Average cost for new wind capacity in 2007 was per $1,710 per KW, according to the Annual Report on Wind Power 2007 [PDF]. Some of the largest new wind farms had costs as low as $1,240 per KW, while the smallest ones tallied costs as high as $2,600 per KW.
Further, large new wind farms got more use from each KW than small ones—as much 40 percent capacity utilization for big farms on the best sites vs. a 33 percent to 35 percent average. Since capital costs and capacity utilization overwhelmingly determine wind costs, big wind is simply less expensive than small wind.
One argument against big wind farms is that they need long-distance transmission. Gentle solar cells and fan-sized wind generators on roofs don’t need those nasty old long-distance lines, it is sometimes claimed. But regardless of where you generate solar or wind electricity, generation with long-distance transmission is less expensive than generation without.
If we limit ourselves to local generation and transmission, we either need to generate only a fraction of power from renewables or put in a lot of storage. If we want to get most of our power from renewable sources and still limit how much we invest in storage and how many emissions we generate from fossil-fuel backups, the least expensive alternative is to connect to other renewables across a long distance.
Take the example of solar electricity from desert farms or roof tops. The bulk of solar energy received at a site occurs during daily peak sunlight, which lasts about five hours. For local solar to provide most of electricity demand with little use of backup requires at least 20 hours storage. To compensate for at least some cloudy days that grows to more like 48 hours storage. Further, the difference between summer and winter sun can easily be 1.5 to 1 or worse.
On the other hand, wind tends to blow hardest outside of peak solar energy hours. Strong wind seasons tend not to overlap with strong sun seasons. Unfortunately, good solar energy locations and good wind energy locations mostly don’t overlap. Hence we need long-distance transmission even when energy is generated from rooftops and parking lots. And once we have long-distance transmission in place, large-scale wind farms are a lot less expensive per kWh than small-scale rooftop wind.
Why buying cheap energy certificates worsens climate change
Comments
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Sean Casten Posted 3:55 am
12 Jan 2009
The T&D system, on average costs $1300/kW of delivered power. That alone makes up for almost any economy of scale benefit for central power.
The T&D system in the US loses 9.5% of it's power in line losses on average, and in excess of 20% on peak. As a result, delivering 1 kW of load from a central station requires 1.2 kW of installed capacity. (This also has efficiency ramifications, since those kWh lost to line losses are totally lost; the societal impact of that loss is no different than making a conscious choice to invest in inefficient motors & lightbulbs - it's pure waste.)
Research done at Carnegie Mellon (I don't have a web link, but you can find if you google Hirsham Zerriffi and chase down his PhD thesis) has shown that for simple nodal analysis reasons, a network with a few large central generators requires more total installed capacity than one with many small local generators. Our current system builds in about 20 - 25% additional central capacity for this so-called "reserve margin", and if I recall Hirsham's analysis, it suggested that a fully decentralized grid could provide the same overall reliability with just 5% reserve margin. (The logic here isn't one of size per se, but rather the number of nodes. All else equal, fewer total generators = a greater probability of a system-wide failure.) Note that this is in addition to the line loss value, and multiplicative, so 1 kW of delivered power actually requires something on the order of 1.2 x 1.25 = 1.5 kW of installed central capacity. It may not all be wind, of course, but the multiplier is necessary for any centrally-biased generation plan.
As Amory Lovins has pointed out qualitatively, and Oak Ridge National Lab has summarized quantiatively, bigger power plants tend to have longer outages than small ones, furthering point (3). This is a particular issue for thermal plants, as it simply takes a long time to start up and shut down big, thermally conductive hunks of metal. However, I would expect some mass-related drivers as well.
Without getting into the specifics of wind, at least three of those four drivers also apply to wind, so I'd not be so quick to assume that bigger is always beautifuller.
That said, there is clear benefit in a grid from a system reliability perspective and ensuring that the capacity factor on any given generator is not curtailed by local load (and vice versa). But while that argues for a network connecting all generators together, it does not argue for big, remotely sited generators.
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David Roberts Posted 4:03 am
12 Jan 2009
grist.org
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Gar Lipow Posted 4:16 am
12 Jan 2009
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Gar Lipow Posted 4:20 am
12 Jan 2009
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Sean Casten Posted 5:34 am
12 Jan 2009
So while one can certainly make the case that in certain geographies you won't need to add a full complement of T&D - an argument regulated utilities make all the time when they argue that local generation should receive no compensation, I might add - on a national average basis, you need both for the same reason that you need new generation: we've maxed out the capacity of the existing network.
Bottom line is that if you need to add transmission, you almost certainly need to add distribution as well. If not today, then tomorrow. But in all cases, generation built anywhere but at the load ultimately needs to add high and low voltage wires (and pay accompanying capital and operating costs) in order to get it to the load.
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Gar Lipow Posted 7:34 am
12 Jan 2009
I would add as to the question of large generation failing for longer times than small - I wonder if does apply to wind and sun, which even when done in large farms are still modular. I'll have to look at the study, because I'm not saying it does not apply. Just something I wonder about. I will return to this question eventually
The thing is, I'm not wedded to this. I mean if we can generate everything locally with really low carbon sources, that is great. I really don't particularly like long distance transmission lines, though if you could take those foul smelling diesel logging trucks that pass by my house off the road, I'll gladly accept a HVDC line through my backyard.
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Sean Casten Posted 7:56 am
12 Jan 2009
The good news with local generation though is that it doesn't have to. Any place where people live is a place that consumes more power than it generates. Ergo, any power plant sited at those locations will tend to flow next door rather than up onto the high voltage grid.
The upshot is that local generation effectively gets rid of the need for any additional "T", and substantially slows the need for additional "D". (The distinction being that the site of the local generator still needs backup capacity, which gets closer and closer to full building load as you get closer and closer to the point of use for statistical reasons.) The most thoughtful analyses I've seen suggest that the total wires need for local generation is something on the order of 10% of the wires need for remote generation to provide an equivalent level of reliability.
Note that a key to this is that local plants are innately smaller. The logic breaks down if you're going to build the same, supersized power plant centrally as remotely as it is then well in excess of local needs. But for a whole lot of reasons, no one is going to put a 200 MW wind farm in downtown Minneapolis, any more than they're going to put a 1000 MW nuke in downtown Phoenix. However, a better regulatory model might well install 100 2 MW power plants throughout the greater Minneapolis / St. Paul region, giving the reliability benefits of more nodes without the accompanying need to export power out to where it is needed.
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Jon Rynn Posted 8:21 am
12 Jan 2009
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ce1907 Posted 10:46 am
12 Jan 2009
Several issues seem to be mixed.
How much locally produced electricity can be consumed by the producer? Is storage a huge problem? What about those homegrown geounits for sticking the heat somewhere useful?
Even if only some homegrown is consumed at home, does it reduce "peak loads" in a significant way?
What about the small sellers to the grid, like the beer factory with excess heat? Is your main point that you have to add more grid to accommodate them? Why, exactly?
What is distribution? As opposed to transmission?
Do your models assume dumb grid or smart grid (meters)? Is the analysis changed with a different assumption?
Many other questions, I am sure. Or ignore all the questions. But write for the public.
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Gar Lipow Posted 11:05 am
12 Jan 2009
most cities cannot generate all their own power needs. There are exceptions like San Diego and Phoenix.
Even if you can generate everything locally in some seasons you will need a hell of a lot of overcapacity to generate for four seasons. Wind friendly areas will probably have low winds in either the spring or summer (maybe both). Sun friendly areas will less sun in the fall and certainly in the winter. So even if you generate locally, you still will need long distance transmission so that cities can back each other up for seasonal differences. Let me add that even with the same sources there are good effects in having long distance connections. For example distributed wind sites within a small area may generate seasonal power with differnces as much as three to one. But take all wind power in the U.S. and connect and that ratio drops to about 1.5 to 1. (To derive the latter figure, simply look at the DOE figures and average them for all wind currently generated.) Add sun into that mix and of course the ratio drops a lot more. So even with locally generated power you can cut generation capital costs in half by having long distance transmission. And since it is pretty undisputed that the per KW cost of renewable generation is lower with bigger plants than with smaller, that effect is bigger for small sun and wind than for big sun and wind. The way around that with todays technolgy is lots and lots of backup - which means burning fossil fuels and creating GHG emissions. The demand for backup in an all mostly local renewable scenario is too high to meet with biofuels.
There is another point specifically for solar. Heat from concentrating solar can drive heat engines to produce power, and we can also store that thermal energy to provide baseload. But, as has been driven into my head, existing commericial small scale heat engines are too unreliable, have too high a mean time between failures. Only comparatively large scale heat engines are reliable enough to produce electricity from solar heat at a reasonable cost.
Since most solar energy fall over the course of about 5 hours in any spot, you need many more hours of storage for sun than for wind. So with today's technology a PV only scenario basically limits sun to providing peak generation in hot climates.
3) Incidentally your distribution figures are just considering wire capacity. But are grid is not just inadequate in carrying capacity. We need smart grids for a number of reasona. People normally think about smart grids in terms of demand management, because that is an area with obvious benefits. But we also need a smart grid to provide dispatch management to know how much to shoot down which wire. We use very crude means right now to estimate that when much smarter means are available. Smarter dispatch can reduce losses down both transmission and distribution wires.
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Sean Casten Posted 11:24 am
12 Jan 2009
That said, I wouldn't presume that all power is wind or solar. People will continue to want to be warm, and thermally balanced cogen will always be a better way to provide that niche than central power + local heat. Likewise, many industrials (and, for that matter, cooling systems in summer) create waste heat which can be recovered to make electricity. And, of course, there are any number of other waste energy sources, from landfill methane to digester gas to black liquor and sawmill shavings that present great opportunities for power generation from waste that would otherwise be vented/landfilled. Does that all add up to enough to get rid of all central generation? Probably not - but it's much bigger than just a seasonally adjusted load for traditional renewables.
That said, there's a basic logical flaw in assuming that San Diego has to back up LA. The beauty of local generation is that you generate what is optimally efficient given the local source. You size a landfill gas generator to the volume of landfill gas, not to some larger need that requires you to burn natural gas. Ditto for local wind availability, cogen or any other optimal load. Once that's all done, you then inevitably have to balance, which is best done centrally (such that San Diego doesn't export to LA), but there is no reason to burden the cost of the San Diego local generator with the wires for the remote gas plant. (Indeed, the primary benefit of that plant in San Diego is the reduction in the necessary size of the central facility.) The upshot being that there's no reason to burden appropriately-sized local generation with wires costs.
Is it possible then to inappropriately size local generation? Of course. In fact, our central generation plants have provided a great template for precisely how to do that. But it's not a mistake worth repeating!
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ce1907 Posted 11:24 am
12 Jan 2009
Is that irrelevant? Is there no significant energy loss over distance?
Cities aside, if the suburbs were more self-sufficient (solar/wind in the backyard, plus those small geothermal whatsits), would it reduce peak requirements to a SIGNIFICANT level, and so reduce the need for the extra dirty peak load plants?
Even assuming that cities need to import electricity, why do you think existing wires are not sufficient?
Especially if more self-sufficient types were reducing peak needs? Especially if meters made distribution more efficient?
Building huge grids everywhere is going to ignite a NIMBY firestorm, consuming political capital for years, and making enviros look like dithering fools. You realize that, right?
Assuming we drink the koolaid and decide to swat down bunny rabbits, snail darters, and enviros, does it matter what KIND of transmission lines we build? I vaguely recall some ranting about voltage something and direct current something else. Do you have a view? Is it a significant choice? How so?
Why does it "feel" like more transmission lines just means let the utilities do what they want, and everyone else get out of the way?
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Sean Casten Posted 11:47 am
12 Jan 2009
Criticism well taken!
To your questions:
The key point to understand with local generation is that electricity is fungible; if I produce power at my home in excess of my needs, there is no technical reason not to stick the excess onto the grid. Voltage is precisely analagous to the slope of a hill, but where your actions change the altitude of the valley. If you're running your air conditioner, you're making your valley deeper, such that electricity flow to you. Turn off your A/C and the lights and suddenly your neighbor is in the valley and electricity flows to her. A generator can run flat out and the electrons will flow to lowest voltage, subject only to the limits of all the load downstream of the transformer - which is simply the device that connects the high voltage (aka, high altitude) transmission system to the low voltage network in your neighborhood. There are often legal barriers to running in this configuration, but laws can be changed. The second point per your question is that there really is no cost-effective way to store significant volumes of electricity. So once you optimally size to a given fuel supply/electric load, you need to "use it or lose it". Lots of technologies are in development, but none are proven for any kind of long-duration storage. Someday, perhaps...
Any "homegrown" power reduces peak loads to the extent that it reduces what utility managers refer to as your "coincident peak". This refers to that moment in time when the load of your home is coincident with the peak on the overall grid (or at least the relevant local section thereof). This is best understood with an example: let's say that the grid has a peak demand on 3 PM during the summer months. Your house, by contrast has a peak demand at 7 PM when you're home, kids are still awake watching TV and you've got your electric oven running and keep opening the fridge to cook dinner. If you have an on-site generator, the degree to which you reduce peak demand is a function not of what you're generating at 7 PM, but rather what you're generating at 3 PM. Make sense?
The best way to size cogen plants is to follow the thermal load, such that the "waste" heat from the power plant is sized to local thermal loads with the electric production simply floating along with whatever is required to meet that thermal demand. This is a direct corollary to point 1, since while electricity is fungible, heat is not (e.g., I can move electricity from Chicago to Texas, but cannot move heat more than a few blocks). So in the case of your brewery, I simply follow the heat load they have to boil wort, sterilize bottles, etc. In most industries, it turns out that the power output of a perfectly-matched cogen plant produces less than the total power demand of the facility, such that they never export to the grid. There are a few exceptions (paper mills being a good example), and in those cases, one does want to export to the grid. But this doesn't necessarily mean that they need more wires. After all, they had wires built to serve their peak demand, and the onsite cogen is now reducing the peak demand, so you can piggyback on those wires and flow to your (lower voltage) neighbor. In other cases, you need more wires, and then it simply becomes a question of economics: if it's worth you and the utility's while to build those wires, you will. If it's not, you simply reduce the size of the plant to serve <100% of the thermal load and dial back on power accordingly. It's suboptimal from an efficiency perspective, but sometimes forced by the economics of any specific project.
Pure jargon! In utility-speak, transmission refers to the high-voltage (many thousands of volts) wires that carry power from central station power plants out to the various towns and municipalities. The advantage of high-voltage power is that it is relatively cheap to transmit (power = volts x amps, and the size of a wire is a function of the amps it carries. So by increasing the voltage, you can move power around in much smaller wires). But remember that power is like altitude, so giving high voltage power to a home is like dropping a piano on a seesaw. The kids don't like either. Thus, as you get closer to the point where electricity is used, utilities will "step down" the voltage to a lower level - per our analogy, converting one 1000 lb piano into 100 10 lb bowling balls. The "distribution" network is the network of lower voltage wires on the downstream (e.g., customer) side of these transformers that provides appropriate voltages to electricity users.
Smart grids are one of those ideas that in my opinion gets far more press than it deserves. As noted above, electricity flows from low to high voltage, and the lowest voltage is at the point where power is being consumed. The idea that you somehow need all sorts of fancy meters to help electrons figure out how to flow downhill is really nonsense, unless you believe that the only way to run a grid is to have some central utility manager sitting in a room, looking at what every generator is doing in real time and making active decisions about where electricity should be flowing in the system. Which is, at core, a deeply Marxist philosophy. (The fact that it is a good approximation of our deeply inefficient modern grid works is no excuse for the approach.) Yes, there is the potential for clever meters to do clever things, but that is a fundamentally separable question from whether or not it is possible within the context of the current grid to generate locally-produced, efficient power. Which is an unabashed yes.
Have I clarified or muddled?
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Sean Casten Posted 12:01 pm
12 Jan 2009
Quite true. And no less true for any other flavor of local generation. There is an energy loss over distance, although to be precise, it is more a function of the resistance in the wire. (An electrically jargonish term, but familiar to anyone who's ever felt a wire and noticed it was hot. The smaller the diameter of the wire relative to the current it is pushing through, the more is lost as heat through resisitive losses. This is the basic premise behind electric heaters.) And those losses are over the entire length of the wire, such that longer wires shed more heat = lose more of their input electricity to no useful ends. My earlier comment to Gar about "i-squared-r" losses refers to an engineering formula that says that the heat rejected from those wires is proportional to the current squared times the resistance - meaning that for a fixed diameter of wire, increasing the current through the wire leads to geometric increases in losses. This - per my prior comment - is another reason for high voltage transmission, because it reduces the current through the wire, enabling you to send a given quantity of power over a longer distance.
Analytically, yes. But quantitatively, homes are a small part of the total load and an even smaller part of the potential for efficient generation. The biggest loads and opportunities for greater efficiency are in industrial facilities and to a lesser degree in commericial/institutional buildings (apartments, hospitals, prisons, universities, etc.) So while the suburbs certainly have a potential for generation, they're far from the ideal place for it.
Interestingly, existing wires are more than sufficient if we start moving generation towards the point of demand, due to my earlier comment about remote generation needing so much overbuild for line losses and reserve margins. By building generation at the load, you necessarily free up lots of wire capacity for other purposes or - as is more often the case - to accomodate future growth in electricity demand.
True. All the more reason to go local! On the other hand, utilities have historically been able to build wires in spite of NIMBY for the simple reason that when push comes to shove, making the Wii work trumps NIMBY. But it does explain in part why total electricity demand has been growing faster than wires construction for the last 3 decades.
Those who believe that the optimal long-term solution is central spend a lot of time focusing really high voltage distribution, superconductors and any number of other technologies that allow you to move more power around with fewer wires. Technically, it works, but can't change the inherent inefficiencies (both environmental and economic) associated with central power. At least from my perspective, it's a red herring - but others may differ.
I'm not quite so cynical. But bear in mind that utilities make money by investing capital in their system, and in that sense, your belief is appropriate. They don't make money by building the most cost-effective system. And a centrally-biased, transmission-intensive grid is precisely what you would expect utilities to build given the way they make money. Imagine if your only income was 125% of the expense reports you submitted to your boss, and ask yourself how your behavior would change. Then realize that that is almost precisely how utilities are compensated. Whether one chooses to blame the utilities or the regulators for that state of affairs is frankly a matter of preference - but it most definitely leads to deep inefficiencies in the way we produce and distribute electricity.
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ce1907 Posted 12:11 pm
12 Jan 2009
no need for grid management
for some reason, I suspect that a bunch of people would disagree
why would the Establishment argue that we need the guy in the control room flipping the switches?
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Gar Lipow Posted 12:16 pm
12 Jan 2009
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Sean Casten Posted 12:23 pm
12 Jan 2009
In actual point of fact, they aren't right now either. Close to 10% of all the power generated in the country happens without any regulator (or utility manager) deciding which generator to run, how to run it, etc. Certainly none of the ~100 or so that I've personally been involved with have any such control.
The more complex answer to your devil's advocate question is that we are about 20 years into a process that is far from over, wherein utilities have kicked and screamed with respect to any change in system architecture that would highlight their fallibility/suboptimality. Since they have been paid to manage the grid, I quite understand why they've objected. And at the same time, recognize that the systems that have been installed over their tremendous objections have not only been way more efficient than the crap they build, but also not killed anyone, caused blackouts or led to any of the other doomsday prophesies that they have long assured us would come to pass if their expertise was in any way bypassed.
So yes, lots of people disagree. And while they haven't yet lost the war, they've won every major battle over the last 15 years, to society's great gain!
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ce1907 Posted 1:09 pm
12 Jan 2009
actually cares about grid
this is an opportunity
being largely wasted.
There is no organized discussion, and no reduction of key points to CNN level.
where is the leadership?
all we have is a bunch of pompous shallow types yelling "smart grid" as if they knew what they were talking about
and various geeks arguing tiny details that no one who can get a date can bear to listen to
not a good situation
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Bob Wallace Posted 1:49 pm
12 Jan 2009
We're probably not quite to the point where we should do a widespread build out. Best to get the bugs out on smaller scales and get standards set.
BTW, the US is not alone. England, for example, has just distributed a thousand or so "smart" refrigerators that adjust their operation times based on grid performance rather than on signals from "central control". That's another approach being investigated.
(That's probably a lot more information than your attitude deserved.)
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hapa Posted 1:54 pm
12 Jan 2009
"sean, the generators that don't require new routing, new links, new wires, new demand management, they all just run on... 'fuel'... right?"
and
"when do they stop running on 'fuel'?"
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ce1907 Posted 2:52 pm
12 Jan 2009
yes, it is a hell of a plan. Small demonstrations (to be funded in the stimulus?) of WHAT?
no software standards
what are we testing?
it is all a diddle factory to pretend there is action
meanwhile, the real tug of war will be over standards, to be decided by the biggest and the fattest over time
while NIST happily waits for a result in a few years, so it can (finally, maybe) make a recommendation to FERC, where the losing biggest and fattest can make an end run on the earlier decision on standards
in other words, drift for 20 years. at best
and oh, yeah: bully for the British. it is only in the movies that anyone has cared what the Brits do for about 50 years
you have no idea of my true attitude
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Gar Lipow Posted 3:04 pm
12 Jan 2009
I will say that past a certain point we may need have some broad say about what type power is generated. I will also note that the quality of power in the U.S. has deteriorated since deregulation, with more blackouts and more brownouts, and with more vulnerability to scams such as Enron. So I would not be too quick to boast how successful deregulation has been.
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Bob Wallace Posted 3:33 pm
12 Jan 2009
What are we testing? We're doing beta testing, if you please. Stuff has been designed, various metering systems that allow two way communication between supplier and consumer.
Twenty years to implement? Why in the world should that be true? Give things a year or so to sort themselves out and then we'll see wider implementation. When we see a major utility company such as PG&E starting up smart meter installation you know we're past the thinking stage. And PG&E has started.
BTW, ever notice how lots of commercial jets are powered by British made Rolls-Royce engines? They've been installed into Boeing's 747, 757 and 767. They are going to be installed the 787.
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Bob Wallace Posted 3:38 pm
12 Jan 2009
I assume that much of that lower capacity is due to lack of water during part of the year. That is certainly the case for a couple of the western US dams close to where I have lived. Output is slowed during the dry season so that the total amount of water can be rationed until the winter rains. Even the TVA dam that I grew up near in Tennessee was sometimes throttled down when lake levels were low.
Do you know of any studies that tell us how much of that potential could be used for pump-up storage? And how much per kWh that might cost?
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amazingdrx Posted 12:27 am
13 Jan 2009
But I agree that large wind and concentrating solar, with heat storage to provide power at night, maybe backed up with closed loop geothermal, all these sources, plus wind/wave
power from offshore, transported over long distance smart grids, would be a great stable base for the continental electrical superhighway system.
Right down at the indiviual home and neighborgood level, that 48 hour battery energency very low power and building mass heat storage, along with rooftop solar and local farm based wind and farm biogas, would be practical and economical.
We need the whole sytem designed from the cellular level, the individual home or farm or public building or factory, through local smart grids with their own biogas backup and on up to regional grids with super conducting magnetic energy storage.
The complete organic smart grid would consist of all the cells working together.
Internet over the power grid would be the nervous system, connecting to the neurons, the individual smart grid devices in homes and buildings and wind and solar system, and backup generators.
It's hard to envision, given the static model of centralized power. But it's definitely coming, ready or not.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Gar Lipow Posted 2:58 am
13 Jan 2009
One thing that might be possible. We have a lot of dams used for the purpose of flood control or irrigation that don't have turbines. These are generally low head, but and given the important ways the water is used, there are limits to how much we can control the timing. What I still think we might be able to do is to install true closed cycle pumped storage in dry areas with large differences in height, pumped storage where you make a one time draw of water and then don't draw further on hydro sources.
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stopgreenpath Posted 4:26 am
15 Jan 2009
money quote:
"A more realistic scenario involves distributing these same PV systems throughout the 50 states. Currently available sites--such as vacant land, parking lots, and rooftops--could be used. The land requirement to produce 800 gigawatts would average out to be about 17 x 17 miles per state. Alternatively, PV systems built in the "brownfields"--the estimated 5 million acres of abandoned industrial sites in our nation's cities--could supply 90% of America's current electricity.
These hypothetical cases emphasize that PV is not "area-impaired" in delivering electricity. The critical point is that PV does not have to compete with baseload power. Its strength is in providing electricity when and where energy is most limited and most expensive. It does not simply replace some fraction of generation. Rather, it displaces the right portion of the load, shaving peak demand during periods when energy is most constrained and expensive."
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/solar/myths.html
Your whole argument ignores the decongestion and point of use factors that mean that much, much less power will need to even enter the grid if most structures generate a large percentage of their own demand. No peaks, no valleys. It also ignores that storage solutions should be top priority for the new administration (see MIT's simple hydrogen storage solution, anticipated within 5 years). And worst of all, it ignores the total decimation to ecosystems and massive GHG emissions of building out giant, remote power infrastructure far from point of use.
I seriously can NOT see why anyone who cares even a tiny bit for the planet feels they can get away with advocating the wholesale slaughter of millions and millions of acres of wilderness in order to remonopolize the Big Energy Robber Barons' disastrous externalization of costs onto ratepayers, taxpayers and the planet. calling such power "green" or "renewable" is worse than a joke because it is built on the back of a large, dead habitat and carbon sink (in the case of the Mojave, at least). Most of these projects - including Big Transmission - could barely zero out their own GHG emissions over their lifecycles, much less result in net emission reductions.
You talk about the "best wind," but why not address the REALITY of Big Wind, that the vast majority of Industrial Wind plants are unacceptably weak and unreliable? the average output of the massive (and growing) disastrous Big Wind projects near Palm Springs is only 15%, occasionally increasing to a max of 19% of capacity. on any given day, even if there is wind, fully 30% of turbines are inoperational. but because of Big Energy lobbyists and their greenwashing cheerleaders, they keep funding them and building them, while the vast, endless, baking sprawl of the built environment goes without PV, even though it is sunny 8+ hours a day, 350+ days a year there. Why is that? Because of propaganda and payoffs, not because Big is Beautiful. Big is crap from every perspective but the profiteers, who get guaranteed profits whether their project performs or not.
sorry, but it's not NIMBYism that prevents us from embracing these boondoggles, it's concern for the environment and for ratepayers, both of whom are totally ripped off by these Big Energy dead-ends. point of use solutions need to be the ONLY focus of the first Phase of a renewable energy paradigm. We need to invest in R & D to make Phase 2 just as clean and green with storage solutions and consumption decreases not with wilderness slaughter and eminent domain.
the greenest energy is that which you needn't ever produce.
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Gar Lipow Posted 8:56 am
15 Jan 2009
More to the point,as you save PV does not provide baseload. And for the most part it does not provide load following. It is pretty strickly peaking. So where does the rest come from? Wind is an obvious answer, but unlike PV with today's technology wind is not something you can put in most homes, or on most buildings or in most parking lots - at least not in quantities needed to supplement PV. You come back to needing distannt wind, and long distance transmission. And, as I've pointed out ,that long distance transmission could be part of a buildout of new long high speed freight rail. So you are not tearing down massive amounts of land for it.
Look there are benefits from decentralization. But what scares me is that I see arguments that are more strongly devoted to decentralization than reducing emissions. YOu know one path I can see. PV covers every surface at very high prices providing about 20% of our power. We put in urban wind, and build windfarms close to urban ares that combined another 10%. We get another 6% from hydro and geothermals. That leaves about 64% from fossil fuels and biomass stripped unsustainably from wilderness or displacing food production. Or maybe we let nuclear provide 25%. That leaves 39% of power provided from coal and natural gas. And if that coal and natural gas is burned in small local generators, that still is horrifying. And generally I'd hope that most proponents of localism would not see nuclear as a good solution any way.
In short there is one sense in which I do want to pick winners. Or to specific I want to make sure certain technologies are not winners. And those are coal, oil and natural gas. And ultimately current nuclear technology.
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stopgreenpath Posted 5:42 am
16 Jan 2009
the 90% of US energy needs that can be met on brownfields alone does not even factor in rooftops, parking garages, etc. that would all be EXTRA power. And, the calculation is based on cheapo thin film (10% efficiency, not 18-40% like the expensive stuff), which means about a buck a watt - MUCH cheaper than Industrial Wind plus Long Powerlines. And all these urban areas already have transmission, so they are primed for upgrades to Smart Grids, but no wilderness killing and transmission losses are required.
Add to that, it has been proven that FEED IN TARIFFS reduce consumption more effectively than any other policy, and we will see an immediate and dramatic drop in consumption, which is the best emissions reduction policy out there.
While this is all happening, R & D will come up with the solutions for Phase 2, because they will see which way the wind is blowing (sorry!), and will focus their efforts there, instead of on deadly, toxic "renewables." We have a Mars Rover. The cellphone and computer have exponentially increased functionality and efficacy while reducing size, materials and price. why? because they saw where the market was heading and poured their resources there. This means good, clean solutions are not only going to be feasible but will soon be affordable.
Trying to solve it all in the next 10 minutes is not helpful. This will have to be done in phases, both from an engineering perspective and from a political one. we have the power to influence the process - right now - and steer policy towards practices which do not harm a single acre of functioning ecosystem and focus solely on the built environment - at load centers. Emission reductions will follow much more quickly than you think, once the public and industry are engaged, and are getting rewarded for doing the right thing.
the greenest energy is that which you needn't ever produce.
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amazingdrx Posted 7:41 am
16 Jan 2009
Gar I think solar cogeneration and ground source heating/cooling and across the board efficiency improvements in manufacturing (cogeneration) can get 29% at least. From solar cogeneration on roofs producing domestic hot water all the way up to solar furnace cogeneration on factory roofs.
I think wind/wave and ocean current power could be around 20% instead of 10%.
And using natural gas in solid oxide fuel cell turbines for backup is not as bad as regular copal and gas plants. These fuel cells can run on biogas from waste most of the time.
A recent estimate I saw for cow biogas alone claimed that 4.5 million homes could be powered in total. That is without landfill, garbage, food and crop waste, wood waste, and sewage added in.
We are nearly there, ready to phase out nuclear plants over the next 20 years as technologies like superconducting electromagnetic energy storage. And much better cheaper batteries are developed.
I know you are skeptical of smart grid storage potential, but this is developing right now. Studies may just turn up soon on the first smart grid installations.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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