The Oil Drum: Net Energy | Energy from Wind: A Discussion of the EROI Research

337 comments on Energy from Wind: A Discussion of the EROI Research

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Nick on October 19, 2006 - 3:16pm

"What technology in particular are you talking about for electric vehicles? 8x the energy consumption even in the same-aerodynamics chassis?"

The question I was answering was: could the grid support the replacement of all light duty (cars, SUV's, pickups) gasoline vehicles with EV's? I used efficient EV's (Tesla) and HEV's (Prius) and compared them to the current fleet average. The comparison helps answer the intuitive question: "isn't that a lot of energy for the grid to supply?" The answer is that it's not really as much energy as you might expect. OTOH, if you compared within the same class of aerodynamics chassis the ratio might be 4-6:1.

The Tesla uses 215 wh/mile, outlet to wheel, and it's optimized for speed, not efficiency.

"What are the 'very good storage methods'?"

I'm mostly thinking of the same things: off-setting hydro, pumped storage, flow batteries, EV planned charging and Vehicle to Grid. "very good" might have been a little strong - "good enough" is probably better, though Alan feels very strongly about the effectiveness of hydro & pumped storage, and I think PHEV & EV's will be very, very useful.

If I understand you, you feel that if wind is otherwise viable that transmission won't be a barrier to it's use. Is that right?

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Squalish on October 19, 2006 - 3:34pm

I feel that in the many orders of magnitude of technology improvement necessary to shift to a sustainable energy future, a 25% energy loss to transmit electricity from as far as Seattle to Boston is a pittance. The many years of wind capacity growth of ~25% only needs an extra 1 year if you were producing it all in Seattle and bringing it to Boston. Which you're not.

That sending your solar produced in Texas to Los Angeles probably has less of of an energy footprint than storing it in pumped storage in Texas for later use in Dallas is helpful.

A good portion of industrial use can be tempered to low-usage times. Smelters don't have to operate at 4:30pm when everyone at once turns on their AC. That and EV planned seem like they'd have a lot bigger effect than vehicle to grid, which is hopelessly decentralized + inconveniant IMO.

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Nick on October 19, 2006 - 4:09pm

Yeah, V2G would be pretty complicated to implement in a largescale way. Using it for household backup might be easier.

OTOH, these days cars are pretty much computers that happen to have wheels, and communication & control through intelligent meters might not be difficult to do in the long run. Things will change a great deal in the next couple of decades, I think.

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Nick on October 19, 2006 - 4:11pm

"Using it for household backup might be easier."

I meant household demand management & time shifting. Though I have seen somebody use a Prius as a household UPS....

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Engineer-Poet on October 19, 2006 - 10:29pm

I feel that in the many orders of magnitude of technology improvement necessary to shift to a sustainable energy future...

I think you've overestimated the problem here. It appears that less than 1 order of magnitude in conversion from biomass to energy will do to replace all petroleum motor fuels. There are energy-positive structures being built; with continued improvement in their cost structure (a large part of which will be economies of scale) and increasing price of fossil fuels, and they'll be cheaper than conventional structures too.

Smelters don't have to operate at 4:30pm when everyone at once turns on their AC.

Actually, many industrial processes require continuous control. Thermal cycling of the insulation in a smelter is bad; blast furnaces are often rebuilt after each shutdown.

That and EV planned seem like they'd have a lot bigger effect than vehicle to grid, which is hopelessly decentralized

Many commentators consider decentralization a virtue.

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Squalish on October 19, 2006 - 11:13pm

Many commentators are going to be pissed when they find their new EVs half charged because it wasn't very windy today(though PHEVs have a bit of an advantage here). Vehicle to grid requires perfectly sinchronized 60hz invertors at every house with near zero drift. It requires intelligent load balancing across a network of vehicles so prone to break down that you have a repair shop within a few miles of your house. I'm all for solar decentralization, perhaps inverted at the neighorhood level. But load balancing based on a vehicle that's driven off the grid, needs to be reliably kept at a high charge percentage, and which relies on battery tech with limited charge/recharge cycles, doesn't seem like a good way to use resources. Even solar-to-grid is rather difficult - preventing islanding and keeping in phase with good power factor and such are hard. It's simply much easier to drive the grid waveform from a single or few highly managed sources. Using car batteries for distributed storage requires very smart management that isn't possible with our current grid.

Shifting charging demand over to certain times is much, much easier. It's trivial and self-regulating to setup a wifi or wimax network and send out an expected power price over time chart, then have a locally smart charger fill that up with the cheapest juice.

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I wasn't really talking about short-term demand, though I guess I'm a bit out of my league here. Would changing the standard electricity-intensive heavy industry worker over to a night shift be possible as a means of deflecting demand from peak periods?

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Sorry I was rather vague in the first statement - I should have stuck to wind capacity. A ~10% or so average hit in transmission costs from the nearest rural area populated with wind turbines is nothing, compared to the many thousands of percent that would be needed to shift most of our energy production over to wind turbines.

It means that yes, if we wanted to we could built an underwater nuclear complex in the center of the south pacific thousands of miles from the nearest human, and shift over all the energy to our homes at a cost of increasing the complex size by a paltry 50% or so over what we could build right here.

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wwswimming on October 21, 2006 - 10:59am

hi

why is the synchronization at 60 Hz with system wide phase coherence difficult ?

i'm worked on R&D teams where phase locked loops were up in the 200 MHz ballpark.

there's got to be a way to synchronize phase at 60 Hz.

wwswimming
at
yahoo.com

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AlanfromBigEasy on October 21, 2006 - 11:21am

he many thousands of percent that would be needed to shift most of our energy production over to wind turbines.

Your cost estimates are WAY off. With no economic value attached to GW today, the zero GHG grid that I proposed would likely raise rates 50% to 75% (which would happen anyway).

A steady rise in carbon taxes would push us towards that sort of grid anyway (nukes need pumped storage as well to neet anything more than peak load). Depending on costs associated with nukes (remember costs of the last dozen finished in the US, and the new Finnish one seems in trouble early) and just how steep the decline is in WTs and other renewable costs (WT electricity will be cheaper in 2012 than today, Not so for nuke) the mix will be somewhere between 23% nuke and ~/2.3rds nuke on strictly economics alone.

More than 2/3rds nuke begins to run into significant problems. France is able to get up to 90% nuke becasue they sell power all night long to ALL of their neighbors. Swiss utilites buy night power from several French nukes and save their water for selling back to the French, Germans, Italians at peak (at 3 to 5 times the price). Perhaps we can do the same with Canada.

Also nuke is VERY risky to build a society on because of common design flaws. Any design can have a hidden flaw, which, when discovered, requires shutting down ALL reactors of that type for months tp years. It has happened several times already and will happen again. No one reactor type should IMHO supply more than 4% of national power. Unexpectedly losing 4% of your generation is a blow, but it can be worked around with luck. More than 4% ? Nope.

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Nick on October 20, 2006 - 11:11am

"many industrial processes require continuous control."

EP, I'm surprised at your emphasis here. A LOT of industrial power is shifted to the night to take advantage of lower rates. Heck, I have a steel mill a mile from my home that shifts into overdrive at night...

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