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My point was that one cause-- loss of wind-- was being singled out for blame for an emergency that clearly had multiple causes.
The biggest cause was the sudden unexpected spike in demand due to colder temperatures moving into the state. From the numbers in the article, it seems that *if wind hadn't dropped*, this alone would have caused a stage 1 emergency. Why was this the temperature drop and power spike unexpected? Large changes in temp can typically be predicted hours, even days in advance.
The article also says "multiple power suppliers fell below the amount of power they were scheduled to produce on Tuesday." Details, please, Reuters! How did the magnitude of these shortfalls compare to the magnitude of the wind shortfall? How many suppliers fell short? Why? What was their power source?
Given that a large spike in power was (or should have been) expected, and that multiple (non-wind) power suppliers were falling short, why wasn't standby backup increased, even at the cost of wasting fuel? When you have some problems, and more are on the way, that's the time to increase your safety margin.
And why wasn't the wind shortfall predicted? I'm no meteorologist, but it would seem to me that a large decrease in wind over a large area (i.e., movement of fronts) should be predictable on the timescale of hours.
So I think that the bottom line is that yes, a wind shortfall did cause problems. But the emergency happened because a lot of things went wrong; the drop in the wind was only a (relatively minor) cause.
I don't seek to write wind off on the basis of one outage, but the problems are rather tougher than for some other sources.
Fossil fuel or nuclear can usually be just scheduled for maintenance, and taken off line at a time known way in advance, although of course you can have the occasional breakdown, but wind is by it's nature variable, so is tougher to balance all the time, and the back up needed for any given level of security of supply would tend to be higher, although by no means one for one.
German and Danish infrastructure is 'probably' usually run at higher safety margins than is common in America, just like the highways, so a higher penetration of wind may be easier than in most places in the states.
With the typical low-levels of infrastructure investment in the States it seems likely that there could be more frequent problems where wind increases it's share of generation much.
My original comment had been concerned with bias in the Reuters article, not the broader issue of suitability of wind. But the latter is interesting to talk about.
Your post perpetuates a common myth: "Fossil fuel or nuclear can usually be just scheduled for maintenance, and taken off line at a time known way in advance, although of course you can have the occasional breakdown"
Unscheduled maintenance is just a serious problem for fossil (at least coal). According to this study
I don't know the comparable figures for nuclear, but remember that when nuclear unexpectedly goes down, a lot goes down all at once. Witness the power outages in florida earlier this week, and similar unscheduled shutdowns in Spain and Japan last year.
As the study cited above notes, simply by linking geographically diverse wind turbines, one can achieve a "baseload supply" (i.e., availability comparable to coal) of one third of nameplate wind capacity. Again, that's without any form of storage.
You are right that infrastructure investments are necessary. But investments are necessary to build the wind turbines in the first place. Think of the extra infrastructure as part of the cost.
As I always say ... 'watch and learn' - as we inevitably move to more and more alternatives to FF expect instability and intermittent power, grids are complex machines - this is how many parts of the world have to work already, individuals in those countries plan so as to mitigate it's effects ... you can too!
I don't want to come across as some sort of anti-wind loon - I try to judge every suggestion on it's own merits.
In fact, for the UK at least, variability may be less of a problem than is currently realised:
http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/publications/downloads/sinden05-dtiwindreport.pd...
sinden05-dtiwindreport.pdf
However, that does not mean that the variability, both over the short-term and the rather longer term will not cause any problems, and particularly in the US with it's history of minimal investment in infrastructure that may cause problems.
It is up to you to make your own judgement, but it seems to me that a high level of penetration of wind power in the States might cause more problems than a similar level in Europe.
With wind having a rather high EROI already, has anyone done an HONEST feasibility study on what the costs and options for storage might be? Pressurized air wind energy storage? Heat?
Given wind's strong advantages in other areas I don't think it would be all too difficult to mitigate the intermittency issue with a little planning and forethought.
With these renewables it just looks like we're going have to build some storage capacity. I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing. Just part of the solution.
I favor pumped hydro as cost effective. People will say that you have to have the land for it and not everyone has the vertical rise. Even in the flat lands of Texas, there could be enough of a plateau for this. It is pretty efficient and can provide water storage for crops and homes.
There was a recent study in Scientific American which sought to show that it would be possible to generate all the power for the US using solar energy, and transmitting it as needed from the South-West to other areas.
Amongst other issues discovered was the proposed storage mechanism to make up for overnight capacity.
They wanted to use compressed air.
The problem is with that is when you come to use it you have to re-heat it, and they were going to use natural gas for the purpose.
The burn would have been huge, if my memory is correct much larger than current gas use.
Other storage proposals run into similar problems.
It boils down to that unless you are very lucky and have access to hydroelectric capacity, as Denmark does from Scandanavia, then effectively you have to have large amounts of FF capacity to back-up, and that a proportion of it will be spinning capacity, ie fired up but idling, and burning fuel in the process.
When it is brought into action it is then much less efficient for the first half hour or so.
You might also perhaps build vast polders in the ocean or great lakes, and pump water in them, but the costs would be added to the already large costs of windpower, and so are pretty impractical for the foreseeable future.
Recent costs for the UK's proposed 33GW nameplate off-shore wind build were given as £66bn - and you only get around 10-11GW of power per hour from that on average, so it works out at around £6.6bn GW - hugely expensive without building fancy storage, and at least twice the price of a nuclear build.
You can reduce that of course if you have somewhere to put the turbines on land with good wind resources, as is the case in many areas of the States, but it is still pricey before you start building huge amounts of storage.
T Boone Pickens is currently building the biggest wind farm in the world in Texas, 4GW nameplate for $10bn.
The problem is of course that the actual energy flow on average per hour on a generous figure of 35% average capacity is only around 1.4GW.
Let's round that up for convenience and to be very fair and call it 1.5GW.
That is $6.6bn GW - about half the cost of off-shore but still dear and around the price of a nuclear build which would not suffer from the same need for storage at high rates of penetration.
So the wind option can be useful, particularly where it tracks well with peak use, but is a very long way indeed from being able to power most of the grid at any reasonable cost.
There are two concepts intermingled here. First is capacity factor. That is just the total electrical production over a year divided by the nameplate rating x the hours in the year. The US nuclear fleet is hitting over 90% regularly. The initial design economic assumptions for these large nukes was 70% or 80% so they are doing really well.
The second is forced outage rate. That's when unplanned shutdowns occur. It used to be that a nuke would scram once or twice a year. Scrams seldom happen anymore. Most US nukes startup and run 18 months without hiccup or trip at 100% capacity.
They do have to be shutdown once in a while to remove old fuel and add fresh. Most plants do this over an 18 month fuel cycle. Refueling takes from 12 to 30 days depending on other work underway and the specific plant design features. New nukes are supposed to do 17 days with all required maintenance.
Coal plants have the capacity factor mentioned above but since they are fueled continuously, they don't need to be suhtdown for refueling. Hence, almost all of their downtime (but not all) is due to forced outages. Typically a boiler tube will blow or a burner with clog up, stuff like that.
We nukes call coal plants "dirt burners."
Your cited claim that wind power can claim 33% capacity is incorrect and is academic wishful thinking. In Texas, for example, ERCOT only allows 8% credit and that's generous.
Chapterwon and Dave;
I agree that the emphasis was unnecessarily harsh on windpower, which we know will be a variable supply. My contention is that a great portion of the fault lies with our system being built on the 'Assumption of Steady, Continuous Energy' Petroleum has fed us this myth for decades, and we are looking to all the other sources to back up that promise.
Petroleum and Gas will prove their intermittency soon enough, and in the rearview mirror of history it will look like One On, and then One Off.. Solar and Wind go away, but they keep coming back. Nuclear looks sort of steady from this 5 decade window at the height of Petroleum's abundance, but I am very skeptical that it can survive in a world without such a meaty petroleum backup supply. I've said it before.. I think Nuclear DEMANDS as much of a 'Baseload' of energy around it as it seems to offer.
The core problem is that we need to feed our towns, homes and businesses like anything else in the natural world eats.. you have to store energy and be able to ride out periods of scarcity. Life doesn't operate on this 'baseload' fantasy, we've just been able to mimic that euclidean ideal concept for a little while since we found that motherlode. It has been a fun little mask that we wore to pretend that we aren't children of 'Mother Nature'.. she has never even been that far away, we just acted like we were Astronauts for a spell.
Bob Fiske
Well said sir. And at 90 billion per major plant nuclear does seem to be a very intense form of energy. I'm not completely adverse to nuclear the way some are, though. I could be wrong. But as for wind and solar, I'm in complete agreement. We need to build the storage.