Windmills Overload East Europe’s Grid, Risking Blackout • Hacker News Board

Re: Windmills Overload East Europe’s Grid, Risking Blackout

#41

Post by gwright » Sat, Oct 27, 2012, 4:58 PM UTC

Lots of armchair quarterbacks in this thread.

The actual operation of an electric grid is a delicate balancing act between supply and demand.

  -- the grid needs to respond in real-time to changes in supply/demand (weather induced outages, Germany using your grid as an energy sink)
  -- the grid needs to respond to daily fluctuations (day/night cycles, cold day, warm day, etc)
  -- the grid needs to respond to medium-term fluctions (scheduled maintenance on plants and infrastructure, seasonal variations, price of coal, natural-gas, oil, etc)
  -- the grid needs to respond to long-term fluctuations (new infrastructure, recessions, regional economic growth or decline, technological changes, etc.)

On top of all this, governments can change the regulatory environment on a whim thus invalidating many decisions made with previous assumptions.

Back to the original article, wind energy is particularlly problematic for the grid because its output is highly variable, not predictable in the short-term, can not be economically stored except in specialized cases, and is rife with government-induced market distortions that are also not all that predictable in the medium and long term.

Re: Windmills Overload East Europe’s Grid, Risking Blackout

#42

Post by morsch » Sat, Oct 27, 2012, 5:01 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #37

tvladeck wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I know you're speaking from the power plant's perspective, but factoring in externalities, natural gas is cheaper to operate than coal. Nuclear is really cheaper. Wind is about the same as coal.

All of the things you state as facts are subject to long-running debates.

Re: Windmills Overload East Europe’s Grid, Risking Blackout

#43

Post by tvladeck » Sat, Oct 27, 2012, 5:03 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #37

tvladeck wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I know you're speaking from the power plant's perspective, but factoring in externalities, natural gas is cheaper to operate than coal. Nuclear is really cheaper. Wind is about the same as coal.

oh, absolutely - this doesn't consider the social cost of carbon, or even the social cost (health costs) of particulate emissions.

Re: Windmills Overload East Europe’s Grid, Risking Blackout

#44

Post by Someone » Sat, Oct 27, 2012, 5:05 PM UTC

DasIch wrote: post #28

redwood wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right on: this is an exciting opportunity for grid management. A number of transitions will have to occur: movement toward more peaky-capable baseload generation, probably through natural gas turbines, movement toward storage etc. At the very least it's surprising they aren't pumping water uphill, or just shutting down hydro throughput, in these time periods. Or perhaps Europe's system of hydro electric dams isn't la…

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…

Hills can be made: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&...

Also, about the German grid: http://lehre.umweltpruefung.tu-berlin.de/mw/index.php?title=.... Germany has less need to distribute power east-west because, if there is wind in the Northwest, there will likely be wind in the northeast, too, but there, statistically, will be less sun in the south. Similarly, having sun in the south correlates with less wind in the north.

Re: Windmills Overload East Europe’s Grid, Risking Blackout

#45

Post by rainysunday » Sat, Oct 27, 2012, 5:12 PM UTC

silvestrov wrote: post #4

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.

Starting next year there will be an extra management bonus in Germany if the wind park is remote controllable. (There are two ways to sell wind energy in Germany, just sell it as it is produced (fixed feed-in-tariffs, EEG) or trade it. In the latter case it makes sense to stop your wind park as prices become negative.)

Re: Windmills Overload East Europe’s Grid, Risking Blackout

#46

Post by jerven » Sat, Oct 27, 2012, 5:12 PM UTC

This is not uncommon with other forms of generation with high capital cost and low production opportunity costs. The Netherlands almost managed to melt the Belgian high power grid importing very cheap French power a few years back. The French nuclear power plants would produce anyway even if they only made a single cent as one cent is better than no cent ;) Windmills owners have the same issue, once build cost of energy production is near zero so sell what you make for what ever the market will pay. Gas, oil and coal stop producing the moment the fuel becomes more expensive than the worth of the produced energy (bound by shut down and start up times).

I expect the same solution. More transmission capability or charging more and fixing the market issue. This really is a market issue in that the east europeans don't charge enough for transmission costs to stop the Germans from doing.

Production variation is a problem but not such a big one as price volatility and consumer (demand) volatility. i.e. power demands at peak times. i.e. when everyone wakes up and turns on their coffee machine etc...

Large (esp. direct drive) windfarms are actually good at dealing with the demand volatility as they can spin up and down in minutes. While weather volatility is in the hours. Same day weather forecast is very good. So inside a grid windfarms are nice. Its when transmitting outside the grid like nuclear they can be mean to other producers.

Re: Windmills Overload East Europe’s Grid, Risking Blackout

#47

Post by rainysunday » Sat, Oct 27, 2012, 5:22 PM UTC

Loic wrote: post #34

One thing that everybody forget is that with agreement with the main power producers in Germany, the government of Gerhard Schröder (10 years ago) started the plan to built the network to link North Germany to the South for renewable energy production together with the agreed shutdown of the nuclear powerplants in 2020. Once the left/green government was replaced with the current one, the big power producers did a ni…

> 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.

You're right that the former east has its "own" grid operator [1], but there is much more installed wind power in the north west[2].

[1] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromnetzbetreiber#Netzbetreibe... [2] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windenergie#Deutschland

Re: Windmills Overload East Europe’s Grid, Risking Blackout

#48

Post by nlh » Sat, Oct 27, 2012, 5:26 PM UTC

sehugg wrote: post #9

A utility in Texas offers free power between 10 PM and 6 AM: http://cleantechnica.com/2012/05/18/txu-is-first-to-offer-fr... Makes for some very interesting arbitrage opportunities, even if it is residential only (I assume).

Bitcoin mining perhaps? If I recall, after the initial hardware investment, electricity cost is the main variable to a successful mining operation. Reduce that cost to $0 and it suddenly becomes significantly more appealing...

Re: Windmills Overload East Europe’s Grid, Risking Blackout

#49

Post by rainysunday » Sat, Oct 27, 2012, 5:30 PM UTC

uvdiv wrote: post #19

JimmyL wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a successful experiment doing something very similar to this - although I can't find the article - with cold storage facilities in the Netherlands. Cold storage is apparently a pretty big industry there, and all those buildings are designed to be highly thermally-efficient anyways. There's also a huge segment of the cold storage market where the exact temperature of the storage doesn't matter, it just needs…

Or to solve this at an earlier point, why not just turn off the windmills when the power's not needed. Because the subsidies in Germany are tied to the amount of electricity sold. That's why they're selling even at negative market price -- to collect the feed-in tariff.

There are two ways to sell, fixed price (difference to real price is in the end payed by comsumers) or trading it.

Re: Windmills Overload East Europe’s Grid, Risking Blackout

#50

Post by Gravityloss » Sat, Oct 27, 2012, 5:32 PM UTC

tvladeck wrote: post #21

silvestrov wrote: post #4

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.

You are correct, but the problem is tuning the production from wind farms to match demand exactly, in real time, which is what is required to operate the grid. When it comes to renewable energy wind is the hardest in this regard, because production can fluctuate rapidly in very short time scales, especially when there's gusting.

all modern wind turbines have variable incidence blades meaning power regulation can happen on a second timescale.

I'm not exactly sure about the electrical machinery, but if that is sophisticated enough, it can be used in high accuracy fashion to control the generation so that the electeicity is produced in high quality.

You can think of the wind plant working as a giant flywheel. If there is a sudden gust, the spin speed increases and the extra speed is gradually harvested as energy. No sudden spikes. In theory the plants could be used to improve the frequency quality even more by also acting as motors.

If there is a real wind powef power electrical engineer around, feel free to chime in.