Terxpahseyton
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My mom told me that when she was a teenager (30+ years back) there was a row of very warm winters without any significant snow.
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Table not a graph, but worth sharing:
Electricity from new installations of wind power will be as cheap as from new installations of coal power in the US by 2016. It may be already, they used 2016 because of the long lead times for some types of power plant.
Basically we're still getting better at wind turbines. Quality is increasing, price is falling as economies of scale kick in, experience is growing in operation and maintainance and therefore curving those costs down, and more wind installation in a grid should mean a higher capacity factor (more actual output per MW of capacity).
Note particularly how the higher fixed operation and maintainance cost and higher upfront capital costs are offset by the cost of fuel for other types of power generation. Throw in carbon prices where they exist, and the potential for future fuel price rises and the picture looks even more interesting.
Electricity from new installations of wind power will be as cheap as from new installations of coal power in the US by 2016. It may be already, they used 2016 because of the long lead times for some types of power plant.
Basically we're still getting better at wind turbines. Quality is increasing, price is falling as economies of scale kick in, experience is growing in operation and maintainance and therefore curving those costs down, and more wind installation in a grid should mean a higher capacity factor (more actual output per MW of capacity).
Note particularly how the higher fixed operation and maintainance cost and higher upfront capital costs are offset by the cost of fuel for other types of power generation. Throw in carbon prices where they exist, and the potential for future fuel price rises and the picture looks even more interesting.
Monsterzuma
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nice, although intermittency is still a major problem. barring a breakthrough in energy storage technology or massive continent-wide power grids, you can't run a grid on wind power alone. even if theoretically you could it would be a new undertaking with all kinds of development risks.
The US could do it with an seriously upgraded Smart Grid and lot of offshore windfarms in the East.
Of course you can't run a grid on wind alone. You can't run a grid on anything alone, even coal or nuclear (well you could with those, but it would be expensive and wasteful because you can't turn them on and off quickly in response to demand fluctuations). Different generation methods have different cost profiles (mostly maintaince versus mostly fuel, for instance) and you need a market with multiple sources to find the optimum mix at the best value.
The point here is that onshore wind power generation is a mature and viable technology and that the challenges are not now technological, they are entirely of political will and of financial investment. The current grids and generators took decades to build, overhauling them is a significant undertaking. That's not a failing of wind and other technology to be good enough, it's a simple economic limit on the speed at which change can occur, period.
All wind's intermittency does is change how you do that generation mix because it changes the market operator dispatch process from being entirely dictated by bidding and demand, to also being dictated by weather fluctuations. It's not actually a technical challenge, and intermittency is already accounted for by the fact that the capacity factor used is only 34%. What that means is actual GWh output is every 100 MW of wind turbines are producing 34% of total theoretically possible GWh a year, on average. Individual turbines are unpredictable, but an aggregation of them is less so.
You may be interested in this: Busting the baseload power myth
This image in particular is illustrative:
Substitute things like gas and combined cycle into the latter diagram (he's shilling for solar thermal which is still a bit too immature to be very useful yet) for a better understanding of how it works currently in places with high wind capacity like Spain or probably Texas. Wind power get priority, the rest of the dispatch process fills the remaining demand around it. What wind does is reduce the need for what we currently call "baseload" but probably increase the need for a bit more peaking capacity.
Monsterzuma
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I'm suspicious of the mention of "energy storage". Usually the batteries concerned rely on rare minerals that would become unaffordable when renewable energy gets scale up a lot. Like I said, a breakthrough in that area would change the situation.
Storage? The only mention is solar thermal, where "storage" is "superheated water or molten salt stays hot for a long time" as opposed to batteries. But as I said, in the second graph substitute more conventional generation (like gas and combined cycle) in place of solar thermal with storage, because he's shilling an immature product.
The underlying point is entirely valid, with no reference to any form of "storage". Uncontrolled wind without storage can form the basis of a significant chunk of electricity demand, and constant-output baseload generation is not actually essential.
The underlying point is entirely valid, with no reference to any form of "storage". Uncontrolled wind without storage can form the basis of a significant chunk of electricity demand, and constant-output baseload generation is not actually essential.
Batteries, the conventional type at any rate, are not really what they are talking about for mass energy storage. You could never build that many conventional batteries. That's something that still needs a lot of development for the future.
Possibly, but that's not a dealbreaker. I'll try and dig up a graph of wind output in Spain, a place where wind is a big part of the generation mix (16% in 2011 and rising steadily).
Firstly, everything in an electricity wide-area grid fluctuates anyway because of changing demand over the course of the day and year. Generation is arranged in short intervals by market operators, in Australia means the generation mix is changing every 5 minute period even eithout renewables. Weather forecasting is actually already an important part of the grid management process - if it's very hot or cold, then there's going to be greater demand and extreme peak demand periods. Grids handle that fluctuation perfectly well.
Compensating for fluctuating wind is not a huge technical challenge beyond compensating for fluctuating demand, but wind forecasting just creates another variable for the operator controlling the grid to take into account. Wind tends to ramp up and down smoothly enough to be factored in the same way demand changes are. When there's low wind, other sources (especially gas and hydro which have short start-up times) can be fired up to compensate. The tradeoff of course is that on windy days, wind displaces nearly everything else in the generation mix.
But secondly, fluctuation is reduced by sufficient numbers and distribution of turbines. Weather in one place fluctuates but macro level conditions are less variable. Averaged across longer periods and larger areas, wind power output becomes fairly predictable and able to be planned for, same as any other form of energy market forecasting predicts future generation mixes, based on demand variability.
Firstly, everything in an electricity wide-area grid fluctuates anyway because of changing demand over the course of the day and year. Generation is arranged in short intervals by market operators, in Australia means the generation mix is changing every 5 minute period even eithout renewables. Weather forecasting is actually already an important part of the grid management process - if it's very hot or cold, then there's going to be greater demand and extreme peak demand periods. Grids handle that fluctuation perfectly well.
Compensating for fluctuating wind is not a huge technical challenge beyond compensating for fluctuating demand, but wind forecasting just creates another variable for the operator controlling the grid to take into account. Wind tends to ramp up and down smoothly enough to be factored in the same way demand changes are. When there's low wind, other sources (especially gas and hydro which have short start-up times) can be fired up to compensate. The tradeoff of course is that on windy days, wind displaces nearly everything else in the generation mix.
But secondly, fluctuation is reduced by sufficient numbers and distribution of turbines. Weather in one place fluctuates but macro level conditions are less variable. Averaged across longer periods and larger areas, wind power output becomes fairly predictable and able to be planned for, same as any other form of energy market forecasting predicts future generation mixes, based on demand variability.
Here we go. Dug up the wind industry association's annual report for 2011 - http://www.aeeolica.org/uploads/documents/Anuario 11 completo.pdf Which has wind output broken down by month.
This is total monthly electricity demand over the last 5 years:
As you can see, demand is higher in Spain's winter than in its summer, with a smaller peak at the height of summer before everyone goes on holiday in August.
This is monthly wind generation:
As you can see, it varies but in relatively predictble ways. Happily, peak wind output seems to coincide with the cold wintery periods of peak demand, which presumably is part of why Spain's gone so hard on building its wind industry. It's not as good at addressing the summer peak, though.
Finally, just for reference, this is total yearly generation and percentage contribution of wind power in Spain. The most recent figure is 16% of total demand. Looking at this it seems the industry expectation is for capacity to roughly double by 2020.
This is total monthly electricity demand over the last 5 years:
As you can see, demand is higher in Spain's winter than in its summer, with a smaller peak at the height of summer before everyone goes on holiday in August.
This is monthly wind generation:
As you can see, it varies but in relatively predictble ways. Happily, peak wind output seems to coincide with the cold wintery periods of peak demand, which presumably is part of why Spain's gone so hard on building its wind industry. It's not as good at addressing the summer peak, though.
Finally, just for reference, this is total yearly generation and percentage contribution of wind power in Spain. The most recent figure is 16% of total demand. Looking at this it seems the industry expectation is for capacity to roughly double by 2020.
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Monsterzuma
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They have been mentioned in this context before:
http://peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/2006/04/274-flow-batteries.html
BAM. Here we go. Daily fluctuations for the month of November 2011 in Spain. From the market operator - http://www.omel.com/files/informe_mensual_noviembre_2011.pdf
The green "eolica" is wind power.
Some other terms and notes: Regimen especial is "special regime", meaning it is treated differently to conventional fossil fuel and nuclear power generation (it probably gets priority dispatch). It is divided into wind, solar, and everything else. The red "everything else" is biomass, cogeneration and other non-traditional combustion. If memory serves, cogeneration forms the bulk of it, mostly based on natural gas.
You can see "carbon" (meaning coal), gas, combined cycle and "hidraulica" (ie hydro), picking up the slack on low wind days.
Take a look at the 13th - see how coal shuts down because it's a lower demand day with high wind? The fact that coal has a gap-filling role suggests that the market has plenty of warning (ie, several hours) to bring coal plants online or offline, since they're slow to start up.
Nuclear obviously forms a steady base but if it wasn't there everything else controllable and variable would be contributing more. It's steady because it's going to be under-bidding everything else and selling all of its power at all times. Coal does the same thing in Australia.
My GUESS is that the carbon price in Spain helps both nuclear and cogeneration underbid coal and perform the traditional baseload function.
Imports are minimal in Spain's case.
The green "eolica" is wind power.
Some other terms and notes: Regimen especial is "special regime", meaning it is treated differently to conventional fossil fuel and nuclear power generation (it probably gets priority dispatch). It is divided into wind, solar, and everything else. The red "everything else" is biomass, cogeneration and other non-traditional combustion. If memory serves, cogeneration forms the bulk of it, mostly based on natural gas.
You can see "carbon" (meaning coal), gas, combined cycle and "hidraulica" (ie hydro), picking up the slack on low wind days.
Take a look at the 13th - see how coal shuts down because it's a lower demand day with high wind? The fact that coal has a gap-filling role suggests that the market has plenty of warning (ie, several hours) to bring coal plants online or offline, since they're slow to start up.
Nuclear obviously forms a steady base but if it wasn't there everything else controllable and variable would be contributing more. It's steady because it's going to be under-bidding everything else and selling all of its power at all times. Coal does the same thing in Australia.
My GUESS is that the carbon price in Spain helps both nuclear and cogeneration underbid coal and perform the traditional baseload function.
Imports are minimal in Spain's case.
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Maybe I think on a too small scale due to how the debate is going in Germany. The whole US (or EU for that matter) is large enough to be covered entirely by low-pressure areas so the wind can really always be caught somewhere.
Ziggy Stardust
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Well the EU is a significant geographic dispersion. A major weather event may once in a while cover the whole area. But you'll never get all of the places with no wind some day. And if you get offshore, the wind is even more reliable. Europe has a lot of coast.
Spain's graph above should be pretty relevant to Germany.
There is fluctuation of course, but the point is it's smooth, slow and predictable enough that within a grid, any type of installed capacity appears able to compensate and operate as a counter-balance to the wind fluctuations (if coal can, anything can).
There is fluctuation of course, but the point is it's smooth, slow and predictable enough that within a grid, any type of installed capacity appears able to compensate and operate as a counter-balance to the wind fluctuations (if coal can, anything can).
Mise
isle of lucy
Wow, I was always under the impression that coal had to be part of the baseload and "always on", because turning on and off a coal station was too hard. Amazing that this is actually working right now in Spain; I hope the British government has taken note.
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