Ironically, in light of the State Department’s seal of approval for tar sands oil:
A pair of utilities, Minnesota Power and Manitoba Hydro, have inked a Renewable Optimisation Agreement (ROA) under which electricity from excess wind produced in North Dakota can be stored in Manitoba’s hydro reservoir when loads and prices are low, with the potential for selling that power back onto the huge United States Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator (MISO) market at times when needs are high.
The deal involves the pair building a new 400 mile 500 kV transmission line, with a capacity of 750 megawatts, connecting northeastern Minnesota with Winnipeg, at a cost of $1bn split between the two utilities.
Manitoba Hydro is already an external participant with MISO, as a large hydroelectric system with some of the lowest electricity prices in North America.
“We can act as a rechargeable battery for the MISO market,” says Manitoba Hydro Division Manager of Power Sales and Operations David Cormie. “The arrangement we have with Minnesota Power is that they are going to invest in new transmission in the US, and Manitoba Hydro will invest in the transmission in Canada, and at the same time Manitoba Hydro is going to build new power dams that create more storage capability.”
Manitoba’s 1,000 feet of hydro-electric potential remains only half developed and two new hydro projects with associated storage planned for the Nelson River has created the opportunity for further interconnecting the Manitoba battery to MISO.
“We are able to able to operate our hydro system in a manner that takes energy out of the market when the prices are low, and returns the energy to the market in periods when the prices are high,” Cormie explains.“But the new storage capability of our hydro system can only be useful if the transmission line capacity to the market gets bigger. So between the storage that Manitoba Hydro is developing and Minnesota Power’s willingness to build new transmission, we in effect are making the battery bigger, enabling more two-way trade in electricity.”
The ROA will allow for the storage of a million megawatt-hours of wind power annually and address another 133 MW of excess energy. But building additional big transmission is the key.
“We need some more north – south transmission,” says Executive VP of Minnesota Power Dave McMillan. “And it needs to be built with the bigger-in-diameter wire, bigger conductors that can convey more power. The 500 kV line will be able to transfer 750 megawatts.”
Real Time MISO wind energy is at its lowest level since I started monitoring it beginning Jan 2014. Still has not reached zero, though. The operant question is, what is the load like? Its much lower than the peak levels earlier this month. Other question is, how much of the time is it this low? Not very often. There have been two other times when it dipped below 4GW. Both for 10 hours or less. We are actually at the low right now. The day ahead forecast shows it rising, but since the posted forecasts start at the beginning of the day, we don’t have a full forecast. What it says is that there is a level of wind power available at some fraction of nameplate capacity with high probability and it can be forecast well in advance. So far this year, that reliable level has hovered around 4G. That is substantial. These factors are taken into account in economics. The data shows a large area of distributed wind farms produces a steady, predictable output. Especially in the Midwest. If solar is added to this, the result increased dispatchable power. Ibid biomass, hydro, and so on. Its beginning and its increasing. Hint: Minnesota and Iowa are beginning to implement solar in a big way. We are nowhere near the full potential of wind and solar in the Midwest.
Wind farms are designed to withstand high winds because that is the environment they exist in. There are different categories of high wind survivability. This is an exhaustive wind turbine high wind survivability reference. Wind farm turbines are designed according to the expected maximum wind speeds and turbulence. The standards are set by the IEC 61400. Large wind farms are built to withstand wind speeds over 100 mph, generally from 133 to 156 mph. This is a technical rating including turbulence. Wind turbines do remarkably well in very bad conditions.
This source shows they survived Hurricane Irene well.
http://blog.cleanenergy.org/2011/09/06/hurricane-irene-and-its-impact-on-wind-farms/
Here is how fossil fuel plants and nuclear did.
http://blog.cleanenergy.org/2011/09/02/hurricane-irene-and-its-impact-on-fossil-fuels-and-nuclear-power/
There is a dual standard when it come to wind power. Scrutiny over bird deaths is intense. Bird deaths, bat deaths, imaginary syndromes, and inaudible noise… and no PTC subsidy in 2014. Huge subsidies for FF and nuclear despite failing economics. Studies show FF and nuclear bird and bat deaths much higher than wind. Wind has the lowest environmental impact of all the sources, except possibly hydro. Despite this rigged game, wind is doing very well. MISO wind output in January 2014 was over 4G except on two occasions for 10 hours when it dropped to 1.5GW. It operated at 10G for long periods of time. That is equivalent to about 4 nuclear power plants at 90% capacity factor, with the same reliability. Wind industry would gladly trade FF and nuclear subsidies and apply the same standards of bird and bat deaths to nuclear and FF.
If the Bataan nuclear power plant had been built, it would have suffered Mount Pinatubo eruption and hurricane Haiyan. Hurricanes with storm surges of this level are nearly as bad as the tsunami in Japan. It would have undoubtedly suffered a LOOP, loss of outside power, and would have been vulnerable to backup power generator failure. Any flooded nuclear power plant is a real danger. It needs to be understood that the worst thing that can happen to a wind farm in a hurricane is that it gets destroyed. The worst thing that happens if a nuclear plant is almost unthinkable. Its construction was halted when 4000 defects were found.
A whole lot of hot air and not a single reference proving that
“Both lack of wind and excessive wind can cause entire regions of wind generation to go off-line.”
Sure it could. Show me it happened. Show how often and for how long. Show how likely. Show a source that proves it already happened. Show comparisons for relative effects. Like this one,
http://peekskill.patch.com/groups/editors-picks/p/indian-prepares-for-shut-down-in-case-of-100-mph-winds
In the midst of reports that Hurricane Irene will bring winds as strong as and 46 miles per hour in Buchanan, where is located, the nuclear power plant is preparing for the worst, says IPEC spokesperson Jerry Nappi. Control room operators and staff have been going through emergency response and safety procedures that take them through a shut down of the plant.
“If there are 100 miles per hour sustained wins within 320 miles from the plant we will being assessing whether to begin to reduce power with the intention of going off line,” Nappi said.
That’s 46 mph compared to a 56 mph wind speed for wind. I get it. Nuclear shuts down earlier and stays shut down longer. They could remain online, except for the danger of LOOP, and cooling water problems due to floods. By now, post Fukushima and Fort Calhoun, everybody knows flooding is serious for nuclear reactors. As somebody once said, there’s two things you never want to see in one sentence. Flooding and nuclear reactor. And as you say, due to that pesky NRC, it stays down longer.
I gave references for outages with Hurricane Irene. Why don’t you educate yourself and read about what happened during Irene?
“Show me a weather event which shuts down thermal generation over a wide area while leaving the T&D system intact.” You really should think before you write. Yes it’s true, most customer power outages are grid related. But loss of outside power is a serious situation for nuclear and causes a lengthy power up time, unlike wind.
On Friday the 26th, EnergyOnline reported, “more than 20 Midwestern and Canadian nuclear power units are unavailable … and several fossil-fueled power plants are off-line either for scheduled maintenance … or unanticipated repairs.”
I already cited that. Really, you have to read first. It’s not the only time, not the only event. Several FF plants went down in Texas this January along with the Comanche nuclear running at reduced power. When you don’t pay any attention to cited references and keep the same line… Kind of like when you kept insisting that RE lowered stability and worsened VARS until someone caught you at it. Hey wait, you still are falsely claiming that RE lowers stability. I could provide reference.. Naa… You won’t read them.
This is really silly. You don’t have to look far to find nuclear shutting down in extreme situations. If the grid shuts down, off they go, slow to return. If its hot or cold and demand is extreme, same thing. Its not that it is so unusual. Its just that its unusual to find someone denying it. It happened in Sandy, Irene, and this January, too. Complaints about wind are all out of perspective and compared to absolutes instead of relative comparisons. There is no such power source that is totally unaffected by extreme events. On the balance, wind is more robust. Wind is variable, but not unreliable. For a large wind area, a connected grid has a high degree of reliable power. This is no big deal. Its not like power professionals and financial professionals don’t know how wind works. They are not as stupid as wind baggers would like you to believe. Windbaggers want you to believe they know more that professionals. Yeah, and my dentist builds bridges. On the other hand, professionals have figured out that nuclear can be rather unreliable and expensive.
http://will.illinois.edu/nfs/RenaissanceinReverse7.18.2013.pdf
Moreover, the calculation of load factors in Exhibit IV-3 actually overestimates the actual load factor because the denominator includes only reactors that are operable. Reactors that have been retired early or are on long term outage (not in service for the entire year) are not included in the analysis. I show an adjusted load factor that includes in the denominator the long term outages and early retirements. I assume that all the early retirements were reactors that were expected to still be on line, but for the difficulties that shut them down. As shown in Exhibit IV-1, above, this number is substantial. When early retirements and long term outages of more than a year are taken into account, the load factor has been about 70%.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/30/superstorm-sandy-nuclear-power-plants_n_2042598.html
“Superstorm Sandy forced three nuclear reactors to close by playing havoc with cooling water and electrical lines,”
Replying to the Arcus thread here:
Denmark? The poster country for renewables, the home of Vestas, which still has grossly dirty electricity at 385 gCO2/kWh? You call that a success story? And you call France, at 77 gCO2/kWh, a failure… because it’s “doing it wrong”?
I am being forced toward the conclusion that Greens are religious fanatics. They… no, YOU do not care about the environment, you care about proper devotions toward “renewables”, and anyone who does not worship as you do is a heretic.
Your opinion, repeated time after time, is that these represent success stories, that they are good for the environment. That is either a lie or a delusion. Humanity cannnot continue to emit at the rate of Germany, or even Denmark, and expect the biosphere to exist without grievous damage. Denmark leads us to the same destination as China and India, just a few years later. WTF are you thinking?!
Ontario’s grid has achieved something close to the level required to stabilize atmospheric CO2, and thus the climate. France is probably under it. Both of them could lower emissions by growing their current mix of generation and converting other energy consumption (esp. petroleum) to electricity. Germany and Denmark, too high. The only reason I can see for you to promote Denmark and ignore or denigrate Ontario and France is that same Green religion.
You keep finding reasons to ignore the bottom line. According to a leaked UN report, we have perhaps 15 years to get ourselves onto a track of steadily and rapidly decreasing carbon emissions. We have proven, multiply replicated examples to lead us forward. Increasing numbers of climate scientists are calling for just that solution. Are you “environmentalists” on board? Not just no, but HELL, NO! You push for KILLING existing carbon-free base load generation in Minnesota, in Vermont, and even in environmentally-conscious California. Then you act all shocked and innocent when carbon emissions climb!
Did you even read the link you included? It assumes a wholesale re-construction of the grid topology to achieve the putative benefits of robustness. That is Not. Going. To. Happen. It also ignores the minor detail of massive and system-wide mis-matches between the immediate RE power supply and demand. In conventional grids, this tends to cause blackouts. You appear to believe that renewability pixie-dust cures that. I beg to differ.
First, idiot, it’s not MY number; I gave you the source. Second, your reference hand-waves a great deal about storage, but doesn’t provide info about efficiency or net EROI. The references are to analyses of things like “advanced-adiabatic compressed air energy storage”, of which we have ZERO working examples to date. Our proven schemes involve pumped storage (not easily expanded) and batteries (with the aforementioned abysmal EROI).
I once held great hopes for compressed-air storage in deep sandstone aquifers. The lackluster results from the Iowa Stored Energy Park, and lack of follow-up, showed that it could not be deployed as needed and was not a solution.
That information has come out in the last 4 years. When I get information that proves that something will or will not work, I change my position on it to fit the information. You do not. You are a dogmatist, a priest of the Green religion.
Wind and solar only grow because they are subsidized by fossil and nuclear energy. Take that subsidy away, and they collapse. Do you demand the end of “must-take” provision and feed-in tariffs? You do not. You demand subsidies for things that cannot stand on their own, paid by the energy sources you denigrate. You are a hypocrite.
this pushes the edge for length.
But isn’t it nice that Christopher has taken on the task of keeping E-Pot “busy” on a thread that all of the rest of us have moved past for now? That has kept E-Pot from clogging the other threads with his nuclear power fixation and self admiration. Be thankful for little things (and it DOEs up your “hit count”).
It pushes the edge for invectives. Two of the long posts are double posted. Sorry, I dont mean to make the post long. Its just that I am tired of off topic posts attacking wind and RE, so when a post is about those topics… This is the downside of denier antics. They can destroy education by drowning the conversation. At this point, no one else is listening except the four of us and EP is becoming irrational, so its time to let it go. Ironically, I had a better educational exchange with the lads on an off topic thread. There is always something esoteric to learn researching denier complaints, but there are genuinely interested readers that can learn something more prosaic. I could do without the invectives, but I seem to have grown a thicker hide. Thanks for the forbearance.
Actually, I DID learn something from watching you and E-Pot engage in your marathon debate. I am a very fast reader and scanned just about all of it, stopping on occasion for a closer look. You both put out some links that were worth pursuing (at least briefly), but my impression is that he threw at least ten times as much horsepucky against the wall as you did.
I agree with the “drowning the conversation” idea. E-Pot makes much more sense than DB or O-log, but his need to “self-display” just leads to the rest of us “swimming to shore” by going to other threads. Counter-productive for him, but it looks as if he is more interested in trying to establish self-imagined intellectual superiority rather than convince anyone of the “rightness” of his arguments.
Replying to the Arcus thread at /comment-page-1/#comment-48027 (cut-and-paste to get to it):
Denmark? The poster country for renewables, the home of Vestas, which still has grossly dirty electricity at 385 gCO2/kWh? You call that a success story? And you call France, at 77 gCO2/kWh, a failure… because it’s “doing it wrong”?
I am being forced toward the conclusion that Greens are religious fanatics. They… no, YOU do not care about the environment, you care about proper devotions toward “renewables”, and anyone who does not worship as you do is a heretic.
Your opinion, repeated time after time, is that these represent success stories, that they are good for the environment. That is either a lie or a delusion. Humanity cannnot continue to emit at the rate of Germany, or even Denmark, and expect the biosphere to exist without grievous damage. Denmark leads us to the same destination as China and India, just a few years later. WTF are you thinking?!
Ontario’s grid has achieved something close to the level required to stabilize atmospheric CO2, and thus the climate. France is probably under it. Both of them could lower emissions by growing their current mix of generation and converting other energy consumption (esp. petroleum) to electricity. Germany and Denmark, too high. The only reason I can see for you to promote Denmark and ignore or denigrate Ontario and France is that same Green religion.
You keep finding reasons to ignore the bottom line. According to a leaked UN report, we have perhaps 15 years to get ourselves onto a track of steadily and rapidly decreasing carbon emissions. We have proven, multiply replicated examples to lead us forward. Increasing numbers of climate scientists are calling for just that solution. Are you “environmentalists” on board? Not just no, but HELL, NO! You push for KILLING existing carbon-free base load generation in Minnesota, in Vermont, and even in environmentally-conscious California. Then you act all shocked and innocent when carbon emissions climb!
Did you even read the link you included? It assumes a wholesale re-construction of the grid topology to achieve the putative benefits of robustness. That is Not. Going. To. Happen. It also ignores the minor detail of massive and system-wide mis-matches between the immediate RE power supply and demand. In conventional grids, this tends to cause blackouts. You appear to believe that renewability pixie-dust cures that. I beg to differ.
First, idiot, it’s not MY number; I gave you the source. Second, your reference hand-waves a great deal about storage, but doesn’t provide info about efficiency or net EROI. The references are to analyses of things like “advanced-adiabatic compressed air energy storage”, of which we have ZERO working examples to date. Our proven schemes involve pumped storage (not easily expanded) and batteries (with the aforementioned abysmal EROI).
I once held great hopes for compressed-air storage in deep sandstone aquifers. The lackluster results from the Iowa Stored Energy Park, and lack of follow-up, showed that it could not be deployed as needed and was not a solution.
That information has come out in the last 4 years. When I get information that proves that something will or will not work, I change my position on it to fit the information. You do not. You are a dogmatist, a priest of the Green religion.
Wind and solar only grow because they are subsidized by fossil and nuclear energy. Take that subsidy away, and they collapse. Do you demand the end of “must-take” provision and feed-in tariffs? You do not. You demand subsidies for things that cannot stand on their own, paid by the energy sources you denigrate. You are a hypocrite.
In all fairness, using wind & solar for electricity production is relatively new and all forms of energy have, at one time or another been propped up by public money.
The 2011 MISI report showed that nuclear has benefited up to $73 billion in federal subsidies – not anywhere near as much as oil, gas or coal and less than hydro.
But that’s still not chump change.
And nuclear’s total lifecycle GHG emissions, while very low, are not that much lower than the various renewables.
Commercially-available wind generators date to the early 20th century. The first megawatt-scale grid-connected wind turbine pre-dates the first controlled atomic chain reaction.
Name one that received per-unit subsidies even after exceeding 1% of total generation.
Link?
The anti’s have made a habit of counting the nuclear weapons program and military reactor program as “subsidies”. Considering the firewall between military and commercial reactor efforts (Rod Adams and company have noted just how closely the Navy guards information about its powerplants, presumably to keep countries like China from progressing in dangerous directions) it is incorrect to do so.
Contrast wind subsidies alone. In the last full year on record at the EIA (sum of cells M491 through M502) wind generated 164 billion kWh. At an average PTC of perhaps 2¢/kWh, that comes to $3.3 billion in just one year, for about 4% of total generation of ~4000 TWH (N491-N502). An equivalent subsidy for nuclear (778 TWH, column F) would be worth about $16 billion PER YEAR. Instead, nuclear pays 1 mil per kWh into the waste disposal fund, for the disposal facility that Harry Reid will not allow to be built, or even the already-written reports released. There’s about $35 billion in that fund.
Beware any analysis using numbers derived from Storm and Smith, they should be taken no more seriously than climate “skeptics”.
That said, what matters isn’t emissions from any one thing but from the system as a whole. We know that nuclear power displaces fossil-burners far more readily than wind and solar do, because we have multiple examples of it doing just that. If the high estimates are right and nuclear does emit, say, 150 gCO2/kWh, it is still far ahead of a “renewable” grid that gets 60% of its juice from wind and solar, but the rest from gas turbines emitting 700 gCO2/kWh because they are forced to run inefficiently.
Always look at the bottom line.
The MISI report is here The analysis covers a 50 year period.
1 mil??? $1 million per kWh? That sounds MUCH too high. Or did you mean 1/1000th of a dollar?
Good news for your team is that the courts have stopped the collection of the fee
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/20/us/energy-dept-is-told-to-stop-collecting-fee-for-nuclear-waste-disposal.html?_r=0
What you should be fighting for is large-scale reprocessing not a repository.
With enough reprocessing, the need for a repository can be pushed out at least 50 years.
The first megawatt-scale grid-connected wind turbine pre-dates the first controlled atomic chain reaction.
Long before that, wind turbines were providing electricity, even before Marie & Pierre Curie’s discoveries.
And doing so in rural & remote areas in the 19th century, something that nuclear cannot yet do affordably, in the 2nd decade of the 21st.
While I don’t ever expect wind’s capacity factor to approach what nuclear’s is now, it may well reach what it used to be, say 60%+.
This was the case for US reactors overall well into the 1980s and for Japan for several years immediatelyprior to Fukushima.
http://web.mit.edu/ceepr/www/publications/workingpapers/2010-016.pdf
So nukes got better – but so have IWTs. As Peter posted last summer, the old windbagger yarn about 20% capacity factors are old hat.
And now we’re on the verge of 3-7MW floating!?!towers that can stand up to hurricane force winds, addressing the complaint of spoiled beach views, the need for shallow waters and large seafloor foundations.
But let’s not forget who’s the enemy. Nuclear can’t do everything but nothing does baseload as well and with the recent federal loan guarantees, you’re going to get at least 2 new plants – in about 5-7 years.
And in the meantime? Wind & solar are going to put a hurting on coal and possibly gas, leaving more room for more nukes & more renewables.
Sorry about taking 6 days to get back to you on this.
The number for nuclear R&D isn’t sourced. I also note that nuclear is the only technology with a negative number for “disbursements”; net disbursements for all energy sources were -6 billion dollars, or a net gain for the treasury. Every bit of the gain (18 billion dollars) came from nuclear.
I also note that “regulation” is counted as an incentive. Companies dealing with the NRC would differ.
I thought that was obvious from context.
Banned by law in the USA, if I’m not mistaken. Besides, the critics are right to a degree: the old Purex process is amenable to weapons production, as well as creating masses of waste. What we really need is to get something like the pyroprocessing technology proven at full scale (it works fine at lab scale). Either that, or get something like TransAtomic’s reactor that can use ex-LWR fuel more or less directly, and use it up completely.
The YM repository really had a bunch of contradictory requirements: handle relatively short-term heat dissipation demands, and also isolate long-lived radioisotopes. If they’re chemically separated, those functions are separated too. Many of the short-lived isotopes are very useful if they’re purified; there are a great many uses even for Sr-90 and Cs-137. Radio-iridium is still iridium, a very valuable catalyst.
I can see chemical plants using reclaimed iridium catalysts converting bio-crude into finished products, and capturing the CO2 byproduct as carbonates for permanent sequestration. A system that leaves less carbon in the atmosphere with every cycle of the materials, ultimately driven by nuclear energy.
Nuclear electric power is very affordable; we proved that in the 1960’s, when it was cheaper than coal. What’s expensive is a punitive regulatory system which imposes demands on nuclear power that nothing else has to meet, not even radiological emissions standards. Coal plants can spew radon and tramp U and Th all day; those emissions aren’t regulated. But if a nuclear plant leaks the least bit of tritium, even in amounts less than a luminescent “EXIT” sign and at concentrations you could drink without ill effect, it’s front page news.
Umm… how? The kinetic power of a stream of fluid is ½Aρv³; the maximum recoverable fraction in a free stream is 16/27 of that. This means that most of your energy comes during the relatively short periods when the wind is highest. There are two ways to get a 60% capacity factor. You can put your machine where the wind blows very steadily most of the time (very few places near civilization where it does that), or use a really low-powered generator and spill incident power above its limit to keep it running most of the time. Neither lends itself to inexpensive power.
The Japanese units in testing cost out around $20,000 per kilowatt. Nameplate, not average. Don’t get me wrong, I think the idea is neat, but it’s utterly ridiculous to throw around cost figures like that and then claim that nuclear power must be abandoned because it’s “not affordable”.
I had hopes for the flying wind turbines, which could sit in jet stream winds and have capacity factors closer to 60%. Then the polar vortex went all over hell and gone this winter, and the jet stream with it. I imagined tens of thousands of flying turbines on the ground due to insufficient wind, and huge areas blacked out during the coldest conditions many of them have seen in years.
Planning heavy reliance on wind as an energy source means planning for large-scale disruption and even disaster when these weather events occur, as they will with increasing frequency. I see people in positions of responsibility pushing us in that direction, and it scares the hell out of me.
The fact that coal was exempt has long been a clear sign of corrupt politics.
Rather than slacken the leash on nuclear, the correct thing is to tighten the rules around coal – something that should have been done in the ’70s.
Big Oil has rightfully been a pariah for a long time but Big Coal has gotten off far too lightly.
The impact on the lives of workers, and the environment, even leaving aside CO2 emissions, is truly a mark of shame for the modern world.
As for the floating turbines, while that cost is very high, that will quickly come down if the performance & reliability is there.
We’re all impressed by big, huge, massive & gargantuan but for disasters, it has to be about small & distributed.
Homes that are well-insulated, that can store or filter water, make some of their own energy will be as good or better than only having big, reliable power plants far away.
Which raises a question – is there a viable alternative to the gas/diesel generator?
The closest thing that comes to mind would be something like the Phinergy metal-air fuel cell.
The Betz limit?
IWTs get at most 75% of that limit so there’s room for improvement.
The power curve for most IWTs is very steep, thanks to that helpful v³
– the Vestas 112-3.0MW which is designed for lower wind sites ramps up from 500kW at 10 mph to nearly 2.5MW at 20mph.
Taller towers, longer & lighter blades will go a long way towards improving the capacity factor.
Reply re-parented at http://climatecrocks.com/2014/02/04/transmission-allows-wind-storage-in-canada/comment-page-3/#comment-51234
While looking into info on wind turbines, I found an announcement that the Burbo Bank offshore park in the UK will have some of the new 8MW monsters from Vestas.
http://video.vestas.com/video/7108123/v164-80-mw-taking-offshore-wind-power
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/02/19/uk-offshore-wind-farm-will-field-vestas-8-mw-behemoths/
At this size, I imagine it would be really difficult to transport the pieces to most onshore destinations so this behemoth will only have seabirds for the slicing.