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How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

nytimes.com

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Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

#191

Post by IpV8 »

coryfklein wrote: post #171
pkulak wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need a surprisingly small battery to shift use a mere 4 hours. This is why we need market rates for power, for everyone. If I have a bunch of panels and my power is worthless at 2pm, that's fine. A small battery system will pay for itself quickly if that power is worth peak at 6pm. Or maybe I set my car to charge in the early afternoon? Maybe when I install my system, I put my panels facing West instead of south?

Can you quote costs here? How much will it cost me to install a battery that lets me come home from work, turn on the air conditioner for 3-4 hours, run 2 loads through my washer and dryer (cause I have 3 kids), do a load of dishes, all while running the water heater, lights, etc? Does a single $4,000 power-wall do that? And if it is merely saving me the cost differential from electricity at noon and electricity at 6…

You're going to be closer to $10,000 for that kind of storage. Probably not economical for your use case unless you get good rebates and electricity is expensive where you live.

Source: I build home battery backup systems for a living.

The types of people buying batteries today live in places where arbitrage is an option (california, hawaii), or where the grid is frequently or always down (puerto rico)... or rich people who want to be energy independent. They generally haven't made it to the general public yet, but cost is coming down every year and utilities/incentive programs are spreading.

Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

#192

Post by dmix »

Anyone familiar with these "bladeless" wind turbines as an alternative to large blades?

http://www.vortexbladeless.com/

Based on their marketing (far quieter, 40% more energy) it seems like an interesting option. I know one of the biggest complaints that farmers have is the noise they cause, so they have to be placed far from houses.

I'm curious to see if it's mostly fluff or has any potential... but I'm not expert on the subject.

Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

#193

Post by ThomPete »

gehsty wrote: post #125
ThomPete wrote: post #19

Problem is that these are political markets not market markets. Denmark spent a lot of money on getting their windmill industry up and running and windmills still aren't solving the base problem as they aren't reliable for all sorts of weather. Furthermore, windmilss don't really scale well, Nuclear on the other hand which is both safer and more scalable and greener would change that but right now only the Chinese se…

Can you please define doesn’t scale well? I work in this industry, wind farms have gone from For reference the new nuclear in the UK (Hinkley 3.2gw) is receiving a £93/mwh subsidy, offshore wind uk project Hornsea two (1.8gw)is going to get £72mwh, and the Netherlands projects are receiving a zero subsidy for ~750mw projects. It is not going to solve our energy crisis but there are virtually no negatives to building…

The amount of energy needed will increase even though we become better and better at optimizing the individual items power usage.

In other words, wind and solar are linear solutions to exponential problems.

I have nothing against wind or solar but the idea that wind and solar will be able to solve our energy problems is based on a political mandate, not on science or any realistic evaluation of the energy needs of the world.

Wind can't run as long as nuclear can without maintenance and the cost is also going to be higher to maintain because of the large area it occupies.

The cost of Nuclear is suffering under the lack of political support compared to alternatives.

Furthermore, alternatives are not without problems:

"The first thing he discovered is that solar panels, in fact, contain significant quantities of toxic metals like lead, chromium, and cadmium — known carcinogens — and yet no nation outside of Europe has a plan to safely dispose of them. Many could end up in waste dumps in poor communities in Asia and Africa and poison drinking water supplies.

How much solar waste is there? About 300 times more per unit of energy than there is from nuclear power.

As a result, if solar and nuclear waste from producing the same amount of electricity were stacked on football fields, the nuclear waste would reach the height of the Leaning Tower of Pisa (52 meters), while the solar waste would reach the height of two Mt. Everest (16 km)."

http://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/6/22/the-case...

And here is a study debunking the idea of alternatives as a realistic alternative (I am not saying you claim they are but that was my main point)

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/06/16/1610381114.full

Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

#194

Post by dmix »

IpV8 wrote: post #191
coryfklein wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you quote costs here? How much will it cost me to install a battery that lets me come home from work, turn on the air conditioner for 3-4 hours, run 2 loads through my washer and dryer (cause I have 3 kids), do a load of dishes, all while running the water heater, lights, etc? Does a single $4,000 power-wall do that? And if it is merely saving me the cost differential from electricity at noon and electricity at 6…

You're going to be closer to $10,000 for that kind of storage. Probably not economical for your use case unless you get good rebates and electricity is expensive where you live. Source: I build home battery backup systems for a living. The types of people buying batteries today live in places where arbitrage is an option (california, hawaii), or where the grid is frequently or always down (puerto rico)... or rich peo…

Do you believe the batteries should be subsidized instead of the power going back into the grid?

Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

#195

Post by rnosov »

coryfklein wrote: post #187
rnosov wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it that hot in your area that you have to run air conditioner for 3-4 hours after sunset? Typically solar output correlates really nicely with the need for air conditioning. Washing and drying could be done say on a weekend ( during daylight hours ). Many water heaters come with an integrated storage tank for hot water so they can actually be used as a form of energy storage. That leaves lights in your example and…

The hottest time of day is 3:00 PM and, due to heat-lag, the hottest time of day _inside_ a house is a little bit after that. Since I set the thermostat higher while I'm gone during the day, this means the house can be roasting by the time I return and require 3-4 hours of AC for it to get more manageable. And no, our washing and drying can not be done on a weekend. We have 3 kids and if we waited for a weekend to do…

In such case you might want to use this thermal lag to your advantage. Set AC to cool your house as much as possible during the midday and you'll come back to hopefully much cooler house in the evening ( so no need to run air conditioner ). Here essentially you would be using the thermal mass of your entire house as an energy storage medium.

With washing, if you have to do it every day you might want to start it right after the sunrise when you're likely to to leave for work. If your kids are old enough you can instruct them to take the washing out and put into a dryer as soon as they get home.

The point is you'll need to make some changes to your lifestyle and habits but these changes are not as severe and problematic as some people claim.

Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

#196

Post by hackerman12345 »

gascan wrote: post #147
boxcardavin wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest ones produce over 5 megawatts at peak capacity, I think someone has built over 10 megawatts but I'm not sure. 5 megawatts is a pretty useless figure for most people to imagine, and I think imagining it in units of homes-powered isn't great either because we don't have a sense of the heat or kinetic energy equivalent because our homes are quiet machines. A 260 horsepower car (think new minivan) at full thr…

But perhaps the most useful might be power-plant-equivalents. The Stockton Cogeneration Facility near San Fran had a nominal output of 60MW. Thus, around twelve of these mega-windmills would roughly equal the output of that coal plant.

A large size nuke plant does about 1300 MW nominally (it is initially about 3000 MW thermally but only 35% or so is successfully converted to power for the grid).

Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

#197

Post by Brakenshire »

coryfklein wrote: post #189
antisthenes wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be more efficient to cool the home while you're not there than to turn on AC immediately after you come home from work in a hot home. > run 2 loads through my washer and dryer (cause I have 3 kids) Surely you don't run 2 loads through your washer and dryer _EVERY_ day, do you? Do your children change clothes every 2 hours? Do you change bedding and towels every day? Point being, I can come up with incredibly…

> Surely you don't run 2 loads through your washer and dryer _EVERY_ day, do you? No, but I need to be able to _any_ day, and honestly for us doing 2 loads a day happens very often - it's not an edge case for us. If you're befuddled as to how that is possible, join the club. As for shifting our day's schedule around electricity rates, good luck bringing that idea up with my wife.

Yeah, but the once a week cases are handled by a connection to the grid, just as at present. The bulk of the necessary time shift is handled by the battery and some other techniques to shift demand, and the rest is balancing contention between households in aggregate, and nudging storage and peaker plants, that is, exactly what currently occurs on the grid.

> As for shifting our day's schedule around electricity rates, good luck bringing that idea up with my wife.

The electricity costs of washing and drying are significant, could easily be hundreds of dollars a year. If you could save half of that by generally running a programme overnight, lots of people would do it . Not everyone would be able to because of noise, with that number increased by technological developments in software and hardware specialized for that use-case, but a lot of people would. And you wouldn't do it for every wash, only when it was convenient. This already happens over here, I often run my dishwasher overnight when the tariffs are lower, it's good for the environment and saves me money, or when I need it sooner I run it straight away.

Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

#198

Post by IpV8 »

dmix wrote: post #194
IpV8 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're going to be closer to $10,000 for that kind of storage. Probably not economical for your use case unless you get good rebates and electricity is expensive where you live. Source: I build home battery backup systems for a living. The types of people buying batteries today live in places where arbitrage is an option (california, hawaii), or where the grid is frequently or always down (puerto rico)... or rich peo…

Do you believe the batteries should be subsidized instead of the power going back into the grid?

Not sure why that's an either or?

Do you believe the batteries should be subsidized - Yes, I think that they should be subsidized now. I normally don't like government involvement in markets other than protecting against externalities, but in this case I believe that subsidies can expedite innovation in the area. Once the market exists and the technology moves far enough along, I think that we will be able to slowly remove the subsidies and battery systems will be cheap enough to warrant their place in the market without. Also I strongly believe that the faster we move away from fossil fuels, the less lives will be lost to climate change.

instead of the power going back into the grid - Not sure what you mean here. People sell back to the grid all the time. A battery backup system in sell mode is essentially another power plant. Great!

Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

#199

Post by vosper »

coryfklein wrote: post #133

Selling solar back to the grid has one major problem that, fortunately, doesn't plague windmill installations: The Duck Curve [1]. The problem is that peak energy usage now occurs after sunset . So no matter how many solar panels you stack on your home, around 6-7 PM the coal, oil, and gas power plants all have to spin up to their max capacity. Your solar panels are new less likely to _replace_ a coal power plant, al…

There was a very interesting article about hydrogen fuel cell cars posted on HN the other day, one of the things they mention is that excess energy could readily be diverted to hydrogen manufacture.

http://www.thedrive.com/tech/14431/are-hydrogen-cars-the-nex...

Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream

#200

Post by Reason077 »

jhayward wrote: post #183
Reason077 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coal power plants can ramp up and down pretty quickly in response to demand. Not quite as quickly as gas, but generally quick enough to respond to changes in renewables supply when operated as "spinning reserve". Nuclear plants, of course, can not.

There are plenty of coal plants that absolutely can not ramp up and down in less than many hours, and will lose money as they do so. There are also many nuclear plants perfectly capable of "load following", responding in the time frame of minutes to 10's of minutes to load changes.

My understanding is that while load following is possible in nuclear plants, there are significant design, efficiency, and cost compromises involved. For these reasons, load-following nuclear is fairly rare.

In the UK, all of our nuclear power plants operate at their design capacity all the time. Their output only changes during scheduled periods when they are shut down for maintenance, refuelling, etc.

In contrast, all of the remaining coal-fired power plants in the UK effectively operate as load-following reserve. They ramp up only on cold winter days when demand is high and when wind generation is low. There are now many "coal free" days in the warmer months where there is no coal-fired power generation in the UK at all (it looks like today will be one of them!)

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