From the American Institute of Physics
Using fluctuating wind power
Incorporating wind power into existing power grids is challenging because fluctuating wind speed and direction means turbines generate power inconsistently. Coupled with customers’ varying power demand, many wind-farm managers end up wasting power-generation capacity and limiting the service life of turbines through active control – including fully stopping turbines – in order to avoid any possible damage to the power grid from spikes in supply. In a paper published in the American Institute of Physics’ Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, researchers propose a new strategy to optimize power-generation efficiency and so better control wind farms.
The new strategy is based on continuous predictions of how fluctuating winds affect each turbine’s maximum generation capacity. It also incorporates factors missing in other wind-farm control strategies, including differing power generation between turbines, actual fluctuations in power generation capacity, errors in prediction, communication disruptions preventing active control, and even turbines without the capacity for continuous active control. To demonstrate the feasibility of the new strategy, the researchers compared their predictions to raw data from a single wind turbine. The team then further refined their calculations and simulated a control operation with data from a wind farm of 33 turbines.
The results suggest that wind-farm managers can improve their power-generation efficiency with the new strategy. However, the researchers caution that before implementing the strategy, each wind-farm manager should adjust the underlying parameters – such as how often to adjust each turbine’s speed – based on local conditions.
Article: “An Active Power Control Strategy for Wind Farm Based on Predictions of Wind Turbine’s Maximum Generation Capacity,” is published in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy.
Link: http://jrse.aip.org/resource/1/jrsebh/v5/i1/p013121_s1
Authors: Dewei Liu (1), Jianbo Guo (1), Yuehui Huang (1), Weisheng Wang (1)
(1) China Electric Power Research Institute
Related articles
- Rethinking wind power – Harvard study shows it to be overestimated (wattsupwiththat.com)
- Research suggests scientists have overestimated capacity of wind farms to generate power (eurekalert.org)
- Protesters say turbines will disrupt migratory patterns of swans near Grand Bend (lfpress.com)
So yet another extremely complex non-solution bound to fail. Just give up already.
Should be a piece of cake. Recycle the high velocity automated stock market trading programs. What could go wrong?
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/53864
GOOD READ!
Don’t forget the PDF
http://altamontsrc.org/alt_doc/cec_final_report_08_11_04.pdf
OMG, we are surely doomed.
“To demonstrate the feasibility of the new strategy, the researchers compared their predictions to raw data from a single wind turbine. The team then further refined their calculations and simulated a control operation with data from a wind farm of 33 turbines.”
so they never actually USED their strategy on turbines in the real world …
did you post this as a joke ?
Which part of this ‘new strategy’ deals with creating the right wind speed , for without that they got nothing ?
Why don’t they just ground out the turbines with a variable control on the current flow to ground and keep the current flow to the grid from spiking by sending the spikes to ground?
Don’t these shysters get it. No wind no power- little wind = trickle power. Meanwhile back at the power (back up) station LOTS of power.
When will this madness end maybe at 97cents /kwh????
on (e.g.) 19/03 at 19.00hr, Elia, the Belgian transmission systems operator, predicted wind generation of 52.88 Mw on a total monitored capacity of 930.65 Mw … (now I must say that 99% of the time their predictions are quite accurate, and as should be the case, too optimistic … but …)
Actual generation turned out to be 21.80 Mw
I don’t see how a better (forecasting) strategy can make that 21.81 Mw
Whatever is done to try and improve the efficiency of wind turbines it will never remove the fact that they require conventional power running on standby at all times. As a result there is no reduction in CO2 emissions from deploying wind turbines – unless of course the back-up is nuclear but then why would you want wind turbines in the first place?
Since one cannot make a turbine produce more energy than is available in the wind, then any control strategy must rely on lowering a turbine’s potential to smooth out production. It is possible to make a wind farm’s production perfectly flat and consistent. Simply turn them all off. Since the goal is to produce some power, then it becomes a matter of balancing the reduction in maximum wind farm output with the amount of inconsistent power that can be tolerated by the grid. Sure, some high tech strategy may help, probably by a few percent at best. However, the main problem, economical storage of surplus energy, remains unsolved. Then of course, there are all of those dead bald eagles and bats to worry about. On the bright side, any strategy that call for slowing down turbines in the name of grid stability should at least result in fewer bird fatalities.
Without any quantification at all (or at least apparently not short of what may exist behind the paywall), there is not much to say.
Actually, nominally unreliable renewables, like solar power as well as wind power, could be made reliable by a global superconducting power transmission grid, for fairly stable power generation 24 hours a day 365 days a year regardless of local weather variation, like we could send power to China during our day and the other way around during theirs.
Generation from such would still need to be cheaper, though. Places like California may have greatly overpriced residential rates (like Anthony Watts mentioned up to $0.93/kWh at times during the summer in his locale), but, generally at the industrial scale, the present and proper price of electricity is not more than around $0.05/kWh.
If solar power did eventually become as cheap as fossil fuel for electricity in some future decade (though it is far from so now) and if long-distance superconducting power transmission made it reliable, I bet many of the activists presently supporting it would switch to opposition, from having supported it precisely because it was overly expensive and hence an excuse to pretend energy conservation cutbacks were unavoidable and necessary.
Why should it take so long time to realize that.
Imagine you set up a power plant of 300MW capacity (like a larger windfarm), then all would concider it should need some way of contol of the output. Nobody would allow it to operate at random power output, except when it is a wind farm.
If wind farms should be a reliable part og our energi production, they would need to supply backup capacity or make deals with others to secure the same backup, so that you can count on a certain minimum capacity at all times.
Use wind energy for pumped storage only. Less efficent but more predictable and easier on the grid I’d suspect. Do they use this any where else? Do any wind farms employ compressed air storage?
It would be intersting to hear how their strategy will cope with a long term high pressure zone lying over the area. I suppose they could draw power from the grid to drive one turbine to create wind to drive its neighbour?
That should work, shouldn’t it? Free energy.
When will they realize that the fundamental problem with wind power is that it cannot produce power when it is required. Over production when it is not required is irrelevant. It may trash the turbine, but that is irrelevant to the grid.
Most of it is waster power when the grid cannot accept it so use it for something. I suggest using it to make methane from atmospheric CO2 and water. Then you compress it using the same wind power. Each week, somebody comes out and takes away the compressed gas for use.
OR, you use the windmill to fractionally distill air resulting in storage of the very expensive Xe.
Band-aids that can’t address basic physical facts — low energy density & unreliability. Prettied-up 19th century technology.
How about putting a ginormous flywheel on each one or use lead blades or something? Yeah, I can fix that!
I have an idea – make all wind farms virtual wind farms, model the predicted output, and pay the operators in virtual money. We can then generate all the worlds needs using virtual power, and the climate modellers can predict a virtual benefit. They can all be happy and leave the rest of us alone in the real world.
While there may be strategies to enable wind operators to squeeze a few more megawatthours out of their machines, the central deficiency with wind power remains : it’s uncontrollable, and that means it’s worth only a fraction of power that can be produced on demand. Uncontrollable power, no matter how it’s generated, is simply not of very much value, since it introduces side effect costs (which wind enthusiasts NEVER acknowledge or figure into their cost estimates). California is building very expensive pumped storage to allow more wind and solar to be used, but that method extracts a 30% penalty thru losses and the storage facilities cost nearly as much as a nuclear power plant of equal capacity. Of course the pumped facility can only provide 10 to 15 hours worth of power, so if the wind dies for more than a day or two, fossil fuel generation will have to make up the loss.
I recall last year when there was a failure at a coal/gas powered station in California there was the usual hue and cry about wind power. However, stopping to look at the facts posted in that article one can see that the data posted by whatever the power authority down there is called, one finds that the sum of wind and solar was almost constant.
I’ll try to find that WUWT post.
The best strategy would seem to be to combine wind and solar since the two are fairly complementary in meteorological terms.
No surprise to the number of (very) small scale off-grid people I know that find , even on a mirco generation scale they get one or the other.
DBO says:
March 25, 2013 at 1:10 pm
Most of it is waster power when the grid cannot accept it so use it for something…”
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Good idea.
How about grinding flour?
Tried and tested.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/09/wind-power-not-coming-through-for-california-power-alert-issued-by-the-caiso/
Coincidentally, I’ve been doing some calculations recently regarding wind efficiency, and posted the results yesterday, on my blog:
http://dereksorensen.com/?p=124
I’d be gratful for anyone more knowledgeable than me to check my assumptions/calculations because quite frankly I can’t believe the results, which seem to indicate that to guarantee 8.5Gw of power 24/7 from wind would require more than 960,000 square kilometers – almost four times the land area of the United Kingdom.
(If 8.5Gw seems a little arbitrary, it’s the currently claimed capacity for wind in the UK)
Why don’t we just use wind for pumping water uphill? The only viable way to deal with the fluctuations is to ‘smooth’ it out–and re-adding water to a reservoir does that. Efficient? Certainly not, but neither are back-up generators–which is how this should be viewed.