How to Get Wyoming Wind to California, and Cut 80% of U.S. Carbon Emissions | Hacker News Reader

How to Get Wyoming Wind to California, and Cut 80% of U.S. Carbon Emissions

technologyreview.com

123 pointsrbanffy45 comments

Wyoming is an amazing place. I was just reading about how windy it is there. Blows vehicles over cliffs. Turns over 26 wheeled tractor trailers.

Geologists have rough estimates for how much sediment, from the once 10,000 - 15,000 foot higher Rocky Mountains, has been deposited in the plains and in the Mississippi river delta. It's a lot! So much that the delta has 25 thousand feet of sediment, sinking and pressing down into the Earth's mantle, causing one heck of a thermal reaction.

But maybe 30% of the former Rocky Mountains is unaccountable as sediment or as nicely sloped Kansas/Nebraska plains. One day, scientists in South Carolina noticed a lot of dust in the air. They checked the weather and found out the dust had been carried from the Rockies. They estimated that over 1,000,000 tons of dust was deposited in the Atlantic Ocean that day.

Apparently, many places in Wyoming don't have any soil smaller than pebbles. It's all been blown away.

Wyoming has a history of producing energy for the West Coast. The Jim Bridger Power Plant is turing 250 tons of WY coal per hour into 2,000 MW of electricity for the Pacific Coast. But, it's keeping all the pollution for Wyoming.

You can learn a hundred more interesting facts, in poetic story form, by reading: Annals of the Former World by John McPhee.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005H0O8KQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

"The Jim Bridger Power Plant is turing 250 tons of WY coal per hour into 2,000 MW of electricity for the Pacific Coast. But, it's keeping all the pollution for Wyoming."

How, with all that wind, is the pollution staying in WY?

Good point. Jim Bridger is in SW WY, so prevailing winds do take it east across the state, but it must go past the state as well. It just doesn’t go to where the electricity is used, which is west.

Upvote for the McPhee reference. Annals is the compilation of his 4 books on geology. Your reference is from Rising From The Plains, I think. They're excellent reads on how North America came to be. Even as a non-geologist, they're among my favorite reads.

There's a whole lot of nothing at all in Wyoming. I remember driving through on the highway eastbound, and came to a spot where the only sign of civilization was the road. Not even an aircraft contrail in the sky. Just the road.

For anyone else in my position, who thought that AC won because it was inherently more efficient for transmission, the Wikipedia page [1] has a nice overview of HVDC. There's also this PDF from Siemens[2] with some data. Interesting points: the voltage being discussed is in the hundreds of thousands of volts (800,000 for the line in the PDF), and the transmission losses are apparently 30-50% lower for HVDC.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current

2. https://www.siemens.com/press/pool/de/events/2012/energy/201...

A simplistic explanation of the tradeoff between HVAC and HVDC transmission with modern technology is that HVDC has lower losses, but the converter and switching stations are more expensive. So HVDC can make sense for an application that needs to transmit a very large amount of power over a huge distance with no need for switching stations midway. A classic example would be linking a very large offshore wind farm to the onshore transmission system. But for "normal" transmission applications, where there are many stations connecting different HV circuits to each other as well as to lower voltage distribution circuits, it is less economical.

The "DC can't be transmitted long distances" myth seems to date back to a time when solid-state (read: efficient) DC-DC converters didn't exist. In Edison's time, the entire DC grid had to operate at the same voltage, whereas an AC grid could utilize transformers to step the voltage up for transmission. But if a DC "transformer" had existed at the time, DC grids would not have had that limitation. The physics (capacitance, inductance, skin effect) dictate that for a given voltage and distance, DC is always more efficient than AC transmission.

As currently proposed, the TransWest Express HVDC line start in Rawlins, WY, and first run towards Delta, UT, where without connections [1] it will begin to run alongside the Intermountain Power Plant HVDC Line [2], for the majority of its remaining journey, before ending in the complicated clustering of substations near Boulder City, Nevada.

The Intermountain Power Plant HDVC line begins at the Intermountain Power Plant, a coal-fired plant in Delta owned in large part by Southern California cities, and runs to Adelando, CA, on the outskirts of Victorville. It can already rapidly dump power between west-central Utah and southern California. With coal prices remaining high relative to natgas and California pushing for more renewables, the future of the Intermountain Power Plant is in question. It seems shortsighted then, to not plan an interconnection at Delta from the start.

Redundancy and resiliency is another issue. Most of the transmission lines between the Las Vegas Valley and Mesquite, NV closely parallel each other, the Union Pacific railroad, and I-15. One major disruption to a small area could easily cripple a significant portion of southern California's power capacity (including power lines [3] to Glen Canyon Dam, Navajo Power Station, and the coal plans around Farmington, NM), and cut off a critical transportation route with the interior. The patchwork of public land, protected land, and military reservations in southern Nevada complicates the placement of infrastructure, and confines it to narrow corridors, but piling further projects immediately adjacent is a risk.

[1] http://www.transwestexpress.net/about/docs/TransWest-Express... [2] https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/3392214#map=7/37.130/... [3] https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/14282204

It’s really strange that it doesn’t mention the two big HVDC lines that are already built and operational from the Pacific Northwest to LA and LA to Salt Lake City. I think something like half of LA’s power comes over that first line...

If your goal is just to connect the grid you’d only need to connect Wyoming to Salt Lake and maybe upgrade Path 27.

Super exciting that you could solve the issue of intermittency of renewables and increase the stability of the US grid all while getting a 250% return. What's not to like?

What saddens me about wind is that it destroys the landscape. You used to be able to drive across Kansas on I-70 and just look at the emptiness of the Plains, now the drive is dotted with wind turbines nearly the entire way.

[Ironically, the EPA was harassing gas companies in Kansas about drilling rigs disrupting the breeding habits of the greater prairie chicken. Not sure if the same happened to the wind companies]

I'm happy to see renewables, but they are coming at a cost.

You know what else will destroy the landscape (and to say nothing of the human capacity to enjoy it)?

Climate change.

Kansas is a bad example with all the earthquake issues!

Better to have several small ones than a single big one.

It's hard to be sad about natural processes doing their natural process thing.

Or did we cut down all the trees and dig up all the grass that was preventing the soil from blowing away?

OP is not saddened by the existence of air currents, but by 'wind' as an energy source, specifically the tall turbines that extract wind energy.

One thing that I do appreciate is that most wind energy installations bury their cables. It's only a few percent more expensive than poles, but looks so much better and has fewer maintenance needs. It's a tragedy of economics that we as a society have selected elevated transmission lines.

Drive along the giant freeway admiring the natural landscape?

I can’t speak to Kansas, but driving across Spain I found the wind turbines a pleasant part of the landscape. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I can speak to Kansas. The land owners appreciate the rents paid, and the counties appreciate the property tax base and jobs that come with the turbines.

Yeah here in Europe lots of farmers are happy with wind turbines on their land. It helps them earn a stable income.

  driving across Spain I found the wind turbines a pleasant part of the landscape

Don Quixote, not so much.

Hydro power floods huge areas of land and destroys fisheries. Fossil fuels produce harmful air pollution that kills both wildlife and people, in addition to the long term effects of climate change. All energy sources have impacts, at least with wind once you decommission the plant the landscape is left largely intact. Try doing that with a hydro reservoir or open pit coal mine.

The Good Rain by Timothy Egan is a great read related to this if anyone wants more perspective on how hydropower impacts the environment.

I don't know, this is sort of like the people who didn't like the Eiffel tower. Seems rather subjective?

http://articles.latimes.com/1987-04-23/news/mn-722_1_eiffel-...

I agree. Wind machines are a landscape blight, as well as being massive bird choppers. Solar on all south-facing roofs and consideration of altering designs to create nice south-facing roof faces is where renewable should be accomplished. So long serene rolling hills of grass and wheat; hello nasty looking tech.

> as well as being massive bird choppers

This is a fairly minor issue that the planners are usually required to mitigate as much as possible, and the non-renewable sources have a significant cost to bird habitats as well. The various bird protection societies are usually cautiously in favour of wind power provided it's not in a sensitive habitat.

It turns out that glass-windowed skyscrapers and domestic cats are far more deadly to birds.

Monocultural wheat fields are also a highly artificial industrial landscape, just a more familiar one.

Except for Altamont Pass. It's one of the few breaks in the California coastal range, so it's a big migratory bird corridor. It was one of the first big wind farm areas, and it has row after row of small wind machines for several miles. At peak, it had 5,000 wind turbines in a valley that's less than a mile wide. It's a Veg-O-Matic for birds.

The little wind turbines are being replaced with fewer and bigger ones, which are less of a hazard to birds.

I've read that painting the windmills white attracts insects, which attracts their predators.

I dunno if anyone's experimented with other colors, to see impact on avian mortality.

They aren't massive bird choppers. That's a persistent myth from some very early wind farm that used short turbines with small, faster-moving blades.

My guess is the myth persists largely because trolls hired by the Koch Brothers and the fossil fuel industry keep pushing it.

Chickens perhaps dont care as much about windmills than they do about noisy/smelly drilling rigs. The mills probably do kill a few chickens but not in the same way as pollution.

Note that these turbines are near the highways for a reason. Those who care enough about the view to get out of thier cars will always find windmill-free vistas.

That reason being the presence of long straight right-of ways and easy maintenance access, right?

Or that if you are going to bring big heavy things in by truck, closer is always better.

> destroys the landscape

On the other hand, consider the character of the landscape knowing that anyone can see it from a public highway. What you saw had already stopped being wilderness.

It's like receiving a bouquet of flowers and then complaining when they don't last. The same underlying changes that brought you the experience is the one that ensures it is temporary.

Acres and acres of corn, soybean & wheat fields aren't natural landscape either.

It's hard to tell sometimes whether someone is being sarcastic, or just truly ignorant. If you're sarcastic, well played, if you're serious, you probably need to get out of your echochamber and travel a little bit!

I find the wind turbines to be really cool to look at, at least from my experience with driving through central Oregon. The scale of each one, and the quantity of them are really awe inspiring. Maybe it's just the novelty of it though. But I really enjoy coming across a field of them.

I appreciate this idea. My only concern would be putting ourselves in a situation where the west coast could lose power by sabotaging a single transmission line

And probably give Wyoming the best public school and healthcare system in the country.

Is it public knowledge who is supplying the conductors for these HVDC lines? I presume this is going to be an application of relatively new HTS wire...

HVDC uses ordinary resistive conductors at high voltage. There's no superconducting wire involved.

EDIT: I see that you might have been wondering about this sentence from the article:

"In addition, researchers are exploring different types of semiconductors to improve the cost and performance of circuit breakers and voltage converters, Sivaram says, and working on superconducting cables that could boost power capacity and cut energy losses to nearly zero."

Wide-bandgap semiconductors like silicon carbide and gallium nitride are already working their way into high power applications. Superconducting energy transmission is much further from industrialization.

It's been on my radar that HTS wire is now commercially available and has already made an impact in the planned development of dramatically smaller fusion reactors. I also read reports of their use in massive electric motors used by navy vessels. Basically all these massive electromagnets can be made smaller, more powerful, and more efficient thanks to HTS wire.

They're already being used in the Tres Amigas project [1], though I haven't investigated what the scope of the application is there. I assumed it would be the power transmission since it seems likely to have the greatest losses due to the distance. It's clearly stated that American Superconductor is supplying the HTS wire for the project.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tres_Amigas_SuperStation

The plan at Tres Amigas was to use superconducting equipment and short-range superconducting cables on the interconnection site. It's not replacing any long-range transmission with superconducting wire. You can see a diagram in the lower left of this article:

http://www.tresamigasllc.com/docs/HTS-Cable-TA-Energy-Indust...

I say Tres Amigas "was" going to do this because the project seems dead. It lost a major partner in 2015, scaled back a lot, and the project site hasn't posted any updates since 2016.

Thanks for the link to the pdf, I hadn't read that.

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