In any case, GE and MIT are working on adapting technology from the oil industry (gasp!) to build large, far-offshore wind farms. The idea is to put them far enough from the shore so that a) they get more regular and stronger winds, and b) the Kennedys shut the fuck up, please.
An interesting idea, for a number of reasons. First of all, it would dramatically increase the amount of wind power available to countries with large coastlines. Fortunately, this includes India, China, the US, as well as many other nations. Secondly, it illustrates an important point about the impending Green Revolution - while we desperately need to leave behind the oil industry, this doesn't necessarily entail everyone in the oil industry losing their jobs. People who build oil rigs may find themselves more profitably employed in the offshore windfarm biz.
Meanwhile, Robert Rapier has an interesting post about the possibility of storing energy underground in the form of compressed air.
Members of the Iowa Association of Municipal Utilities have invested in a proposed power plant that would use wind turbines to drive compressed air into underground aquifers. The air would be released to generate electricity when needed.This takes on the most common knock against renewable energy - intermittency. If this turns out to be cost-effective, there's the possibility of much greater potential, possibly in exhausted oil and natural gas fields.
The plant will use power from its own wind turbines, supplemented by cheaper electricity bought at off-peak times, to force air into rock formations at least 2,000 feet underground.
Current plans call for pressurized storage of tens of billions of cubic feet of air in rock formations deep underground.
2 comments:
Other plots include pumping water uphill, which is then released though a dam... instant hydro.
THis is expensive to do, though.
A better option are flow batteries. These exists and are in use. They use tanks of fluid, one charged positive, the other negative, which are pumped through a cell, which either charges or discharged the battery. We are talking batteries at the megawatt scale. They are rather low-tech.
They do not lose the ability to keep a charge like lead-acid batteries do.
There's a system in use in Japan which feeds the energy from a wind farm in to such a battery. The battery feeds the grid. When the wind dies down, the battery keeps the feed load to the grid the same.
Flow batteries requirel ittle maintenance. Parts are made largely from fibreglass and PVC pipes. THe pumops which move the fluid are water pumps.
Flow batteries can also be used to store power generated off-peak hours, like at night, to dump their load into the grid during peak hours. This can substantially reduce the need to build to power plants.
There's a Canadian company that does this:
www.vrbpower.com
I recently read some infomation from the International Energy Agency and I was pleasently surprised to discover that according to them wind energy was cheaper than nuclear energy and cost about 4.4 U.S. cents per kilowatt-hour as opposed to about 4.7 cents for nuclear.
Anyway, near where I live we have a combination of persistant winds and old copper mines. I would imagine that another way to store compressed air would be to simply seal off an old mine and use that. This would save us from having to use use natural gas to solve our wind intermitency problems.
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