Gas Wants To Kill the Wind 479
RABarnes writes "Scientific American has posted an article about the political efforts of natural gas and electric utilities to limit the growth of wind-generated electricity. Although several of the points raised by the utilities and carbon-based generators are valid, the basic driver behind their efforts is that wind-generation has now successfully penetrated the wholesale electricity market. Wind was okay until it became a meaningful competitor to the carbon dioxide-producing entities. Among the valid points raised by the carbon-based generators are concerns about how the cost of electricity transmission are allocated and how power quality can be improved (wind generation — from individual sites — is hopelessly variable). But there are fixes for all of the concerns raised by the carbon-based entities and in almost all cases they have been on the other side of the question in the past."
LED Light Bulbs (Score:4, Interesting)
Just wait until LED light bulbs start hitting the fan. Watch the coal lobbiests and their pet politicians scramble then. I was recently allowed to try some 100W LED floodlights that were indistinguishable from the incandescent version, except no heat and a lot less power.
Re:if these jerkwads had any sense (Score:5, Interesting)
This isn't a question of IF, it merely a matter of when and how, and IF the gas companies had half an ounce of sense in their heads, they'd be "Springfield Energy" not just "Springfield Gas".
RS
Re:LED Light Bulbs (Score:4, Interesting)
Last I checked, LEDs were roughly as power-efficient as fluorescent. The shift from incandescent bulbs to fluorescent and now LED bulbs is more than offset by the increase in draw from computers and other electronics.
I haven't been impressed with the current batch of LED light bulbs. They're pitching an MBTF of 15,000 and 25,000 hours when LEDs have classically exhibited lifetimes closer to 60,000 hours. That means they're doing something wrong.
Which socialist EU utopia gets 50% from wind? (Score:1, Interesting)
Quit blaming evil US capitalism for the failure of a pie in the sky hippy idea which simply does not work, has not worked, and is unlikely to work in the near future.
Re:Yet another conspiracy theory by idiots (Score:3, Interesting)
Wind turbines, even under favorable circumstances, don't produce even enough power to manufacture wind turbines. [citation needed]
Join forces! (Score:3, Interesting)
The answer is easy: the gas and wind groups should join forces. When they have enough wind, switch the gas systems to standby. When there is not enough wind, then crank up the gas systems. In addition, they should look into energy storage such as flywheel and/or compressed air. These will help fill in the gap between when the wind dies down and the gas turbines spin up.
Heck, wanna really have fun? Have surplus wind energy electrolize water into hydrogen and and oxygen, and store the hydrogen to feed the gas turbines. Or, use plasma incinerators to convert garbage into syngas and burn that instead of natural gas. If you did that you would not even need the natural gas people. Heck you could sell the excess back to the natural gas people!
Re:Reminds me of broadband internet in the beginni (Score:2, Interesting)
From the Wall Street Journal (Score:4, Interesting)
The WSJ ran an article about this within the last week or two. The only gripe that traditional power companies had that seemed valid in my opinion is that wind producers get an exemption if they don't meet their production quotas. In a nutshell, this is how it works in Texas (and presumably other states): At the beginning of the day the department responsible for buying power for the state purchases power from utilities. The utilities bid based on how much power they are going to provide, and what the cost will be. Wind power comes in cheaper than gas or goal and gets purchased first. Gas and coal get penalized for not producing as much power as they promise to produce. So if they say they will deliver XXX megawatts, but due to facilities problems or whatever only deliver xxx-y megawatts, they have to pay a fine. If wind fails to deliver their promised megawatts, they are exempted from the fine.
On one hand wind is variable and not easy to predict (although wind based power companies claim that their models are become more accurate and reliable). On the other, wind is easy to come in inexpensively in part because there are incentives in place to make it cost competitive and they also don't have to pay fines for failing to deliver.
I'm of the opinion that the system is fine. Everyone agrees that wind can't provide baseline power. I think the government should reach some sort of compromise between the two. Wind can continue to be cheap and by all means we should be using it when it's available. When it isn't, wind based utilities should have to offset the cost of falling back to gas or coal. It takes hours to bring a plant online and doing so incurs operating costs. If the plant sits idle because the wind stays constant then that's great. The plant operator still needs to be compensated for spooling up the turbines, even if they aren't selling the output. The trick is pricing things in such a way that there is still an incentive to use wind when it's available. Maybe they can trend it, and say over the last five years, wind under-delivered by xx%. Therefore wind needs to adjust their rates upward by xx-y% to offset the irregularity. Y would be an agreed upon value to acknowledge the fact that man can't control the weather, but that when conditions are good, it is in everyone's best interests to tap the wind as a resource.
Re:Reminds me of broadband internet in the beginni (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing is Wind is Flaky, Personally I like to have power all the time, even when there is no wind.
There are two solutions to this problems:
1. Giant Batteries/ Flywheels/ Water storage hills
2. Gas Supplement.
The Reason you use gas is it's easier to turn on and off the Coal/Nuclear.
IMHO Nuclear>Gas+wind>coal
Granted this is a simplistic approach, But Gas is coming either way. There is going to be a ton of it on the market soon.
Standard Disclaimer: the company i work for would benefit by me making these statements.
Wind not what it is blown up to be (Score:2, Interesting)
When you can make wind blow when you need electricity, then it will be able to compete. Do a little work on google and you will find the problems associated with wind blowing when you don't need electricity and not blowing when you do. Storage is in its infancy at this scale. If you want more technical terms, search for the correlation of wind generation with utility demand. You will find it is poor. Any time a large wind farm is planned, a huge engineering study must be done to find out what additional dispatchable (usually gas) generation must be installed to cover for when the wind is not blowing at the right time.
I don't practice IT, you don't practice power engineering.
Re:if these jerkwads had any sense (Score:3, Interesting)
No. That plan was killed by the people of Texas because Boone wanted to get right of way to build a power corridor, and coincidentally he would use that right of way to build a pipeline to drain an aquifer supplying local farmers to provide Austin, TX with green lawns for a few more years. It was all a farcical comic book villain style plot.
Re:Reminds me of broadband internet in the beginni (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is the high voltage transmission infrastructure that no one wants to build. FTFA:
Reaching a goal of 20 percent wind generation in 2024 would require construction of 10 inter-regional high-voltage lines spanning a total of nearly 22,700 miles, at a cost of $93 billion. Such an ambitious goal won't be achieved under a business-as-usual approach, the study concluded.
Not only will it cost an enormous amount of money, but it will have to cross State lines, meaning it will take multiple
regulators, multiple special interests, and multiples of everything else you can think of in order to become reality.
Infrastructure is one of America's top 5 problems for the 21st Century.
Not only do we require trillions in new infrastructure,
there are still trillions in repairs we've been putting off.
Craftsman (Score:4, Interesting)
They also still have the unlimited lifetime replacement guarantee.
When you strip a socket from a set, or break a wrench, or bend the end of your screwdriver, you can even today just bring in the biggest piece you've got left and they'll give you a brand new one right there.
As a service it is, to say the least, very very cool.
The only downside is that there seems to be fewer Sears stores than there used to be. Too many "real Americans" would prefer to buy the cheap knockoffs of everything for a few cents less at Wal-Mart.
Re:Seems kind of one sided (Score:3, Interesting)
Pickens has shelved his plans to build a massive wind farm in Texas due to - as an upthread post noted - a lack of electricity-transmission lines [wsj.com].
Of course, there weren't any high-voltage transmission lines near Hoover Dam when they built that, so this is sort of a spurious argument: If your plan for building a wind farm didn't include connecting it to the grid in some useful way, then your plan was incomplete.
Re:Successful???? (Score:4, Interesting)
Worse, regulations that were put in place after the Depression and were working fairly well have been removed for the past 30 years by the Republicans. Credit default swaps used to be illegal. And banking used to be separate from wall street gambling. Bring back Glass-Segal and separation and we may not have one this bad again.
Re:Reminds me of broadband internet in the beginni (Score:1, Interesting)
Not really. In the case of the US, it's more of a national security issue than economics. Having less dependency on oil and gas imports makes life a lot easier for the government. I'm pretty sure dealing with angry oil and power execs is preferable to fighting drawn out wars.
It's a fact that oil will run out eventually, so it makes sense for the government to invest money now in order to be more prepared to weather the inevitable crisis. It will create jobs, infrastructure, possibly even lower consumer prices and reduce external dependencies. Just like building the highway system made doing business easier, so building a power system will do the same. Perhaps they could do it through PPP and split the risk/cost with business.
Leaving it solely up to business, will mean that nothing will happen until the economics are right (read : until prices are so high that they can make a shedload of money). By that time, it'll be too late.
Re:Bullshit (Score:3, Interesting)
Look at Haiti and Chili. The recent earthquake in Chili resulted in 1,000 dead. A terrible tragedy to be sure, but in Haiti, an earthquake 500 time smaller killed a quarter of a million people. The key difference is regulation. In Chili, there are strict regulations on building. In Haiti virtually none at all. The only people who cry out loudest to have regulations removed are the ones who want to benefit most by their being gone. The ones who most need to be regulated. It is naive to think that people are driven purely by positive motives, and our fore-fathers wisely placed as many barriers to tyrannies as they possibly could in our government. The tyrants have been quietly removing those barriers, and it is time we slapped them hard, and put those barriers and more back where they belong.