More from utility expert Michael Osborne.
The utility of the future will view power resources, increasingly renewable, not as “intermittent”, but as variable, and predictable.
Best example, sun is strongest during the part of day when electric usage is at its peak – therefore predictably able to shoulder large portions of “peaking” capacity, more cheaply than coal, nuclear, or, increasingly, even gas.
Likewise, onshore wind peaks at different times of day than near, or offshore. They compliment each other.
They are predictable. They come in waves.
Peter – Wonderful. A really simple, understandable explanation. Thanks for the mention of offshore vs onshore. Further, near the coast, wind displays a diurnal pattern that neatly complements solar. Glad to hear Osborne thinks solar will be picking up in Texas by 2016. Texas could develops its vast resources properly.
Its particularly important to inject the reality of daily system operation. The system operator plans the generation based on the day ahead demand and generation forecast. Then the operator selects all the sources for the next day. Its right there in the charts that ERCOT and caiso provide. Thats how its done. Thats why the forecast accuracy is important. And why there are so much reserves for load variation.
http://www.caiso.com/Pages/TodaysOutlook.aspx
http://ercot.com/content/cdr/html/CURRENT_DAYCOP_HSL.html
The grid exists because it helps generators schedule supply to meet demand.
The philosophy of wind and solar is the opposite: supply cannot be scheduled (prediction is not the same as control), so the concept is to find demand which can be matched to it. But who can afford to “schedule” the charging of their EV for the next period of wind, when the battery is flat? Can anyone afford to wait for a sunny day to run their computer at work?
The old joke about the solar-powered flashlight is no joke if you have to wait for day before you can turn your lights on.
This is why no one has ever delivered on the “clean and cheap” promise. The cost of integrating large amounts of unreliable, un-schedulable generation into modern grids escalates on an upward-bending curve. Until there’s some realism about the issue, we’ll continue to waste money and irreplaceable time trying to perfect plans that were doomed to failure from the start.
Since I only do my carpentry projects during daylight hours, my solar powered saw and hammer work just fine. Except when chaos intrudes and predictability goes out the window—-I hate it when I’ve got one end of a board nailed up and have to stand there holding the other end until the wind picks up or the sun comes out from behind a cloud—-very tiring.
http://agreenroad.blogspot.com/2012/05/solar-tractor-solar-golf-cart-solar.html
Yes, John Howe proves once again that you can tack solar panels on electrically powered machines and THEY WORK! Beyond that, there is no point to this video.
Bright-sidedness is predictable—it comes in waves also. It’s nice to see some reason for optimism in what’s happening in Texas, and Texas is the poster child for wind power in the U.S. It is also the poster child for some pessimism when one looks a t the bigger energy picture there and the projections.
“Texas produces more electricity than any other state, generating almost twice as much as the next largest generating state. Almost one-half of the electricity generated in Texas comes from natural gas-fired power plants, while coal-fired power plants account for about one-third of the net electricity generation. Six of the state’s 10 largest power plants are coal-fired. Two nuclear plants, Comanche Peak and South Texas Project, supply about one-tenth of the state’s electric power generation. The rest of Texas’ electricity generation is powered by renewable resources, primarily wind”.
“In 1999, the Public Utility Commission of Texas first adopted rules for the state’s Renewable Energy Mandate. In 2005 the state legislature changed the mandate, requiring that 5,880 megawatts, or about 5% of the state’s electricity demand, come from renewable generation by 2015, and 10,000 megawatts by 2025, including a goal of 500 megawatts of renewable-energy capacity from non-wind resources. Renewable energy sources contribute less than one-tenth of the net generation in Texas. However, with close to one-sixth of the U.S. total, the state leads the nation in electricity generation from non-hydroelectric renewable resources. Wind accounts for nearly all of the current renewable-energy electricity generation in Texas”.
Can anyone do the math with those percentages and the projections 11 years into the future for 2025 and couple that with rising CO2 and temperatures?
http://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.cfm?sid=TX
Texas already exceeded the goal
“requiring that 5,880 megawatts, or about 5% of the state’s electricity demand, come from renewable generation by 2015,”
“Installed Wind Capacity: 12,755 megawatts (MW). State Rank: Texas ranks 1st for total MW installed.”
http://www.awea.org/Resources/state.aspx?ItemNumber=5183
Sounds like we need a refresher on the myth of base load power.
“The argument that we need this baseload power ticking over in the background is basically false,” Heron told RenewEconomy after the conference.
“We don’t have a constant demand, so this idea that we need a constant supply is a myth.”
And as for the suggestion that wind energy is too unreliable to make any kind of meaningful contribution to the National Electricity Market, that’s a myth too, says Heron.
“In the Australia’s National Electricity Market, the network is designed such that any generator at any time can be dropped off the network and the system will continue to function within acceptable limits,” Heron elaborated in an email to RenewEconomy this week.
“This means that there is always ‘back-up’ generation standing by, waiting to respond to a network event.
“Sudden loss in wind, which in the extreme case happens over a number of minutes is a much less severe event than, for instance, having the main connection for a large power station suddenly trip.”
As The Guardian’s Damian Carrington has noted, this kind of major energy supply disruption happens more often than we might think.
“The Didcot fire is at least the third at a UK fossil fuel-fired power station in 2014,” he writes. “In February, fire permanently closed E.ON’s 370MW unit at Ironbridge, while in July, two units at SSE’s 1,000MW Ferrybridge coal plant in West Yorkshire were shut after a fire.”
And neither is nuclear immune from shutdowns, adds Carrington, with EDF Energy taking four of its reactors offline in August after a crack was found in a boiler.
The UK grid’s answer to these recent notable outages – together they removed a total of 7 per cent of generation capacity – was to use its regulating reserve, a mix of electricity, including pumped storage and gas power, kept in reserve to compensate for any sudden drop outs.
(Indeed, even nuclear requires a huge amount of back-up. The National Grid said that the new standby generation required to support the 3.2GW Hinckley C power generator would cost £160 million a year. That is $12 billion at current prices over the life of the plant, which is already going to cost more than $45 billion.)
The lesson, here, says Carrington, is not only that traditional fossil generation is intermittent – and dangerously so – but that “the intermittency of some renewables is simply not a problem.
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/10/28/wind-power-cheaper-reliable-natural-gas/
“requiring that 5,880 megawatts, or about 5% of the state’s electricity demand, come from renewable generation by 2015,
Texas wind generation in 2013 (energy)
“Percentage of Texas’ electricity provided by wind in 2013: 8.3 percent. On ERCOT, the main Texas grid, wind energy provided 9.9% of 2013 electricity.”
The storage necessity myth.
Does Christopher understand that this clip is all a simulation and “projection” of where we would like to be? Does he understand that we have not yet gotten there and that there are obstacles to be overcome? Does he understand that the examples of Germany, Spain, Denmark, etc given in the clip also show that we/they have a long way to go? Does he understand that there’s a reason that there has been much talk about the need for some sort of “storage”?
But more importantly, does he understand that fossil fuels are NOT being replaced worldwide by renewables, as much as we all want that to happen?
If storage was not a sine qua non, Denmark and Germany would not be burning coal as their “storage”.