A study done at Stanford and published in the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology is described by its lead author, Cristina Archer, this way:
... each in a separate cage with a treadmill. At any given time, some hamsters will be sleeping or eating and some will be running on their treadmill. If you have only one hamster, the treadmill is either turning or it isn't, so the power's either on or off. With two hamsters, the odds are better that one will be on a treadmill at any given point in time and your chances of running, say, your blender, go up. Get enough hamsters together and the odds are pretty good that at least a few will always be on the treadmill, cranking out the kilowatts.
The combined output of all the hamsters will vary, depending on how many are on treadmills at any one time, but there will be a certain level of power that is always being generated, even as different hamsters hop on or off their individual treadmills. That's the reliable baseload power.
Read the whole story here at Mongabay.
Oh, wait a minute. My bad ...
She was just using hamsters as an analogy for wind turbines! Turns out that up to a third of the power from a properly connected grid of widely dispersed wind turbines could be used for baseload power, greatly reducing cost.
Seriously, how hard would it be for wind turbine construction to keep pace with plug-in car manufacture?
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Comments
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kiwiiano Posted 10:35 am
25 Nov 2007
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GreyFlcn Posted 11:19 am
25 Nov 2007
Plugins are the perfect load for intermittent power sources, since you got about a 14 hour time window where you need to charge for 3-6 hours.
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Colin Wright Posted 11:46 am
25 Nov 2007
But I like this idea of tying wind farms together before piping the energy to consumers. But I wonder though if wind could ever be considered for baseload power. It might in coastal areas where winds are pretty constant. But I thought the Mid West was prone to summer high pressure systems that occasionally effectively reduced winds to zero over large areas (though this one-year study didn't seem to find this.)
Linking in a network of concentrated solar plants would definately help in that case. Or geothermal plants, of course. But for obvious reasons that sort of R&D will be mightily opposed by the fossil-fuel lobbies, just as they are gutting the energy bill of its Renewable Portfolio Standards. (Did you know there are over 60 lobbyists for each Congress person?)
Could wind generation feed PHEV's quickly enough? (I like your assumption of phasing out coal plants!) Could be a problem in the North West where only only 10 - 20% of our car fleet could be electrified currently. As you know, it will take decades to even get 25% of our power from renewables.
But the bigger crunch might be peak oil. Jeffrey J. Brown reckons world oil exports are currently shrinking over 3% a year (hence the run-up on prices). At some point U.S. consumers will have to reduce oil use commensurably. Three percent of 200 million cars (estimated U.S. cars on the road) is about 6 million cars. That's about half the cars made each year here. So could we see every other new car in the show rooms be a PHEV? I doubt it. Not for a few years, anyway.
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Sam Wells Posted 12:19 pm
25 Nov 2007
In many coastal marine areas it is exactly the opposite. The atmosphere stabilizes at night creating low wind speeds. During the day, mixing down allows higher winds at the surface. To me it is a fact of life where I live.
Sheesh!
Onward through the fog
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Delay And Deny Posted 3:26 pm
25 Nov 2007
As I read about baseload power, what they have to do is keep generators running and "spinned up" during peak demand. When the demand exceeds the current capacity they switch a generator online and keep the voltage constant.
So, each generator is a quantized unit of power that is added as needed. You are talking both about a wind farm of multiple turbines, and a grid of wind farms.
So, with a single for the wind farm, you have lots of variety. But basically you have to build enough turbines to cover peak demand. But wait, wind can be variable, so you have to build more, maybe many more to cover peak demand.
And yes, you can "link them up" but what about the people who need that power locally? And what if both places have low wind?
With standard fossil fuel generators, the point is I can start 'em up when I want to. And I can depend on how much total capacity I have and map that to my total demand. With wind you never, ever have access to the initial input.
My Log
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trock Posted 11:46 pm
25 Nov 2007
The way I heat my home is with passive solar, a wood stove and a LP furnace. I'm guessing that the large windows to the south with tile floor for mass storage contributes about 40 percent to my heating. I've got a wood stove which I fire up often and that contributes another 40 percent. And then I've got the furnace for when I'm lazy. The pipes in my house are insulated and heated for below zero weather so my house can `go cold' when we are away.
So 20 of my heat comes from fossil fuels. I could just heat with fossil fuels because I have to have the furnace anyway, but I think I am better off this way.
That's the same thing that we can do with our electricity grid. The way electrical grid is talked about now is Peak, Shoulder and Baseload power demand. But we can also talk about majority or significant part of total power being renewable and have a percentage of the grid being from fossil fuel as backup and we can be better off. Because if we are going to make any headway into reductions in fossil fuel use some power plants will have to run less than maximum.
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mihan Posted 12:10 am
26 Nov 2007
So, theoretically, if you made your turbine 100 yards tall, the power generated would be fairly steady during most of the day. Fortunately, this is not what we want to do.
That hamster is devastatingly cute.
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caniscandida Posted 4:37 am
26 Nov 2007
cuteness is in the eye of the beholder.
BioD's hamster is as spooky as Schroedinger's cat, and as uncanny as Wittgenstein's duck-rabbit.
In fact it is the Head Honcho Hamster. You can tell by that alarming orange rinse it has just got. It loves to lounge by the pool sipping margaritas, while the other, lesser hamsters are inside running running running in the treadmill, doing double and even triple shifts.
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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