Home turbines fail to deliver as promised, warns British study
January 13, 2009
A study warned that home wind turbines are only generating a fraction of electricity promised by the manufacturers while some even fail to yield enough energy to run the turbine?s electronics.
Home wind turbines are only generating a fraction of electricity promised by the manufacturers while some even fail to yield enough energy to run the turbine's electronics, a British study warned on Tuesday.
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That's a necessary but not sufficient condition for wind power to be useful.
People turning on and off microwave ovens and so on is uncorrelated except in that the tendency is higher when people are generally awake, so you get smooth, predictable demand variations over the course of the day.
Wind turbines are correlated over huge areas and if you have enough of them they'll act like one huge central generating station with power fluctuating wildy over the course of just a few hours. The grid is not a "bank", it's not even a connected graph that can shuffle electricity from anywhere to anywhere; when you get more than a small amount of wind capacity every incremental installment of new wind capacity becomes increasingly burdensome for the grid to accept.
Storage and long-distance transmission is expensive, nobody's building it, not even wind generators which have an huge stake in building it if they ever want to be a significant fraction of the electric grid.
That invariably means the wind plants get backed up by natural gas(a resource that may not last much longer than oil and is certainly nowhere near as big as coal) and hydroelectric peaker plants(not enough to go around; transmission may be problematic if it doesn't coincide with a nearby decent wind resource).
The biggest plants are typically nuclear or coal-fired plant and you're going to need spinning reserve to meet the instantaneous loss of the biggest generator. When wind capacity starts creeping up to 1-2 GW you're going to have to get more coal plants and gas turbines to act as spinning reserve because this is now effectively the biggest single generator on the grid. Spinning reserve burns fossil fuels to spin the turbine and keep synchronized with the grid without providing any electricity, so they can jump in instantly if there's a loss.
In Texas the price payed for power from wind farms by ERCOT goes negative about 20% of the time. What that means is that 20% of the time the grid in Texas considers wind power a burden and will only accept it if you pay them for the wear on infrastructure and the hassle of disposing surplus electricity so the phase and voltage of the grid can be kept stable. (the reason wind farms still sell quite a bit of electricity at negative prices is that they get subsidized whether or not anyone wants their electricity and it gives a higher number of generated kWh that looks good in promotional material).
There will come a point when an increment in installed wind power capacity is less than worthless unless we find a use for intermittent electricity or unless we can figure out some magical way to store electricity which is both affordable and abundant(CAES is expensive and burns natural gas making it neither, there's not enough good spots for pumped hydro and it's likely to be heavily targeted by litigation and NIMBYism if you proposed it on the required scale in an attempt to further run up costs, batteries are very costly and we're not likely to be able to build them fast enough to both sate the demand for EVs and wind plants; flywheels are costly and limited to power quality for now.). While I could imagine extremely high RPM flywheels with bucky-paper rotors, dirt cheap carbon-based quantum-wires for power-lines, great artificial lakes being made cheaply with multi-megaton pure fusion devices for building great lakes for pumped storage, there's an enormous amount of work to be done to prove that such dreams are at all realizable in a practical way. Natural gas may peak in only a couple of decades; physics will not care if you wanted to use wind turbines, if natural gas peaks and the alternative doesn't scale as fast as it natural gas depletes you're SOL, those wind turbines will be sold for scrap or backed up by turbines running on gasified coal.
Water treatment/destilation plants - normally in standby, but jumps to life as soon as there is excess energy.
Water electrolysis plants for storing excess energy by separating water into oxygen and hydrogen gases - also normally in low production mode.
Wind and Solar Power cannot supply our energy needs, if it could we would of used it tens of years ago.
T-Bone and others billionaires are licking their chops as they have a new milking source for public money.
So is the wheel and I guess that worked out pretty well.
Yeah. Lets all find someone who does a piss poor job of solving a problem and then say that it can't be solved.
You'll be the same person that looks at the Chevy Volt when they do their best to screw it up, and then stands up and screams "I told you fossil fuels was the only way!"
Just because these people have no idea how to make wind power profitable/usable, it doesn't mean it isn't.
As best I can tell, T. Boone doesn't care much about wind turbines. Boone has been trying to build a water pipeline from land he has acquired in the more desolate regions of Texas to whichever city will have him. He's using the wind turbines to "sweeten" the deal and keep his sleazily acquired eminent domain rights(i.e. Pickens has the right to build over other people's land or force people to sell their homes in order to build his pipeline in exactly the same way the state does when building a high-way).
The fact that not even wind developers are doing anything to make power from wind turbines usable is rather telling. They're not spending a dime on building these giant webs of HVDC-lines and pumped hydro storage. Nope, they just let the coal and gas people pick up their slack(which there is plenty of).
The one reason that stands out in my mind is the fact that these systems are produced for the pursuit of moolah first and only further developed if the market demands it or if profitibilty allows. Consumerism can bring capital into a new field of development, which in turn can intially make it available to more consumers. However, the notion of R&D takes a remote second place (if that) to marketabilty. Variation and creativity are stifled and instead of the consumer directing/demanding from the companies within a given industry what they want from future products, the industries restrict options to what is considered feasible to produce by a board of directors or parent company.
Couple the above with a populace that wants a quick fix/ product with little or no research on their part and you have a scenario for well-intentioned sheep to be led to the conclusion that the turbines are the best way to alleviate their power concerns at the individual home level...completely disregarding the fact that these turbines may not be the correct application, type of tech needed, or that the homes they are coupled to could be made much more efficient, thereby making future off-grid sources of home power that much more effective.
I'll hop down off my soapbox. Just an idea or two to chew over.
Cheers
Let's be honest, the volt won't work, and here is the biggest reason, People that have an extra 40K to drop on a car, especially now, are not going to drive the Volt, they will keep driving their SUV's and occasionally take the Volt out for a quick trip to show off their car, but due to limited use they'll poison the batteries and stories will start about unreliability which is unfair but will plague the industry for the next 40 years, making gas engines the go to. Just like diesel before it, and steam before that. That aside, the tech that everyone shgould really be looking for isn't better battery life, which is neccisary, but will come about anyhow, but rather quick carge or hotswapable batterys which would allow the average person to make their regular vacations to see family or drive to someplace outside of a 25 mile radius of their house.
Yes, I will be a pessimist when I see money going down the drain, especially when it's Tax dollars through grants, on tech that will never help anyone.