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13 comments on In A Year, It'll Be Like Telephone Poles

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Engineer-Poet on March 16, 2006 - 3:56pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Where do you get the 10% effective capacity from?  Multiplying the 30% capacity factor by itself?  That's faulty (dishonest) accounting.
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ericr on March 16, 2006 - 5:33pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
As I said up there, the 10% effective capacity figure is from an analysis by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority: "The effects of integrating wind power on transmission system planning, reliability, and operations," March 4, 2005, prepared by GE Energy Consulting (an odd choice, since GE Wind is profiting greatly from public policies supporting wind power, but it does make the 10% figure all the more believable and even generous).

The Royal Academy of Engineering in the U.K., the Irish Grid, and a couple of studies in Germany (according to grid manager Eon Netz) all calculate that the effective capacity of wind is about a third of its average capacity.

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LevinK on March 16, 2006 - 7:50pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
If you account for the higher losses from power transmission from wind-mills located who-knows-where, the losses for maintaining a spinning reserve or from enforced pumped storage, the thermodynamic losses of rapidly ramping up or down reserve capacity and all others related to wind power variability, the overall efficiency will be well south of 20%.
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Engineer-Poet on March 20, 2006 - 2:39am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Sounds like a lack of DSM to me; if the operator could turn water heaters and the like on and off with the variations of the wind, all those problems would disappear.
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