So - we wouldn't do this lightly, but if necessary, it's a good idea.

But this isn't to say wind is bad - it just means that saying that something is technically possible is one hand clapping.  It is also technically possible to build GHG sequestering coal, massive solar + energy storage, hundreds of GW of cogen or to slash load through energy efficiency and other demand side measures - to name just a few.  None of these are silver bullets, but each have their own unique economic, political and regulatory challenges which limits their ability to realize their technical potential.

So the real question comes down to economics: given finite resources, which deliver the biggest bang for the buck to get carbon down as quickly as possible?

And this is where the tension with wind starts to expose itself.  Not because it is bad, but because wind - unlike just about all the other ideas for cleaner power that David cites - depends substantially on a transmission network.  And as a result, wind's economics depend cheap T&D.  This has created tension within the clean energy community between those who focus on the load side of the wire (solar, EE, CHP, etc.) who assert - quite reasonably - that they are not going to deploy their silver bullets if the rules don't reward them for the value they create - i.e., location specific pricing, with compensation for T&D deferral.  Wind providers (broadly generalizing, of course) don't much like this approach because it would implicitly raise their costs of connecting to the grid since - as the Stanford study points out - they need a lot of T&D.  The good news, such as it is is that our current subsidized system wherein the incremental costs for one new power plant are spread across all power plants works very well for central wind, even while it limits our ability to efficiently deploy capital at the load.

Ironically, this puts wind in the same boat as the big coal/nuke/gas generators, creating rather strange bedfellows on policy.  It also - I believe - explains to a substantial degree why wind has taken off so much more quickly than other renewables & clean energy measures: because it fits so naturally into the present utility paradigm.  And in the short term, that's a good thing.  But in the long term, the tension needs to be resolved.

George

George Mobus, Associate Professor, Institute of Technology, University of Washington Tacoma, and Professional Student for Life

If that distributed grid is organized in local, regional, and state sized grids all independent, but interconnected for emergencies and to market excess power (when the wind blows really hard in one area for example), it becomes stable even with intermittent renewable sources like solar and wind.

The trillions saved on massive grid upgrades and power plant buildout, needed to continue on with the present centralized power grid, could pay for a smart grid to make this all work, many times over.

The lower power costs from using renewables, which are independent from fuel price inflation, could revive the economy and protect it from "free" market energy price shock and awe.  

That was maybe the topic of the mysterious Cheney energy meeting (shrouded in executive privelege secrecy)?  How to use shock and awe to conquer the energy markets.  Brownouts, blackouts...  that is what Enron energy traders used after all.

Then the knockout blow was to pass a law allowing companies like Halliburton and Bechtel to start buying up local utility companies.  That law passed a year or so ago.  Right from the lobbyists laptop, into the laws of this land.  Unread and unoticed in the dead of night.

A conspiracy, hehey?  No need for one, it's all "legal".
 

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

Thermal storage is already an efficient and proven technology.

_

However we had a post back a little while ago.

It was saying that perhaps we should use wind to store mechanical potential energy.

Wind -> Mechanical Cranking -> Mechanical Air Pressurization -> Then run an electric generator off of that air pressure, whenever.

Or whatever process is the right balance of thermodynamics and economics.

-David Ahlport

Conservation reducing demand and heat/cold storage supplying stored energy for the end use.

I think solar furnace technology that uses already existing factory sites in very sunny regions could do high temperature industrial processing, like silicon refining and PV fabrication, then as the product cooled the waste heat could be used for electric power cogeneration.

A lot of industrial processes could work on stored heat as well, like distillation or plastic molding. Or food processing, for instance, on stored cold.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

Hear is a pro wind report written by one of the largest wind companies in the world. They have a large interconnected grid with over 7,000 Mw of capacity, which academics assure us will smooth out fluctuations in wind power. What makes this report extraordinary is that it includes a frank discussion on the limitations of wind power.

http://www.eon-netz.com/Ressources/downloads/EON_Netz_Win ...

Look at the figures on pages 7, 8, and 10. notice the large fluctuations in output, despite the fact that this is a large distributed array of windfarms.

In order to provide customers with a stable supply of electric power conventional power plants, including nuclear plants must have control systems fast enough to create a mirror image of these outputs, which is more challenging than following a load on a grid without wind and solar farms.

By providing wind and solar installations with free voltage regulation, free frequency regulation and free backup power, they make intermittent sources appear less expensive and more practical than they really are.

Here are a few quotes from the report;  

"The feed-in capacity can change frequently
within a few hours. This is shown in FIGURE 6,
which reproduces the course of wind power feedin
during the Christmas week from 20 to 26
December 2004.

Whilst wind power feed-in at 9.15am on
Christmas Eve reached its maximum for the year
at 6,024MW, it fell to below 2,000MW within only
10 hours, a difference of over 4,000MW. This corresponds
to the capacity of 8 x 500MW coal fired
power station blocks. On Boxing Day, wind power
feed-in in the E.ON grid fell to below 40MW

 (note, 40 Mw is 0.6% of total capacity, claims of 10 - 20% reliable with distributed grid are false).

Handling such significant differences in feed-in
levels poses a major challenge to grid operators....

traditional power stations with capacities equal to 90% of the installed wind power capacity must be permanently online in order to guarantee power supply at all times."

"The average feed-in over the year was 1,295MW, around one fifth of the average installed wind power capacity over the year."

(Note, this is less than the output of one EPR reactor.)

"Over half of the year, the wind power feed-in was less than 14% of the average installed wind power capacity over the year."

"As a result, the relative contribution of wind
power to the guaranteed capacity of our supply
system up to the year 2020 will fall continuously
to around 4% (FIGURE 7).
In concrete terms, this means that in 2020,

with a forecast wind power capacity of over
48,000MW (Source: dena grid study), 2,000MW of
traditional power production can be replaced by
these wind farms."

"Large thermal power stations do not disconnect from the grid even following serious grid failures, instead they generally trip into auxiliary services
supply and until then, "support" the grid.

Wind farms, however, have so far disconnected themselves from the grid even in the event of minor, brief voltage dips. Experience shows that this can lead to serious power failures:"
-----

Most people think nuclear power is more expensive than wind due to high capital cost, $3.50 / watt for nuclear vs. $1.50 / watt of wind, data plate rating. But we are not buying data plates, we are buying kWh's. these numbers should be normalized to include the effects of capacity factor and lifetime.

Nuclear

$3.50 per watt / 0.9 capacity factor / 60 year lifetime =  $0.0648 / watt year = $65 / kW year

Wind

$1.50 per watt / 0.3 cf / 25 y =  $0.20 / watt year = $200 / kW year

Wind kWh's are three times more expensive than nuclear.

Now imagine that you are the grid manager for a large utility. You know that your electricity supports traffic lights, hospitals, oxygen concentrators in the homes of sick people, large industrial processes, air conditioners, furnaces etc.

When the grid fails, people start dying.

Lets say you can get kWh's from a large array of nuclear plants and windmills. Which kWh's are most valuable to you, the ones you can count on being there months in advance, or the ones that may or may not be there? Assign a number to your preference for reliable kWh's, call it the reliability coefficient. Lets say you consider reliable kWh's to be three times more valuable than unreliable kWh's. Now include this preference in the relative cost of kW years.

Wind   $200 / kW year x 3 = $600 / kW year

Nuclear   $65 / kW year x 1 = $65 / kW year

Nuclear kWh's are nine times more attractive than wind.

Even so, most people would say that when the wind blows we should throttle back the nuclear plants and use all the wind power available because "the wind is free".

But the only savings from doing that is the cost of the fuel not consumed, about one half cent / kWh.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat8p2.html ...

This is the real break even cost for wind and solar kWh's. This is the maximum price we can pay for wind and solar power without raising somebody's electric bill.

For another example of why wind cannot provide reliable power see this;

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/3/12/63111/0928/#37 ...

Things Everybody Should Know About Energy

Hear(sic) is a pro wind report written by one of the largest wind companies in the world. They have a large interconnected grid with over 7,000 Mw of capacity, which academics assure us will smooth out fluctuations in wind power. What makes this report extraordinary is that it includes a frank discussion on the limitations of wind power....

It is not the AMOUNT of wind capacity that brings reliability, but the distribution. EON area is distributed only compared to having a single wind farm. It is not anything like the distribution studies of this sort suggest.  For distributed wind production to increase reliability the grid involved has to cross macro-climate areas, not just micro-climate areas.  In short, the annual report you cite does not reflect on the study you are attempting to refute.

And you dinged wind for 1/3rd capacity twice
Effectively making it 1/9th capacity

Huh.

-David Ahlport

The CO2-climate connection "shtick" has also recently been refuted by a single paper, I forget which university.

How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?

Do wind turbines actually last 25 years?

Depends.  Obviously, the climate and the area it's in are factors (ones placed offshore in salty waters won't last as long as ones onshore in more arid places for example), and also on what they're made of.  There are some composite materials out there that can last a long while, but they're much more expensive than your typical steel/aluminum structure, so they aren't used as often.  Proper installation and regular maintenance will increase a turbine's life, obviously.  Design and the type of turbine are also factors.  Some are easier to maintain and less expensive to replace than others, but complex ones may actually last longer in some cases.

Well, how about the entire state of California, down to 4% when electric loads peaked during the 2006 heat wave.

http://www.ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/Wind- ...

How about the entire U.S. , wind output was down 20% below average during the heat wave while the demand was 20% above average.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table1_1_a.h ...

That is based on monthly averages. I would love to see a detailed graph of total U.S. wind output for one year, with one minute, or at least one hour resolution. I'll bet there are times when it is less than 10% of data plate rating.

My paper comes with a spreadsheet with all references and calculations. The internet is loaded with summaries of conclusions like this one, but I have yet to find a report of this type that provides all the data and calculations for review.

Even Amory Lovins released some spreadsheets, which revealed that his statements were not supported by the data.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/12/19/13959/922/#5

When wind conditions are good Denmark sells kWh's to its neighbors at fire sale prices, and when wind is bad the buy reliable kWh's at a higher price.

60 years for nuclear
25 years for wind
And you dinged wind for 1/3rd capacity twice
Effectively making it 1/9th capacity
Huh.

The lifetime ratio is 2.4 years of nuclear / year of wind. I dinged wind once for capacity factor of 0.3 and a factor of 3.0  for unreliability .

If a hydro reservoir receives only enough water to run the electric turbines at an average capacity factor of 0.3, you still have the option of cranking it up to 100% during the load peak,  and back to say 0.2 the rest of the time, not so with wind, as in the California example, 4% wind on peak.

Put in whatever coefficients you think are fair and show us what you come up with.

Things Everybody Should Know About Energy

However, in some ways, it is akin to the problems faced by the old Bell System in trying to build distributed networks while placing switches & trunks to keep costs down.

Sean: "because it fits so naturally into the present utility paradigm"

Can you give any comments about the extent to which different US states are or aren't changing that paradigm?
 

-John Mashey

http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/winds/aj07_jamc.pdf .

Thanks GRL

I am going to start with my conclusions, for those who don't want the details.

This is politically correct junk science, and if it is widely accepted and implemented people are going to die in large numbers.

A number of problems come to mind in reading this report, a careful review would probably uncover more.

1    The location chosen for their distributed wind array is the best in the country, as indicated by their average capacity factor of 0.41 about a third higher than national average, also partially explained by the large machines assumed. If wind is to be a major source of energy their will have to be large arrays in other locations where conditions are not as good.

2    There is a very simple way to test this theory. Set up a computer model of a distributed array. Apply the wind data base over one year. Plot the output on an hourly basis. Analyze the results. This could be done for several models to address issues like number of windfarms and array size.

The authors choose a much more circuitous rout.

2005). The intermittency of wind is directly
transmitted into wind power, which dramatically reduces
the marketing value of wind (Milligan and Porter
2005). On the other hand, because coal combustion can
be controlled, coal energy is not considered intermittent
and is often used as "baseload" energy. Nevertheless,
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%....

"Firm capacity" is the fraction of installed wind capacity
that is online at the same probability as that of a
coal-fired power plant.
 

This is how the authors redefine reliability. A two week wind lull in the middle of a 100 year heat wave is no more problematic to the authors than the routine maintenance outages of several conventional plants scheduled a year in advance for the off peak season.

As for the rare unscheduled outages, nuclear plants are more reliable than coal. When something does break, say a feed water pump failure, the repair time is known and it quickly becomes a scheduled outage.

 The 12.5% of unscheduled wind outages amounts to 45.6 days per year. Most will occur during extreme heat wave and cold snap conditions. If we make wind a large fraction of our capacity many people will die during these wind outages.

3   

Figure 3 shows that,
while the guaranteed power generated by a single wind
farm for 92% of the hours of the year was 0 kW, the
power guaranteed by 7 and 19 interconnected farms
was 60 and 171 kW, giving firm capacities of 0.04 and
0.11, respectively. Furthermore, 19 interconnected wind
farms guaranteed 222 kW of power (firm capacity of
0.15) for 87.5% of the year, the same percent of the
year that an average coal plant in the United States
guarantees power.

A distributed array off 19 windfarms spread over the best wind territory of the U.S. can only guarantee 15% of rated output 87.5% of the time, and the downtime is not predictable, but most likely to occur at the worst of times.

To replace a 1500 MW nuclear plant with "reliable" wind power we need to install 9,000 MW of wind turbines. At $1.50 per Watt they will cost $13 billion, not including the interconnecting transmission lines. We will need to replace them in 25 and 50 years.

3    The report plots a year of data in a way that completely hides the seasonal variation, which is one of winds biggest problems.

4   

A final benefit of interconnecting wind farms is that
it can allow long-distance transmission from a common
point, where several farms are connected, to a highload
area to be reduced with little loss of transmitted
power. Suppose we want to bring power from N independent
farms (each with a maximum capacity of, say,
1500 kW), from the Midwest to California. Each farm would need a short transmission line of 1500 kW
brought to a common point in the Midwest. Between
the common point and California, the size of the transmission
line would normally need to be N _ 1500 kW.
However, because geographically disperse farms cause
slow winds in some locations to cancel fast winds in
others, the long-distance transmission line could be reduced
by 20% (to N _ 1200 kW) with only a small loss
(2% with N _ 19) in overall delivered power (Fig. 3).

Suppose California considered building a 1,500 MW nuclear plant in Amarillo Texas. They would need to build a 1500 MW transmission line to California. It would be at full capacity 90% of the time and zero 10% of the time during refueling and maintenance outages.

The 9,000 MW wind farm could derate its transmission line capacity to 7,200 MW, so they would have to build 5 transmission lines like the one for the nuclear plant.

 Lets stop pretending that wind can be reliable. It is distorting our perspective on energy and it is going to get people killed.  


Things Everybody Should Know About Energy

Hall believes we have two problems illustrated by his balloon chart. First, in order for these alternative sources to move rightward on the graph--that is, produce much larger quantities of energy for society--they will have to be deployed on a vast scale which few people contemplate or understand. Two examples come to mind. The worldwide installed capacity of solar photovoltaic cells is 10.9 gigawatts. With the total worldwide installed electrical generating base at 3,872 gigawatts, it would take more than 2,000 years at the current rate of installation (1.74 gigawatts/year) to reach today's capacity. And that's without even considering future growth in electricity demand. If we include the installed base of wind (74.3 gigawatts) and the current rate of wind installations (14.9 gigawatts/year), we can bring the figure all the way down to about 230 years, again without considering growth in demand. Of course, the rates of installation will grow, and there are other renewable and nonrenewable energy sources available. But the challenge of scale remains huge.

Charlie Hall's Balloon Graph

19 Dec, 2007 10:11 am

http://scitizen.com/screens/blogPage/viewBlog/sw_viewBlog ...

The emotional appeal may seem irresistible but it is unnecessary and makes your arguments vulnerable. People are already dying in large numbers from the environmental effects of coal-fired electricity generation which the wind power would supplant. Do you really want to get into a pissing match on death probability statistics, or do you want to discuss electricity generation options on their actual merits?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

To a large extent, the ball today moves forward at the ISO level.  So we see capacity markets in ISO-NE and PJM, node-specific pricing, spinning reserve payments, etc. - all of which are directionally towards cost-causer pays methodologies, and shifts away from historic models of broad subsidization.  ISO-NE's capacity market goes so far as to explicitly acknowledge that a kW bid into capacity markets at the load end of the wire is worth more than one upstream due to line loss and reserve margin requirements, such that you get a multiplier on the order of 1.2 for any load-sited capacity production.

I should note that there is also one noteworthy exception to my "no states are doing much" comment: Connecticut.  They now have massive incentives to put in generation and/or curtail load at the customer end of the wire, to the tune of $500/kW incentive payments, low interest loans and more.  This is a massive shift, albeit one driven by the fact that the state got slapped with $300MM/year penalties from FERC for not keeping their transmission system upgraded.  This is instructive: if you keep subsidizing, the system eventually breaks.  So do we get to a point of economic responsibility in a thoughtful way, or do we get to it because the system breaks...?

Likewise the brownouts and blackouts in California after deregulation shows how relying on "free" markets AND centralized power production is a fools paradise.

There was a huge blackout on the eastern US a few years back also.  

The old model of a centralized grid that can supply any and all demand at anytime does not work in a very complex demand side stressed by ever increasingly extreme weather swings due to GHG climate change.

This grid relies on phone calls to central operators to stabilize the grid, but this grid has to respond on the level of microseconds not minutes.  

A smart grid is needed that priotizes demand like hospitals and emergency services and basic power supply to homes and businesses.  that way essential power uses are never shut down.  no one dies due to lack of power.

To do this the grid must feature local and regional loops that use distributed generation and storage to make them independent.  And uses smart grid technology to shut down non-essential loads and let them coast with storage.

The old centralized grid myth of stability and safety is exposed in many extreme weather events, ice storms, drought, tornado, hurricane.  And also in extreme corporate/government thievery insider trading events, like the Enron energy trader created grid crisis in California.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

To take just one example of why CA's screw up have nothing to teach us about dereg, consider that they let wholesale prices float but capped retail - and then got in a massive squeeze when generators found that it didn't make any sense for them to sell to retail customers at the same time that they could make a killing selling to wholesale markets.  This is far from the only reason for the CA meltdown, but this one fact tells all you need to know about whether this was really a market.  (I'm pretty sure that a market doesn't cap rates, except insofar as they establish a price beyond which no one's buying.)

Rather than rant any more, see my longer ramblings on this topic here and here. But in the meantime, bear in mind that while California showed how NOT to restructure electricity markets, they really didn't teach us anything about the usefulness of markets in the electric sector.

This source tends to increase with GHG climate change, since more wind is the inevitable result of more energy trapped in the climate system of spaceship earth.

Siting, cost, and intermittency are all solved by this design.  to make offshore wind the best, cheapest, cleanest base load power.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

We also agree that without someone to look out for consumer's rights, it can't be free.  I call that government oversight regulation.

I think the energy trader gaming friendly deregulation was the main culprit in the California crisis, maybe I'm wrong.  What else changed during this time period after the Cheney Whitehouse (secret) energy meeting?  That might have contributed to the crisis?

Whatever it was, Enron traders used insider information and control to charge consumers 1000s of times what normal power rates were?  That kind of deregulation, or whatever you call it.  Definitely is not going to work.

I want the grid to be like the highway system.  Where any producer can transport goods to any consumer over the public right of way.  With no interference from monopoly corporate forces.

That takes actual government ownership of our highway system, that is regulation if anything is.  

The grid runs in the public right of way, just as wireless signals travel over the public auirwaves.   Make it all what it should be, a highway for energy and information kept free by government ownership, oversight, and regulation.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

One of the best ideas I've heard is to let distribution utilities own the wires, but don't let them own the metering or billing function.  This is closer to the highway analogy, and removes the ability for utilities to use their control of the distribution channel to limit access to market.  But it's certainly not the only way.

Re: Enron, there was certainly gaming of the system, which in retrospect you could see coming, and a smart regulator should have been watching out for precisely that kind of monopsonistic behavior, as we do for other highly concentrated industries.  But that said, we ought to recognize that a grid that truly reflects actual prices will see locally and/or temporally higher prices in a deregulated model, precisely because those are the places that have been so heavily subsidized under old models.  This ought not be held up as a failure of deregulation though, to the extent it sends a signal to more efficiently allocate capital towards/away from higher cost areas.  A part of the political problem though is that it only takes one spike in power prices to lose an election - but it takes a predictable shift in prices to get folks to allocate capital...

The link is below.  I welcome anyone to read, comment, denounce, etc.  

http://invisiblegreenhand.blogspot.com/2007/12/diversifyi ...

Works just like a spinning wheel: foot taps are converted into smooth rotary motion.

Anyone ever heard of such a design?

What would be the point of metering electricity?

Great straight line.  Anyone?


http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

"It was 50 years ago today that Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss, chairman of the

US Atomic Energy Commission, said:

'It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter...' "

According to nuclear advocates, he was not talking about nuclear generated electrical energy though.  Let us for once happily concede this ridiculous claim.

He must have been talking about homes of the future with concentrating PV/heat cogeneration right up on the roof?  Yep.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2007/12/20 ...

Once the 2 year payback period is up, it's free.  

But when you sell it back to the power company you might want to meter it, you will get 23 cents per kwh for it in parts of Wisconsin.  And 56 cents per kwh in Germany.  

It's a gold rush.  Solar gold.  

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

3   

Figure 3 shows that,
while the guaranteed power generated by a single wind
farm for 92% of the hours of the year was 0 kW, the
power guaranteed by 7 and 19 interconnected farms
was 60 and 171 kW, giving firm capacities of 0.04 and
0.11, respectively. Furthermore, 19 interconnected wind
farms guaranteed 222 kW of power (firm capacity of
0.15) for 87.5% of the year, the same percent of the
year that an average coal plant in the United States
guarantees power.

A distributed array off 19 windfarms spread over the best wind territory of the U.S. can only guarantee 15% of rated output 87.5% of the time, and the downtime is not predictable, but most likely to occur at the worst of times.

4   

A final benefit of interconnecting wind farms is that
it can allow long-distance transmission from a common
point, where several farms are connected, to a highload
area to be reduced with little loss of transmitted
power. Suppose we want to bring power from N independent
farms (each with a maximum capacity of, say,
1500 kW), from the Midwest to California. Each farm would need a short transmission line of 1500 kW
brought to a common point in the Midwest. Between
the common point and California, the size of the transmission
line would normally need to be N _ 1500 kW.
However, because geographically disperse farms cause
slow winds in some locations to cancel fast winds in
others, the long-distance transmission line could be reduced
by 20% (to N _ 1200 kW) with only a small loss
(2% with N _ 19) in overall delivered power (Fig. 3).

Suppose California considered building a 1,500 MW nuclear plant in Amarillo Texas. They would need to build a 1500 MW transmission line to California. It would be at full capacity 90% of the time and zero 10% of the time during refueling and maintenance outages. The nuclear plant would cost about $5 billion, and the transmission line to California would cost about $1.47 per kWmile, $2.5 billion, total cost $7.5 billion.

http://www.oatioasis.com/AZPS/AZPSdocs/APS_Tran_Seminar_0 ...

Note that the transmission line cost, $1.47 per kWmile, does not include the cost of land. That could raise the total cost quite a bit, depending on the details of the route.

Or California could simply build the nuclear plant in California and save the transmission line cost and line loss.

To replace a 1500 MW nuclear plant with "reliable" wind power we need to install 9,000 MW of wind turbines. At $1.50 per Watt they will cost $13.5 billion, and we will need to replace them in 25 and 50 years, whereas the nuclear plant will last 60 years.

Each of the 19 wind farms would have a data plate rating of 474 MW.
To connect these farms to a central point will require on average 100 miles of 474 MW transmission line. At $1.47 per kW mi, the collection grid will cost $1.3 billion.

The 9,000 MW wind array could limit its transmission line capacity to California to 7,200 MW in exchange for a 2% loss, so they would have to build 5 transmission lines like the one for the nuclear plant, at a cost of $12 billion. The total cost to replace one nuclear plant with "reliable" wind power is $26.8 billion.

5    One of the biggest drawbacks of wind power is the daily and seasonal variation in power output.

http://www.energyprobe.org/energyprobe/articles/EPreviewo ...

An unbiased researcher would highlight these weaknesses in the narrative and graphically. These authors do not mention the problem and the report homogenizes  a year of data in such a way that the graphs completely hide these factors.

 Lets stop pretending that wind can be reliable. It is distorting our perspective on energy and it is going to get people killed if we act on that belief.  

Things Everybody Should Know About Energy

No upgrade needed. Trillions of dollars saved.

Continuing on the present course of more power use, more centralized even larger nuclear and coal power plants, and 100s of new nuclear power and "clean" coal plants is unimaginably expensive.

Your argument is with reality BILL, not renewable power.

As solar PV continues to come down in price  becoming ever less costly than coal or nuclear power, likewise with wind, wave, water and biogas from waste, these distributed sources make power transmission cheaper.

We all win.  Get on board and come on in for the big win with us BILL.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

Perhaps you are right. Millions of these smaller nuclear powerplants might be cheaper.

If only he could have done a film on renewable distributed smart grids.  Look what "Strangelove" did for the bomb.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

We don't believe that.

Though it'll obviously be a large component, other sources will need to be used as well.

The argument that wind-powered generators will fail and cost lives in events like heat waves would be unfounded, since heat waves, while bad for wind power, would just as easily be a boost for solar power.

Then there's geothermal, wave, gas from landfills, etc.

And that also seems to ignore the possibility of storin' excess energy during times of peak production for future use.

Wind power alone isn't the answer.  But clean renewables together are.

DRX

You're a genius, you should write an article for Scientific American. Those idiots think solar needs a super grid. Explain to them how people outside the desert can get by with solar capacity factors of 11% and multiple days without sun.

http://soltrex.masstech.org/systems.cfm?systemid=S0000000 ...

The argument of wind not bein' effective...  seems to rely heavily on the assumption that we believe wind will make up close to 100% of our renewable enrgy needs.
We don't believe that.

That's a good first step Tasermons, but many people do believe it.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/3/12/63111/0928/

Please go to the top of this column and read the original report.

Recently a study found that wind can serve as reliable baseload power. The key is to link wind farms together with a high-speed transmission grid.

"This study implies that, if interconnected wind is used on a large scale, a third or more of its energy can be used for reliable electric power....

So much for the "wind can't do baseload" shtick.

This finding is false because the authors redefined "reliability" in an improper way to make wind power look more reliable than it is. The authors also took pains to disguise two major weaknesses of wind power, daily and seasonal variation.

Impartial competent authors would have made all these points clear, and concluded that wind cannot replace significant amounts of baseload generation.

The argument that wind-powered generators will fail and cost lives in events like heat waves would be unfounded, since heat waves, while bad for wind power, would just as easily be a boost for solar power.... And that also seems to ignore the possibility of storin' excess energy during times of peak production for future use.

Solar cell performance declines with increasing temperature.

How do you propose to store excess wind power in March for use in July? There is no guarantee that wind and solar peaks will occur on opposite cycles.

Here is an improbable headline;

Seven Day Los Angeles Blackout During Record Heat Wave Kills No One

If you agree that we need reliable energy sources, than the intermittent sources must be cheaper than the fuel saved to break even. If we rely on both wind and solar to back up each other in the replacement of conventional baseload generation, then we must compare the sum of both wind and solar costs, (20 - 50 cents per kWh depending on who's numbers you use), with the cost of fuel saved, one half cent per kWh for reactors.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat8p2.html ...

When wind and solar cost drops below that level, I agree they should be in the mix.

Things Everybody Should Know About Energy

I'm not touting a 100% solar powered system.  A distributed grid relying on solar, wind, wave, hydro power (with extra wind pumped storage), current power (river, ocean), biogas from waste, and solid oxide fuel cell/turbine generation running on that biogas.  With natural gas backup and coal to natural gas conversion underground.

I even want to give nuclear a chance by letting the industry build a few waste recycling, meltdown proof experimental reactors in remote already contaminated, leaking  locations, like the many rad mining and processing facilities.  Give 'em a chance to prove themselves for a decade or so, then reexamine the nuclear power proposition.

Considering the disaster nuclear power has become under the nuclear industry/government revolving door non-regulatory system, that is more than charitable.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin