Wind Power To Be Collected More Efficiently

It will be done by optimizing siting.

Evolution is providing the inspiration for University of Adelaide computer science research to find the best placement of turbines to increase wind farm productivity.

Senior Lecturer Dr Frank Neumann, from the School of Computer Science, is using a “selection of the fittest” step-by-step approach called “evolutionary algorithms” to optimise wind turbine placement. This takes into account wake effects, the minimum amount of land needed, wind factors and the complex aerodynamics of wind turbines.

What a Nice Bit Of Work. Collecting energy which is mostly useless more efficiently is a big advance. Evidently storage – which is the real missing ingredient is more difficult.

Not useless you say? This story says otherwise.

Today in Scotland, as the Great Recession rolls on, and as newly reprimitivized “wind farms” replace more tried and true — and apparently predictable – methods of electricity generation, history rhymes rather nicely. The BBC reports, “Six Scottish windfarms were paid up to £300,000 to stop producing energy, it has emerged:”

I guess wind is different. With normal power plants you pay for the energy used. With wind plants unusable energy now has value. Well not to civilization of course. But the wind farmers do quite nicely.

H/T Instapundit

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Alarmism

More than six billion humans face extinction every year. And every year millions die. If the death rate accelerates it is hard to predict the overwhelmingly catastrophic consequences.

Inspired by Ecologist who says:

More than 25% of flowers face extinction – many before they are even discovered

I wonder if he didn't spell his name wrong. Mistakes happen. I'm just wondering if it shouldn't be Ecoligist.

And where did I find this person? At the Guardian UK's enviro blog where they claim Germany will get all its energy from renewables (or France) by 2050.

I wonder what their plan is for days when the wind doesn't blow? Or days when it blows too strong? Solar I guess until the sun goes down.

Except for one minor problem, German subsidies will be shifted from solar to wind.

The German photovoltaic industry knew bad news was on the way, and it could have been worse. Last week, Germany’s Environment Ministry recommended a shift in subsidies from solar energy installations to offshore wind farms. The solar sector breathed a collective sigh of relief because the subsidy could have easily been significantly cut or completely eliminated. Nevertheless outraged, the German Solar Industry Association issued a statement complaining that its members were in “a sensitive phase of development and [face] harsh competition with Asia.”

With Germany's impressive track record of renewable energy legislation, we have to wonder if the future will cause fickle investors to flock to wind now that solar subsidies have been cut in Germany. On the surface, this might look like a victory for wind power, but if you do a bit of digging, a different picture emerges.

Germans get 13% of their energy from renewable sources, but little of this energy comes from offshore wind farms, and the technology has been struggling to get out of the starting blocks. "The development of the offshore wind industry has gone forward more slowly than expected," said Michael Schroeren, a spokesman for Germany’s environment ministry. "And the cost of these new technologies is also higher than was expected." By shifting subsidies from solar to wind, the German government is essentially signaling to the market that wind isn't doing that great, and that the technology needs all the help it can get.

And why is a subsidy even necessary? Simple. Solar and wind are not competitive without lower cost collectors and really low cost storage. Otherwise you have to keep coal and natural gas plants on hot standby to make up for instantaneous declines in output. And of course on a really good day when solar and wind are producing more electricity than needed the excess is just wasted. And you still need the fossil fuel plants on hot standby - just in case. So where is the subsidy for storage? Not in evidence.

It looks to me like a classic case of ignorant politicians leading a stupid people. Well, in the long run the Germans (and every one else for that matter) always get what they deserve. Let us hope they get it good and hard and soon. Pour encourager les autres. Nothing like a Greek tragedy to wake people up.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

A Solar Powered Government

A wind and solar powered government? I kid you not.

WASHINGTON — The federal government, the nation's largest energy consumer, will reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 28% over the next decade, the White House will announce today.

"It's a real opportunity to lead by example," says Nancy Sutley, chairwoman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). "And not just for the environment but to spur innovation and create jobs and savings."

The council says the reduction in energy use in the government's 500,000 buildings and 600,000 vehicles will be equal to taking 17 million cars off the road for a year or not consuming 205 million barrels of oil.

Some states, cities and companies have set similar goals, but environmentalists say the federal government's plan is ambitious. "It's a bold target," says Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council. "It's a great deal for the American taxpayers … and a great example for the rest of the country."

I'd like to see them get that up to 100%. Then the government could shut down in the winter when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow. Not to mention freezing in the winter without natural gas for building heat. Or burning in summer when there are electrical shortages from a lack of electricity for air conditioning. I could see a real exodus from government service with conditions like that. Why didn't the Republicans think of that?

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Giving Thanks

We have so much to be thankful for. Not the least of which is abundant energy which makes our lives so comfortable. At ECN Magazine I have reposted an idea I had from November of 2006. The idea is to develop a neighborhood energy source and storage unit along with communications facilities that could be dropped into a neighborhood to start improving life. Also included would be water pumping and storage modules.

I only mentioned wind power in the article, however any energy source that makes sense in a particular location could be added or interchanged.

The changes from 2006 are adding an off the shelf battery with included motor generator set and substituting WiFi and laptops for a TV station and television receivers. Read the article. There are links.

So what about giving thanks? One way would be to do what you can to make something like this happen.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Warm Sodium Battery

There is some amazing news in the world of high energy batteries. Coors Ceramics thinks they have a way to make Sodium-Sulfur batteries that can operate at 90° C ( 194° F which is below the boiling point of water)and charge-discharge once a day for ten years.

The battery breakthrough comes from a Salt Lake company called Ceramatec, the R&D arm of CoorsTek, a world leader in advanced materials and electrochemical devices. It promises to reduce dependence on the dinosaur by hooking up with the latest generation of personalized power plants that draw from the sun.

Solar energy has been around, of course, but it's been prohibitively expensive. Now the cost is tumbling, driven by new thin-film chemistry and manufacturing techniques. Leaders in the field include companies like Arizona-based First Solar, which can paint solar cells onto glass; and Konarka, an upstart that purchased a defunct Polaroid film factory in New Bedford, Mass., and now plans to print cells onto rolls of flexible plastic.

The convergence of these two key technologies -- solar power and deep-storage batteries -- has profound implications for oil-strapped America.

"These batteries switch the whole dialogue to renewables," said Daniel Nocera, a noted chemist and professor of energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who sits on Ceramatec's science advisory board. "They will turn us away from dumb technology, circa 1900 -- a 110-year-old approach -- and turn us forward."

One small quibble. Unless this technology can be used to make liquid fuels at a lower cost than oil, its uses in transportation will be limited. One drawback is that it needs to be kept around 90C for the battery to deliver juice. It will be hard to maintain that temperature with low losses in a Chicago winter.

Enough of the caveats. How about some more techno porn.

Inside Ceramatec's wonder battery is a chunk of solid sodium metal mated to a sulphur compound by an extraordinary, paper-thin ceramic membrane. The membrane conducts ions -- electrically charged particles -- back and forth to generate a current. The company calculates that the battery will cram 20 to 40 kilowatt hours of energy into a package about the size of a refrigerator, and operate below 90 degrees C.

This may not startle you, but it should. It's amazing. The most energy-dense batteries available today are huge bottles of super-hot molten sodium, swirling around at 600 degrees or so. At that temperature the material is highly conductive of electricity but it's both toxic and corrosive. You wouldn't want your kids around one of these.

The essence of Ceramatec's breakthrough is that high energy density (a lot of juice) can be achieved safely at normal temperatures and with solid components, not hot liquid.

Ceramatec says its new generation of battery would deliver a continuous flow of 5 kilowatts of electricity over four hours, with 3,650 daily discharge/recharge cycles over 10 years. With the batteries expected to sell in the neighborhood of $2,000, that translates to less than 3 cents per kilowatt hour over the battery's life. Conventional power from the grid typically costs in the neighborhood of 8 cents per kilowatt hour.

Re-read that last paragraph and let the information really sink in. Five kilowatts over four hours -- how much is that? Imagine your trash compactor, food processor, vacuum cleaner, stereo, sewing machine, one surface unit of an electric range and thirty-three 60-watt light bulbs all running nonstop for four hours each day before the house battery runs out. That's a pretty exciting place to live.

And then you recharge. With a projected 3,650 discharge/recharge cycles -- one per day for a decade -- you leave the next-best battery in the dust. Deep-cycling lead/acid batteries like the ones used in RVs are only good for a few hundred cycles, so they're kaput in a year or so.

My favorite caveat in projects like these is logistics. Or in layman's terms "how soon can they ramp up production once they have a working battery.

Grover's brother, John K. Coors, is CEO of CoorsTek, the manufacturing company that applies what the scientists at Ceramatec dream up. Their nephew, Doug Coors, oversees R&D.

With some 21 plants producing advanced ceramic products worldwide, the expectation is that full-scale production of ceramic sheets for the new batteries could be tooled up in short order. In fact, only a handful of CoorsTek facilities would likely be employed.

The order of magnitude pencils out along these lines: a target of 20 gigawatt hours of storage in 20 kilowatt-hour battery increments equals 1 million batteries. Or using a different metric, 1 million square meters of thin ceramic electrolyte would yield 20 gigawatt hours of batteries, equal to California's entire spinning reserve.

Nobody at CoorsTek even blinks at such figures. The company already produces 3 million pounds of ceramic material per month. "Once we have a working prototype battery with all the standards and cost requirements met, it will come up quickly," said Grover Coors. "It would scare people to know how quickly we can bring this up."

They're about about six months away from initial scale-up toward a commercial product, he said.

Lots of sodium will be needed to make the new batteries, and Ceramatec proposes a symbiotic relationship with the federal government to get it. Enormous quantities of sodium metals, the byproducts of nuclear weapons manufacturing, just happen be available for cleanup at Hanford nuclear reservation near Richland, Wash. It's a ready-made source of material that CoorsTek can recycle.

Of course once that source is gone they will have to pay full price for their sodium. Fortunately neither Sodium nor Sulfur are too hard to come by.

And what does all that talk about time to scale up mean? Here are my guesses. About a year and a half to pilot plant production. A year for battery testing and scale up. Another year to get a full production plant operating. So optimistically about 3 and 1/2 years. Realistically 5 years. Pessimistically 7 years. And very pessimistically never.

What would this technology mean? For one thing, besides its uses for wind and solar, it would be very handy for shaving peak loads. It costs the utilities a lot less to deliver steady power than to deliver power that varies a lot over the course of a day. Think of it as having a peaking plant and some backup power (for the refrigerator and furnace) in every home.

Of course superflywheels [pdf] might be a competitive technology capable of even more charge discharge cycles at roughly equivalent energy density.

H/T R. Dave Talk Polywell

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Visit To A Dead Planet

Energy From Thorium imagines Captain Kirk and the big "E" visiting A Dead Planet (uh groovy man - NO IT IS NOT).

As the away teams reported back to the Starship Enterprise, the reports were all the same. Everywhere on the planet were signs of an advanced civilization. Great abandoned cities were found al over the planet. In each the signs were the same a loss of energy followed by a drastic population drop. The fossil fuel resources of the planet appeared to have been exhausted, and as power plants died computers had been shut down.

Wind generators were everywhere, but when Scottie looked at their pictures he shook his head. “Good God,” he said, “you cannot run a planet on wind.”

Mr. Spock nodded. “I don’t understand why they did not build nuclear power plants,” he said. One away team returned from the North East quadrant reporting a single life sign and recommending a follow up.

The follow up team finds a very interesting life form on the planet. One you may have even seen on this planet. Go and read the whole thing.

H/T joedead Talk Polywell

Power From Wind

I think it might be a good idea to look at how a wind generator's output varies with speed. Wind power varies with the cube of wind speed. That is basic physics. No way around it that we know of.

So let us look at some wind turbines. Typical are turbines that start generating power at wind speeds of 2.5 meters per second and max out at wind speeds of 16 meters per second or 20 meters per second. First let us convert that to miles per hour to get a feel for the speeds involved.

2.5 m/s = 6 mph
16 m/s = 36 mph
20 m/s = 45 mph

Now let us look at output.

If you consider 2.5 m/s minimum output then at 16 m/s maximum output the max/min ratio is 262. At 20 m/s the max/min ratio is 512.

Or consider a wind blowing at 90% of maximum turbine rating. Output is 73% of maximum. At 80% output is 51% max. At 70% it is 35%. At 60% it is 22%. At 50% it is 12.5%. At 40% you are down to 6.4%. At 30% you are down to 2.3%. At 20% you are at less that 1%.

Economically it is probably useless (other than to impress the rubes) to design wind turbines that can handle max/min ratios more than 5 or 6 to 1. And from a practical stand point useful effectiveness is actually in the 2 to 1 range.

So it is not just having wind. You really need a very stiff breeze to generate useful power. I think our experiment with deploying massive amounts of high cost wind power are just about over. If the costs come down that improves the situation some. But not a lot.

Evidently Mr. Obama and his Green friends have never run the numbers.

Inspired by Glasgow Looking To Freeze In The Dark

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Jobbed By Greens

You think green energy crates jobs? Guess again.

A power producer typically gets paid for the power it generates. In Texas, some wind energy generators are paying to have someone take power off their hands.

Because of intense competition, the way wind tax credits work, the location of the wind farms and the fact that the wind often blows at night, wind farms in Texas are generating power they can’t sell. To get rid of it, they are paying the state’s main grid operator to accept it. $40 a megawatt hour is roughly the going rate.

This is really incredible. The power companies are constructing wind turbines and, at certain times, not only providing the power for free but actually paying the grid to take it. All to capture subsidies and tax credits paid for by these special rate surcharges. The only jobs being created are analysts trying to find the best way to rent-seek under these new laws. I would rather pay people to dig holes and fill them back in.

What they really need to do is to find customers who are willing to be paid to use electricity. In other words we have set up a system where conservation is a bad idea.

Once you start screwing with the market ever more laws are required to make up for the distortions created by the previous set of laws. It never ends and only gets worse.

H/T linearthinker at my post Wind Scam

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Wind Scam

In a comment on my post Green Energy Kills Jobs stressdoc had this to say about his experience with wind power.

I am a mechanical engineer and quite knowledgeable about wind power and the reliability problems. They are many!

Wind power has a longer history in the EU, but the experience has been similar. Wind power has been subsidized in the EU for longer than it has here in the states. The results have been similar. Power from wind turbines is more expensive that the more traditional sources (coal, gas, hydroelectric, nuclear and oil). The only way that it viable is with government subsidies.

In the EU, turbines cannot be installed without monitoring system to watch their health. This is due to the many failures that have occurred. They cannot operate without insurance and the insurance is unavailable without monitoring. Here in the states, very few turbines are installed with monitoring.

Why? Simple. Turbines here are normally owned by investor groups that exist primarily to market the tax credits. The total cost of the turbine can be recouped in 3-5 years with these credits. The investor groups contract with the turbine manufacturers to install and operate the turbines for the 5 year warrantee period. By the time that the warrantee has expired, the turbines are paid for and any further running time is pure gravy. When they fail, shut them down and there is no loss.

Except, of course, to the tax payers that support this scam.

I have always thought that the subsidy for wind power ought to be phased out. I'm more convinced of that than ever. I am still in favor of wind power, where it makes unsubsidized economic sense.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Green Energy Kills Jobs

Durango, Colorado is having economic difficulties. And what are they giving up to be able to pay for city workers? Green energy.

For two years, the city of Durango, Colo., bought electricity for all its government buildings from wind farms. The City Council ended that program this year, reverting to electricity derived from coal-burning plants and saving the cash-strapped city about $45,000.

“It’s very hard for us to lay off an employee to justify green power,” City Manager Ron LeBlanc said. “Those are the tradeoffs you have to face.”

As long as wind and solar electricity cost more than conventional (coal, nuclear) electricity they are going to be a job killers. Now imagine what a plan to reduce fossil fuel use by 80% by 2050 is going to do if they are not replaced by low cost alternatives.

Plus, it seems wind is having reliability problems. Not just the intermittency of wind. The gear boxes connecting the turbine blades to the generators are falling apart.

Engineers at DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory want to know why some gearboxes and other key wind turbine components wear out too soon. Wind turbines are expected to operate for 20 years. Early equipment fatigue threatens to reduce performance and drive up wind power costs. "The end users and the owner-operators say we're only getting five years, or in some cases, three years out of these gearboxes," said NREL principal engineer Sandy Butterfield, who is leading the Gearbox Reliability Collaborative. Initially, the gearboxes are being tested at NREL's National Wind Technology Center before testing at a Colorado wind farm under real conditions.

Well that is going to raise the cost of wind power. A lot.

In good economic times the extra cost of wind electrical generation made some sense in order to develop wind to see how it worked in practice. Given the hard times we are having it makes sense to phase out the subsidy for wind so that wind turbines are installed only where they make economic sense. The same goes for solar and all the alternative energy subsidies. They are a job killers.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Energy Twaddle

I don't agree that global warming is a problem. The globe has been cooling for the last 8 or 10 years and solar scientists are predicting that the cooling could go on anywhere from 10 to 80 more years. However, this video is a good primer on the energy it takes to run a modern civilization.

I like fusion power. And the best hope we have in the near term with respect to quick development and low cost fusion energy is Polywell Fusion. It is not a sure thing but neither are the ITER experiments. The one thing Polywell has going for it is that the development path is short (5 years for proof of concept vs 30 years for ITER) and the cost of energy from such a plant would be less than the cost of coal.

Bussard's IEC Fusion Technology (Polywell Fusion) Explained

Why hasn't Polywell Fusion been fully funded by the Obama administration?

Something To Study

This is an update on my previous post Superconductor Generators For Wind where I stated that American Superconductors were working on superconducting generators for wind. That turned out to be incorrect.

It turns out that the DOE is now sponsoring a program to develop superconducting generators for wind and American Superconductor Corp. is in the thick of it.

American Superconductor Corp., Devens, Mass., recently announced that it has entered into a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and its National Wind Technology Center (NWTC) to validate the economics of a full 10MW-class superconductor wind turbine. Under the 12-month program, AMSC Windtec, Klagenfurt, Austria, a wholly owned subsidiary of AMSC, will analyze the cost of a full 10MW-class superconductor wind turbine, which will include a direct drive superconductor generator and all other components, including the blades, hub, power electronics, nacelle, tower, and controls.

The NWTC will then benchmark and evaluate the wind turbine’s economic impact, both in terms of its initial cost and its overall cost of energy.

OK. It is just a study. But it is a start.

Why is this important? A couple of reasons. First off is that the superconducting generators proposed will eliminate one of the high cost and high weight items in a wind turbine generator set. The gear box. It should also lower the weight of the generator as this article on superconducting motors shows a weight reduction of 50% for a 36 MW motor is possible.

And the weight reductions have multiple benefits. It lowers the weight of the generator support structure at the top of the tower and also lowers the weight of the supporting tower. There are big cost savings possible if American Superconductor can turn the study into an actual generator.

Ten megawatts is probably above the size where wind power costs less than coal fired electrical power. If only the mopes in Congress had been putting more into research we might not be spending a fortune on wind generators that produce electricity (unsubsidized) at a cost of 2X of coal fired electricity. Better late than never.

Having Doubts

Mr. Obama is big into alternative energy. Wind. Solar. Geothermal. However, even his supporters have doubts about his energy plans.

I like Barack Obama but I have doubts about his presidency when I hear him saying that the US will “double the amount of energy that comes from renewable sources by the end of my first term." He should know that that’s not possible. But instead, during his State of the Union speech, he proclaimed that we’ll reach that goal in three years, not four.

Most anyone who has studied the energy situation must wonder about Obama's, or his advisors', energy experience. Presented with the numbers from the table (see below) he would realize that the majority of the renewable power comes from hydro and from wood, about 154 gigawatts. Readily available data show that the 6 percent for hydro and bio is pretty much all we can hope for. Trying to increase those yields we would have to ask: Where shall we find the extra rivers to dam? Lease the Amazon? And where do we find the extra land to double the wood and corn production? Annex Canada? Ukraine?

Understanding those limitations, Obama apparently relies on direct solar, wind, and geothermal energy growth. All three sources are presently producing about 19 GW. To reach the goal of generating 2 x (154 + 19) = 346 GW by 2012 (or 2011), the output of the three sources would have to increase nine-fold. That implies building many times more wind mills, solar plants, and geothermal stations in three years than have been installed in the previous decades.

The cost of these projects, projects that will provide extraordinarily expensive electricity (five to ten times more than coal or nuclear) is enormous even on the scale of the anticipated deficit spending, pardon me, stimulus package. While the cost would be prohibitive, the real question is whether the four-year, now three-year, deadline is at all realistic. Before we look into that, perhaps a comparison with past prophesies will give us a hint.

During the 1970s, Jimmy Carter committed the US to derive 20 percent of its energy from renewable sources by the year 2000. Let's check: The proportion of renewable energy production today, 9 years after the deadline and almost 40 years from inception, is essentially the same as during Carter's presidency. Worse yet, the percentage has declined recently from 7.5 to 6.7 percent over the past 10 years.

In 1978, Ralph Nader said “Everything will be solar in 30 years.” Notice that the 30-years mark just passed; the production is somewhere between 0.08 percent and 0.11 percent – depending on what is meant by “everything.”

The Union of Concerned Scientists, projected for the millennium end: “Wind farms will provide 0.68 quads of electricity” (the amount was 94 percent less than predicted), “direct solar 0.60 quads” (the amount was 87 percent less).

I have my doubts too. There is a limit to the amount of intermittent energy sources the electrical grid can absorb. Some think it is ten percent. Some of the more optimistic folks think it is twenty percent. No way is it anywhere near 100%.

Our biggest wind resource is the upper Mid West. There is no where near enough transmission capacity to bring that resource to the loads in the lower Mid West and the coasts. And there is no way that transmission capacity can be built in three years when the permits haven't even been applied for. And that does not even include the NIMBYs and the Ultra Greens who will fight additions to the grid tooth and nail.

Evidently neither Mr. Obama nor his new Energy Secretary have run the numbers. That is no way to do engineering. Or as many of us like to say: Hope is not a plan.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

A Policy Of Fascism

Here is an interesting article from about 6 months ago about wind power in Germany. It discusses what the German government was paying individuals for solar and wind power installations. And then it gets into politics.

Now I have nothing against wind power or solar power. I do have problems with articles that gush and fawn over something without clearly explaining the cost tradeoffs. In fact I wonder if the CSM article had the numbers right, a commenter to the article points out that Germany pays something more like $0.66 a kwh to PV power generators. The commenter also says the German power rates are something like $0.29 per kwh. What is even more disturbing is when the commenter says, “Each Renewable Energy source has different rates of support (Wind, Geo-thermal, Wave, Ocean Current, Bio-fuels, organic farming, Eco-friendly material production, etc).” Boy, you can see the handouts were more designed to increase the size of the bureaucracy than do any sensible energy policy. The tragedy of this German policy is that the government, about the most technically incompetent bunch of people you can find anywhere, is picking winner and losers. Oh, I am sure they can point to mountains of paper studies that supposedly lead to the various hand-out rates for the different energy sources, but the real deal is like with politicians everywhere, each industry put their brown envelopes under the table, or reminded the commissar about that “incident” at a party back in college twenty years ago, or just schmoozed an laughed at jokes until they got their handout allocation.

This is not energy policy, this is fascism. Having a strong central government working “in partnership” with big business is not democracy and it is never good, look at the two trillion dollars that our government is shoveling to Halliburton and its cronies. If you want to subsidize alternative energy you should set a fixed handout- 20, 30, 40, cents a kwh and let us technical types figure out the best way to get there. This is just a modern-day version of the farm handouts and dairy handouts and wheat handouts and a host of other subsidies that governments use to concentrate benefits (and brown envelopes) while diffusing costs. You are not doing anything sane if you tax the entire population and hand out incentives for people that want to put windmills up. The government is distorting the market and they are wasting the resources. But politicians always prefer to have the money sent to them and then doled out to their deadbeat relatives and favorite cronies.

The question is - why subsidize power generation at all? Put the money into research so the costs of alternative energy can come in below the costs of current sources. Of course research is not very expensive and it doesn't allow the government much leeway to hand out billions (is it now trillions?) to their favored cronies with the size of the packets in the brown envelopes making the difference as to who the politician's "real" friends are.

The author of the article goes on to equate the current craze for alternative energy with Mao's Great Leap Forward.

I find it amusing that the same people who love centralized government demand decentralized business. They want a huge government that takes all our money and then hands it out in small dollops to make us behave the way the ruling elite wishes. In Red China Mao loved to see little steel mills in everybody’s back yard. The new advocates of big government now want us all to have wind generators and solar panels in our back yard. I agree with people that say we have to take away subsidies for big oil, but lets not then go on to hand them out to the folk-energy people. Either one is a betrayal of the public’s trust.

Well our new Great Leader will surely do the right thing by us. Just ask him.

The Wind Power Express

Since there is so much Green Money coming out of Washington it looks like a lot of people want in on the act. There is a lot of wind in the upper Mid-West but not many power lines. So a company is proposing that the government get behind building some new power lines.

ITC Holdings Corp., over the past year, has worked to develop the "Green Power Express," a network of transmission lines that would facilitate the movement of 12,000 MW of power from the wind-abundant areas in the Dakotas, Minnesota and Iowa to Midwest load centers, such as Chicago, southeastern Wisconsin, Minneapolis and other states that demand clean, renewable energy. This new project addresses the recognized lack of electric transmission infrastructure needed to integrate renewable wind energy.

"We are proud to announce the Green Power Express after almost a year of studies, stakeholder discussions and development," said Joseph L. Welch, chairman, president and CEO of ITC. "The Green Power Express will create the much-needed link between the renewable energy-rich regions of the Midwest and high-demand population centers. The plan is consistent with efforts supported by organizations such as the Upper Midwest Transmission Development Initiative and promotes a national energy vision. ITC looks forward to continuing to work with them and other stakeholders in the region to move forward with this long-term solution to our national energy challenges."

The Green Power Express is just one step in ITC's broader efforts to modernize the overburdened, aging electricity grid. This project will be an integral component to ITC's efforts to create a high-voltage backbone that can meet America's renewable energy goals and eliminate costly inefficiencies in the grid.

Lots of wonderful goodness there. Until you get to the fine print.

The Green Power Express transmission project will traverse portions of North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana and will ultimately include approximately 3,000 miles of extra high-voltage (765 kV) transmission. The entire project is currently estimated to cost approximately $10 to 12 billion. Portions of the Green Power Express fall within the service territory of ITC Midwest, an ITC subsidiary. ITC has been working with many of the Upper Midwest wind developers over the last year in assembling a realistic accounting of their wind development plans and sites, which resulted in the design of the Green Power Express.

That transmission is going to be done with AC which is not the most efficient over long distances for a number of technical reasons. DC also gives you something for wind generators - it can accept variable frequency AC easily (because it is converted to DC. In addition the power quality of the AC does not need to be very good. So what does that mean? Cheaper (and possibly lighter) generators for all those wind turbines. The savings in wind turbine costs might very well pay for a significant part of the line costs. Unfortunately we have separated generation from transmission (it does have its good points in diversifying sources of supply) so that the system costs are not properly accounted for.

I suppose that political pressure could be brought to bear to get the transmission companies to do the right thing.

Contact Government:

House of Representatives
The Senate
The President

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Interesting Power Supply Company

Commenter windmill at Talk Polywell has brought to my attention an interesting power supply company Diversified Technologies Inc. Here are a couple of short (under 10 pages) papers that explain the technology.

Solid State High Voltage DC Power Distribution & Control [pdf]

Here is the key point from the above [pdf].

The largest cost components in this design are the semiconductors (IGBTs). Because of their widespread use in locomotive engines, subway cars, elevators, and a wide range of electrical motor drive and power supply systems, these devices are evolving at a rapid pace, especially in comparison with vacuum switch tubes. In the last decade, we have seen the switching speed and power handling capability of IGBTs increase by an order of magnitude (200 kVA to 4 MVA), at essentially constant prices. This puts high power electronics, for the first time, on a favorable, long term cost reduction path. This is the equivalent of the computer industry’s Moore’s Law of continually higher performance per unit cost, but applied to power systems.

Today, a 100 kV, 2MW buck regulator, with a series switch, can be built for approximately $500k USD. This cost will decline due to increased semiconductor performance and decreased manufacturing costs. In contrast, estimates for the equivalent conventional approach are $2- 3M USD, and show no trend towards cost reduction.

Quite so. IGBTs with a voltage rating of 6,500 Volts and a 600 Amp current rating are now off the shelf.

A Solid-State Switch for 13.8kV Power Distribution [pdf]

The company claims to be able to make power conversion equipment that costs in the range of 10¢ a watt in production quantities. That is a very good number. Diversified claims specifications for their supply technology that are very not too bad. An adjustable 100 KV DC supply can deliver 1% regulation and .1% ripple. That is just the ticket for Polywell Fusion experiments using D-D. For pB11 at the resonance peak I'd like to see tighter regulation. Say .1% regulation and .01% ripple. I have some ideas.

OK. That gets us past fusion power supplies. What implications does it have for the electrical grid? It means that High Voltage DC distribution of electrical power is now within the realm of economic feasibility. DC distribution is more efficient (per unit of materials used) than AC distribution. It can also cover much larger distances without having to worry about AC phasing problems due to differences of route lengths from different sources. Wind in North Dakota feeding loads in New York city? No problem.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Why hasn't Polywell Fusion been funded by the Obama administration?
IEC Fusion Technology (Polywell Fusion) Explained

Superconductor Generators For Wind

American Superconductor is making 100 superconducting generator sets for China.

DEVENS, Mass. --Jan. 22, 2009--American Superconductor Corporation, a leading energy technologies company, today announced that it has received a multi-million-dollar order for 100 sets of its wind turbine core electrical components from China's CSR Zhuzhou Electric Locomotive Research Institute Co.(CSR-ZELRI), Ltd. The company will use the components in 1.65 megawatt (MW) wind turbines designed by AMSC's wholly owned AMSC Windtec™ subsidiary. Under the terms of the contract, AMSC expects to ship all of the core electrical components by the end of calendar 2009 to support CSR-ZELRI's increased production of wind turbines.

AMSC's core electrical components include the company's proprietary PowerModule™ PM3000W power converter and enable reliable, high-performance wind turbine operation by controlling power flows, regulating voltage, monitoring system performance and controlling the pitch of wind turbine blades to maximize efficiency. Introduced in late 2008, the PM3000W is a fully programmable, flexible and modular power converter developed specifically for wind turbines with power ratings up to 6 MW.

The advantage of superconducting generators is that they weigh less. And the less the weight at the top of the tower the less material that is needed to make the tower. Doing more with less. Since capital costs are a very big component of the cost of wind energy lowering them lowers the cost of wind energy.

China has big plans for wind.

According to the Chinese Wind Energy Association [written in Chinese], China will grow its base of wind power from 5.9 gigawatts (GW) at the end of 2007 to more 10 gigawatts in 2008. In its Global Wind Energy Outlook 2008 report, the Global Wind Energy Council estimates that China's installed base could grow to 101 GW by 2020 under its "moderate" outlook scenario and 201 GW under its "advanced" scenario.

I think you have to divide those numbers by 3 to get the average power output. So 101 GW installed is equal to about 33 - 1 GW coal or nuclear plants. Not bad.

According to the Global Wind Energy Outlook 2008 report about 30% of the US investment in new electrical generating capacity is going into wind. And Turkey is ordering wind turbines like crazy. Wind is an excellent hedge against rising natural gas prices as the two types of generation are complimentary.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Update: 02 Feb. 2009 02:41z

Commenter Keith says there are no superconductors involved. He is right. I let my wishful thinking run away with me. He does say AMSC is developing a 10 MW generator for offshore wind. Something I would not have known without my error. A 10 MW job is just about the limit with current blade technology. So that is very welcome news.

They Can't Make Them Fast Enough

Wind energy has hit a snag. The companies involved can't make the turbines fast enough.

"The worldwide demand for wind energy equipment is outstripping supply," says John Dunlop, senior technical services engineer for the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA). The manufacturing base that produces the huge structural components, blades, generators and gearboxes that make up today's high-tech windmills simply can't keep up with the number of planned and ongoing installations. Dunlop points out wind turbines purchased today won't likely be delivered until 2011 or 2012. "That's the lead time right now," he says.

Those lead times are confirmed by key components suppliers too. "It's more like 2012 in most cases," says Parthiv Amin, president of Winergy Drive Systems, a subsidiary of Siemens Energy & Automation and maker of the gearboxes and power transmission components used in wind machines.

A sizeable chunk of this demand is coming from the U.S. AWEA figures put the annual growth rate of wind energy capacity in the U.S. at 29 percent for the five years ending in 2007.

Wind turbine manufacture is hard to ramp up because the parts are very hard to make.

Wind energy does have some adoption barriers unrelated to the supply chain for turbine components. For example, transporting and installing wind turbines that now routinely reach 100m and have rotor diameters ranging from 60m to 100m is one such barrier. So is power transmission over our existing grid infrastructure. "The windiest locations tend not to be located near our population centers," says Dunlop. And with wind, whose available energy is a function of wind-speed cubed, "location is everything," he says.

Yet the barriers that may matter most to engineers can be found in design departments and factory floors. In particular, Dunlop mentions a lack of wind-friendly gearboxes, generators and bearings as a current bottleneck that could affect wind energy growth in the short term.

That's not surprising. Wind turbine components have a lot more in common with aerospace components than industrial ones. Consider gear boxes, for example. Amin says a 1.5 MW wind turbine would have a gearbox that weighs about 16 tons with both planetary and helical stages. On a wind turbine, these gearboxes act to increase speed rather than reduce it. Amin says they typically take a 70 or 80 rotor rpm up to 1,400 rpm or so to run the generator. In short, these gearboxes have to be big and robust.

Yet they also have to be as lightweight as possible given the stresses they see, and they have to be more precise than many ordinary industrial gearboxes. "In the industrial world, you want a gearbox to be as robust as possible. You might have a 1.5 to 2.5 safety factor," Amin says. On a wind turbine, though, such a big safety factor would add up to unacceptable weight penalty that could propagate through the turbine design in the form of heavier tower sections, foundations and bearings. "We have to design to razor-thin factor of safety because the weight issue," he says.

And it is not just gear boxes. The blades are difficult to make too.

The same goes for composite blades. "You're starting to see some failures in the field," says Bill McCormick, business development specialist for composites at MAG Cincinnati Automation & Test. He attributes them not to design but to lack of automation still common in the production of the huge turbine blades. "There's still a lot of hand layup and eyeballing the placement of reinforcing layers," he says.

Imagine trying to make a 150 ft. long blade by hand placing fiberglass. It would be hard to keep acceptable tolerances. And as the turbines get bigger fiberglass won't be strong enough. Carbon fiber will be required. And ordinary copper and steel generators will get too heavy. Superconductors will be required.

However, for immediate manufacturing problems hope and help is on the way.

All that may change as more money flocks into wind energy. Amin says he's starting to see "tremendous investments" in the kind of advanced manufacturing capabilities needed to ease wind energy's supply chain bottleneck – perhaps as early as 2011 in his opinion. Winergy itself plans to invest $30 million in its Elgin, IL facility this year and another $70 million over the next four years. And Spain's Gamesa, a leading maker of wind turbines, has opened manufacturing plants in Pennsylvania to make blades, nacelles and towers.

Elgin is about an hour's drive from where I live. I probably should take a camera and visit the plant some day.

Biodiesel Stalls Bus

Cold weather is the bane of alternative energy. Wind turbine blades ice up, solar panels get covered with snow, and biodiesel congeals.

In January 2007, a bus stalled in the middle of the night on Interstate 70 in the Colorado mountains. The culprit was a 20 percent biodiesel blend that congealed in the freezing weather, according to John Jones, the transit director for the bus line, Summit Stage. (Biodiesel is a diesel substitute, typically made from vegetable oil, that is used to displace some fossil fuels.)

The passengers got out of that situation intact, but Summit Stage, which serves ski resorts, now avoids biodiesel from November to March, and uses only a 5 percent blend in the summertime, when it can still get cold in the mountains. “We can’t have people sitting on buses freezing to death while we get out there trying to get them restarted,” Mr. Jones said.

Winter may pose even bigger safety hazards in the vicinity of wind turbines. Some observers say the machines can hurl chunks of ice as they rotate.

“It’s like you throw a plate out there and that plate breaks,” said Ralph Brokaw, a cattle rancher in southeast Wyoming who has 69 wind turbines on his property. When his turbines ice up, he stays out of the way.

The wind industry admits that turbines can drop ice, like a lamppost or any tall structure. To ameliorate the hazard, some turbines are painted black to absorb sunlight and melt the ice faster. But Ron Stimmel, an expert on small wind turbines at the American Wind Energy Association, denies that the whirling blades tend to hurl icy javelins.

Which would tend to indicate that at this stage of alternative energy development that cold weather is a hazard to energy production. Not to mention life and limb.

This could be a difficult problem especially for wind which produces its highest output in winter when the winds are the strongest.

...as renewable energy becomes a bigger part of the nation’s power mix, the seasonable variability could become more of a problem. Already, power developers are learning that they must make careful plans to avoid the worst impacts of ice and snow.

Trey Taylor, the president of Verdant Power, which has put small turbines in the tidal East River in New York City and plans more for the St. Lawrence River in Canada, said that ice chunks could slide over one another “like a deck of cards,” pushing ice below and harming turbines. That may rule out parts of otherwise promising sites like the Yukon River in Alaska, he said.

Kevin Devlin, the vice president for operations of Iberdrola Renewables, a wind developer, said that winter was probably the hardest time of year to maintain turbines, because workers must go out in snow and ice. Occasionally, he said, the turbines will shut down or set off alarms if it is too cold, and workers must brave the elements to fix them.

For homeowners, the upkeep of their power sources can also be a bother.

Mr. Stankevitz keeps his panels tilted 40 degrees or higher, but they still become covered with snow — and experts say that if even one cell in a panel is covered, the panel will not produce power.

With alternative energy only at about 1% of grid power the variability of the sources with the weather is not a big consideration. However, as the proportion rises the difficulties in maintaining the flow of electricity in all weather conditions will get more serious.

No doubt solutions will be found over time. However, forcing the introductions of these technologies before the problems are solved is a waste of resources. And you know what wasting resources does, don't you? It causes pollution.

H/T My Climate Buzz

The Ezekiel Project - Update

A few days ago I was having a look at water issues in the Middle East at my post Running On Hungry. A discussion of the book When the Rivers Run Dry came up and there was a mention of the Dead Sea shrinking. That reminded me of a post I did in 2004 called The Ezekiel Project which dealt with proposed efforts to rejuvenate the Dead Sea. I think it is time to revisit that issue.

Before we do that however I think it would be good to go to the home page of The Ezekiel Project and have a look at their panoramic photo of the Dead Sea (the above photo is an excerpt), it is breathtaking.

OK. What is this all about other than refilling the Dead Sea? It is about Dead Sea Power.

The Dead Sea Power Project (DSPP) is a tunnel and hydropower project that can produce 1500 to 2500 megawatts of clean and renewable electric energy. The value of such electric energy will be maximized by power generation during peak demand times. Planned operation of the project can fill the Dead Sea to the desired level within seven years of operation; after that, the continued operation of the hydropower plant will be enabled by the development of additional desalination capacity to supply the water needs of the region.

Over a period of seven years of planned operation, the DSPP will restore the Dead Sea to the desired level, and thereby reverse the erosion and subsistence that is presently destroying the area. In addition, the placement of a deep layer of Med Sea water on top of the Dead Sea will stop the overturn of water in the Dead Sea that brings noxious gases to the surface.

The planned annual supply of Med Sea water through the DSPP will be five billion cubic meters, which, after desalination (using distillation to remove ninety percent as potable water) can provide five hundred cubic meters per person per annum for eight million people. Maximum capacity of the project is for twelve billion cubic meters annual flow, which would provide enough water for twenty million people if suitable desalination capacity should be developed. Desalination plants can be placed on the Jordanian and Israeli sides of the Dead Sea and can be powered by electricity from (i) DSPP, (ii) gas fired co-generation units and (iii) wind turbines on top of the mountains in Jordan. Such sources of electricity can also be used to pump seawater into reservoirs on top of the mountains, which in turn can be utilized, on demand, for desalination and electric power generation as needed.

That should be enough water to supply all of Israel and a lot of Jordan. Or some other mix for the two. Note that with a large drop available and a good supply of wind the problems of intermittent wind can be solved for this locality.

So what will the project cost?

The Dead Sea Power Project (DSPP, www.deadseapower.com) proposes a $3.5 billion hydroelectric project to transport water from the Med Sea to the Dead Sea via a ten meter diameter tunnel by gravity flow, pictured in Ezekiel's vision by the one in one thousand factor for the depth of the river flow going down from Jerusalem into the Dead Sea.

Ezek 47:3-5-- When the man went out toward the east with a line in his hand, he measured a thousand cubits, and he led me through the water, water reaching the ankles. Again he measured a thousand and led me through the water, water reaching the knees. Again he measured a thousand and led me through the water, water reaching the loins. Again he measured a thousand; and it was a river that I could not ford, for the water had risen, enough water to swim in, a river that could not be forded.

And what is the current status of the project?

Presently I am exploring the requirements for license of this project as an Independent Power Producer project with the government of Israel. Anyone interested in helping with this process should contact me.

Randolph Gonce

Rgonce
at
aol
dot
com

Randolph gives more complete details at the Ezekiel Project site linked above including a proposed route. If it could be done it would be quite beneficial to the region and would be one of the engineering wonders of the world. And at $3.5 billion the project costs seem rather modest given the projected outcome of replenishing the Dead Sea, generating electricity, and providing desalinated water. Not to mention realizing a Biblical vision, which though having no monetary value does have an aesthetic value for quite a few people.

Cross Posted at Classical Values