Why We Have No Wind or Solar Power
 

A funny Mother Goose & Grimm in the sunday funnies.

http://www.grimmy.com/images/MGG_Arc...08/MGG1005.gif

:D :D :D :thumbup:

Don't worry...I'm sure they're working somewhere to either claim some sort of ownership to the wind and sun...or inventing twisted schemes beyond our comprehension tocontroll them. I can picture a giant Exxon tarp in orbit.

like the cartoon
but you have to admit - oil companies are addicted to even more than we are
they have very few alternatives and their bread and butter is sure to run out
some of them are learning to ecomod - but addicts are hard to change
the status quo rules in all of our lives - we need stress to get us out of the rut

oil companies & alternative energy venture capital
describes some baby steps in big oil ecomodding
not even enough money to convince everyone they are for real yet
and Exxon is still in complete denial - a true addict indeed :rolleyes:

no mention yet for venture capital to blot out the sky ;)

Thank you for posting this -- my 11 year old son saw this in the paper, and showed it to me. He gets it.

It's illegal to catch rainwater that falls on your own roof in certain parts of CO. The idea may not be as far out or as far away as we think. The level of greed these people possess is amazing.

We have no wind power? Then what on earth are all those wierd-looking propellor dohickies doing on Altamont Pass?

1-- it's a cartoon, not (quite) a serious commentary.
2-- compared to the other forms of energy mentioned, we have such a small amount of wind and solar that they might as well be nonexistent.

Hyperbole == exaggerating to make a point, or to make a joke.

-soD

They will eat up all the patents on the bearings, or the lubrication of them. Then they will eat up anything having to do with floating magnets. Anytime someone has a bright idea they get bought or disappear.

The exxon tarp, i was thinking that and read your post.

I knew a couple guys who worked on those about 22yrs ago

In the 1980's, the tax breaks were huge for constructing those windmills on the Altmont Pass. Several who's who in American business formed partnerships to comission building may of them and reap the tax advantages. But here's the travesty, the produced electricty couldn't get onto the grid! PG&E paid theses partnerships for eletricity produced, even though that power did absolutely nothing but turn a meter, so the utility knew who big a check to write that month. The rational was it was more cost effective to just payt he windmill owners, than to build the required sub-station required to get the electricity onto the grid, where it could do some good.

That was then... I drove through there regularly for the last couple of years, and it seemed like there was always construction going on, with new & larger towers going up. Likewise there seem to be other wind farms going up all over the place.

I know it's a cartoon, and it's supposed to be funny, but if you actually know anything about the technology (instead of just buying into the modern myth that it's all a conspiracy by "Big Oil"), it's not.

I don't see the humor either. Wind and solar aren't feasible. Oil companies, AFAIK, don't own coal mines or uranium mines (many DO on both oil and gas fields).

My dad works in the electric utility industry for a small-ish local division of a regional power conglomerate. One of his former jobs involved him supervising/organizing storm response crews and field work. Most of his experience with power customers informed him that while people don't like paying for electricity, the only thing that motivates complaints (often vocal and occasionally violent toward the crews) is *unreliable service.*

Solar and wind are UNRELIABLE. You can't count on a clear sunny sky or a stiff breeze. You can't flip a switch and bring up wind or solar generation. They are neither suitable for baseload (core reliability) nor peak load (meet demand as demanded). That means they're just worthless.

Sure, you can throttle-back other power generation (making them less efficient) and absorb the output of solar/wind generation through the grid, but you can NOT eliminate a single megawatt of generation capacity whether it be nuclear/coal/gas/oil because you have to count on at least occasionally supporting peak loads without any solar or wind input. Anything less means failure to meet peak loads which means a VERY ANGRY population.

Hello,

The sun will rise tomorrow -- solar power is completely reliable. How long will oil/coal/gas/uranium last; and what will we do when then run out? If we use them up, what will future generations do?

We need to spread out our gathering systems over a wide area, and we need a better grid to distribute the power. We need to have methods of short term storage. Solar heat can be stored with molten salt underground, air pressure can be stored underground, hydrogen can be split from water and stored, and EV batteries can be used to absorb excess capacity.

Distributed collection works for both wind and solar, and then there's geothermal sources, biomass, biofuels, wave power, tidal power -- a diversity of sources spread out of a wide geographic area can easily be used to meet our needs.

Last time I checked, there are a few windy and sunny spots in the United States, there can be more than one wind farm and solar farm, with a nuclear power plant or two to supplement. I also believe that the energy produced by the farms can be stored for use during off peak hours, or when there is a shortage of sun or wind. You just need a good foundation/infrastructure to get it going and then there would be no shortage of energy.

Your statements are like those of the people when electricity was first (when Edison first designed the grid) being produced for consumers, "the amount of DC power we are able to produce limits the abilities of our system to just enough within the city limits". Now we have power to 99% of the nation, all the time, so all we need is a reliable way to store and transport the energy and we will be all set.

Though some of them are invested in solar power: BP Solar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia for instance.

I work for one of the larger companies working on alternatives ( i am NOT with big oil - but we are one of the other big players).

We are selling wind turbines like crazy - many are not the 1000's of unit wind farms but the 20 - 30 unit farms.

For the Reliability comment - there are places in this country where the WIND ALMOST ALWAYS blows - you need to remember these are 100's of feet in the air - on ground level you have trees / buildings that break up the airflow - but at a few hundred feet in certain areas - you have flow as pretty near to all the time as you can have.

I think the comment about how to network into the grid is a good point - you CAN throttle back the units to scale the amount of power produced ( or even make the blades stop altogether) so it is not so much a BASE LOAD all the time operation -- but we SHOULD be thinking of them as a NUKE - you get it started and you keep it running - let the Nat Gas fired turbine plants come up during peak periods as needed.

Solar has some technology issues yet - making the cells more efficient and less costly. But as we get there - i think you will see almost EVERY HOUSE with solar cell roofing shingles to collect what ever power it can collect - maybe it is alot - maybe it is alittle - but it will be SOMETHING to offset fossil fuel comsumption.

Steve

Can somebody confirm that Altamont is now on-grid? Personally, I think that the best available solution to the intermittent nature of wind and solar power is pumped hydroelectric storage. It is reasonably efficient, and can use existing facilities. A lake that is silting in can still be dredged to give full performance for a few days at a time. If I build off-grid, I plan to hook my windmill to a water pump, and a generator to a pelton wheel, but I'll move that to the house forum.

BTW, funny cartoon... I liked it :-)

Sorry jamesqf and Bicycle Bob, the Altamont Pass windmills are on the grid... I was sort of mixing past with current news. PG&E eventually built that substation in the late 80's-early 90's. I'm not suggesting any conspiracy. Back then, one of the owners was floating an interim plan to use that untapped electricty to produce hydrogen, and bottle it at the wind farms. PG&E got there act together and the rest is history.

But there's more news about those wind machines in the last 6-8 months. Several environmental groups have sued and won, won the appeal too, i think to get <some? all? not sure...> windmills on the Altamont Pass torn down. I don't know all of the particulars, or which farms, or which machine design the court action relates to, but birds of prey 'strikes' were deemed environmentally unfriendly and if I understood the program I watched corectly, some owners of windmills received court orders to tear them down and have been doing so.

Again, I don't know all the particulars, I don't know anyone conected to that industry anymore, all I saw was a short program on local cable that made my jaw drop... the program focused on the bird strikes, projections of numbers of killed hawks and other birds of prey (based on some actual carcass counting), and the lawsuit victory and the next lawsuit being brought to not only tear these 'bad neighbors' down, but to have them completely removed from the sites, cut up, and recycled (with oversight, or course). Reminded me of a UN solution :eek:

It would seem there is no apeasing some groups. :mad:

I once visited a foundry in the Sierra foothills, who's big claim to fame was Pelton wheel manufacturing in the late 1800's. They had examples of enclosed pelton wheels (double sccop design) that were claimed to be very efficient. I love the idea of storing the energy by pumping water into an elevated water tower, then using that to generate electicity for your home, say, at night with no wind. It sounds like less trouble than batteries... WOuld you close loop the system and use anti-freeze?

Excuse me?! Are you serious? That's amazing.

One would imagine that, in an area where rainfall is less than plentiful, any homeowner willing to take on saving rainwater would be congratulated for his ingenuity and thrift.

The way I see it, if I own the roof and am expected to keep it up, not to mention the land it sits on and keep THAT up, then whatever lands on the roof is mine mine mine and the local government can go #@C& itself.

I've got to add, I live in a part of the country not known for its wind. Here in E. TN, a wind over 8mph is considered downright breezy, but most wind gennies are barely cranking over at that speed. That doesn't mean there isn't reliable wind, though. We have a small wind farm north of Oak Ridge - funded and installed by no less entity than TVA - and it worked out so well that they went and installed more and bigger gennies. Now I'm hearing rumbles on expanding it further. In the area where they're installed, the wind averages - AVERAGES, notice - about 14 mph. That's dead in the middle of the meat-and-potatoes kind of windspeeds the power people like to see.

Doofus M -

Do you see lots of sales in Texas? Once when I was flying back to LA, the steward saw that I was reading an article on wind turbines. He told me that the incentives program in Texas was being used mostly by the rich cattle (and oil?!?!?) landowners. They would put up the windfarms and let the cows graze below. Because they have the land where the wind blows, they get a dual use out of the land.

CarloSW2

MechEngVT has it. It is the intermittent nature of wind and solar that doom them. To back them up you have to run a fossil fuel plant in wasteful "spinning reserve" to cover for when the wind or solar units drop the ball.

We should be working on utility sized energy storage to level out the output of wind/solar. Pumped storage is nice but is highly site dependent and most of the sites have been developed already.

The big Vanadium batteries offer promise but aren't ready for prime time.

Until somebody comes up with a mobile-usage battery, running you car on wind or solar is just out of the question.

Well, doom renewables for us anyway. Those precise Germans already know how to manage it, but I suppose expecting Americans to do similar isn't realistic, right Big Dave? :p

http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=tR8gEMpzos4

Not quite true: you can float some intermittent generation (I've seen numbers up to 30% of total) on the system, basically because you have to have spinning reserve on the grid anyway. Then there's e.g. hydro, where you have a degree of choice about how much water you'll let out at any given time. And of course your system control operators are juggling all the various supplies, trying to get the cheapest electricity while staying within system guidelines... (At one point in my career, I used to maintain the some of the powerflow & stability programs that the utilities used to plan all this.)

There are potentially much better ways of storing energy than pumped storage, hydrogen, or exotic battery chemistry. High-speed flywheels, spinning in a vacuum on magnetic bearings. Very little conversion loss, and little friction loss over periods of a few days. Put a unit like that in every house that has PV panels, add a smart controller, and you could add quite a bit of solar/wind to the grid.

data
 

roflwaffle
good flick - and that is probably the future near term - for going all renewable
You have to get over 10% wind base load for those problems, US is no where near that

we are making progress though
check out the DOE & you will see much of power generation growth is in renewable energy
EIA - Annual Energy Outlook 2008 - Electricity Demand
(at least in the near term - goofs still think 2030 will have less renewable growth :rolleyes:)
we are on course - grow the good stuff - let the old wear out and fade away
I am much less worried about the future than I was 10 years ago
we actually have a measurable amount of renewable infrastructure and it is growing

Bird strikes
Bird strikes are an issue with small turbines
they spin so fast they look like a blur and the birds try to fly thru them
new large bladed turbines do not have this issue
ones near here are held to 28.8 RPM - easily visible and avoidable by birds

More data:
compensation for wind turbine on land - 2-10K per year!
http://www.windustry.org/sites/windu...mpPackages.pdf

Hi,

The upper midwest of the USA and offshore, the wind blows quite steadily. The southwest has lots and lots of sunshine, and most other areas can certainly produce power from PV much of the time. The ocean tide is always shifting, and there are almost always waves offshore. Geothermal heat is definition of dependable -- drill a deep hole anywhere you choose, and pump water down there, and you'll get steam to run a generator.

With efficient grid distribution, all this power can be "moved" to where it is needed.

Yes and no. First, in most of the country the hole has to be pretty darned deep, and drilling costs money. Second, you only get so much heat per unit time out of a hole (or an existing geothermal resource such as a hot spring). It comes down to heat flow rates, and rock isn't a good conductor of heat.

Hi James,

Recently, and MIT lab developed a way to drill a 7-8 mile deep hole relatively easily; using a gas cutting head rather than a mechanical one. The heat down that deep is pretty darn close to inexhaustible.

The German video had a lot of "ifs" and "coulds" and other expressions of uncertainty. Sounds like it has an equal probability of being vaporware.

The plan is built on a number of things not likely in the US.

1. The Germans' plan would require a big increase in T&D lines to wheel power about the country. When was the last time a T&D project of any size was done in the US? Last one I can think of was a 25 mile interconnector link that Schwartzenegger pushed through eminent domain to mitigate the power wheeling problems CA had in the early part of the decade. The German plan would require thousands of miles of either 765 kV or DC transmission lines. It would take decades to force that through the courts.

2. A biogas generating plant is still a generating plant and still subject to New Source Review. for the US we are not talking dinky little 70 Mw peakers. We are talking 400 Mw minimum. Not to mention the emissions from the gasification process itself. Surely nobody things that destructive distillation of cellulose is going to occur without air pollution. It would take at least a decade to get the permit and years more of court challenges.

3. Most of the good pumped storage sites in the US have already been developed. In the West you get into water rights issues. In the Midwest and Middle South you have no delta-y. Once again you are talking more than a decade to get the necessary permits and fight off court challenges.

4. Flywheels, spinning on gas bearing and in a vacuum to eliminate windage, were tried back in the 1970s. Energy storage goes up with the square of the RPM so 100,000 RPM was the starting point. Even with carbon fiber wheel webs they flew apart before they got anywhere near the necessary RPM. Nice idea. Doesn't work.

5. The only idea that is not poisoned is the vanadium redox battery, and it is still at a primitive stage. The technology is at least a decade away from application if some lawyer doesn't find a way to challenge it in court for decades more.

...now we get to it
the biggest reason we do not have more solar or wind
- it is more expensive than burning carbon
in this part I'm with Dave - these clever energies are harder

wind is close & so is some biomass - the rest can't compete
yet...

there are some promising solar thermal projects out there. insulation is easythe coffee in my stanley thermos can still burn me 12 hours after i put it in there. running a steam turbine twentyfour-seven, should be pretty easy to figure out

Hello,

Have you folks seen the proposal in Scientific American? It uses a large amount of solar PV and heat systems in the southwest of the USA to generate up to 69% of all the electrical power for the entire contry:

A Solar Grand Plan: Scientific American

High voltage DC transmission lines would connect the generators to the large city nodes. The excess power would be used to compress air into underground caverns, and then when needed, the air pressure would be used to spin turbines and generate it near the consumer.

Also, molten salt could be stored underground near the solar heat plants to store excess heat for days of power w/o the sun.

Add to this, dispersed wind farms from Texas to the Dakotas, and add biomass, geothermal, offshore wind power, tidal power, wave power, and we could have a huge amount of power -- WAY in excess of what we would need.

So, mix and match, disperse, diversify, distribute, conserve -- this alone could cut our needs in half! Almost zero carbon emissions, and zero mercury, and none of the myriad of other pollutants, no fissionable or radioactive materials to leak into ground water or terrorists to covet -- we don't ave to import anything, and we don't fund unfriendly governments. We provide jobs that cannot be globalized, and we have no need to fight over oil, or natural gas.

Lessee -- it pretty much solves at least three major problems: energy, security, and economic stress.

Neil,
I am not going to rehash all the issues we discussed in the other thread, the main issue being intermittency. You are basically proposing that we power the industrial heartland of the U.S. (NY, OH, PE, MI...) with a multi-thousand mile ambilical cord from the windfields of the midwest and the sunbelt of the south-west. You see no security issues here? Do you think those communities that are at the end of the cord will find it acceptable that they are always the butt of the brownouts when energy shortages occur?

DC transmission from the High Plains to the Great Lakes? Thousands and thousands of eminent domain cases. Thousands of appelate court cases.

Hi,

Did you watch the video on what Germany is doing? Geographic distribution, and source distribution answers the "intermittent" issue.

A strong, flexible and robust grid is a key part of the answer -- if we get energy independence that employs lots of people, stops the need for fighting over oil, and drastically cuts pollution. I think it can happen, and I think others will agree with me.

Wind farms can be offshore of both coasts, and wave and tidal power systems are also on the coasts. Biomass can be used in many other places, and so can geothermal. Seems to me like all areas of the country/world have plenty to add to the mix!

It's worth pointing out that these large bladed designs have really high tip velocities.... Which leads to an unfortunate limitation of scale as you get nearer to the sound barrier.

High Altitude It's the future :D

Neil,
I like this as a thought a experiment
but in the real world it will have some issues

DC lost out as the power of choice for very good reasons 100 years ago
Cadmium in PV is not much better than mercury from coal in my book
+3-4 cents per kWh for cavern storage is hard to support 11 cent rates
most of all it starts in 2020 and changes 69% of power distribution in 30 years
I has taken a 100 years to build the system - it will take that long to change it
don't get me wrong - I'm for it - but it must earn its way into the grid
if it doesn't it will be an economic burden of good intentions

BTW
all the best Ideas are always 10-20 years away
I have been dreaming of viable PV for... +25 years

Hey! weren't we supposed to have jet cars by now;)

Its still all theoretical! Germany still uses conventional sources for 85% of thier power, so they have proved nothing in that video.

Power generation, Germany

Denmark the world wind leader is only at 20%. Because they are a small country they just lean on their neighbours to export and import their intermittency problem.

Wind power in Denmark - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Really as I see it the best way to vastly expand renewable energy is to ease up on the restraining laws and policies for property owners in the US.

For example, with net metering of solar panels you cannot make a profit on your solar array as an individual. The best you can do is get to Net 0, which means you create as much power as you use. If you build a system that generates a surplus of electricity over the the agreed time span between you and your electricity provider, you have just donated power you your local supplier. Likewise, your provider will demand that you install a special meter for the service, even though you can set up a panel array and simply convert it to AC and plug it into an outlet to move your meter backwards, which is also illegal without contracts with your local power provider.

These are unacceptable, if we're really serious about getting off oil and expanding solar and wind power then some of these little steps when combined with the current (and hopefully even better future) incentives would create amounts of power that these large scale farms would be hard pressed to match. And paid for with the dollars of private citizens.

The benefits of such a system would have a number of positive effects. A decentralized grid, faster pay off periods for the owners of the systems, long term revenue potential for owners of such systems, conversion of useless spaces (roof tops) rather than using up millions of acres of undeveloped land, lessen power losses from travel, and I could go on.

Really the whole thing is just frustrating, especially since the rules are set up not to help people but to benefit the power providers. The powers that be are currently only playing lip-service to the whole concept, but really they need to suck it up a little and let us have a bite.

So I can call up my local drilling company and hire one of these, no? Until then, it's still theoretical/prototype stuff. Might work, and certainly worth looking into, but we need technology that we can build today - or that should have been built 20 years ago - not "we'll have the bugs worked out in a year or two" pie-in-the-sky.

It's not a question of it being inexhaustible or not. It's a question of how fast the heat will flow through rock. So you drill a well: that's a narrow cylinder. Pumping water down it will boil the water, but will also cool the rock at the surface of the cylinder. That sets up a gradient, so heat will flow from the surrounding high-temperature rock, but since the rock is not a good conductor of heat, it will not flow very fast. For any particular situation - size of well, temperature at the bottom, etc - you will quickly reach a steady-state, where heat flows at a constant rate, which generates X amount of steam and so some fraction of X MWatts of electricity. That's why the geothermal plant up the road only generates 90 MWatts (or whatever the number), and not enough power to run the whole West Coast: because that's the amount of heat that flows into the geothermal area.

Any engineer could easily plug numbers into the relevant equations, and figure out how much power you can expect to generate from a given well. The drilling people can give you a cost on the well, then you need generators, ongoing maintenance, and so on. Do the math, and figure out how much a MWatt is going to cost.

Hiya,

That's what I thought when I first heard about high voltage DC transmission line, too -- but they are in fact very efficient, and they are real. There are at least three working HVDC transmission system already, so forget what you think you know on this!

How is a working system that is reliably supplying 15% of the electricity for a major European nation "theoretical"? If they can improve it and enlarge it, it will supply all their power -- if it was "theoretical", why would the German engineers even think of implementing it?

Can you call your local builder to construct a nuclear power plant for you? The temperature at ~8 miles is ~300C, and sure, you could not put an infinite amount of water down there, but the surface area is pretty big, even if you only count the hole itself; and leave out any cracks or fissures.

Science Friday Archives: Geothermal Energy