I remember seeing the windmills for the first time in person when I was in my teens, on a flight from Boston to Copanhagen. I saw another "field" of them as my boat left port in Denmark.
They were incredible to look at, just mesmerizing. They were beautiful, gorgeous in more than just their form. That something so bold and elegant could create meaningful amounts of power blew my mind. I remembered reading about lakes and ponds in New Hampshire that had no persistent human contact but tested positive for mercury from coal plants. Looking at these windmills was like staring into a vision of the future. Looking at them, I had never felt so optimistic about technology before.
When I got home I went on the internet to read about wind power and see if there were any initiatives in my home state or Massachusetts. The negativity I found in the papers was its own mind-boggle.
They do complain about views and noise in Europe too. But with a functioning government their concerns are overruled by the majority who doesn't have a view of the coast.
I love looking at windmills too but then I don't look and listen to them all day.
As far as power generation I'm amazed the ground windmill approach is as popular as it is. It's not efficient. It has serious limitations. Seems like a craze. But then the incredibly inefficient coal plants were a craze too. Electric lights and vacuum cleaners, how did we live without them! We can make coal plants far more efficient. A 10% efficiency increase would be bigger than the renewable industry in the US. We can also make wind kites which make a lot more sense. Lets see if we bother.
While the view may be a rather weak argument, wind power doesn't make much sense. Nuclear power is just a better way to produce energy. It's cheap, stable and just as environmentally friendly. It's too bad that politics prevent it's usage, adoption and development in so many countries. There's very little research on thorium power, too, which would solve most of the remaing negative points about nuclear power.
I don't get it. It's easy to guess that "well, the rich of course are going to manipulate the political process to protect their privileged position, even if it means those less well off and society at large will be the worse for it." Which is plausible at first, considering who fossil fuels hurt and whom wind farms "hurt."
But it's not like Europe doesn't have entrenched economic interests, and it's not like those entrenched interests wouldn't have captured the political process. What's so special about the USA that gives ridiculous outcomes?
Visit somewhere in California where a pristine mountain side with trees and red rock was just 10 years ago, and not it is nothing but wall of spinning white blades of bird killers.
Wind is like water. You can't just slow it down with your turbines and expect no environmental impact. Putting them on the windward side of a mountain reduces the rain fall on the opposite side. Birds die in the blades. It isn't all rainbows and butterflies.
Denmark is the country within the European union with the highest penetration of wind power in electricity consumption (almost 26%). However, in absolute terms both Spain (22 GW) and Germany (29 GW) vastly exceed Denmark (4 GW) and are two of the largest "wind markets" worldwide (as of end 2011) [1].
In particular, Spain has made a tremendous effort investing in wind energy (tax incentives, subsidies, etc. were granted), and it's amazing to see that in about 15 years, this type of energy went from 0 to about 20% of the total energy produced within the country [2].
Including also the rest of renewables to the mix, it seems obvious that in the coming 15-20 years, it should be possible to generate more than 50% of energy from renewable sources, e.g. solar energy in Spain achieved power grid parity in terms of cost last December [3].
In spite of the current economic downturn, these are pretty amazing times we are living in!
In the United States we have Iowa, where >24% of electricity last year came from wind, and where there's more nameplate capacity of wind than the entire demand of the nation of Denmark.
Interesting error, since it's more common to get confused in the other direction. Many people think the peninsula of Jutland is Denmark, even though the center of business/power/economy is in Copenhagen, on the island of Zealand, which is closer to Sweden than to the Jutland peninsula.
Also known as a single nuclear reactor. While I am all for renewables the real problem is storage and buffering. The solutions in these areas are improving but not nearly as fast as needed.
A cheap supercapacitor with less than 10% daily discharge rate could go a long way in positioning renewables to shine.
And all those windmill parks are heavily subsidized, which contributes to the Danish electricity prices being the highest in all of EU[1], 0.3 euro per kwh. Its basically a state-guaranteed high yield for the pension funds etc that put them up, paid for by the consumers in DK.
Wow, that's about 10x more than in USA
And Canada (excluding Hawaii and Kentucky).
I wonder what people would choose given the option between cheap and not from natural gas, as this is going to be the situation in USA for the next 20 years due to shale gas
I'm pretty naive on the science of these things, but I have a concern: is there any possibility that increasing use of wind energy could have negative affects on the environment by essentially taking energy out of our atmosphere? Could our winds gradually slow down over time?
Maybe it's just such a small fraction that it doesn't matter. Or maybe wind energy is essentially another form of capturing solar energy, because the winds are created by temperature differences, which are created by the sun hitting the earth, and that energy is constantly renewed?
I don't know, but I'm curious. Any insight about this would be appreciated.
Wind is pretty fickle already. I sail a lot on the Long Island Sound (25 miles north-east of NYC). On hot afternoons the bridges create thermals that completely screw with the prevailing "natural" wind. You can feel the effects 10-15 miles away.
I don't think it's a bad thing at all, it doesn't impact the macro climate just the local power of the wind and direction, but it is noticeable. There are all sorts of micro influences based on the buildings on land as well that matter to sailing, but the overall picture is dominated by the weather rolling through on any given day. A bridge or a building or a big open parking lot might shift the direction a few degrees or locally increase/decrease the wind, but that's it.
Any windmill impact from changing wind patterns or reducing wind power is radically less than eg building homes (given we build millions of homes annually), or simply driving vehicles (of any sort, given the numbers of vehicles globally).
You could never build enough windmills to cause a problem. The only real environmental concerns are killing animals (insects?), and construction / manufacturing related.
Well since the wind is due in large part to the rotational inertia of the the planet (the air stays still, the earth and everything on the surface moves through the air) the earth's rotational kinetic energy is being sapped. It can't last. Peak spinnage! Tell the people! (...some will say)
Just in case you're wondering how a price for energy can be nagative: It is not. Someone else is paying full price for it. The producer is guaraneed to always sell the enegry into the grid at a fixed price. The market is broken.
Recently when there was a windy weather situation, Denmark produced enough power from wind turbines to cover 82%[1] of the entire power usage in denmark.
As a grid engineer, I find the Danish case to be somewhat unique because of their strong AC and DC interconnections to Germany and Sweden. Basically, they can free-ride on the large european grid (UCTE), which stretches from Portgual to Russia, to maintain network stability while increasing domestic wind penetrations above 50%.
I think a more interesting case study is Ireland, which has far weaker interconnectors to the UK and operate mainly as an island network. Like Denmark, they are also trying to integrate large amounts of wind (a goal of 40% by 2020, which is equivalent to over 6GW peak), but unlike Denmark, Ireland also have to deal with the resulting stability issues.
An EirGrid engineer I spoke to recently mentioned that frequency stability is already a big issue for them. The main solution proposed in a 2010 study [1] amounted to maintaining a sufficient operating inertial reserve, which would potentially mean curtailing wind generation at times. In the future, I would look to Ireland rather than Denmark for solutions to integrating more wind into the grid, because they are already at the pointy end of it.
I'm pretty sure this is done at a large scale in both Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. While storing energy have always been a huge problem, I'm surprised this is not more popular.
France built out a system of hydro dams and nuclear power plants in the 70s, and they store excess nuclear power by pumping from reservoirs downstream to ones upstream, for later hydro power generation. Unlike Denmark, however, France has the Alps, and thus a suitable location for dams.
Seems like an ideal arrangement would be to use Norwegian hydro power installations as a buffer for Danish wind power output.
Can someone explain why you would ever pay someone to take surplus power? Is it because they don't want it To go to waste? Otherwise can't they just get rid of it somehow?
The most compelling use case for excess energy is to store it. There's a big research area in developing batteries for temporary grid storage. Compared to standard batteries, the goal is to trade off weight for cost, so that it's practical to capture the delta between {peak demand, actual demand}. See [1] for such a battery.
There are certain times when there is a surplus of energy in the network (usually at nights iirc).
With a lack of good storage mechanisms, energy vendors need to actually pay companies to use the energy at certain times. Otherwise, the energy excess would damage the network.
If Denmark doesn't have enough companies that could take the energy, they have to send the energy to be used up somewhere else. It's quite likely that at the same time in other countries a similar situation occurs, so nobody really wants the extra electricity. Hence Danes need to pay other countries to get rid of it.
What's surprising is there's no way to disengage the generator and just let the turbine spin for nothing when there's excess power. Seems they could push around seawater if they need the resistance for structural integrity.
Off shore wind power is about 25% of the wind power capacity of Denmark, the rest are 'normal' wind turbines. However, they'll contribute more to the total energy output. Off-shore wind turbines generate about 35-50% of their maximum capacity on average, compared to 20-30% of normal wind turbines.
Grid oversupply is bad (just as any overpowered circuit is generally bad). There isn't a way to dump power or store it, so they had to dump it on other countries who then had to adjust accordingly on their grid. You might think of it as a nice gesture, but it isn't; the other country has to power off plants or otherwise adjust to handle the excess as well. There isn't an "energy garbage can" or dummy load at power grid scale.
Running a power grid is a 24x7 dance of supply and demand, which is why people that hate renewables like wind are quick to lament its variable nature. It's the same in high-capacity systems planning in our line of work; systems that have variable latency are a lot harder to plan capacity for than systems with fairly constant latency. Just substitute "supply" for "latency", and you're now a power grid operator.
A quick check on wind turbine design for power generation [1] confirms to my satisfaction that all wind turbines should be throttable down to zero electrical output and then with good mechanical brakes [2] taking away the remaining kinetic energy sufficient to stop then lock the rotor. I've read elsewhere (sorry, no reference) that stopping the rotor can be necessary in emergency windspeed conditions. Per [2]:
> Let’s compare the emergency braking requirements of a
>1.5 MW wind turbine under maximum wind conditions with
>those of a 40-ton mining truck. Imagine driving a
>fully loaded truck down a steep gradient of 25% (1:4)
>at 85 mph when a road sign warns of a cliff a quarter
>mile ahead. The engineering required for effective
>braking in both cases is much the same. Braking for
>the wind turbine is, in fact, more demanding.
Beyond mechanical brakes, the available control strategies and actuators normally applied toward maximizing power output per [1] can instead be applied toward bringing the power output to zero and the rotor to a halt, such as:
* Apply generator torque control (dumping power to the grid) sufficient to slow the blades down to near zero
* Then or as the blades slow down, stall or furl the blades using pitch control
* Apply the brakes to lock the rotor
* Yaw the whole machine 90 degrees off the wind
OK so if they're stoppable, what is up here?
Others more familiar with Danish market, operators and regulatory conditions might speak better to this, but I'll surmise that the turbine operators get paid when they produce energy, whether Denmark needs it or not. So the turbine operators never stop their turbines, night nor day.
When that creates an excess of energy the grid engineers must do something. The article mentioned slowing hydro output elsewhere and heating the water used locally for district heating.
This creates an environment where there should be a financial incentive to create technologies for storage or highly variable use of this nightime and other times highly variable excess electrical energy.
Hundred-megawatt data centers [3] with quickly variable compute capability come to mind, but making stored hot water hotter (the district heating 'dummy load' approach) seems to me a lot simpler, cheaper and immediately practical, if a bit wasteful of the low-entropy energy that electricity is.
[+] [-] simonsarris|13 years ago|reply
They were incredible to look at, just mesmerizing. They were beautiful, gorgeous in more than just their form. That something so bold and elegant could create meaningful amounts of power blew my mind. I remembered reading about lakes and ponds in New Hampshire that had no persistent human contact but tested positive for mercury from coal plants. Looking at these windmills was like staring into a vision of the future. Looking at them, I had never felt so optimistic about technology before.
When I got home I went on the internet to read about wind power and see if there were any initiatives in my home state or Massachusetts. The negativity I found in the papers was its own mind-boggle.
Do you know what they complained about? The view.
[+] [-] Detrus|13 years ago|reply
I love looking at windmills too but then I don't look and listen to them all day.
As far as power generation I'm amazed the ground windmill approach is as popular as it is. It's not efficient. It has serious limitations. Seems like a craze. But then the incredibly inefficient coal plants were a craze too. Electric lights and vacuum cleaners, how did we live without them! We can make coal plants far more efficient. A 10% efficiency increase would be bigger than the renewable industry in the US. We can also make wind kites which make a lot more sense. Lets see if we bother.
[+] [-] nawitus|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scarmig|13 years ago|reply
But it's not like Europe doesn't have entrenched economic interests, and it's not like those entrenched interests wouldn't have captured the political process. What's so special about the USA that gives ridiculous outcomes?
[+] [-] drakaal|13 years ago|reply
Wind is like water. You can't just slow it down with your turbines and expect no environmental impact. Putting them on the windward side of a mountain reduces the rain fall on the opposite side. Birds die in the blades. It isn't all rainbows and butterflies.
[+] [-] moakleaf|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] vitobcn|13 years ago|reply
In particular, Spain has made a tremendous effort investing in wind energy (tax incentives, subsidies, etc. were granted), and it's amazing to see that in about 15 years, this type of energy went from 0 to about 20% of the total energy produced within the country [2].
Including also the rest of renewables to the mix, it seems obvious that in the coming 15-20 years, it should be possible to generate more than 50% of energy from renewable sources, e.g. solar energy in Spain achieved power grid parity in terms of cost last December [3].
In spite of the current economic downturn, these are pretty amazing times we are living in!
[1]: http://www.ewea.org/fileadmin/ewea_documents/documents/publi...
[2]: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/es/timeline/957d498ae7...
[3]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterdetwiler/2012/12/26/solar-g...
[+] [-] potatos|13 years ago|reply
For what it's worth.
[+] [-] oellegaard|13 years ago|reply
We're not an island* :-(
* We do have 1419 islands, though.
[+] [-] alexholehouse|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _delirium|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] venomsnake|13 years ago|reply
A cheap supercapacitor with less than 10% daily discharge rate could go a long way in positioning renewables to shine.
[+] [-] Zigurd|13 years ago|reply
It would be interesting to compare:
Capital requirement
Insurability
Maximum damage to the environment in case of a disaster
Decommissioning costs
Maintenance costs
Construction schedule
[+] [-] AndreasFrom|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btb|13 years ago|reply
[1] http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index....
[+] [-] ttuominen|13 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/27/i...
[+] [-] snowwindwaves|13 years ago|reply
I wonder what people would choose given the option between cheap and not from natural gas, as this is going to be the situation in USA for the next 20 years due to shale gas
[+] [-] ok_craig|13 years ago|reply
Maybe it's just such a small fraction that it doesn't matter. Or maybe wind energy is essentially another form of capturing solar energy, because the winds are created by temperature differences, which are created by the sun hitting the earth, and that energy is constantly renewed?
I don't know, but I'm curious. Any insight about this would be appreciated.
[+] [-] krschultz|13 years ago|reply
I don't think it's a bad thing at all, it doesn't impact the macro climate just the local power of the wind and direction, but it is noticeable. There are all sorts of micro influences based on the buildings on land as well that matter to sailing, but the overall picture is dominated by the weather rolling through on any given day. A bridge or a building or a big open parking lot might shift the direction a few degrees or locally increase/decrease the wind, but that's it.
I doubt wind turbines do much more than that.
[+] [-] adventured|13 years ago|reply
Any windmill impact from changing wind patterns or reducing wind power is radically less than eg building homes (given we build millions of homes annually), or simply driving vehicles (of any sort, given the numbers of vehicles globally).
You could never build enough windmills to cause a problem. The only real environmental concerns are killing animals (insects?), and construction / manufacturing related.
[+] [-] alexholehouse|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aj700|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vilda|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Systemic33|13 years ago|reply
[1] DANISH http://ing.dk/artikel/vindmoeller-slog-rekord-i-gaarsdagens-...
[+] [-] vitaminj|13 years ago|reply
I think a more interesting case study is Ireland, which has far weaker interconnectors to the UK and operate mainly as an island network. Like Denmark, they are also trying to integrate large amounts of wind (a goal of 40% by 2020, which is equivalent to over 6GW peak), but unlike Denmark, Ireland also have to deal with the resulting stability issues.
An EirGrid engineer I spoke to recently mentioned that frequency stability is already a big issue for them. The main solution proposed in a 2010 study [1] amounted to maintaining a sufficient operating inertial reserve, which would potentially mean curtailing wind generation at times. In the future, I would look to Ireland rather than Denmark for solutions to integrating more wind into the grid, because they are already at the pointy end of it.
[1] EirGrid Facilitation of Renewables study, http://www.eirgrid.com/renewables/facilitationofrenewables/
[+] [-] Bockit|13 years ago|reply
I find the idea of using a dam as a battery quite interesting.
[+] [-] waterlesscloud|13 years ago|reply
Just south of the Bay Area, you can see such a facility on the road between the 101 and the 5, at Pacheco Pass.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Luis_Reservoir
See also : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped_storage
[+] [-] oellegaard|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WiseWeasel|13 years ago|reply
Seems like an ideal arrangement would be to use Norwegian hydro power installations as a buffer for Danish wind power output.
[+] [-] dmoo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TomGullen|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drakaal|13 years ago|reply
The author couldn't decide on the capitalization of "of" in the title so maybe they just didn't know 1000 Meg is a Gig.
[+] [-] adventured|13 years ago|reply
Water desalination perhaps, since it's energy intensive.
[+] [-] michael_miller|13 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.stanford.edu/group/cui_group/papers/Yuan_EES_2013...
[+] [-] muratmutlu|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kolinko|13 years ago|reply
If Denmark doesn't have enough companies that could take the energy, they have to send the energy to be used up somewhere else. It's quite likely that at the same time in other countries a similar situation occurs, so nobody really wants the extra electricity. Hence Danes need to pay other countries to get rid of it.
[+] [-] WiseWeasel|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baq|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waterlesscloud|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aj700|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pieter|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattangriffel|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tiredofcareer|13 years ago|reply
Running a power grid is a 24x7 dance of supply and demand, which is why people that hate renewables like wind are quick to lament its variable nature. It's the same in high-capacity systems planning in our line of work; systems that have variable latency are a lot harder to plan capacity for than systems with fairly constant latency. Just substitute "supply" for "latency", and you're now a power grid operator.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] EEGuy|13 years ago|reply
* Apply generator torque control (dumping power to the grid) sufficient to slow the blades down to near zero
* Then or as the blades slow down, stall or furl the blades using pitch control
* Apply the brakes to lock the rotor
* Yaw the whole machine 90 degrees off the wind
OK so if they're stoppable, what is up here?
Others more familiar with Danish market, operators and regulatory conditions might speak better to this, but I'll surmise that the turbine operators get paid when they produce energy, whether Denmark needs it or not. So the turbine operators never stop their turbines, night nor day.
When that creates an excess of energy the grid engineers must do something. The article mentioned slowing hydro output elsewhere and heating the water used locally for district heating.
This creates an environment where there should be a financial incentive to create technologies for storage or highly variable use of this nightime and other times highly variable excess electrical energy.
Hundred-megawatt data centers [3] with quickly variable compute capability come to mind, but making stored hot water hotter (the district heating 'dummy load' approach) seems to me a lot simpler, cheaper and immediately practical, if a bit wasteful of the low-entropy energy that electricity is.
---
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine_design
[2] http://news.altramotion.com/?p=242
[3] http://gigaom.com/2012/01/31/the-era-of-the-100-mw-data-cent...
[+] [-] SmokyBorbon|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kolinko|13 years ago|reply