For the First Time, Wind on the Plains Supplied More Than Half Region's Power | Hacker News Reader

For the First Time, Wind on the Plains Supplied More Than Half Region's Power

bloomberg.com

124 pointsmastazi64 comments

That's because there's not much load in that area. America's best wind power belt is north from the Texas panhandle up to Canada.[1] But there are no big cities in that region.

The US thus needs more long DC power lines. The technology is already in use in China. The Zhundong-Sichuan power line goes 2600km. It's a DC line at 1.1 megavolts carrying 10 gigawatts. That technology could easily carry power from the wind belt to the rest of the US.

[1] http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/80m_wind/USwind300dpe4-11.jpg

It was also at 4:30am on a Sunday morning.

They need more windmills. Fortunately, that is a fast growing industry.

That doesn't matter, the information loss in mentioning a percentage makes it sound really awesome and headline worthy!

This is of course expected, and not a knock on the achievement at all. Wind is in its early days, and growing quickly. There's only so much installed capacity, so it's going to reach it's peak percentage of the energy mix when the demand is lowest. And it will only do that if its the cheapest available energy.

Also, wind tends to be higher at night-time, which makes them a good complement to solar. Getting to >50% is something that many many many people have doubted is possible at all.

Dallas-FTW, Kansas City, Minneapolis, and Chicago look to be pretty darn close to that wind power belt.

Agreed on the HVDC lines. They end up reducing the cost of electricity too, because they let us use all of the really cheap wind on the plains, and sun from the southwest.

Don't diminish this achievement by claiming it's a low populated area. The Midwest alone accounts for 1/5 of the population of the U.S. [1].

1. https://www.census.gov/popclock/data_tables.php?component=gr...

The Midwest has many large cities.

But the Midwest does not completely overlap the wind belt. The more densely populated parts of the Midwest are especially far away.

Right, and places like Texas, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Montana are not included in the Midwest. The point isn't that the wind belt region makes up exactly 1/5 of the population, but that there are many people there that shouldn't be dismissed because they aren't in the most densely populated cities.

Oklahoma is definitely included in this RTO's footprint as is Kansas and parts of Montana.

The wind farms in SW Minnesota/the eastern Dakotas/ NW Iowa (http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/30m_US_Wind.jpg) are relatively close to the larger urban areas in the region and I suspect some of it might even feed into Chicago.

There's not much overlap between the wind belt and where people live. But there are many round farms in the wind belt. The unused corners of round farms would be good places for windmills. There's road access in place. Extra revenue for farmers. Won't bother the crops.

Collecting up the power and shipping it somewhere useful is a problem. That requires new high voltage transmission lines and collection at substations for conversion to DC and long distance transmission.

Most of the Midwest population is centered around the Great Lakes, not the wind belt.

The runaway favorite in wind energy is Denmark, where wind turbines, predominantly offshore-based, produced 44% of the total energy production in 2016.

https://apps.axibase.com/slider/energinet-2016/?slide=2

However, wind energy production is remarkably volatile with the minimum and maximum average hourly production per day being two orders of magnitude apart: 912.7 MWh (min) vs 102.6 GWh (max).

https://apps.axibase.com/slider/energinet-2016/?slide=24

They started incentivizing solar generation since it is counter-seasonal compared to wind, wind is stronger in winter months.

https://apps.axibase.com/slider/energinet-2016/?slide=5

This is not sufficient however, so sufficient reserved conventional capacity and interconnects to Norway (hydro) and Germany (gas) is something that helps them even out production on abnormal days.

Yeah that sounds like the perfect mix of generation technologies. Only thing missing is pumped hydro storage for some of those GWh days.

Pumped hydro requires very specific geography to make it viable, which is why it's present in so few places. That's why so many people are investigating other storage systems: batteries, compressed air, flywheels, etc.

You can shift electricity a thousand+ miles with minimal losses. Outside of small islands the real limitation is political borders. You can easily used pumped hydro on any major landmass, but ideal locations are often across a border which very closely ties your infrastructure with another country.

PS: The Rio Madeira transmission link in Brazil, with an overhead length of 2,385km, is the world's longest power transmission line. The geometry get's complex as you can effectively sift power from location A to D by offsetting the direction you send power from intermediary production at B and C.

I was under the impression that line losses were rather high, until I did a quick bit of research and found that they are at around 5 to 6% nation wide [1]. At those levels, it can easily make sense to transmit the power to a location that has better storage.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=105&t=3

The real limitation is mostly technical: dynamically matching supply and demand when some or most of your supplies' outputs are directly controllable is a hard problem in a large, complicated, distributed grid.

Compressed air is probably one of the worst possible ways to store energy, because you cannot achieve more than a low-single digit percent efficiency. Thermodynamics is not your friend when compressing and decompressing air.

http://orbit.dtu.dk/files/6324034/prod21323243995265.ecos201... claims 29-43%, which still isn't great but better than single digits.

The highest point in Denmark is ~170m high.

Hydro + Wind + Solar is a powerfull mix. Hydro tends to have fixed power per year, and a lot of flexibility when you release that power. Solar matches the daily demand in most areas, though Denmark is very far north to produce solar they can import solar from the south.

Wind is really cheap and provides some power 24/7 but does not match the demand curve. So even then you still needs some backup power either from pumped hydro or peaking power plants.

IMO, the real downside is the electric grid becomes even more complex to manage and takes real investments to handle shifting supply.

Real investment usually means lots of real jobs. So win win.

This quote reveals the actual progress:

'“Ten years ago we thought hitting even a 25 percent wind-penetration level would be extremely challenging, and any more than that would pose serious threats to reliability,” Bruce Row, Southwest Power Pool’s vice president of operations, said in the statement. “Now we have the ability to reliably manage greater than 50 percent. It’s not even our ceiling.”'

It amazes me how humans constantly have sheer lack of will power to solve some global issues. For example, according to this pie [1], electric car is still a car indirectly running on fossil fuels.

For fun, let's think for a second how much solar panels does it take to power planet Earth. After rough calculation it's about 496805 km2, which is approximately an area of Spain. This calculation is based on consumption predicion of 198 PWh per year in 2030, and average solar energy of 1000W/m2 with 20% efficiency and 70% sunny days a year. Of course, this is an ideal "world is at peace and there is always somewhere sun shinning" model and it uses today's best available technologies. Storage and transmission system errection would pose a cooperation challenge on a global scale. Just morning food for thought...

[1] http://www.tsp-data-portal.org/Breakdown-of-Electricity-Gene...

From the article: > Ten years ago we thought hitting even a 25 percent wind-penetration level would be extremely challenging, and any more than that would pose serious threats to reliability,”

I do remember reading articles 10 years ago and thinking that we would probably not get anywhere near where we're at today. Frankly, I'm more impressed with the technical progress than with the political bureaucracies which prioritize their own bureaucratic inertia above actually solving the problems we have.

But your car is also a battery and you could charge it using excess home solar.

I personally think the answer is to expand nuclear power. Current and next generation plants are way safer than the designs used for Cherynobl, Three Miles or Fukushima .

Nuclear power seems cleaner, but when you take under consideration things like waste fuel storage it simply does not make much sense.. Yes, it's a great short term solution, but what if in 500 years there is nobody to take care of all of the spent fuel, and clean up all of the nuclear power plant sites?

In 500 years the fuel will have decayed to near-harmlessness. It'd still be a toxic heavy metal, so you don't want to eat it, but simply standing next to it isn't going to kill you.

There's also the little detail that we're using the least efficient fuel cycle imaginable. More efficient ones, e.g. involving breeder reactors, wouldn't produce nearly as much waste.

What if just one of the almost 500 power plants goes into a meltdown after a disaster/asteroid strike/pandemic . How long will it take for the fuel to become harmless? 20k years?

Compare how many people are killed, let alone animals per unit of energy produced with Wind as compared to Nuclear. Wind is far more deadly to humans (from accidents) & animals than the public is lead to believe. Nuclear despite its accidents is far less lethal towards the environment around it.

Wind is only a third as deadly as coal apparently, which isn't too great in my book: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2013/09/29/forget-eag...

Also: http://firsttoknow.com/in-october-2013-two-engineers-became-...

however, the article is saying "coal is the biggest killer in U.S. energy at 15,000 deaths per trillion kWhrs produced, while nuclear is the least at zero. Wind energy kills a mere 100 people or so per trillion kWhrs, "

I don't claim that nuclear is not safe in a short term, especially when we can fully control it. But in a long term it is dangerous to the planet as a whole, not only to humanity.

We could build breeder reactors and burn up >90% of the stuff we call "waste".

The cost of nuclear is really unimpressive and the permitting takes ages due to the unpopularity and safety concerns.

(Hinkley Point C I'm taking as an example; it's being guaranteed electricity prices far above those of wind)

> still a car indirectly running on fossil fuels

the change isn't going to happen overnight. Even if the car still runs on fossil fuels, it's more efficient to produce them at scale, where you can have better exhaust management, and (usually) exhaust produced out of the city. Charging will usually happen nightly, which is good for balancing the load on the grid. In some plants, carbon can be captured, and at the very least exhausts are scrubbed better than what comes out a car's exhaust pipe. So even when an electric car runs on a LNG or coal plant, there's still efficiency gained.

People are selfish, we have more than we need, and all the pleasures and luxuries to satiate every desire we could possibly have. It's (sadly) not surprising that protecting the earth isn't high on many people's agenda.

We're looking to expand http://www.electricitymap.org to the US in order to properly visualise this. Can anyone help? I'm looking for volunteers to help here: https://github.com/corradio/electricitymap/issues/143

Has anyone done any back-of-the-napkin math on how much solar PV we can harness before we start contributing to actually warming the planet? Since it turns mostly-reflected-back-to-space radiation into absorbed-onto-the-surface radiation.

Is there a point at which we need to focus more on wind? (since wind arises from already-being-absorbed-by-surface radiation)

Yet they account for a modest percentage of the total production. This is where PowerPack and other grid storage technologies would need to come in - to counter the variability of renewable production. Pumped hydro would be cost effective per MWh stored, but there's limited chance for building that.

There are other mechanisms that can also help ameliorate the challenges of intermittent ("non-dispatchable") power generation:

- Long-range (generally, DC) power transmission lines. China is investing heavily here.

- Similarly, inter-grid connections. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tres_Amigas_SuperStation - Superconductors!

- Diversified renewables. Solar works on the stifling windless summer days; wind works on those nasty drifting snow winter nights.

- Dispatched demand. For example, industrial facilities can be incentified to shut down power-hungry processes on days with less available electricity, in exchange for cheaper electricity on other days.

- Of course, 'peaker' natural gas turbines. A surprising number of gas power plants are used less than 10% of the time...

In the few factories I have worked the power hungry processes cannot be stopped on demand (eg. one day notice), as it would waste products, it would mess up minimum stockpile lean manufacturing, as the process cannot be interrupted, it could often damage equipment, and usually restarting these processes is very expensive in terms of energy (eg. Reheating a kiln)

The renewables are simply not predictable enough for this, that is why nuclear, an later fusion power will have its place in the energy mix in the foreseeable future.

You're right; many of these facilities go so far as to install backup Diesel generation on-site.

There are plenty of opportunities for demand-shaving, though. The simplest one is to simply reduce the HVAC load by adjusting the thermostat.

I agree we need some nuclear, too, at least in the short term; it's not an either-or proposition. We need nuclear AND renewables AND smart grid AND storage.

The paper mill near here has one of the larger power plants (biomass, burns waste wood) in the region. It uses more power than the nearby small towns combined.

The best way to get industrial consumers to switch is to drive down costs. We're certainly nowhere near 250 Megawatt-hour batteries being cheap and commonplace, but there are projects of that scale that have been announced (in particular I'm thinking of the Vanadium flow battery being installed in China).

Long term, this becomes a matter of calculation. For some businesses its is possible and cheaper to adapt their energy consumption to the spot market prices of electricity, for others it is not, they can decide either to have some storage facilities of their own, or pay the utilities companies to provide the full load 24/7.

one more point

- invest in storage technology

Can we imagine, if we can store all electricity and reuse at night, it will reduce a lot of cost ?

I've even heard of a technology for pushing compressed air in abandoned mines with surplus electricity, to be let out through turbines when there's need for power.

We do all of the above (except the compressed air thing and superconductors) here in Finland and between neighboring power grids. Of course there is room for improvement.

Variable pricing can likely do a great deal to match supply with demand without needing grid storage. Many uses of power are flexible, like charging electric cars, running the electric water heater/freezer/refrigerator, etc.

The variability needs to be very high to be an effective incentive for small power uses. If price of electricity goes from 10c/kWh to $1/kWh, it won't stop you using 1kW kettle for 5min if you want tea. And if push the price high enough to be effective, it starts hurting essential electricity users. Demand adjustment is more effective for industrial users who have beancounters.

Probably better to target excessive capacity and pay for use during overproduction. It makes grid storage and alternatives like water to hydrogen conversion profitable solutions.

>The variability needs to be very high to be an effective incentive for small power uses. If price of electricity goes from 10c/kWh to $1/kWh, it won't stop you using 1kW kettle for 5min if you want tea.

Industrial users can be persuaded to vary their usage though.

A 'smart home' could also be programmed to handle variable electricity usage - e.g. load up a washing machine ready to go and let it start running when electricity is cheapest, or electric storage heaters.

Neither of these things require any technological leaps whereas efficient, cost effective grid-level energy storage does.

That's right. It won't solve the problem, but it will substantially reduce it, as in less grid storage will need to be built.

It's roughly 2x more expensive on peak vs off peak in Ontario and it was enough that all my roommates would plan their dishwasher and laundry schedule around it.

Ah good, perhaps we will soon be able to dump our asinine requirements around ethanol (which, I think, only exist because of Iowa's unique position in choosing Presidential candidates.)

Only if we can get more EVs on the road to reduce petrol consumption.

It is worth noting Texas has it's own grid seperated from the west and east grids supplying most of the rest of the world. I had a relative who was a project manager on some of the big wind installs in Texas, but for some reason I can't remember his main criticism of the project which caused him to move over to solar work...

Interesting.

You can't swing a cat without hitting a wind tower construction crew in OK and the TX panhandle.

They're building some huge interconnect HVDC lines to the rest of the country from the Panhandle region. There's a 4GW, 600kv line slated for completion in 2018 that's going to bring Texas and Oklahoma wind power to the TVA.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/huge-transmission...

4:30 a.m. on Sunday

Seriously people? Many places are throwing away energy at this time. This is like a participation award.

> The power grid that supplies a corridor stretching from Montana to the Texas Panhandle was getting 52.1 percent of its power from wind at 4:30 a.m. on Sunday, Little Rock, Arkansas-based Southwest Power Pool Inc. said in a statement Monday.

I fail to see why the time it happened is relevant here. We're talking about generating capacity here, not draw. The wind blows around the clock, this could have happened at 4:30 PM.

I quit thinking about this energy source after re-opening my chemistry book.

You need ~400M-500M tons of steel to make 2-3 Terawatt Hours of Electricity

Disclaimer: My family owns a steel plant, so I'm bias in that I think the carbon emissions required to produce steel wind turbines don't make sense/don't match the intention of building wind turbines.

Where does that "~400M-500M tons of steel" number come from?

The turbines tend to have composite blades and steel towers. Actual studies put the amount of energy returned by wind turbines at ~18 times the energy invested: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/1863

And if not wind turbines, then what is your preferred low-carbon energy source?

You have to think bigger about materials level embodied energy.

If you go about looking at energy density without evaluating the feedstock materials and embodied energy, your maths won't achieve the desired result.

I was doing the math on the back of a napkin, but there's quite a few papers on the topic.

www.vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/15.WINDTURBINE.pdf

I might be off by 25M-50M tons, but I think the overall assertion is valid.

My belief about how to fix the problems with energy grid: http://engineersf.com/things-humanity-could-do-right-now-to-...

Any sort of libertarian or free-market approach to this problem will likely fail. This is one of those mission critically deal breakers where human behavior can't be modulated in a desired direction.

From that very paper you linked:

"the aggregate installed wind power of about 2.5 terawatts would require roughly 450 million metric tons [of steel]"

That's terawatts (nameplate power capacity) NOT terawatt-hours! A very important distinction since the steel is a onetime cost for the life of the turbine and can potentially be recycled at EOL.

Yes, you need currently available usually fossil energy to make renewable sources, including PV and nuclear. What is the alternative? Yes, embodied energy / EROEI is important, but it has to be considered fairly across all technologies. Including battery storage and nuclear plants, and the replacement of petrol vehicles with EVs.

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