Get smart
Electric power companies complain about wind power because it's intermittent: if suddenly the wind stops, they have to bring in other sources of power.
This is no big deal if we only use a little wind. Across the US, wind now supplies 4% of electric power; even in Germany it's just 8%. The problem starts if we use a lot of wind. If we're not careful, we'll need big fossil fuel powered electric plants when the wind stops. And these need to be turned on, ready to pick up the slack at a moment's notice!
So, a few years ago Xcel Energy, which supplies much of Colorado’s power, ran ads opposing a proposal that it use renewable sources for 10% of its power.
But now things have changed. Now Xcel gets about 15% of their power from wind, on average. And sometimes this spikes to much more!
What made the difference?
Every few seconds, hundreds of turbines measure the wind speed. Every 5 minutes, they send this data to high-performance computers 100 miles away at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. NCAR crunches these numbers along with data from weather satellites, weather stations, and other wind farms - and creates highly accurate wind power forecasts.
With better prediction, Xcel can do a better job of shutting down idling backup plants on days when they're not needed. Last year was a breakthrough year - better forecasts saved Xcel nearly as much money as they had in the three previous years combined.
It's all part of the emerging smart grid - an intelligent network that someday will include appliances and electric cars. With a good smart grid, we could set our washing machine to run when power is cheap. Electric cars could store solar power in the day, use it to power neighborhoods when electricity demand peaks in the evening - then recharge their batteries using wind power in the early morning hours. And so on.
I still believe we need nuclear power to help battle global warming. But I also think power grids, water distribution networks, transportation systems and so on need to also become information networks - without that, civilization is like a organism without an adequate nervous system.
For more, try the Technology Review article below, and this:
• Keith Parks, Yih-Huei Wan, Gerry Wiener and Yubao Liu, Wind energy forecasting: a collaboration of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Xcel Energy, http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/52233.pdf.
Electric power companies complain about wind power because it's intermittent: if suddenly the wind stops, they have to bring in other sources of power.
This is no big deal if we only use a little wind. Across the US, wind now supplies 4% of electric power; even in Germany it's just 8%. The problem starts if we use a lot of wind. If we're not careful, we'll need big fossil fuel powered electric plants when the wind stops. And these need to be turned on, ready to pick up the slack at a moment's notice!
So, a few years ago Xcel Energy, which supplies much of Colorado’s power, ran ads opposing a proposal that it use renewable sources for 10% of its power.
But now things have changed. Now Xcel gets about 15% of their power from wind, on average. And sometimes this spikes to much more!
What made the difference?
Every few seconds, hundreds of turbines measure the wind speed. Every 5 minutes, they send this data to high-performance computers 100 miles away at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. NCAR crunches these numbers along with data from weather satellites, weather stations, and other wind farms - and creates highly accurate wind power forecasts.
With better prediction, Xcel can do a better job of shutting down idling backup plants on days when they're not needed. Last year was a breakthrough year - better forecasts saved Xcel nearly as much money as they had in the three previous years combined.
It's all part of the emerging smart grid - an intelligent network that someday will include appliances and electric cars. With a good smart grid, we could set our washing machine to run when power is cheap. Electric cars could store solar power in the day, use it to power neighborhoods when electricity demand peaks in the evening - then recharge their batteries using wind power in the early morning hours. And so on.
I still believe we need nuclear power to help battle global warming. But I also think power grids, water distribution networks, transportation systems and so on need to also become information networks - without that, civilization is like a organism without an adequate nervous system.
For more, try the Technology Review article below, and this:
• Keith Parks, Yih-Huei Wan, Gerry Wiener and Yubao Liu, Wind energy forecasting: a collaboration of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Xcel Energy, http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/52233.pdf.
