[Orcnet] MORE ABOUT: Wind power and gas turbines

[Keith Lofstrom]

> >Subject: [Orcnet-members] MORE ABOUT: [Orcnet] Wind power and gas turbines
> >>From data points from Steve W:
> >
> >There are big flat places like Wyoming and Montana and the Dakotas that have
> >the potential for enormous amounts of wind generated electricity. 
> >
> >To make this happen, these states are promoting the construction of major
> >new HV distribution systems to collect the electricity and export to other
> >states like Minnesota, Illinois and Missouri where it would feed the big
> >Mid-West grid.

On Wed, Dec 03, 2008 at 08:36:07AM -0800, H. Joe Tabor wrote:
 
> Last summer I checked out the Pickens plan website.  They had a great video on a
> Texas town that was economically dying, but T. Boone Pickens put up a
> windmill farm, and the town is now prospering and growing.  Haven't
> checked out the latest video yet, but here is the link if anyone still hasn't
> seen it.  (At the entry to the web page, there is a selection to skip
> providing the requested info.)

Yes but ...

It is common knowledge that wind turbines are getting built - many are
in Oregon, and that has been in the Oregonian many times recently.
My question is where the power comes from when the wind isn't blowing;
other very distant wind turbines?  Hydro?  Or, as in the case of the
European wind systems, from standby gas turbine generators dependent
on carbon fuels from questionable sources?

The utilities are required by their regulators to buy alternative
energy, when the alternative energy is available, at high rates set
by regulators.  Of course you can make money when someone is forced
to buy from you.  The utilities don't care - much - because they
sell the power to consumers at cost plus.  If the electricity costs
them $1.00 a kilowatt hour, they get to sell it for $1.50 perhaps
(averaged into the cost of their base-load power at maybe $0.05 ),
assuming the regulators are friendly in the long term.  In Oregon,
you make the regulators friendly by doing fashionable stuff that
looks good on TV.

The question (and it is a technical one) is how much hydropower and
how much natural gas turbine power must be added into the mix so that
the product the consumers buy is available 24x7 and matches the daily
and weekly usage cycle?  For example, if wind power, averaged over
the grid, is available 70% of the time, then 30% of the time (in non
hydro areas) they are burning expensive natural gas from T. Boone
Pickens rather than coal or uranium.  That is good business for Mr.
Pickens, but not for the consumer or for the environment. 

Remember, usage varies over the day, and coal, uranium, and even hydro
power generation must be scheduled hours or days in advance.  In the
70's, BPA was the largest user of "super" computers in the northwest,
modelling usage, weather, and riverflow to determine when to release
water from the giant reservoirs at the head of the Columbia.

That, BTW, is the "digital grid" - computers are essential to
predicting when and where to send power, and to estimate the
reliability of the analog measurement information coming in from
sensors operated by fallable humans.  If it costs $5M and 5 hours
(WAG) to bring a low-emissions coal generator up to temperature,
you want to be fairly certain that the spot price of electricity
when the generator comes on line is higher than your generating
costs.  If it is a balmy weekend and a lot of your consumers go
camping, supply may exceed demand and the spot price will plummet. 
If it is a hot weekend your consumers turn on the air conditioners,
the spot price will climb, typically until large industrial
consumers shut down their machinery and sell their power contracts
back to the grid at a tidy profit.  The power market must always
clear, second by second, as the grid has no warehouse to store
energy in.  There is no place to get more power in a sudden hurry,
beyond the rotor inertia of the large generators, or by enforcing
a demand reduction by lowering line voltage (brownout).  With all
the smart power regulators out there, which will happily draw 3
amps at 80 volts instead of 2 amps at 120 volts, lowering grid
voltage is becoming counterproductive (same watt load, more watts
for I2R losses).  More modeling and prediction have seen us through
so far, but at some point predictions fail.  In Joe's analogy,
sometimes the predicted result is "1" and the actual result is "0".
While a less frantic world would accomodate an occasional "0" -
(power's out, let's make whoopie!) we spend vast sums to avoid
failures.

We mitigate these problems by investments in generators that may
be more expensive or polluting to operate, but turn on quickly. 
Hydro (until you suck the river dry) and natural gas (until you
suck the pipe empty) are the current alternatives.  While the
rivers are public goods, they have finite capacity, and the gas
pipelines are subject to the same spot market economics as
power.  If the price of a BTU of gas must rise 10X or 100X to
clear the market, then whoever is selling the gas makes a hell
of a profit.  Remember, when the price drops below zero, you
stop selling gas, so you've got a builtin rectifier on whatever
noise drives the market price.

All that leads up to the question:  does dependence on unpredictable
wind or cloud cover (solar) increase or decrease the noise in the
system?  There are many suppliers that benefit if the system is
noisier (remember that rectifier effect) - that is why commodity
arbitrage is a profitable business.  One should look with great
skepticism at the proposals from arbitrage businesses to see if
those proposals increase the noise that the arbitrageurs profit
from.  The Latin phrase is "Cui Bono" - who benefits?

And that is why I am interested in the actual data on the
construction of gas turbine generators in conjunction with the
construction of wind generation.  Investments here are not made
elsewhere (conservation, load shifting, internationalization of
the grid), and as citizen engineers we have to think smarter than
the rooms full of Enron-like smart guys that the arbitrageurs can
afford to hire.  "Alternative" energy is not necessarily "good"
energy - it depends on the situation and the numbers.  It takes
people with our talents to understand those numbers and
situations, and recommend the best among available alternatives.

So - beyond the obvious (more windmills are getting built) and
the seemingly unrelated (more natural gas facilities are being
built) does anyone have data or experiences that demonstrate a
connection, or the lack thereof?  Remember, other citizens are
counting on us to notice the subtle stuff.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs