Brian Merchant in Motherboard:
On Wednesday, March 27th, the largest state in the contiguous United States got almost one-third of its electricity by harnessing the wind. According to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the bulk of the Lone Star State’s power grid, a record-breaking 10,296 MW of electricity was whipped up by wind turbines. That’s enough to provide 29 percent of the state’s power, and to keep the lights on in over 5 million homes.
ERCOT notes in a statement issued today that “The new record beats the previous record set earlier this month by more than 600 MW, and the American Wind Energy Association reports it was a record for any US power system.”
The landmark is further evidence of one of the nation’s unlikeliest energy success stories. Conservative politicians have a renownedaversion to clean energy (thoughRepublican voters favor it overwhelmingly), and Texas is still deep red. Yet wind farms are cropping up in there faster than almost anywhere else. ERCOT points out as much, as it boasts of the sector’s recent growth:
Texas continues to have more wind power capacity than any other state. The ERCOT region has more than 11,000 MW of commercial wind power capacity, with nearly 8,000 MW of new projects in development and more than 26,700 MW under study. Wind power comprised 9.9 percent of the total energy used in the ERCOT region in 2013, compared to 9.2 percent in 2012.
Texas has more wind power than any other state, by a huge margin. And it keepsblowing through these major milestones just about every year. There was some trepidation that Texas’s wind industry would slow as fracking rose in prominence and a key tax credit faced expiration, but hallmarks like this underline some very strong fundamentals. Wind power is ideal for Texas, where there’s a lot of open land, a lot of breezy plains—and a rising demand for electricity, as the state’s population continues to grow.
So the wind boom has carried on. After new power lines are installed to better route the power from rural areas to more populated cities, Texas will be the 5th-largest wind power producer in the world. Most importantly, perhaps, is that there’s now a thriving industry with real economic and political power—citizens and politicians alike appreciate, work, and profit from the wind sector, so they’ll be more willing to fight for it.
Clean energy has become an institution in the most un-hippie state in the country, and there’s reason to believe it will not only stay that way—but continue its trajectory and even pass on its influence to the rest of the nation. If Texas can get a third of its energy from the wind, why not Kansas, Wyoming, Alaska? With installation and generation continuing apace, and promising new high-flying technologies rolling out, the future of wind power is looking stronger than ever.
As good as the Texas story is, the Longhorns have a long way to go to match the Greenhorns in Denmark.
Motherboard again:
Here’s another feather in Denmark’s green cap. The national nonprofit that supplies the nation’s electricity and natural gas, Energinet, reported that wind power supplied a record 54.8 percent of the country’s electricity in the month of December. During the Christmas week, when electricity demand is historically lower due to holiday business closures, wind power provided a whopping 68.5 percent of Denmark’s electricity.
On the best day of the month, December 21, wind power generated 102 percent of electricity demand—more energy was generated than needed. In fact, for one hour on December 1, wind power produced over 30 percent more electricity than was needed.
The record-setting month follows a banner year for wind power in Denmark. Wind generated 11.1 billion kWh of electricity in 2013, from an installed capacity of just under 4.8 gigawatts, representing 33.2 percent of electricity consumption for the year. Last year, Denmark installed an additional 600 megawatts of wind power capacity. It also represents the serious commitment to renewable energy by the government, which has established a target of 50 percent of all electricity coming from wind power by 2020.
Wind is setting records for low cost also.
“In the Midwest, we’re now seeing power agreements being signed with wind farms at as low as $25 per megawatt-hour,”
“Given the large expected increase in demand for gas, offset by production gains, gas prices are expected to rise over the long term. As a result, the bar for renewables and other fuel sources to cross continues to rise, thus making it easier for alternatives to gain market share.”
Financiers in particular are conscious about the volatility in U.S. gas prices and the likelihood that they will rise. These factors are influencing where they are putting their money, and new YieldCo financing facilities for solar and wind energy are making these technologies both cheaper and more attractive.
http://www.greentechmedia.com/content/images/articles/citi-lcoe-all-technologies.jpg
http://grist.org/news/wind-energy-becoming-cheaper-than-natural-gas/
Wind must be backed by other generation which can cope with rapid variability. Hydro is the ideal, but next-best is gas-fired turbines. Wind and natural gas are joined at the hip.
All electricity generation needs back up. There’s absolutely nothing special or unusual about wind in that regard. Rapid variability isn’t the problem though. Individual turbines are variable, but many linked together in a grid not so much.
Also wind turbines are excellent for balancing load / demand which is seriously useful. Demand being way more variable than supply.
I found your comment so staggeringly ignorant it took me hours to find my figurative voice again.
Your assertions suggest that it is impossible to educate you. Like a young-earth creationist, you are utterly convinced of things that are factually false. I don’t have the time to dig up sources for complete rebuttals, and your confirmation bias probably makes it futile anyway. All I can do is list what you get wrong.
Wrong. If it weren’t HIGHLY unusual, there would be no need to completely re-work the grid to accomodate it.
Four words: “ramp rate”. “Thermal cycling”.
I have a link to a graph of the Washington state wind farms sitting at zero total output for the better part of 2 weeks, but with the incompatibility bug which disabled TagSieve I’m unable to dredge it out of my bookmarks right now.
System operators swear that wind farms and “RE” in general is their biggest headache for balancing production and demand. Your qualifications are what, exactly?
Given that the supply of wind+solar can (and does) go completely to zero while demand never does, I’d say you have to be insane to believe what you wrote. Therefore, I shall: you have to be insane to believe what you wrote. This, god help us, does not prevent you from demanding that policy based on your insane demands be imposed on everyone.
This has the aspects of a tragedy worthy of Greek myth: the insane public, prostrating itself to the god Renewability, finds its own death when its prayers are answered (like King Midas)… and finds that its most significant contribution to renewability is its own energy of decomposition.
What delicious irony. Engineer-Poet, a well-known nuclear fanboy and one of the most motivated reasoners on this site, accuses someone else of confirmation bias.
Let’s see now…
1a) Jason is completely correct about all generation needing back-up. This includes that beloved nuclear, which has both scheduled and unscheduled (often quite spectacular) downtime. This is just plain common sense. *Every* source of generation can fail on occasion, and so we will always need some way to keep the lights on during those times.
1b) The grid doesn’t need to be reorganized because wind is *unusual* in any way, but only because it wasn’t originally designed to support the nature of its output. You’d think that an engineer would be able to figure that one out.
2a) No, rapid variability isn’t really that much of a problem (it’s more of a limitation than a weakness). E-P wants you to believe that variability equals unreliability, but that’s trivially untrue. Wind hardly ever just dies suddenly (unlike, say, a nuclear power plant), but tends to ramp up or down smoothly, and in ways that are forecastable hours or even days in advance. Things that are predictable aren’t unreliable, and can be planned for.
2b) Jason is completely right again to point out that while a single turbine is highly variable, a whole fleet of them is not. The more sources you add, the more the output tends to center around a mean value. Again, you’d think that an engineer would know something about the nature of redundancy and distributed sourcing. And it gets even better when you combine wind with other sources, particularly solar. The need for storage/back-up for wind and solar, while necessary, is also highly overstated by the detractors.
2c) E-P says he has a link to a wind farm that experienced a two week downtime, but of course he can’t be bothered to actually post it. But even assuming it’s true, there are other questions to ask. How common was this event? Was it typical, or the result of a rare combination of conditions? Is what happened in Washington applicable to wind power in general, or only to that region (how likely is it that Denmark, for example, would suffer a similar situation)? When the wind was down, how did solar generation perform? And finally, is there any real difference in outcome between this event and what happens when a nuclear power plant blows a gasket and suffers two weeks of unscheduled downtime?
2d) If variability really is the problem with wind, then what’s needed to back it up is something that’s easily rampable. The best solution is obviously storage, which is coming along nicely, but other options like biofueled peaker plants can also do the job. What doesn’t work well in such cases are large, unrampable baseload generators like coal or nuclear.
As for the rest of the post, I don’t have much knowledge of those areas so I will leave it to someone else. But I will say that everything I have read so far tends to show that wind power is not a cause, but rather a solution to the problems of variability and downtime. How many articles about how wind power kept the lights on in a winter snowstorm or summer heatwave do we need to read before it starts to sink in? How many articles do we need to see about how it’s now supplying 30%, 40%, 50% or 100% of a country’s electric needs without causing “headaches”?
Like many other obviously intelligent and educated people who have ideological biases, I’ve noticed that E-P has a kind of myopic vision when it comes to the nature of renewables. While he’s sometimes very good at pointing out issues with individual technologies, he appears to be quite unable to see how they fit together as a whole, so that the weaknesses of one are compensated by the strengths of another (as in the wind/solar combination), or how they can often be easily managed with just a bit of planning and forethought. To him wind just *has* to be not *quite* good enough, so that his real love can look better in comparison.
(PS: I’ve posted here before a couple of times under another name, but the reply box no longer gives me the option of a g+ login. What’s up with that? I had to take the radical step of signing up for a WordPress account to post this, something I was really trying to avoid doing. )
You want Prayer? OK. Will all repeat after me?
“Lord We implore you to free us from the flowery and narcissistic writings of the one who fancies himself a Poet. We beg that you show him the way out of the dark recesses of his self-admiration and back onto the path of the Engineer, where he at least on occasion makes contributions of value on Crock. We ask that you remind him of the lesson of Matthew 7:1-29, and tell him to clear up The Desmid Question before he berates others for their inadequacies. We ask this in the name of your son Jesus Fracking Christ, who died on the cross so than mankind could F**K up the planet in the name of profit and destroy all the life thereon. Amen.”
altair04 rebutted here, for readability:
http://climatecrocks.com/2014/04/02/texas-lassos-one-third-of-electricity-from-wind/comment-page-2/#comment-55180
As I write this, Denmark is reporting 264 g/kWh of CO2 emissions. This is much too high if we are ever going to arrest the increase in atmospheric CO2, let alone reduce it.
Denmark is held up as a model, but it is only able to manage the unreliability of its wind generation by using hydro-heavy Sweden and Norway as buffers. Sweden’s CO2 emissions are about 23 gCO2/kWh, less than a tenth of Denmark’s average. This is possible because Sweden’s thermal plants don’t use carbon-based fuels, but uranium.
Those truly concerned about the climate should go back and note that Hansen’s testimony before Congress did not tout Denmark as a model for the future. He touted Sweden.
Load and generation variability are likely to be handled differently in the future.
https://www.ecn.nl/nl/nieuws/newsletter-en/2010/september-2010/wind-energy-and-power-grid/
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0196890408004780
Here’s a quick quiz question for grid energy storage watchers: What kind of asset is already deployed in homes around the Northeast U.S., Ireland and other cold-weather markets, just waiting to be networked and controlled?
The answer is thermal electric heaters: systems that use electricity to super-heat ceramic bricks or tanks of water, then slowly release that heat into homes via fans and pipes. About five hours of electric charging provides a full twenty-four hours of home heating — something that usually happens on a set schedule every day, with little or no value to the grid.
Variability can be handled in many ways, not just storage.
– demand response
Loads that integrate and do not require 24/7
Water pumping
Drying
Continuos process
Loads that can be scheduled or timed
Washers, dryers, time delayed functions
– reserves
– embedded load storage ( hot water tanks )
Another energy storage method which has been used for several years involves commercial freezer warehouses – which are widespread around the world and used for storing products such as frozen foods. At times when local energy is overabundant a warehouse can lower its thermostat way down and bank the cheap energy as ‘cold’. It doesn’t hurt the contents to be chilled to -40 instead of just -20. Then, when electrical supply drops or demand peaks, the warehouse can coast and minimize its energy use for a period.
Good post. There are regional differences. In California, water is pumped from the north, up over the mountains and into LA. It’s the single largest load in the state. Another integrating load.
Lacking from your list is any estimate of the magnitude of average load each piece encompasses, nor the feasible storage * duration. Some items, like drying, appear suitable as dump loads; the question is, how much matter can you stockpile for later drying without e.g. molding or other deterioration? That limits how much you can defer your demand.
People will vote this down because it challenges cherished notions of the “renewables” advocates. Problem is, nature demands answers to the same questions, and has the only vote that counts.
I live in Texas,and have been on a 100% renewable plan for many years.At first I had to pay about 2cents /kWh more than the other lowest cost non-renewable plans,and I was willing to make that sacrifice,but the last couple years The costs are about equal. Most people that I know do not even pay attention to the content mix of their energy plans,and some even pay well above average because they haven’t bothered to shop around once their plan contract expires.
Are you limiting your consumption of electricity to the periods when the “renewables” are producing (and consume proportionally to their production), or are you using fossil-fired capacity when they’re sidelined?
So what if he is? The main point is that every kilowatt hour he gets from renewables is a kilowatt hour he’s not getting from fossil fuels. It may not actually be 100% yet, but it is a move in the right direction. And his plan is designed to, at least on paper, act as if it were already 100%, with the money he pays going towards actually implementing that goal.
BTW, I’ll bet you there’s never been a time in his plan whererenewables were not producing at some level. When you’re talking about a state as big as Texas, the chance of there being absolutely no wind and no solar available at the same time is approximately zero.
Nice posts altair. Kudos. Here are some nice references for you. ERCOT has good archived historical data. ERCOT is actually a small region compared to MISO. I have been following MISO, ERCOT, CAISO. All of them give data, but its easiest to find archived daily reports by hour on ERCOT. There is not one single day with zero wind in January. I think you will find the same for February, and every month I looked at. Same for MISO. What you find is that Midwest wind is incredibly strong in January. Perfect for winter loads. Midwest wind is lowest in June, July. Perfect for balancing solar. I don’t need to tell you about renewables integration, you seem to be way familiar. NREL, WWITS, EWITS, are the best sources. You also seem to be familiar with the way ISOs and the electric power system works. Good. Peter has posted several articles about how wind has saved utilities bacon when NPP failed suddenly.
http://www.ercot.com/gridinfo/generation/windintegration/
altair04 – here is some more for you. The subject of wind reliability, large area distributions, and storms has been discussed in great detail before. There is a wealth of information in these blog posts.
http://climatecrocks.com/2014/02/04/transmission-allows-wind-storage-in-canada/comment-page-2/
The lignite-burning boilers and gas-gulping turbines providing reactive power, regulation and spinning reserve for the grid have to burn fuel just to be there when needed; even if they are providing no kWh, they are still burning fuel and emitting carbon. The only way to avoid this is to have demand exactly track the supply. That is why the precise consumption pattern of skeptictmac57 is relevant.
You’d lose that bet. The Bonneville Power Administration serves some 300,000 square miles (about 15% bigger than Texas) and its 4 GW of wind generation was essentially AWOL for the better part of 2 solid weeks so far this year. You’d have had zero wind and zero solar for most of those nights, and nights are long in January in Idaho and Washington.
Have a look at either or both of the links below. Does it look even remotely like there’s 4 GW of wind generation spread across an area “15% larger than Texas”?
http://www.bpa.gov/transmission/Projects/wind-projects/Documents/BPA_wind_map_2012.pdf
http://gis.bpa.gov/gis/wind/index.html?mapsvc=http://gis.bpa.gov/ArcGIS/rest/services/BPAPublic/WindMap/MapServer
Looks to me that the entirety of their wind farms occupy an area that MIGHT be 15% OF the size of Texas.
If you look at the most dense concentration, there’s 3.3 GW of nameplate wind capacity operating in an area of ~1800 sq miles
That’s 0.077% of the area of Texas.
That does make them vulnerable to doldrums – a known complication of building so much in the Columbia Gorge as indicated at http://www.bpa.gov/Projects/Initiatives/Wind/Pages/default.aspx
My specific words were “SERVES some … 15% bigger than Texas”. If you want to fight a straw man, post your own sub-thread and leave me out of it.
As for the distribution of the wind farms, they are put where they are cost-effective. They need wind to supply their energy, physical access to install the farms, and proximity to transmission to get the power out. Further, you haven’t even tried to make your case. You are implying that if wind farms had been sited elsewhere in the BPA territory, they would have filled in that 2-week near-total outage. Where’s your evidence?
For the sake of argument, suppose that the proposition is true: siting a bunch of wind farms in certain areas would have provided significant “in-fill” power during those 2 weeks. This begs the question: why aren’t there wind farms there already? If the sites weren’t economic, they’d just go bankrupt or require even more subsidies to operate. That would make a lie of the claim that RE is sufficiently abundant and cheap to substitute for both FF’s and nuclear power.
It remains the case that wind installations drop off steeply when tax preferences for them expire. It follows that most of them cannot compete unless they are given some sort of help, which comes at the expense of other sources of energy and the economy in general. This is synonymous with “misallocation of resources”, aka “waste”.
Compounded by the fact you’d said elsewhere in this article’s comments – “I found your comment so staggeringly ignorant it took me hours to find my figurative voice again.”, the feat of intellectual dishonesty you exhibited here is so profound that I’m beginning to re-evaluate my low opinion of Omnologos.
The comment you initially replied to and the portion you quoted implied very strongly that given Texas’ size & renewable potential, it would be highly unlikely that neither wind nor solar could contribute significantly at the same time if the farms were distributed across its area.
Now, there was no evidence given to support this, a point you did not raise at that time.
If it were I who was disagreeing with altair04’s point, there are a few things I might have done.
One would have been to find nighttime data for Texas wind production where it was very low or perhaps look for calm, cloudy days.
Having looked at the distribution of Texas wind farms, I would think finding periods of poor wind production should be possible as they appear to be heavily centralized in a triangular area bounded by Lubbock, Abilene & Fort Stockton as well as, to a lesser extent, in the panhandle north of Amarillo.
Hmm, or maybe IOWA – those fools have been claiming over 20% power production from wind for several years and closing in on 30%. There’s bound to be many stretches of windless days with nothing to do but burn coal & cornhusks.
If I were very confident or feeling particularly ethical, I might have chanced finding contradictory data for California, whose exploitation of wind & solar is perhaps the most balanced & long-running in all of North Am.
No doubt there must be oodles of data to show altair04 what a maroon he is.
But, no.
I, being neither engineer, poet nor gestalt of same, I would not have thought to find an area in the Pacific Northwest with a heavy concentration of wind farms in a fairly small area, managed by a multi-state utility and used a prolonged lull as disproof, claiming all the while how much bigger than Texas it is.
And when called out on my bullshit, hey, I SPECIFICALLY said SERVES, alright?
Very well said, but E-Pot is not listening.
He is too busy admiring himself in the mirror and waging an insane debate with stepengn and I over on the otherwise long dead Artificial Leaf thread. Perhaps we are stretching him too thin and that makes it hard for him to respond intelligently?
(…mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the biggest narcissist of all?…)
In new Zealand 85% of our electricity is renewable with a mixture of hydro, geothermal and a bit of wind. The next step is to convert our transport to electricity to reduce our oil import bill. http://www.climateoutcome.kiwi.nz/clean-energy-alternatives.html
I am also a Texan and although we have a lot of wind farms and in Houston and Dallas there are privatized markets for electricity, in fact very few people choose 100% renewable. The cost is either the same or 5-10% higher, but so many things about ordering electricity services makes it difficult to choose a renewable plan.
I wrote an article about it for Texans two years ago. http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/weblogs/idiotprogrammer/2011/09/how-to-choose-a-texas-electric-provider-the-wrong-way/
My money quote: “In 2010 Electric plants in Texas (population 25 million) emit as much CO2 as electric plants in the COMBINED states of New York, California, Florida, Massachusetts and Oregon (population: 86 million)”
Good blog post. I did not know that many locations still could not choose their providers in the market place. Is that still the case (article was from 2009)?
The ‘Power to Choose’ interface changed about a year or so ago,and is a bit better now.However you still need to know what you are doing. I agree that the fixed 12 month rate is the better choice (unless you like to change more often,where you might surf the teaser rates). You also need to watch the ‘Minimum Usage Fees’ note,as it can cost you $10 to $14 more per month if you are under 1000kWh,which I usually am. I also like to keep an eye on the complaint score,despite the fact that I have never really had a problem with my providers,but I still will pay a bit more if the cheaper providers have a poor score.
Any plans to update the (2009) data since windpower continues to grow in Texas?
It wasn’t hard for me:
http://powertochoose.com/
Fixed rate, 3 year plan, 1 cent more per kwh for 100% renewable. No hassle, easy set up, and I get full status reports on usage each week.
Maybe the powertochoose website was in a more rudimentary state when you reviewed it, but you can easily select a fixed rate plan for whatever length you like, and there’s a full range of renewable plan options.
My wife and I use about half the power that the average Texan does, so ironically I pay more per kwh for using less power than I do selecting a 100% renewable plan.
Something I noticed is that your money quote had no link to supporting data.
More delectable irony from E-P. The very person who couldn’t be bothered to post supporting links in his post further up the page now berates another for not supplying supporting links.
Texas also has terrific solar resources that they’ve barely begun to develop.
It’ll be a good thing for the Southwest when Tres Amigas comes online around 2016 and the Lone Star State will be better able to take advantage of their renewable resources.
Thanks for the link. I read it has the capability to expand to 30GW!
Here is an article on demand response. Today’s grid reality is rapidly becoming yesterday’s.
Tying multiple buildings together could allow property owners or demand response aggregators to put that demand to use in various grid markets beyond old-fashioned, peak-reduction-centric demand response, he said. “There’s a lot of investment we’re making in our product, for what I’d call state awareness: what’s dropped, what running, what’s available,” he said.
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/californias-title-24-a-grid-smart-thermostat-in-every-building
This is one of the many ways the future power system is changing.
Taller, less expensive, easily transportable wind turbine towers increase capacity factor, energy and lower costs.
The space frame advances the potential of GE to deliver taller towers capable of more power production at a lower cost.
GE’s enclosed-lattice, five-legged space frame prototype, sited at the company’s Tehachapi, California facility, is 97 meters tall with a “brilliant” GE 1.7-megawatt, 100-meter rotor turbine on top. GE will introduce a 139-meter-tall space frame for its 2.75-megawatt, 120-meter rotor turbine on March 11 at the European Wind Energy Association conference.
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Is-GEs-Space-Frame-Wind-Turbine-Tower-The-Future-of-Wind-Power
Don’t have a link, but I recently saw a piece on a wind turbine that had no externally visible rotors and was much smaller. It had an open-ended “horn” duct that looked like a microwave antenna. The idea was to channel the wind down the horn, increase its velocity by decreasing the size of the duct, and put a smallish turbine in the airflow. If I recall, it DID generate a fair amount of e for its size. I wonder if it could be scaled up?
You’ll find plenty of ducted turbines in artwork from 70’s magazines. Nobody built them because the ductwork costs a lot more than just making some skinny blades longer.
I saw that one. I am skeptical. Check out Paul Gipe on the subject. Honestly, there is really nothing better than a three bladed upwind turbine. Because wind is higher at high altitudes, cheaper, taller, towers are a big deal. In the Midwest, these could push capacity factors up to 50%. Right not the lack of a PTC is holding back US wind development. While less turbines were erected in 2014, wind energy output still increased due to the addition of new transmission lines, and simple upgrades like GE did to their turbines to increase efficiency. Here is what wind looks like when integrated over a wide area;
https://www.misoenergy.org/MarketsOperations/RealTimeMarketData/Pages/RealTimeWindGeneration.aspx
Barriers to wind development are being lowered:
http://www.midwestenergynews.com/2014/04/03/minnesota-lawmakers-look-to-boost-wind-energy-exports/