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Wind Projected to supply ~50% of electricity for mid-west tonight (2/23/17)
- Thread starter nwdiver
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- Energy Environment Policy
Here's a visual representation of wind speed across the country that is really awesome and mesmerizing. I check it just about every day, especially during my bicycling season. It shows why the SPP should exceed their previous record.
Wind Map
Sure looks like curtailment is what's holding wind back right now... 
Not sure if SPP is being cautious, helping the coal plants or if there's transmission constraints that are holding back wind generation...
This is the primary reason I think we need to be more thoughtful with our investment and use of distributed storage. The uncoordinated deployment and use of distributed storage is likely to make these problems worse if the primary objective is to maximize the self-consumption of solar. Curtailment events almost always occur at night.
Not sure if SPP is being cautious, helping the coal plants or if there's transmission constraints that are holding back wind generation...
This is the primary reason I think we need to be more thoughtful with our investment and use of distributed storage. The uncoordinated deployment and use of distributed storage is likely to make these problems worse if the primary objective is to maximize the self-consumption of solar. Curtailment events almost always occur at night.
Sure looks like curtailment is what's holding wind back right now...
Not sure if SPP is being cautious, helping the coal plants or if there's transmission constraints that are holding back wind generation...
This is the primary reason I think we need to be more thoughtful with our investment and use of distributed storage. The uncoordinated deployment and use of distributed storage is likely to make these problems worse if the primary objective is to maximize the self-consumption of solar. Curtailment events almost always occur at night.
I don't think it would be a problem. Solar charges battery. Evening demand discharges battery which means that there's available capacity during the night. And if, as we hope, consumers have electric cars, it'd be pretty hard (if you're not wk057) to have enough solar to charge the car, so smart charging would provide production response.
That IS the problem. If distributed storage isn't coordinated you're charging your battery with solar when the grid needs it the most... during the day. Then using your stored energy at night... when the grid has surplus energy.
Basically uncoordinated use of distributed storage will lead to not only unnecessary cycling of batteries but detrimental cycling of batteries. It's counter productive to charge batteries during the day when there's a deficit on the grid then force the curtailment of wind energy at night since you're running off of stored energy.
Wind is becoming such a dominant source of energy that the charging and discharging of distributed storage needs to be based much more on the availability of wind power that what's happening on your side of the meter.
How do know? Do they have X GW of coal that they won't turn down? Transmission constraints? I'm just not very familiar with the area. When our BPA curtailed wind a few years back, it was Spring and a big water year much like this year will be. They were spilling water like mad, curtailing wind and all of the thermal plants were off including our 1.1 GW nuclear plant. I tried to help by driving moreIf it doesn't get curtailed...
I'm pretty sure it'll get curtailed...
On the SPP website it says about 16 GW of wind is installed, so getting 14 in generations suggests constant 25 mph winds throughout the installed area. Pretty good, but it's spring.
I don't know for sure... but the predicted vs actual graph is suspiciously tracking with demand... it sure looks like wind is being curtailed for some reason.
Yes, it looks like you're right. Wind is predicted to be flat for days, but produced power is dropping as load is dropping overnight. Too bad
SageBrush
REJECT Fascism
The trumpish era is going to bless the idea of prioritizing coal use first, when rational policy should be clean energy first and fossil fuels last. If coal plants are not profitable in that scheme, they need to shut down.
Sad, how much damage one idiot in the WH can cause.
Sad, how much damage one idiot in the WH can cause.
Ulmo
Active Member
Curtailment proponents say that it is OK to not communicate to users (via prices or any other method) when more power is available, thus not giving users (and the whole grid) the opportunity to use the better (cleaner) energy. I say that's wrong. Let's look at variable large load users:
Interestingly but not coincidentally, many of the large fields of windmills, solar panels, and hydroelectric power are located relatively close to where the huge water projects are that could use a large amount of this power. It is doubtful that it would be cost prohibitive to find available transmission facilities for that power, or to enhance it to some degree. It is true that a lot of the users are far from those variable generation sites, as well, but that has been partially true for most generators for a long time. Even if there is insufficient transmission capacity now, a large proportion of variable use could be used by (automated) variable users.
One easy way to communicate that availability is on the order of a second or so precision real time pricing. Sun shines, wind blows, and you make available energy according to what users can use. It could even be offered in terms of a gust of wind: the gust starts, milliseconds later you find buyers in some city that you presently can deliver to on grid, and you then put it on the grid within a second of the gust of wind. The gust dies down a few seconds later, you raise the price, and the grid relents within a second. Similar with clouds and sun. The smoothing function would happen over distances and with some batteries. Faster response times could be required for more extreme transitions. But even clouds take time to cross the skies, so there is a rolling effect that averages things out.
Essentially, I find "curtailment" a sort of cheap way to describe planning that partially includes cheap behavior of pro-pollution forces trying to get more money than they really need by supplanting available and usable clean energy sources more than they need to, but also includes outdated and insufficient models for communicating available resources to end users. Plenty of end uses are variable.
In a fast response system, even long-term constant users like air conditioners and refrigerators can option to turn on exactly when there's some more energy and turn off exactly when there's less energy, within a degree of their target temperature (have dual triggers in each direction: when it needs to get colder, start looking for available energy, and another trigger to override the availability check). But definitely a lot of large users like water pumping into tanks, reservoirs and canals, water filtering, and in homes water heating, can be done in a much more variable manner. Those users in aggregate could easily soak up all the current renewable variations throughout the day.
All of this will be irrelevant when we have more clean energy than we ever need energy at all, and "curtailment" (lack of dispatch) will be done 100% of the time somewhere, all the while no dirty energy sources are ever used. That is our goal. Never forget that. If there is insufficient clean energy sources due to a drop in some sort of variable source, then we can do a combination of build more clean energy sources, more storage, and more variable users.
P.S., my writing is most likely regional and California-centric. Huge water projects, wind farms, solar farms and hydroelectric generators probably aren't the same elsewhere. My writing is entirely relevant for 40,000,000 people.
- Electric vehicle charging
- Water pumping
- Water heating
- Desalination
- Sewage filtering
Interestingly but not coincidentally, many of the large fields of windmills, solar panels, and hydroelectric power are located relatively close to where the huge water projects are that could use a large amount of this power. It is doubtful that it would be cost prohibitive to find available transmission facilities for that power, or to enhance it to some degree. It is true that a lot of the users are far from those variable generation sites, as well, but that has been partially true for most generators for a long time. Even if there is insufficient transmission capacity now, a large proportion of variable use could be used by (automated) variable users.
One easy way to communicate that availability is on the order of a second or so precision real time pricing. Sun shines, wind blows, and you make available energy according to what users can use. It could even be offered in terms of a gust of wind: the gust starts, milliseconds later you find buyers in some city that you presently can deliver to on grid, and you then put it on the grid within a second of the gust of wind. The gust dies down a few seconds later, you raise the price, and the grid relents within a second. Similar with clouds and sun. The smoothing function would happen over distances and with some batteries. Faster response times could be required for more extreme transitions. But even clouds take time to cross the skies, so there is a rolling effect that averages things out.
Essentially, I find "curtailment" a sort of cheap way to describe planning that partially includes cheap behavior of pro-pollution forces trying to get more money than they really need by supplanting available and usable clean energy sources more than they need to, but also includes outdated and insufficient models for communicating available resources to end users. Plenty of end uses are variable.
In a fast response system, even long-term constant users like air conditioners and refrigerators can option to turn on exactly when there's some more energy and turn off exactly when there's less energy, within a degree of their target temperature (have dual triggers in each direction: when it needs to get colder, start looking for available energy, and another trigger to override the availability check). But definitely a lot of large users like water pumping into tanks, reservoirs and canals, water filtering, and in homes water heating, can be done in a much more variable manner. Those users in aggregate could easily soak up all the current renewable variations throughout the day.
All of this will be irrelevant when we have more clean energy than we ever need energy at all, and "curtailment" (lack of dispatch) will be done 100% of the time somewhere, all the while no dirty energy sources are ever used. That is our goal. Never forget that. If there is insufficient clean energy sources due to a drop in some sort of variable source, then we can do a combination of build more clean energy sources, more storage, and more variable users.
P.S., my writing is most likely regional and California-centric. Huge water projects, wind farms, solar farms and hydroelectric generators probably aren't the same elsewhere. My writing is entirely relevant for 40,000,000 people.
Last edited:
Ulmo
Active Member
The next day, Feb. 24, 2017, was the most utility solar in California.
RichardC
Cdn Sig & Solar Supporter
I believe that you your observations are more generally applicable. We are on a variable price plan where the cost of power can vary by up to a multiple of fifteen times (from lowest to critical peak pricing). Through use of pricing sensitive load shedding equipment for home heating, hot water and electric car charging, we have shifted up to 96% of our power consumption to times outside the 3 pm to 9 pm peak load / price period.
Very informative post. If I read the SPP website correctly, the wholesale prices were negative throughout the entire multstate region last night. So it appears that this information is available, it's just not being used, or the dynamic pricing is not being offered to the end user.
Ulmo
Active Member
Install solar, not wind.
While I don't want to lose the existing investment of existing wind farms, they have been found to be detrimental to climate, birds, health, and our environment, and I advocate (and have advocated for a long time) to go 100% solar from now on:
Large-scale US wind power would cause warming that would take roughly a century to offset
While I don't want to lose the existing investment of existing wind farms, they have been found to be detrimental to climate, birds, health, and our environment, and I advocate (and have advocated for a long time) to go 100% solar from now on:
Large-scale US wind power would cause warming that would take roughly a century to offset
Extracting energy from the wind causes climatic impacts that are small compared to current projections of 21st century warming, but large compared to the effect of reducing US electricity emissions to zero with solar. Researchers report the most accurate modelling yet of how increasing wind power would affect climate, finding that large-scale wind power generation would warm the Continental United States 0.24 degrees Celsius because wind turbines redistribute heat in the atmosphere.
'Then they added in the effect on the atmosphere of covering one third of the Continental US with enough wind turbines to meet present-day US electricity demand.'
This is like claiming caffeine causes cancer because if you give a 500g rat 100g of caffeine it gets cancer... no one is ingesting 1/5 their weight in caffeine and no one is proposing we meet 100% of our electricity demand with wind... Even so; a 0.24C LOCAL rise in temperature is nothing considering we've ALREADY hit 1C GLOBALLY.
We need wind. As much as we can build... as fast as it can be built. Even at that rate it will never be 100%... because solar.
SageBrush
REJECT Fascism
Absolutely.
The wind related warming is just a local surface effect, it is not a net global warming. Much ado about nothing.
We probably need a Wind Power Thread But for now...
Simulations show that large off shore wind farms can significantly weaken hurricanes.
But for now... Simulations show that large off shore wind farms can significantly weaken hurricanes.
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