Science News Review

Update on Wind and Grid Issues

Dec 17 at 7:07pm by Aileen

As the economy slips ever farther down the black hole of imaginary values and criminal greed, the looming necessity for using this crossroads of history to re-make our energy future has moved the issues up on the To-Do list. America’s automakers are lining up, hats in hand, to obtain enough funding to keep their (union) workers employed, and the funds they want may come attached to serious strings that require more gas-efficient cars, hybrids, flex-fuel and even new lines of plug-in electric cars to help get us off our addiction to other nations’ oil.

Which then begs questions about what sources of electrical energy we need to develop that do not spew greenhouse gases into the air, leave us with millions of tons of toxic or radioactive industrial waste, and cause serious detrimental health effects (and death) to the population. Following on the issue of our choices for future development is the antiquated state of our electrical grid, which is both inefficient and dangerously likely to fail altogether without much trouble.

Fact is, energy use conservation could make a more serious dent in our consumption without doing anything at all. This is what happened this past summer when gasoline prices climbed to around $5 per gallon, and diesel prices became inverted. Millions of people limited their driving, pooled for shopping excursions, and stayed home instead of driving long distances for vacation. Petroleum usage plummeted, which informs us that we don’t really have to use as much as we do. Changing light bulbs and turning off lights and appliances and turning down the thermostat can save quite a bit of our generation capacity too, but that will of course jump when we have to charge our cars at night.

But the inefficiency of the grid system itself wastes ~30% of what we already do generate. In order to diversify our sources, we are going to need to modernize the grid to lose less of the available ‘trons between the wind or wave farm and our refrigerators. The Obama transition team is already looking into a possible massive CCC-type project to modernize the grid, and with a genuine scientist at the head of the Department of Energy (Steven Chu), we might expect more forward-looking options for how to do that than the old-timers in the outgoing administration could ever have offered.

Meanwhile, many states and industrial concerns are planning for the alternative energy sources that the new grid will rely upon for generation capacity. Since there’s no such thing as “Clean Coal,” many planners would dearly love to get away from coal and nuclear plants (that take decades to bring on-line and are increasingly expensive). Wind, wave, geothermal, hydroelectric, there are many possibilities to be developed that not only don’t emit greenhouse gases, but also don’t emit waste heat into the environment like boiler and heat transfer systems do.

The Industrial Wind Action Group understands the grid issue better than many, as the siting of industrial-strength wind farms in regions of the country that enjoy steady winds enough to achieve peak performance is going to need transmission accessibility from parts of the country that managed to get electrified mostly as an afterthought. There are even some fairly radical ideas out there about concentrating wind farms in the midwest by swapping-out government-owned land in the far west for a huge reserve in the heartland. Even the investor class is getting in on the action, as Great Ideas: Where the Buffalo Roam… Turbines Spin from the Common Sense Investor demonstrates.

We’ll keep up with developments in all areas of alternative power research and development as well as initiatives to modernize the grid. Stay tuned!

Links:

US Electric grid needs modernization
A Vision for a Modernized Electric Grid: Clean Infrastructure for a 21st Century Economy
Industrial Wind Action Group
Great Ideas: Where the Buffalo Roam… Turbines Spin
What is an Intelligent Grid?