Why We Have No Wind or Solar Power

[Blue Bomber Man]

Duffman, I am not over simplifying nor am I ignoring standard deviation. The larger the decentralized grid, the more it can handle swings in production and demand because the fluctuations become the equivelent of a drop of water in a pond.

[Concrete]

Duffman,

Thanks for the data (duh, wiki, the internet & all, I feel silly )

also I think I have been misunderstood
I am not worried about terrorism and power lines (how many poles lost to terrorists = 0)
I am worried about storm/weather damage = thousands of poles knocked down each year
millions lost to economic impact of power outages each year
let us address the real danger before the imaginary

I'm sure the 2-4 times installation cost (per wiki) of pole versus buried cable is for
power companies expense only & does not take into account community economics

BTW
finding a break in a long buried wire is probably not as hard as you might think
you can "ring" the wire electrically and basically echo locate the break
in fact a clever power company could do it live and might even be able to predict failure points
we do it at work all the time to test coax cable health/losses

conradpdx,

I like your idea of distributed power idea & I have dreamed that dream too

but run the economics - it is a looser/expensive
in fact even selling at market rates you would be loosing your shirt
otherwise I would already be doing this


Also
for those worried wind is not a true large scale solution

sure wind could be too intermittent for high percentage use (say over ~20%)
but I don't think that is going to happen any time soon

here is a DOE report selling 20% wind by 2030
20% Windpower by 2030
so the "too much wind" debate is a little premature

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by Blue Bomber Man

The fact of the matter is a decentralized power grid based soley on renewables (that obviously have varying outputs) can be 100% reliable and cover 100% of the nations power needs, provided that we advance our distribution network far enough.

The reason for this is averages. Say you have a small system with 10 sources of power. The probability of having enough power during all times would be fairly close to zero. However as you add millions of different sources, such as hometop solar panels, wind arrays, hydro, geothermal etc, the probably approaches 100%, which would actually be higher then the current systems capabilties.

No. Unfortunately, the two sources most people mean when they talk about "renewables", wind and solar, aren't random at all. They're connected by high-level physical processes such as weather and the Earth's rotation. Take the simplest case: PV cells generate electricity when the sun is shining. So assume the sun shines half the time, build twice as many arrays, and you should be able to get 24-hour power 'cause of the randomness, right?

For a less obvious case, consider weather. It's not just random clouds here, wind there. Suppose you've got your solar grid that provides plenty of power under average conditions. What happens when you get say a Pacific storm system that puts cloud cover over most of the western US? What happens when you get a series of storms lasting a week or two? (Which does happen every few years.) And at the same time you have a couple of blizzards moving down out of Canada, so the midwest & east coast are socked in? Your solar isn't producing much, most of the wind turbines are iced up, and your pumped storage all went down the tubes by about day 5. What do you do? Crank up the coal-fired plants? But the owners weren't making any money from them, so they sold them off as scrap :-)

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by conradpdx

No I realize this, so lets say only a third of the residential properties are capable of producing just enough power to cover their own power needs. Then perhaps a third that could produce excess power. Right there we've gotten to 22% of the electricity in the nation on renewables. That's not including the power produced by the aprox. 11% that produce more power than they need. If they even produced enough excess to cover half of the remaining 1/3 that has problems producing their own power we are now pushing 27% of the nations power coming from home owners.

Which is fine, and would be a good thing. If you read studies by power systems engineers, you find that the grid can run with roughly 10% (as it is) to 30% (with relatively cheap upgrades) of intermittent generation. (I'm just going from memory here: read the articles yourself for better figures.) But remember what I said about the problem not scaling linearly? The greater the fraction of intermittent generation, the more difficult/expensive the problem becomes.

Screw the investors/owners of the old power plants.

Screw them 'til you need to run the old plants for backup power, 'cause you got a couple of weeks of unusually cloudy weather :-)

Honestly, I think this system would work very well.

I prefer to go by the opinions of power system engineers :-)

And I never claimed it to be a cure all, just something easy to make a big dent, or a just good place to start.

Maybe YOU didn't, but a lot of people are. That's the real problem: they see that a small percentage (about 1%, IIRC) of renewables can just go on the grid, so they think everything could be made renewable just by building more PV panels & wind turbines. They prefer wishful thinking to engineering :-)

[conradpdx]

Just a point James....


Investors don't run power plants and there are no individual owners of large power plants, it's all run by investors. They simply buy the power plants that typically are built by the government and sold to them at a loss. However the power systems engineers you mention do run the plants, and I didn't flip them off.

And part of the reason it's difficult to work with intermittent power suppliers is that it hasn't been an issue in the past. I have been on the DOE site the last few days, and they are actually working on this problem with a system that they say will operate the grid more like the internet, as opposed to the current "railroad switchman" system. They do say it's expensive right now, but considering that data can be transported through the electric currents of a house, I don't see why this tech can not be used on the grid which could in turn make it near fully automated.

[Blue Bomber Man]

Your large turbines would not ice up for similair reasons that basjoos does not need windshield wipers. Solar cells would be recieving less light, but power would still be flowing from the south. Natural gas can be throttled up and down, as can nuclear, hydro would still run, so could tidal/wave energy.

The whole concept of the Smartgrid tech seems foreign to you. I recommend you research it some so you can find its advantages. It will show why sources that throttle power will be able to charge higher rates to make up for lower productions to make them cost effective when needed. The entire system would be much more reliable then todays current grid, and would be sustainable.

[order99]

I've read a bit about Solar PV, Wind Turbines and Hydroelectric in this thread so far, but there's a technology from the 17th century slowly making a comeback in some of the hotter parts of the world...Solar Thermal energy.

There's currently a plant just outside of Barcelona created to be a massive Solar Oven, just like the cheap boxes that cook food you can make for about $10-only instead of cooking your food, this one supplies energy. The Tech is simple, efficient and non-polluting-massive, heat-absorbent towers full of water are surrounded by rows of reflective surfaces to focus and maximize the effect...the resulting superheated steam(comparable to the results we get from Fission) drive turbines for rather respectable amounts of power. During the night, insulated tanks full of pre-heated boiling water (which were siphoned from the Daytime loads) drive the turbines in a continuous load.

The plant has been considered quite a success by the Spanish government, and a second plant is under construction-the Backup Tanks are using a "milkshake" of heavy Salt/liquid Slurry this time for a more even Thermal Absorbtion/release curve than the previous model...

Then there's the Australian plant under way soon, pretty much a Greenhouse Funnel. Transparent panels will allow the Desert's rays to superheat the air in an area about a mile across, where it will rise through a gradually narrowing aperture, gaining speed from the compression as it goes...by the time it exits the six-foot wide aperture at the top, the air will be at near-Hurricane speeds. The entire last hundred yards of this 'throat' will be lined with Industrial reinforced Wind Turbines. In theory, energy production should completely cease about twenty minutes after Sunset-but the Daytime output is supposed to be tremendous! Guess we'll find out the results in a few more years on that one...

I suspect that Thermal Mass is going to get some long belated respect from architects in the next few years, as it's still the best way to regulate Temperature in a dwelling. As to existing structures, Geothermal might make a bit of a comeback-and i'm not talking about active heat sources here, i'm talking about the ground's tendency to remain at a steady temperature! Several designers have Retro-fitted existing structures with about 1000 yrds or so of PVC, buried about 20 ft underground and then tied into a high-efficiency heat pump...this results in a steady-state temp of 65-70F all year for very little energy!

[Duffman]

Originally Posted by Blue Bomber Man

Duffman, I am not over simplifying nor am I ignoring standard deviation. The larger the decentralized grid, the more it can handle swings in production and demand because the fluctuations become the equivelent of a drop of water in a pond.

You said earlier no one was talking math concepts, well real data talks and BS walks.

http://www.energistyrelsen.dk/graphi...ettet_Test.zip

These are the production numbers from the wind turbines in Denmark (dont worry there is english in the spreadsheet), of which Denmark has 20% of their grid comprised of wind, the largest in the world.

If you scroll to the far right it shows the sum for each month (for 2007) for a turbine, if you then scroll down you can see the total monthly production. THIS IS MUST SEE FOR THOSE WHO SAY THE AVERAGES WILL WORK THEMSELVES OUT!

[conradpdx]

Concrete...is it really that expensive. If the ability to go solar was opened up it'd be easy and cheap, all that would really be need to start as a property owner for a solar array would be about $1000.

1) Start with one panel and an inverter. Simply plug inverter into an outlet. Any DIY'r that's routed a 3 way switch can wire a grid tied system. It's not even as difficult as a 3 way switch.

2) take the money you saved with panel one and bank it till you have enough to buy panel 2.
3) repeat process till entire roof structure is covered and other components are bought with this same principle.

It would work much like a savings account. Start small and watch you array grow.

At some point within the first 5 years most houses will get to the point where in the summer months they wouldn't be paying a bill and would be getting checks. Turn it around right away and expand your system.

Once you got to the point that you were within three years of producing excessive power from your site you could then apply for a business license. This would then make any further expansion in hardware and loan interest would then be a tax write off.

This along with the fact that the governments already got incentives for alternative energy would make this process even faster.

But what stops this is that running the meter backwards with a panel is illegal. And the power companies often have a limited size of array that they're willing to allow net metering.

I honestly don't think the problem is desire of the population, money, or engineering but one of political power (pun somewhat intended).

[Duffman]

Originally Posted by Concrete

Duffman,

Thanks for the data (duh, wiki, the internet & all, I feel silly )

also I think I have been misunderstood
I am not worried about terrorism and power lines (how many poles lost to terrorists = 0)
I am worried about storm/weather damage = thousands of poles knocked down each year
millions lost to economic impact of power outages each year
let us address the real danger before the imaginary

No I agree that terrorists dont attack power lines, but they are not currently good targets. An anarchist wanting to disrupt society could do so if he knocked out the infrastructure that is in the solar plan for America or whatever it was called. It will never happen because we will never allow our energy security to be dependent on a bunch of select power lines.

Originally Posted by Concrete

BTW
finding a break in a long buried wire is probably not as hard as you might think
you can "ring" the wire electrically and basically echo locate the break
in fact a clever power company could do it live and might even be able to predict failure points
we do it at work all the time to test coax cable health/losses

I know that there are techniques to find breaks without digging up the line, but you still have to walk the length with your instrumentation dont you?