A drop in wind generation late on Tuesday, coupled with colder weather,
triggered an electric emergency that caused the Texas grid operator to cut
service to some large customers, the grid agency said on Wednesday.
Electric
Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) said a decline in wind energy production in
west Texas occurred at the same time evening electric demand was building as
colder temperatures moved into the state.
The grid operator went directly to
the second stage of an emergency plan at 6:41 PM CST (0041 GMT), ERCOT said in a
statement.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Renewable energy, but not very reliable
Windmills sound great, but not so good in practice at times.
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4 comments:
For a more balanced view of the Texas utility system event, see today's (3/1/08) Houston Chronicle article.
When the wind stops blowing and wind farm electricity generation drops, the process usually takes hours. By contrast, other power plants may go out of service instantaneously when a problem occurs. Wind forecasting, which could have helped address the ERCOT situation, can be and is being used by utility system operators to manage wind on their systems, and will become standard practice as the use of this clean, renewable energy source continues to grow.
Regards,
Thomas O. Gray
American Wind Energy Association
www.powerofwind.org
www.awea.org
I'm not very convinced. Yes, a traditional plant will go out of service "instantaneously", but may come back as quickly. When a coal-burning plant fails, they probably have a pretty good idea of why within moments, and can get to work on fixing it.
When a wind plant goes down, what do you do put shrug? When the wind farm output drops off over hours, it probably also takes hours to come back up to normal.
I'm supposing long term, a solution will be to use the windmills to charge industrial sized fuel cells, which can then continue to provide power for hours after the wind stops, almost certainly bridging the gap.
In the meantime, windmills seem like the only form of renewable power production that is subject to just "stopping", unless you count solar power vs. cloudy days?
If your point is just that wind power is more variable than other generating sources, you're right. But it can and still does work within a utility system where customer demand is constantly varying and system operators have to turn power plants on and off to balance supply and demand. Wind adds little net variability to the system, and when it's running, it saves a lot of fuel and avoids a lot of pollution.
Regards,
Thomas O. Gray
American Wind Energy Association
www.powerofwind.org
www.awea.org
Yes, my point is that it's variable. Hydro and geothermal are petty consistent. Tidal is predictably cyclical. Solar mat be "reliable", but depends on the weather.
But wind, well, it just seems hard to know how much to rely on it. In the proper setting it should work well, but does it work well enough to displace more traditional base load sources? There needs to be some way to buffer to help account for wind failure, or spikes in load. Hence, my mention of adding fuel cells (some day) to the circuit.
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