Luboš Motl, Czech physicist, explains:
As Reuters and the Czech media noticed today, the Czech grid is overloaded and the company in charge of it, ČEPS, is finalizing its plans to solve the situation.ČEPS urges the electricity distribution companies to halt the connecting of the new solar and wind plants. At the end of 2009, they were giving 600 MW to the grid. However, projects that would add a whopping extra 3,500 MW have already been approved! This is a genuine threat to the stability of the grid.
ČEPS has informed that if the rules won't be changed to avoid the danger raised by these ludicrously subsidized and hugely irregular sources of energy, it will have to start to disconnect them. This could mean that the green investors could lose their money which would be great.
[...]
Needless to say, billions of dollars are flying and corrupt, green, or otherwise dirty politicians and bureaucrats have helped to distort the market, all the rules, and the stability of the grid, for ideological, irrational, and egotistic reasons (or simply to lick the buttocks of their bigger but even more idiotic EU colleagues), paying no attention to what their decisions would mean to the consumers and the economy at large.
The irresponsibility in the "renewable" electricity subsidies was particularly shocking in the Czech Republic. But I am sure that other countries face similar threats, too. It's just that they don't have any responsible people or companies who would dare to mention that the spontaneous explosion of these "renewable" sources is a fast path to hell.
Update:
Funny that. About 20 years ago a farmer in Southwestern Alberta put up one of those bird killers and wanted to sell electricity on the grid. At the time the grid operator refused because of the uneven load such power would create. The government finally stepped in and forced the grid operator to take the farmer's electricity. Maybe the grid operators know more about operating the grid than do farmers and bureaucrats.
I wonder what this fellow means by "proper sources of energy"? Solar and wind have drawbacks, but they are, still, sources of energy. They could be much more effective in Europe, than they are over here.
It boggles the mind to think that any power grid could work in Europe. There's already a huge mix of energy sources. The only difference with wind and solar is the fact they're cyclical in their output. I'm sure there are some very smart engineers, who could synchronize the various sources.
The problem is not mechanical, it's political. "Green" energy is over subsidized. With all these subsidies, there's no incentive for wind and solar technologies to become more efficient, and cost effective. Same as it's always been, with every technology. Let the market steer the research.
And to think ... the idiot McInty premier of Ontario just gambled seven billion on those very stupid stinking giant fans!"
He is doing to Ontario what Obama has done for the USA ... something about economic destruction.
The folks at Samsung cannot believe their good fortune.
dp: Solar and wind offer sporadic power, thus, once the grid begins to rely on them in great quantity, the entire grid becomes unstable. All other sources offer stable, on demand, power ... Plus, solar and wind never pay for themselves, they are subsidised constantly, which means they are nothing but a pig trough for special interests ... solar and wind have no economic value and never survive a free market approach. It's a matter of physics ... like pounding square pegs ...
Therefore, "improper" in every respect except to make fools feel good.
The End is near...Arizona dumps AGW
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2010/02/11/20100211climate-brewer0211.html
Posted by: Cjunk at February 11, 2010 11:07 AM
I think I said the same thing, just in a different way.
Must be an echo :)
From what I understand and I'm not an expert on grid control - Grid controls traditional function was to maintain constant power and use the use most efficient power supply first. Your baseload power like coal and hydro usually runs at full power because its the cheapest, most reliable source. Imported power is used when a neighboring producer has excess power to sell cheaply or your supplies are inadequate. Peak power from NG runs when needed. This system is intended to provide consumers with the best reliability at the lowest price.
Then along comes the politicians with great ideas - the Green revolution. The introduction of wind and solar added an unreliable, high-cost power source to the mix, causing bumps in power and higher production costs. So, to politicians, the obvious solution to any unintended consequences of expensive, unreliable alternative energy is to add an another expensive, intrusive solution - smart grid/smart meter. It will cost billions to build new transmission lines to wind and solar farms (labor, parts, compensation for property owners etc.) and install new meters. I guess that is where new carbon taxes/cap n trade will come in handy.
Sounds great doesn't it. The cost to transition to the new green economy :
- legislation forcing power companies to install inefficient,unreliable, expensive alternative power
-building a new network of expensive new transmission lines to accommodate alternative energy
-power companies required to install expensive new smart meters that will not save homeowners any money.
The real transition appears to be going from reliable, affordable power to unreliable, expensive power. A perfect example of the effect of government intervention 'improving' a business model.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124050416142448555.html
http://www.heartland.org/infotech-news.org/article/26646/California_Residents_Feel_Cheated_by_Smart_Meters.html
Greg provide this comment from a few threads ago . .
"A distinguished professor from the local university (specialty semi conductor materials), asks question of German dude who just presented some info on his solar panel company. 'My calculations have always shown that the energy to manufacture a solar panel is greater than the expected total output from the finished panel up to their predicted mean time to fail. Has new technology changed this fact?' Answer from German dude. 'The Ontario government pays between 70 - 80 cents per KWhr for power from solar installations supplying the grid. The current rate for all power is 12 cents. This is what matters.'"
Attention shoppers.
...-
"Wal-Mart Canada Plans Wind, Solar Energy Projects >WMT
TORONTO (Dow Jones)--Wal-Mart Canada Corp. is broadening its efforts in renewable energy with plans for three pilot projects in wind and solar power this year.
The Canadian unit of retailing giant Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT), which unveiled a geothermally powered store last year, plans to incorporate wind and solar elements in a new distribution center and two retail stores ..."
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20100210-716842.html?mod=WSJ_latestheadlines
Thanks to the last few generations of de facto dictatorship by the brain-damaged automatons of the ENGO (Sierra Club, Greenpeace, WWF, ad infinitum) schools of worship we are well into the war on Carbon which is, in reality, the war on prosperity.
If you want to kill the competitive advantage of North America you double the energy cost and that is at the low end of the Green Energy cost "advantage". Why else would greens exclude hydro power as a "Green" source.
Fred- That's an interesting comment, but in some respects, the German dude had a point.
I've seen solar panels, powering electric fences, ten miles from the nearest powerline. I've seen them powering metering stations, twenty miles from the nearest powerline. In some cases, the high cost of manufacture is offset by the cost of the alternative. If a generating plant is more than you need, solar panels are very economical.
Keep in mind, none of those situations is subsidized. Before all these subsidies kicked in, there were many advances in solar technology. All the subsidies did was stall that research. Why improve something, when you can sell it, as is, for an inflated price?
Small scale solar and wind power has its place in personal use. If you are too far from a powerline, it costs a small fortune to run a line. To force it through legislate as a substitute for fossil,hydro or nuclear power is at best premature and at worst a betrayal of customers and taxpayers. Business and government need to return to serving the customers and citizens rather than servicing each other.
DP . . . the subsidies will come from either rate increase/surcharges or government grants.
Both come out of the pocket of you & me . . . just because some numb-nuts of a politician wants to wrap him or herself in the warm fuzzy greeny blanket, make self-righteous speeches, make stupid, expensive decisions and kow-tow to the Green Eco-Grifters and International multi billion dollar environmental organizations . . . all so they think they will make voters happy.
Until the bills arrives and people realize they are being robbed blind all in the name of green political correctness.
The left-liberal/socialist AGW Fraud Censor Machines.
Suppression of your opinion(s); political correctness to shut you down.
Not one suppression machine. Two suppression machines in motion.
>>> “He said: “It is important that people have the utmost confidence in the science of climate change. Where legitimate doubts are raised about any piece of science they must be fully investigated – that is how science works.”
…-
“Scandal university climate science to be probed”
“The decision to conduct a second, much broader inquiry into the university’s climate science is an admission that the Russell inquiry will not be enough to restore trust in claims that the world is at grave risk from rising temperatures.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7023520.ece
http://www.bluelikeyou.com/2010/02/11/national-post-on-media-hypocrisy/#comment-74683
LC, you have much of story about grid control but not all of it. As a grid operator you also have to maintain voltage and frequency, i.e. 60 Hz. These have to be maintained to very tight tolerances, otherwise electrical equipment can fail, sometimes catastrophically in the case of electronics. The situation is complicated by the fact that the demand changes second by second as loads are turned on and off. In general, the larger the grid the less noticeable these variations are. (Which is why the greens are insane to imagine that micro or minigrids are more reliable.) So, some sources of supply are on load-following, meaning that their output is constantly varying up and down with the fluctuations in the daily load.
If you put a large proportion of intermittent sources on the supply side the problem is now compounded. Before you only had to manage fluctuations in demand, but with intermittent sources you now have fluctuations in supply as well. With the intermittent supply, the larger the proportion of these on the system, the greater the fluctuations, making voltage and frequency maintenance that much more difficult.
Think of an extreme illustration. Imagine that your neighbour has a 100,000 horsepower electric motor in his basement. Every time he turns it on, the inrush current means that your street is blacked out because the voltage and frequency drop so much from the inrush that the circuit collapses. The purpose of the grid is to ensure that there is enough reserve supply that sudden surges or sags can be managed without allowing surges or sags in voltage and frequency. Or, in the case of the neighbour with the huge motor,that he has enough capacitors to provide his own inrush.
Thanks for the explanation, cgh. Grid control is an important (but hidden) part of energy production and transmission. My only complaint about GC is how unhappy they become when you need to take a unit offline.
I get the feeling that politicians and their advisers do not have a clue what they are doing most of the time. They come up with the most ludicrous ideas and sell them as a magical cure to the issue of the day. Then they are gone from office long before the sh*t hits the fan, so to speak. I think pols need to spend a little less time schmoozing at business luncheons and more time talking to front-line staff.
“Program to Control Home Appliances From a Remote Location” got
$787,250 Stimulus money.
One of the ways we‘re going to really get at energy use is to have smart appliances, to get in and program behavior in the home.
Page 10 of 55:
http://coburn.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.View&FileStore_id=a28a4590-10ac-4dc1-bd97-df57b39ed872
Other “uses” of the money was:
Studying the Learning Patterns of Honeybees ($210,000)
Study on "Hookup" Behavior of Female College Coeds ($219,000)
Arizona Ants Work While Some Arizonans Remain Unemployed ($950,000) Ultimately, 3.46 jobs will be created from this study—two jobs for Arizona State University and 1.46 jobs for the University of Arizona, according to Recovery.gov
Methamphetamines and the Female Rat Sex Drive . . . ($30,000)
More:
http://taxdollars.freedomblogging.com/2010/02/08/stimulus-money-spent-probing-why-men-dont-like-condoms/50553/
Joe: I think I know of whom you speak, a friend of the family, when the farmer installed this bat-whacker, it was the greatest thing since his last greatest money saving device, cheap bugger he is. Years later when I noticed it hardly ever turned I asked one of his sons at a sale how much money the windmill made as I was genuinly interested in installing one. With daddy out of earshot, he fessed up that it was a waste of 70.000, too much maintenance, no return. This is the future with idiots like Renner and Prentice in positions of powern and diverting taxpayers money, lapping up all the lies and deciet from the (We hate Capitalism and Progress) WWF's Sierra club Suzuki etal. Now this giant dinosaur of a windmill just siton the prarie, lonely, waiting for Paul Bunyan to make it into a giant beanie copter for his hat I guess.
More Americans believe in haunted houses than human-caused global warming.
This is back on Oct. 26, before the East Anglia stuff broke out.
Wonder what the percentage is now.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/26/not-scary-enough-more-americans-believe-in-haunted-houses-than-human-caused-global-warming/
[quote]Or, in the case of the neighbour with the huge motor,that he has enough capacitors to provide his own inrush.[/quote]cgh
Well said but....
How do capacitors provide their own initial inrush? Do you leave the motor ON?....The practice of using a HUGE facility sized UPS between the grid & load.. works well.
Is a low cost UPS available that will source the inrush of a 220V deep Well Pump? (looking ahead to 2012)
I have a feeling that DC summing points have a role in the future, But that waits affordable Super conductivity...
The, it's all about control, digital folks will get a wakeup call when a little bitty glitch fries The works.....
JMHO
Phillip G.Shaw
Good find.
I wonder how many were aware that BC, Man, On and PQ had joined in this Al Gore Cap and Trade lunicy.
Here in Ontario, McSquinty has rejuvenated opinion regarding the BooB Rae government.
Where is Bob Harris when we really need him?
RESIST THE NEW WORLD ORDER
Wind power can be economically viable. But several factors have to come into play:
1) Wind power zone, probably class 4 at least, maybe even class 5
2) Large enough project to take advantage of economy of scale
3) Higher energy prices
Unfortunately for Canada #2 and #3 do not make our projects viable. Here in Manitoba several have fallen apart. Considering our bargain basement electricity costs, I can see why. Some areas in the states pay nearly 3X as much for electricity. There's no way a wind power company can compete with a government monopoly hell bent on selling to the consumer at no profit.
Manitoba Hydro also puts in a bunch of bureaucracy that further makes it problematic. Most projects here are 99 MW for a reason, once you go above that there's new red tape. Another problem is the power that a wind turbine puts out is hard to regulate. I'm not talking about wind blowing vs. wind not blowing, but when the wind is blowing the power is not easily added to the grid.
My dad is wanting to build a project wind turbine, not for profit but more for a hobby. He has good fabrication skills as well as an electrical background. Manitoba Hydro basically said don't bother, the power needs to be heavily regulated and clean to be added to the grid. If it isn't there's no way to properly measure how much power it is putting into the grid, and it is very easy to "cheat the system". In other words, they want an expensive system that they approve. This instantly makes it non-viable for any small project.
Phillip: think of a capacitor bank as a battery. The moment of startup, the motor draws its current from the capacitor bank (you need a big enough bank to handle the full load from the motor's inrush). The bank is connected to the grid and like a battery recharges over time. So, the motor load is transferred much more gradually to the grid and becomes much more manageable without sag-outs.
Utilities often have lots of capacitor systems of their own to smooth out power quality problems from sudden changes of load on a distribution system. Capacitors are one of a number of technologies used to mitigate power quality problems. Others include various forms of resistance to power surges induced by either lightning strikes or induced current from solar flares (this one's important for very long transmission systems).
UPS is something else. That's the gold card version of power supply. The motor load isn't connected to the grid at all; it's connected to the UPS. The UPS in turn is connected to the grid. The UPS is intended to work in reverse; namely to prevent grid disturbances from interrupting or affecting your power application in your home or business. This is critical for things like hospitals or various kinds of refrigeration or uninterruptible industrial processes. The UPS is not of course a power source; its effectively a filter that allows a load to be shifted from one source of supply (the grid) to another (your home diesel generator, say) without interruption. My information is a little out of date, but I understand the best are also the most expensive, mechanical flywheel.
A cousin of mine, back in NS, has a windmill. It covers most of his energy costs, which are pretty small, anyway. He bought it, used, from some Scandinavian company. In NS, they have a setup that uses two meters, one for inbound energy, and one for outbound. It shows up on the utilities bill as a +/- balance.
My cousin has been involved in testing proposed windmill sites for many years. He sets up towers, with anemometers, and sends the data to an engineering firm, for analyzing. It's sort of a hobby for him, but he's learned a lot about the industry. According to him, it isn't feasible for most people. You need more than an acre of land, access to a compatible grid, a suitable amount of wind, and a lot of mechanical aptitude. I'd imagine you need neighbours who don't have trouble sleeping through the annoying whine of the blades, as well.
BTW, he has to lay the tower down during hurricanes.
Fan of the stinking IPCC/UN: gonzo.
...-
"Editor of Nature forced to resign from climate review panel
11 02 2010
From Channel 4 news in the UK:
‘Climate-gate’ review member resigns
Within hours of the launch of an independent panel to investigate claims that climate scientists covered up flawed data on temperature rises, one member has been forced to resign after sceptics questioned his impartiality.
// In an interview last year with Chinese State Radio, enquiry panel member Philip Campbell, editor-in-chief of Nature said: “The scientists have not hidden the data. If you look at the emails there is one or two bits of language that are jargon used between professionals that suggest something to outsiders that is wrong.”
He went on: “In fact the only problem there has been is on some official restrictions on their ability to disseminate data otherwise they have behaved as researchers should.”
Dr Campbell, was invited to sit on the enquiry panel because of his expertise in the peer review process as editor of one of the world’s leading science journals.
The journal has published some of the leading papers on climate change research, including those supporting the now famous “hockey stick” graph, the subject of intense criticism by climate sceptics.
Dr Campbell has now withdrawn his membership of the panel, telling Channel 4 News: “I made the remarks in good faith on the basis of media reports of the leaks.
“As I have made clear subsequently, I support the need to for a full review of the facts behind the leaked e-mails.
“There must be nothing that calls into question the ability of the independent Review to complete this task, and therefore I have decided to withdraw from the team.”
The interview, posted on the Bishop Hill blog, run by climate sceptic Andrew Montford, will come as an embarrassment to the enquiry’s chair Sir Muir Russell."
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/11/editor-of-nature-forced-to-resign-from-climate-review-panel/
cgh
a capacitor is a voltage devise, a coil (motor and generator windings ) is a current device. When you fire up a motor it causes the current to lag, this is called phase shift, the capacitor loads up causing the voltage to "lag", thus correcting the phase (pf factor). When hooking a generator into the grid you need to make sure that it is in PHASE. A UPS ( Uninterruptible Power Supple) is a battery bank, you can hook equipment up to it and just keep the batteries on constant charge, or you can have it hooked up so the there is a switching up main power interruption. For computers and other such delicate and low power usage you would use the former setup, for motors and other heavy power users you would use the second hook up.
When I worked as a service tech in the plastics industry I used to recommend customers to acquire capacitor banks to correct their PF, this gave them considerable energy cost savings, and justified $20K - $40K expenditures for these cap. banks.
Assuming for the sake of discussion that one would even want to use wind or solar power on a large scale, then it would be idiotic to do so until one had a means of storing it with high efficiency. I suppose we'll have to wait for a meltdown of the European grid before people other than Lubos Motl clue in to the idiocy being perpetrated.
Right now we don't have a high efficiency/high capacity electrical power storage system. Possible systems are converting electrical energy to gravitational potential energy through pumping water into a reservoir and then generating hydroelectric power at a controlled rate, electrolysis of water into O2 and H2 and then using a fuel cell to recombine them, compressing air in a huge storeage tank, spinning up a humungous flywheel and hopefully soon ultracapacitors with Mwhour capacities.
All of these systems act as a low-pass filter smoothing out the immense fluctuations in power production and feeding power at a controlled rate into the main grid. If one has an isolated pump filling a reservoir then it can withstand the power fluctuations of a windmill (with some local power smoothing thrown in) as the only thing that will be affected by that variable power is the rate at which the reservoir is filled. Knowing the volume of water in the reservoir and the height/volume relationship the potential energy stored there can be calculated very precisely and the hydroelectric generation system can function as part of a stable grid. The only question I'd ask is that why would one bother converting energy from the motion of a very thin fluid (air) into the more usefull energy of motion of a high density fluid (water) when all one has to do to utilize this potential energy is to build a dam and let Gaia do the work by making it rain in high places. We learned how to collect water from the rain thousands of years ago and as long as we have weather this is a very sustainable source of power.
"Sustainability" as applied to wind and solar power is as much an oxymoron as the phrase "honest politician". Any engineer who looks beyond the immediate problem of how one puts a windmill with desired electrical production capacity at location x and instead looks at how said windmill would affect the overall system would tell you to not build the windmill. I like birds so I hate windmills. I wonder how the millions of computers and other electronic devices that would fail during a national grid meltdown figure into the "sustainability" equations?
When solar power costs less than hydroelectric power I'll cover the roof of my house with solar cells and hopefully by that time there will be a nice, small very high density battery storage system so I can get off the grid. Until such time I'm sticking with the power grid with UPS's on all of my computers and essential electronics.
Cgh..GYM,
I started specifying individual UPS's for critical Broadcast systems (without redundant PS) in the 90's. They also work to buffer (condition) the crappy mains...The UPS process is to convert AC voltage to DC and store that DC using polarized Capacitors, the output converts the DC back to AC. All Capacitors used with AC are Non-polarized coupling capacitors (NO STORAGE) resulting in phase shift factors. We have yet to invent a device to store AC
I got to thinking, after cgh posted, because the Stall/Startup of a AC motor is theoretically a dead short & that is the high current (electrical) problem .. What if my well motor ran continuously unloaded/water bypassed using control valves at ~ 60 volts (Solar panels feeding a cheap UPS , with lots of water in my well) .. a system demand would ramp the voltage to 220 and then the loading valves would switch the water output into the system.
I think that would work using a source that just matches the current rating of the motor…
You don’t want to know the initial current demand......
See: Update to this post
Better take that report with a grain of salt. He's a pro at reports and he is a Nuke and Oil man.
GLENN R. SCHLEEDE
Associate Director for Energy and Science:
Files, 1974-77
Gerald R. Ford Library
1000 Beal Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2114
ford.utexas.edu/library/guides/Finding Aids\Schleede, Glenn - Files.htm
[Qoute]
He helped devise and coordinate policy on the Alaska pipeline, earthquake prediction, coal and natural gas usage, funding for energy research and development, the naval petroleum reserves, and nuclear power and policy.
Documentation on questions of nuclear energy is especially significant, particularly regarding the decisions and drafts in 1976 leading up to the Fri Report in September and President Ford's statement on nuclear policy of October 28.
[/Quote]
So much for Schleede.
Many years ago when I first started working in the mainframe computer business, I saw what is the equivalent of todays UPS (Uninteruptible Power supply) function done with what was called a motor-generator set. This was an electric motor that drove an electrical generator on the same shaft. In between the motor and the generator was a massive flywheel. The idea was that you store up some energy in getting the common shaft up to speed so that in the event of a primary power failure, the flywheel would keep the generator working long enough to do an orderly shutdown of the mainframe computer.
So today I am proposing a new concept - call it the foobert flywheel. We hook up all these new-fangled solar and wind power sources to a motor on one side of a common shaft with a generator on the other and a humunguous flywheel in between. The only difference is that the generator would not be engaged until there is demand on the grid for the stored kinetic energy in the flywheel.
When this can be done at a price that is competitive with the best power generators today, I will be a believer.
Foobert,
This is done for industrial power backup supply today.
Huge flywheels on a vertical shaft and the bottom bearing spins on an air cushion or magnetic suspension where friction is almost zero.
They are big, expensive but reliable and some can run for weeks.
Here's the link for the most in Flywheel UPS systems.... as claimed.
http://www.pentadyne.com/
They come first in the listings anyway.
This is the cut-away colour diagram of the Pentadyne Flywheel power backup unit.
pentadyne.com/uploads/18/File/Pentadyne-VSS-Brochure.pdf
or http://tinyurl.com/y8kd753
Thanks TG.