Reply #30: Details, details [View All]

[bdf]

I'm aware that continent-wide wind farms connected by a super-grid can even out wind power. Neither the continent-wide farms nor the super-grid yet exist in the US or anywhere else, although some of Europe has plans on the drawing board. And, from a quick skim, the IEEE paper you cited appears only to deal with wind power, not solar.

The IEEE paper also goes into economics about how much storage would be required in various scenarios but gives no details of how such storage could be implemented. I know of the hollowed-out mountain in Wales used for pumped storage to take care of 5-minute peaks during adverts in popular soap operas when people put the kettle on. That was a big, expensive project. So if wind needs storage, it's going to be costly and take years to implement even with better technologies.

One thing that worries me about the "best electrical engineers in the world" is their bald statement that 1kw-hour of wind power displaces 1kw-hour of conventional power. This is absolutely untrue if the wind power is so irregular that you need to supplement it with conventional power. It takes around 1 hour to bring conventional plant to steam, the fuel burnt during that hour being wasted. Having conventional plant at steam but doing nothing wastes the fuel its burning. Small surges in demand or drops in wind can be met with gas turbines, but unless you can guarantee year-round wind capability (whether that requires storage or not) then 1kw-hour of wind does not replace 1kw-hour of conventional power. Their economics may work when the full system is implemented but breaks badly in the years (decades) it will take to implement.

As for solar, I'm aware that it gets dark at night. Admittedly load in many industrialized countries is higher during the day due to heavy machinery. However, some countries promote the use of storage heaters (called heat banks in Australia) which run during the night-time off-peak period, and that would have to change.

I've seen several proposals for solar storage but none seem to have gone further than proof of concept models. All the proposals I've seen for renewable sources include solar as well as wind.