 | Fatih Birol Presents the IEA World Energy Outlook 2007 | The Oil Drum: Europe | ODAC Newsletter, Monday 10 December |  |
Blogroll
- ASPO The official site of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas.
- Energy Bulletin Clearing house for news regarding the peak in global energy supply.
- PowerSwitch Dedicated to raising awareness & discussion of the impending & permanent decline of cheap oil & gas supply.
- ODAC Oil Depletion Analysis Centre working to raise awareness and promote better understanding of the world's oil-depletion problem.
- Global Public Media Public service broadcasting for a post carbon world.
- Post Carbon Institute Learning to live in a low energy world.
- PeakOil.com US site and forum to educate and promote awareness of global hydrocarbon depletion.
- FEASTA The Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability
- Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs) This website describes an effective and fair response both to climate change and oil/gas depletion
Other Blogs
User login
Personnel
Editors
Contributors
Peak Oil Primers
Archives
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
- July 2006
- June 2006
- May 2006
- April 2006
- March 2006
Vital Trivia
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
GAIA Host Collective
No, actually wind production patterns quite closely follow consumption mattern, being lowest at night and highest in the afternoon. Offshore is the same, with smaller intra day variations (on average). I have a graph showing this, but not on this computer, I'll try to post it later.
Wind turbine are actually helpful to maintain voltage stability and reactive power.
No, actually wind production patterns quite closely follow consumption mattern, being lowest at night and highest in the afternoon. Offshore is the same, with smaller intra day variations (on average). I have a graph showing this, but not on this computer, I'll try to post it later.
Wind turbine are actually helpful to maintain voltage stability and reactive power.
In your story entitled: No Technical Limitation to Wind Power Penetration published on line in the European Tribune,
http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2007/1/28/183633/609
I found a link which led me to a report by the Tyndall Center for Climate Change entitled: Security assessment of future UK electricity scenarios.
http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/research/theme2/project_overviews/t2_24.shtml
In this report they modeled the effects of wind penetration into the U.K. electricity mix up to 37% of total electric energy supplies. At this level of penetration they claim that only 9.4% of conventional capacity can be retired. This claim alone would appear to imply that this model is in strong disagreement with your claim that “wind turbines are actually helpful to maintain voltage stability”. However, here is specific verbiage from the report about the need to compensate for wind variability with conventional generation:
Due to this disproportion between conventional capacity and energy substitution by the wind source, a considerable number of thermal plants will be running at low output levels over a significant proportion of their operational time in order to accommodate wind energy. Consequently these plants will have to compromise on their efficiency, resulting in increased levels of fuel consumption as well as emissions per unit of electricity produced. This will cause higher electricity production costs.
The average load factors for conventional plants, with 25GW installed wind capacity at 35% average output, will reduce to about 40% (utilization factor for UK plants in the year 2002 was 54%)[DTI04]. Nevertheless the cost recovery of those plants that might be forced to run at lower load factors will be a major challenge for future electricity systems.
Would you care to comment on the contradiction between the conclusions of this paper and your statement above?
See my comments that the UK needs a half dozen pumped storage schemes in Wales & Scotland. These could absorb the fluctuations nicely. Interconnections to hydroproducers Iceland & Norway would also be useful.
Alan
I agree that storage is needed for effective integration of wind energy into the grid. Including it will naturally increase the costs. Also if they end up pumping fresh water rather than sea water then seasonality issues and long term fluctuations in rainfall may also affect the economics. Iceland seems like it's a long way away from the U.K. Norway is already providing effective storage for Danish wind power producers. They may have excess capacity, but I doubt that they can provide storage services to all of Europe.
Roger
Pumped storage water (other than - evaporation & + rainfall) is recycled. One time allotment basically.
Pumped Storage is also requied with a high % nuke grid (France uses Swiss Hydro + German coal, Italian, Spanish, Belgium FF + Luxembourg pumped storage to balance their nukes at night). Uk does not have the interconnections to do that. A high % nuke UK would also require pumped storage. As would massive tidal powerplants.
Landsvirkjun made a study on supplying 2 GW of peak hydropower to UK a dozen + years ago. UK uninterested, plant was built instead for steady 540 MW for aluminum smelter.
UK has best wind resources in EU, so "getting your share" should mean a fair % of Norwegian (and even Swedish) hydro. Biggest threat is large Norse wind development IMO.
Best Hopes,
Alan
There is no contradiction whatsoever. You need a lot of wind MW to replace a conventional MW (roughly 4 for 1). But each MWh of wind replaces a MWh of conventional electricity.
All we care about are MWh, not MW.
I wrote:
In this report they modeled the effects of wind penetration into the U.K. electricity mix up to 37% of total electric energy supplies.
I said 'energy' and I meant 'energy'. I know the difference between MW and MWh. In this report 37% displacement of energy (MWh) supply resulted in 9.4% displacement capacity (MW). Have you actually read the report? I got the link to it from your article. You have not answered my question. You also conveniently ignored the statement by the report authors talking about the need to turn conventional generation plants up and down to compensate for wind variability which is in clear contradiction to your statement that wind capacity adds to the voltage stability of the grid.
I have written it three times: wind power replaces few conventional MWs. Yes, that's true. It does not matter. What causes global warming is conventional MWh, not conventional MW. So yes, wind power development requires that conventional capacity be kept in place - but used much less than now. I fail to see how this is a problem. It's not like you need to build new gas-fired plants, they are already there.
As to stability, I'm not sure what you mean. How are starts and stops of gas-fired plants detrimental to voltage stability?
I do not dispute that wind generation displaces some amount of CO2 emissions. I am not arguing that wind power is a useless technology, but we need to be realistic about its economic potential. The fact that with 37% energy displacement over 90% of conventional generation remains in place means that the capital cost of a wind/conventional generation system is much higher than conventional generation alone. And as the authors of the study quoted above point out the displacement of emissions is far less than 37% since spinning reserve and peaking reserve emit much more CO2 per kHw produced, and in addition this excess fuel use means excess costs.
Also natural gas, and after it coal, are going to decline in supply. If we have only displaced 9.4% of conventional capacity at 37% energy penetration then how are we going to produce a stable grid voltage in a post-fossil fuel world? My feeling is that in the long term effective integration of wind capacity will require energy storage which will add substantially to the costs.
I am convinced that wind energy will play an important role in humanity's future, but the claim that wind is already cheaper than natural gas and that there are no economic limits to obtaining arbitrarily large amounts of grid electricity from this source is incorrect.
The fundamental realization that the developed world needs to come to is that our levels of economic production are already too high and that reduction of consumption should be a primary goal. Encouraging people to believe that wind can easily substitute for fossil fuel and thus maintain our high consumption lifestyles without guilt about CO2 emission is dangerous.