Re: Research: Wind power pricier, emits more CO2 than thought

On 3 Jul, 22:20, Bill Ghrist <notmyn...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
'Windfarm output is never zero. Sometimes it's less'

By Lewis Page

Fresh contenders have entered the UK wind power debate, as a turbines
expert funded by the Renewable Energy Foundation publishes an
investigation into a hotly-disputed subject - the variability in output
to be expected of a large UK windfarm base.

In a just-released article for the journal Energy Policy, titled Will
British weather provide reliable electricity?, consulting engineer Jim
Oswald and his co-authors model the output to be expected from a large,
25+ gigawatt UK windfarm collection of the type the government says it
would like to see in service by 2020. Wind is generally seen as the
renewable technology best suited to the UK climate, and so it forms the
bulk of most renewables plans for Blighty.

One of the most frequent criticisms levelled at wind power is
variability. That is, when the wind drops (or blows too hard) the
windmills stop spinning and you get no power. To begin with, Oswald
simulates the output rises and falls that might result from a lot of
windfarms distributed around the UK by using Met Office archived data
from different points up and down the land. Many wind advocates have
argued that with enough windfarms, widely enough distributed, you would
get more reliable power output as some windmills would always have wind.

Oswald's analysis says this isn't true, with calm conditions across
pretty much all the UK being fairly regular events.

Analysis from 1996 to 2005 shows similar results: large, rapid, and
frequent changes of power output being common occurrences ... any
national power system has to manage under the worst case conditions
likely to occur ... These are not extreme cases, whose frequency is so
low as to render the events negligible. Rather, these are representative ....

If the government succeeds in building its mighty 25 gigawatts of wind
base by 2020, according to Oswald's Met Office data-based model its
output will dip to pretty much nothing fairly routinely.

The next line of defence for wind advocates is normally the idea of
hooking up the UK's grid with high-capacity links to those of other
European nations, creating a "Supergrid" with wind so widely spread that
output would be sure to even out. But Oswald has bad news for that idea,
too. He compares his modelled UK big-wind output with that which has
been produced in recent times by other European wind bases, particularly
the substantial German/Danish one.

Read the rest of the article here:http://tinyurl.com/6gsodb

This is a well thought out argument. Tempted to pay for it - do you
know if it has more detailed analysis?

However, a couple of points the author misses:

1. Pumped Storage: There is a lot of potential for pumped storage in
Norway - probably 10s of GW days. And the alps have a lot of hydro
which can be enhanced to pumped storage. Currently this is used follow
demand with a nuclear base. But it can also inversely follow wind
supply.
2. Winter high pressure days are not the highest demand days. Winter
low pressure days are higher, at least in the UK.
3. He highlights a need for the windmills to be widely distributed.
Given the predominance of offshore sites in the North Sea (UK,
Germany, Denmark, Belgium, Holland), this places a premium on sites on
the South and West Coasts. Time to revisit the Hebrides scheme and
good news for Ireland.
4. He has an interesting analysis of gas standby. But bear in mind,
gas capacity is cheap - about £250 million / GW. As for the strain on
the line, it might be worth building a large gas fired plant right
next to a LNG terminal and store the gas as liquid on shore.
5. He correctly identifies PHEVs and EVs as demand levellers.
Certainly by 2020 these will impose a large controllable demand. As
wind power is accurately forcastable a few hours ahead, charging will
happen during the day.
6. Domestic Level Micro CHP: By 2020, expect several million combined
boiler / generators. A typical domestic boiler is able to put out
about 14KW heat. Convert this at low efficiency and you have 3KW of
electric power that can be sold back to the grid. Expect these
devices to be subsidised to the consumer. A few million of these and
you have >10GW of capacity. As heat at a domestic level is easy to
store, this capacity is partly available on demand.
7. You could of course not knock down the old coal fired power
station. It is actually possible to reduce their output at a fairly
rapid rate and on a frequent basis. This can be done whilst keeping
the temperature of the furnace constant. So maybe Drax will be kept
hot in winter only, with a variable output.
.

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