers. Some older transformer designs are amazingly (less than 80%) inefficient, and you can have several of those in series at various step-downs. This is primarily a materials science problem since transformers are about the simplest machines ever. One thing that's big in China right now is amorphous conductive metals, which can be used to to make transformers theoretically approaching 98% or better efficiency. Depending on how old your grid infrastructure is, the various transformers between you and the local generator may account for as much as 50% of the overall loss. That's a really fascinating line of research that unfortunately would probably glass your eyes over (you get points if you get this "joke").

Don't get me started waxing geek over the virtues of high-voltage DC.

Anyway, regarding base load, yes, reducing base load goes a long way, but people hugely underestimate what it is. Base load isn't just used (and wasted) public buildings HVAC and lighting; it's running light rail systems, powering manufacturing and agriculture, charging cell phones and running computers, all this stuff factors in. Like I mentioned above, I think people used to first-world energy usage would be extremely unhappy about seriously curtailing it.


(Here's a sort of funny public experiment they did in Toronto earlier this year on a similar issue, http://www.thestar.com/SpecialSections/EarthHour/article/407284 , I giggled a bit about the SUPER TOP SECRET GRID CONTROL ROOM :> )

Works for these guys:

http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?rn=3906861&cl=7888908&ch=4226722&src=news

Yeah, that's where you're going to see the big win on wind/solar energy. They only tap the grid on days it's not windy, which is not much of the year. That sort of installation wasn't possible until the legislative changes approximately two years ago and I expect to see a lot more of it.

I read the DoE survey in some depth, if the new "superhighway" transmission infrastructure changes they recommend goes in I could see it being a big deal (page 75-101 details the problems and what they want to do), however given nobody has paid for infrastructure in 30 years and our economy is only getting worse, I'd be hedging my bets much more on the side of local wind/solar grids for outlying high-return areas that can peer with the main grid at hundred kV substations and offload substantial mWattage from the main lines during the summer.

There is also what I see as a fairly serious environmental sciences problem that really hasn't been studied in depth, and that is all that wind represent atmospheric temperature gradients moving around that local climates are expected to have. Every wind farm is effectively taking energy out of those and if you're putting in umpteen thousand of them, how much as you affecting surface wind movement and what does that do? I'm hoping we look into that a bit before the cool, wet winds of some lake being cut in half at the shoreline turns in an inland prairie into a borderline desert. Section 5 briefly touches on this but is mostly concerned with how many birds these kill and whether or not people like how they look.


Now, for places like Caribbean islands or coastal towns, a wind/solar grid would be great, because you just don't have the major urban areas with prompt multi-hundred megawatt loads year round and the infrastructure necessary to power that.



Solar panels are a lot better and less expensive than they used to be. However, the reason you will start seeing more and more solar adoption is that they finally changed the laws about electric grid regulation to allow places like your house to be generators (if your house is generating more energy than it is using, net power flow across the line from the street transformer to your house REVERSES, meaning you are now contributing prompt power and not load to the grid). This was a fairly hairy legal issue related to power trading and safety that is getting worked out, and there is new metering technology in the works that will extend the current utility SCADA infrastructure all the way out to individual meters for more precise control of power flow. You can expect to see a lot more in that direction in the next decade.

I don't know why but I hadn't made this connection before Malse. I'm as aware as anyone that you can't destroy energy but instead convert it to something else. Why I didn't work out that by drawing on wind you are in effect reducing it's effect elsewhere I haven't a clue.

Thanks for the input, guess I won't win the lottery and build my own windfarm up in the remote areas of the Utah Rockies now!! ;P Really did want to live off the grid blast it!

Solar Energy has to be the key. Its always sunny somewhere, especially if you go a few thousand miles upwards. The sun is a reactor that has powered our wind, generated our fuel, and warmed our planet for billions of years and will keep doing it for some time yet - we just need to figure out how to harness it straight from the source. Plants seem to do it great, and that video of the biodiesel made from algae (which is one of the fastest growing plants) seems one of the best ways yet.

Carlos Mencia made a good point in his comedy special: meat eaters help reduce the amount of methane being released into the atmosphere from the cows and pigs thereby slowing global warming, while vegetarians are contributing to the global crisis by eating the plants that help clean the air. Something to think about. :p

I love it Byl, I'll have to use that in a discussion someday.

Thank's much Malse a bit lower than i thought maybe but still 5% is nothin to sneeze at. still think that that as much as we need alternative generation. finding away tolower the overall base draw society needs should be as much a priority as anything. starting with outlawing baseboard electric heating.

That's a really fascinating line of research that unfortunately would probably glass your eyes over (you get points if you get this "joke").

Can I just play with my Johnny balls instead?