31–40 of 70 posts
It's like the writer doesn't know that windmills can be stopped. In fact, they have builtin brakes which autoengage and stops the mill when the wind becomes too powerful.
>Wind farms in West Texas earlier this year were paying utilities to use their electricity on particularly gusty days because they can still earn $22 a megawatt-hour in federal tax credits
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Northern Germany like the Netherlands consists entirely of flat land, so there are no hills to pump water up. Further more such solutions require a river relatively close to the hill that runs with enough water that the pumps have enough work to do and that can easily handle the water when you drain it. Even so such plants are used in the Middle and South of Germany where hills and mountains exists but you have to ge…
Germany has a unified grid, I'm sure. We need to remember how small Germany is: smaller than California, for example and California relies on everything hydro from the Pacific Northwest all the way down to mountain western state coal. In anticipation of hot days the Pacific Northwest actually stops water flow on river dams to allow them to peak at high price points. There is probably a middle point here tho: Europe m…
The article seemed to indicate that this is not the case, and that until the south and north parts of the grid are well-connected domestically, excess power from the north gets routed south via Poland and the Czech Republic.
Theres gunna be big money to the company that can figure out how to store huge masses of energy for months, but no doubt thats decades away. However, is there a more simple solution to this problem, like approaching an industry that already uses masses of energy and seeing if they can encourage them to use the energy when there is overloading? I'm unsure what that industry would be. Surely using an overabundance of e…
There's a great sci-fi novel, The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, set in a post-oil world where tightly wound springs are used to store energy, as we do now with clocks. One of the subplots deals with a character trying to develop a material that can be wound tighter and more compactly without breaking. Or explosively unwinding. I'm not an engineer or physicist, so I've wondered, what is the theoretical limit for st…
Also, the power network is still very "former East - former West" built, which is not helping. We had 3 years ago a blackout of the West while the East (which includes the part with most of the windmills) was still up.
At the end, the problem is mainly because of the delayed investment from the network operators and they are now affected by their own unwillingness to build the network. From a financial point of view, it is easy to understand because they are mainly coal/gas/nuclear producers and they would have had to build a network which would then be used by their competitors...
http://seekingalpha.com/symbol/amsc/description
From a description I once read (but can't seem to locate right now) these devices store excess power for short periods in superconducting coils to release the power again when the consumption side needs it. That way both the grid and the windfarms are matched better to each others needs and capabilities.
The whole thing is housed in a 40' container.
They have to shut down coal fired power plants when the windmills produce excess power. Oh, the humanity!
I wouldn't call that a good thing. You generally can't turn off/on a coal plant in a hurry. What they're probably doing is just braking the turbines and still burning some fuel. (Edited, realised it sounded confrontational to begin with.)
They have to shut down coal fired power plants when the windmills produce excess power. Oh, the humanity!
You generally leave the baseload (coal + nuclear) on, and shut down "peaking" capacity, which is, at least in the US, mainly natural gas. Coal is more expensive to build, more expensive to turn on, and cheaper to operate. Nat Gas is cheaper to build, cheaper to turn on, and more expensive to operate
Why don't Denmark and Spain experience such "blackouts" when these two countries have a higher wind energy capacity/production compared to CZ/PL?
Theres gunna be big money to the company that can figure out how to store huge masses of energy for months, but no doubt thats decades away. However, is there a more simple solution to this problem, like approaching an industry that already uses masses of energy and seeing if they can encourage them to use the energy when there is overloading? I'm unsure what that industry would be. Surely using an overabundance of e…
There's a great sci-fi novel, The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, set in a post-oil world where tightly wound springs are used to store energy, as we do now with clocks. One of the subplots deals with a character trying to develop a material that can be wound tighter and more compactly without breaking. Or explosively unwinding. I'm not an engineer or physicist, so I've wondered, what is the theoretical limit for st…
I spring is a material (usually a metal, but could be a plastic as well) that is under stress, typically tension, torsion or compression (depending on type of spring). The limit is basically the yield strength of the material, which is the point where the stress vs strain curve goes nonlinear and the material begins to plastically deform. Obviously the fracture limit represents catastrophic failure of the material, but that is higher than the yield limit.
Basically, it's a material strength and elasticity problem.