The future of mankind lies with nuclear power. I'm distressed by it not receiving as much attention as windmills.
How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream
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Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream
#32As the production costs with windpower decrease due to the technological progress, the question of grid storage and grid interconnection becomes more pressing. E.g. in Germany, they frequently have days of negative energy prices, where producers need to pay to feed energy into the greed because of overproduction of energy on windy/sunny days [0](in German). Without storage and grid interconnection, there is only so m…
Germany has at least one example of an aluminium producer testing dialing the power use of their melter up/down by 25% in response to input from the grid [1]:
> Trimet says that implementing its technology across Germany’s four aluminum smelters, three of which it owns, could provide a demand response capacity equal to a third of Germany’s 40 gigawatt-hours of pumped hydro storage.
There was a lot of confusion about this one when it was published, but as the article points out, they're not using their molten aluminium pools as a liquid battery - they're merely dynamically adjusting the electricity usage of their hydrolysis cells, which also requires some other adjustments to keep the process going, but it's still a lot of power and more responsive than what they do today (which involves taking the smelters entirely offline for short periods).
It helps that their test plant is near Hamburg in the North, "close" to most of Germany's wind turbine capacity which helps alleviate transmission/interconnection problems to the South.
[1] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/german-firm-tur...
Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't this where pumped storage and other forms of storage come into play? Here in Scotland we routinely pump water back up into our lochs in order to store it for future use. There's also various news articles reporting on German mines beginning to be used as pumped storage sites, with a reservoir on the surface, and water dropping into the mines below when there's sudden demand. This is a good problem to have, thou…
According to Wikipedia we have 15 GWh of pumped storage capacity in Scotland. Per annum we use 27,000 GWh. So by my calculations we have a pumped storage battery that lasts about 5 hours. (NB: I didn't check whether the power output of this battery is enough to actually meet demand, but wikipedia says it can run at full capacity for 22 hours, so no)
It can be reused more than once a year. You could use it every day, charge at night when there's no demand, discharge it during the peak. Really depends on how fast it can charge and discharge.
Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream
#34I wouldn't call wind turbines exactly clean energy, between the need to have thermic power plant on stand-by to pick up the slack, since wind is highly irregular, the metric cube of concrete poured in the ground in the middle of nowhere to built them, the kilometers of copper to link them back to the network and the batteries to keep the excess electricity. And it's even worse when you see a field of turbines where h…
The carbon footprint of all these items is still miniscule comparing to the amount of clean energy generated over a turbine's lifetime.
Overall wind trubines have a gross carbon footprint of 14g/kWh. That's even slightly less than nuclear (15g/kWh).
Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream
#35I wouldn't call wind turbines exactly clean energy, between the need to have thermic power plant on stand-by to pick up the slack, since wind is highly irregular, the metric cube of concrete poured in the ground in the middle of nowhere to built them, the kilometers of copper to link them back to the network and the batteries to keep the excess electricity. And it's even worse when you see a field of turbines where h…
> I wouldn't call wind turbines exactly clean energy, between the need to have thermic power plant on stand-by to pick up the slack
Depending on the source of thermal power, the amount consumed on standby can go to 0.
If you have a decent transmission grid, the amount of standby power you need goes down.
And if you have hydro, your emissions go down to 0.
> the metric cube of concrete poured in the ground in the middle of nowhere to built them, the kilometers of copper to link them back to the network and the batteries to keep the excess electricity.
One time expenses, which apply to other power sources too. As opposed to fuel, which is 0 in the case of wind.
Batteries, by the way, are not needed at all for a wind farm.
> And it's even worse when you see a field of turbines where half of them are not turning.
You'll usually see that when the wind is strong but demand for electricity is weak, so the farm operators use the time to do maintenance.
Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
And maybe it can be mediated by fungible electricity transmitted over a grid of conductive wires. Or an electricity market.
What I've meant was mining on the wind mills themselves. So there would be no need of passing through the grid.
I heard that crypto mining hardware has to have decent-ish (80-90%) uptime to be profitable. That would make it infeasible to have it on standby waiting for excess energy on the grid.
Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream
#37I wouldn't call wind turbines exactly clean energy, between the need to have thermic power plant on stand-by to pick up the slack, since wind is highly irregular, the metric cube of concrete poured in the ground in the middle of nowhere to built them, the kilometers of copper to link them back to the network and the batteries to keep the excess electricity. And it's even worse when you see a field of turbines where h…
Except, in the grand scheme of things thats very clean. Compared to Gas or Coal power plants that are much more difficult to build and are also often located in relatively remote locations. We need some kind of power to pick up the slack but not necessarily fossil fuel based. There are all sorts of ways to store energy created at times of high wind for later use, from simple batteries to things like Dinorwig in Wales. The reason half of them aren't turning is often because it takes so long to stop a fossil fuel based power station and the wind turbines would only be generating excess power and affecting the grid, so they have to stop them. With more investment in storing energy they can keep them running far longer and decrease the use of fossil fuels even further.
I'm not saying they are 100% clean, just that realistically nothing ever will be. We can offset that, and we can work to minimise it. For the moment Wind turbines are one of the cleanest ways we have.
Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Simply turning them off would be running backwards since water would build up behind them.
It’s not about building up capacity alone: you want to take power off the grid at negative energy price times.
You are taking power off the grid: The power otherwise produced by the hydro plant.
Of course with a lower reservoir, you can go into negative territory instead of "just" taking the plant down to 0.
Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream
#39Problem 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…
Not disagreeing with you, but how do you come to the conclusion that Nuclear is safer and also more scaleable?
Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream
#40I wouldn't call wind turbines exactly clean energy, between the need to have thermic power plant on stand-by to pick up the slack, since wind is highly irregular, the metric cube of concrete poured in the ground in the middle of nowhere to built them, the kilometers of copper to link them back to the network and the batteries to keep the excess electricity. And it's even worse when you see a field of turbines where h…
Thanks, I didn't know thermal power plants required no concrete and magically connected themselves to the rest of the grid with no wires.