ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

Jerome a Paris at The Oil Drum reminds us that wind is a power source that deserves to be taken more seriously.

Wind is following the exact same growth trajectory as nuclear power did – just thirty years later:

click to view image

Over the past 8 years, wind has represented around 40% of new installed capacity (which, it is true, represents a smaller fraction a new production, in MWh, which is probably closer to 25%).

click to view image

Under market price setting mechanisms, wind power (which has a zero marginal cost) brings wholesale prices down when it is available, by avoiding the need for more expensive coal-fired or, more usually, gas-fired power plants that would otherwise be required. Subsidizing wind pays off.  For example, in Denmark and Germany the overall effect (price reduction multiplied by the relevant volume) now brings savings to consumers  that are equivalent to the gross cost of feed-in tariffs and significantly higher than the net subsidy.

In addition to reducing carbon emissions and improving energy independence, wind saves money.

The Wall Street Journal reports that shares in solar- and wind-power companies have suffered even more than the market at large and that the outlook for new projects is growing increasingly cloudy. The new administration needs to ensure that investments in wind energy – and in saving civilization from an energy crisis and climate change – not only continue, but are massively increased.

Dutch-based Home Energy International has come up with a new design for home wind power.

click to view image

The eggbeater-like design spins quieter and at lower wind speeds than traditional propeller-type turbines. The firm asserts that noise from an Energy Ball is always less than the sound of the wind. And the device works even when the wind speed dips down to as slow as 4.5 mph, whereas the average turbine needs roughly twice that wind speed to turn.

The Energy Ball is that it has a horizontal axis and uses a different kind of physics, called the Venturi effect. The Venturi effect is characterized by a low pressure that occurs when a flow of air or liquid speeds up as it is constricted.
The constriction causes the pressure to drop inside the ball, sucking in air flowing and turning the rotor blades.

Venturi-based turbines are said to be 40% more efficient than a propeller-style turbine of the same diameter.

In a good location, a 1-meter ball can generate up to 500 kilowatt-hours and a 2-meter ball up to 1,750 kilowatt-hours per year. The typical U.S. household uses 11,000 kilowatt-hours per year.

Energy Balls currently are sold in sizes of either 1 meter or 2 meters in diameter. They can be installed on a pole or a flat roof in as few as four hours.
The cost of the Energy Ball is between $3,500 and $7,000, not including installation.

Renewable energy is bumping up against the reality of a power grid that cannot handle the new demands. Achieving a goal of getting 20% of our electricity from wind would require moving large amounts of power over long distances, from the windy, lightly populated plains in the middle of the country to the coasts where many people live. Solar-power stations in the nation’s deserts  pose the same transmission problems.

Many transmission lines, and the connections among them, are simply too small for the amount of power companies would like to squeeze through them. The difficulty is most acute for long-distance transmission, but shows up at times even over distances of a few hundred miles. Today’s grid is a system conceived 100 years ago to let utilities prop each other up, reducing blackouts and sharing power across small regions. It resembles a network of streets, avenues and country roads. What we need, as FERC member Sudeen Kelley says, is “an interstate transmission superhighway system.”

But the grid is balkanized, with about 200,000 miles, or 322,000 kilometers, of power lines divided among 500 owners. States have traditionally exercised authority over the grid but have little incentive to push improvements that would benefit neighboring states. Big transmission upgrades often involve multiple companies, many state governments, and numerous permits. Construction costs are astronomical, and every addition to the grid provokes fights with property owners who do not want to look at a line of power pylons marching across their landscape.

Our rickety grid would have to be transformed if we are to ever achieve  an all-electric automobile fleet.  But that’s just one problem with the dream.

As Richard Heinman points out, cars are inherently inefficient. We can make them smaller and lighter. We can power them with renewable electrons instead of nasty old hydrocarbons. But in the final analysis, pushing a ton or three of steel down the highway just to move a two-hundred pound person to and from a shopping mall is both wasteful and plain stupid in a multitude of ways.

Heinberg consider just two: tires and asphalt.

“Tires are made largely of non-renewable petroleum, and after 40,000 miles or so they tend to wear out. Americans discard them at a rate of one tire per person per year.

“Then there’s the stuff that roads are made of. We build roads compulsively so as to give our precious cars more places to roam, but those roads also soon wear out, so we have to constantly repair them; this requires enormous amounts of asphalt (25 million tons annually in the US). But asphalt is, once again, a petroleum product, and as oil gets scarce the building and maintenance of roads becomes unmanageable.”

“Electric cars are a sparky idea if you consider only what they are designed to replace. But we really need to be thinking about how to reduce our need for motorized transport altogether by redesigning our cities and shortening our supply chains. And where something more than a scooter is necessary, we should move people and freight by rail or water rather than by highway.”

The Oregon Energy Facility Siting Council has approved building what would be the world’s largest single wind farm in Gilliam and Morrow counties in northeastern Oregon, about five miles southeast of the Columbia River town Arlington.

The Columbia River Gorge wind proposes 303 turbines and will be capable of generating 909 megawatts at its peak – enough to power 225,000 homes and to double the state’s current wind-generated energy capacity. Output would enter the Federal Columbia River Transmission System through Bonneville Power Administration’s Slatt Substation.

Other wind projects under review in Oregon include the 400 megawatt Golden Hills Wind Farm in Sherman County and the 143 megawatt Newberry Geothermal Project in Deschutes County.

The largest wind farm in the United States to date is Horse Hollow in Texas at 736 megawatts.

The Umatilla County Planning Commission has given the go-ahead to a wind farm project in Echo, voting unanimously to approve a land-use permit for the wind farm’s transmission line along Highway 207. The line will carry the project’s electricity to a PacifiCorp substation at Hinkle. The land-use permit was the final hurdle before could commence.

The hearing room was packed with more than 70 people, several of whom testified against the transmission line. They argued high voltage lines devalue property and endanger the health of cattle and people, and that having lines on both sides of the highway would make it impossible for farmers to move some machinery down the road and hamper farmers’ ability to use cropdusters and helicopters to spray their land.

Commission Chair Gary Rhinhart said there were 13 other wind farm projects in the planning stages in Umatilla County. and expressed worry there’s not enough room for everyone’s transmission lines. The East Oregonian quotes him as saying,

“I’d like to see electric companies hook up this wind power so we don’t have to hurt any more people than we have to.”

Jerome a Paris reports at The Oil Drum: Europe that the first-ever bank-financed wind farm – which he helped finance – is up and running. It will be generating clean energy for the next 20-25 years – at a price guaranteed not to increase for the whole period.

He says that in Europe it’s getting cheaper to buy “subsidized” wind power than regular, “competitive” power on the free market. While the costs for offshore wind are still slightly higher than for onshore, this is likely to change as standardized methods and more production capacity are put in place.

He says that intermittency is a real issue for wind, but one it appears can be addressed at extremely low cost through investment in the grid, something that’s useful in any case if we want resilient systems.

Wind capacity installed each year continues to increase by 20% or more each year worldwide. On some days, wind is already supplying over 100% of Denmark’s electricity needs and 40% of Spain’s.

And as for aesthetics:

This great “Power of Wind” TV spot from Germany won the “Golden Lion” at Cannes.

A new DOE report – “20% Wind Energy by 2030: Increasing Wind Energy’s Contribution to U.S. Electricity Supply” - concludes that it’s feasible for wind energy to contribute one-fifth of the total U.S. electricity supply by 2030.

Joseph Romm at Climate Progress lists the key conclusions:

• Annual installations need to increase by only a factor of three from current levels by 2018.
• Costs of integrating intermittent wind power into the grid are modest. 20 percent wind can be reliably integrated into the grid for less than 0.5 cents per kWh.
• No material constraints currently exist. Although demand for copper, fiberglass and other raw materials will increase, achieving 20 percent wind is not limited by the availability of raw materials.
• This would require 300,000 MW of wind, delivering electricity for about 6 to 8.5 cents per kilowatt hour, unsubsidized (i.e. no federal tax credit) and including the cost of transmission to access existing power lines within 500 miles of wind resource [new nuclear is currently about 15 cents/kwh (see here)].
• The 20% Wind Scenario could require an incremental investment of as little as $43 billion NPV [net present value] more than the base-case no new Wind Scenario. This would represent less than 0.06 cent (6 one-hundredths of 1 cent) per kilowatt-hour of total generation by 2030, or roughly 50 cents per month per household

Romm says that key benefit is that carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation by 25% in 2030. But this isn’t such good news after all – avoided emissions would merely “nearly level projected growth in CO2 emissions from the electricity sector.”

In other words, emissions would continue to grow – just not as much as they otherwise would. We would be far from on track to meet the 80% reductions necessary to keep atmospheric CO2 at ~450 ppm, much less the level of reductions necessary to stabilize CO2 at 350 ppm, the level necessary to avoid an unacceptable risk of climate catastrophe.

Robert Rapier at R-Squared Energy Blog has undertaken to calculate whether it would be feasible to use solar power to generate enough energy to offset all U.S. gasoline consumption. He concludes that it will take about 444,000 megawatts of electrical generating capacity. Current U.S. generating capacity is over 900,000 megawatts – but there’s little to spare.

He calculates that to generate 444,000 megawatts with solar PV would require just under 1,300 square miles (a 36 mile by 36 mile square) of just PV surface area. To generate that much power with solar thermal – including supporting infrastructure – would require 4,719 square miles (a 69 mile by 69 mile square).

A large area, but not impossible to envision. That’s almost exactly the area of Los Angeles County – and we’ve easily covered pretty much all of that area with built environment.

One Saturday at the end of March, Spain’s windmills produced 40.8% of the country’s electricity needs – 9,862 megawatts.

	Milling around: the German power group E.On is committed to developing wind farms

A workday record of 28% was set earlier in the month.

In Texas, the cost of wind power (with US government subsidies) has dropped far below natural gas at the current market price. Ranchers can collect an annual royalty of $5,000 to $10,000 for each turbine – and still graze cattle underneath.