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238 comments on DrumBeat: February 28, 2008

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chapterwon on February 28, 2008 - 12:01pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

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

because coal plants were shut down for scheduled maintenance 6.5% of the year and unscheduled maintenance or forced outage for another 6% of the year on average in the United States from 2000 to 2004, coal energy from a given plant is guaranteed only 87.5% of the year, with a typical range of 79%–92% (North American Electric Reliability Council 2005; Giebel 2000)

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.

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xeroid on February 28, 2008 - 12:44pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

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!

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DaveMart on February 28, 2008 - 2:03pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

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.

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Robert Marston on February 28, 2008 - 2:29pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

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.

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CalGuy on February 28, 2008 - 2:45pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

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.

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DaveMart on February 29, 2008 - 8:21am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

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.

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Joseph Somsel on February 28, 2008 - 7:37pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

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.

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