Wind For Sale !

I read an interesting article ( http://bit.ly/9q5nqh ) this morning about how a sudden wind-storm in the Columbia River Valley (Oregon, USA) caused the power transmission company to ask the Wind-Farm operators to feather off the turbines. Seems they were generating too much power !


And yet the wind-generators are howling, because that excess capacity is being wasted, instead of being sold. Their neighbour to the south, California suffers annually from rolling blackouts and power-shortfalls. Due to the pollution typically associated with power-generation, California has further mandated the continued growth in the use of energy coming from renewable sources. Even the Obama Administration is promising funding to support the growth of technologies which will lessen America's dependence on fossil fuels. http://bit.ly/VEAiO

Seems the bottleneck in Oregon is the power-transmission company. Power-generation has always been in the purview of government - they were the only ones who could afford to build these huge coal-fired generation stations, or the wildly expensive nuclear reactors. Then the power-transmission lines were built & privatized. So power was steady-state in production & those who wished to consume it merely connected to the grid.

But what happens when there is a storm ? We hear about it in the news all the time - power-lines down; thousands without power; crews frantically working to restore power. It is the grid itself that is fragile. 

In the case of Oregon, the producers were asked to feather off production because the power-transmission company couldn't handle the excess capacity. Seems they were built to handle steady-state power production, with no consideration for surges. Since there is no form of power storage, and excess generation is wasted.

In the renewable energy circles, there are stories of "shade-tree engineers" who are generating their own power, using solar, wind or hrdro generation technologies & selling their power BACK to their local power company. How very Utopian. Only one problem - at least where I live - the power company won't allow producers of renewable energy to tie their systems to the grid. The reason ? During an outage, they can't control the power coming onto the grid & there is a risk of electrocution for the crews attempting to affect repairs ! Don't get me wrong - I don't want to see anyone get hurt ! But, once again the grid is the issue.

As we saw in a previous blog ( http://bit.ly/awotwM ), the paradigm in compute-resourcing is shifting and workloads are being massed onto Mainframe computers again to achieve economies in power consumption & heat-generation. Perhaps the paradigm for power generation & consumption should change.

If we shifted away from a model where power is centrally generated and moved to a more self-sufficient method, would that take the pressure off ?

Near where I live is a small commuter town called Okotoks, Alberta. They have embarked on a model of self-sufficiency whereby all the homes in a community (Drake Landing) participate in the collection & consumption of solar hot-water. http://bit.ly/17uoOg  In my mind, this is a great opportunity to examine the model in action. We see a co-operative which is no longer dependent on the Utility company to provide for them. They generate & store 90% of their heating requirements, and save some 5 Tonnes of carbon footprint !

Imagine then,  a street where there were no power-lines running above the sidewalks. A street where every home had panels of photovoltaic cells on the roofs. A street where small inobtrusive vertical-axis wind turbines are installed on the peaks of the roofs. A street where each house generated & stored enough power for their own consumption. Better, imagine a street where each home collected solar heat for all of its hot-water needs - providing heat for space heating & washing clothes & dishes & showering.

The pressure would be off the grid, because we would no longer NEED the grid. Each home & building would become self-sufficient. The economics make sense. To buld a reliable system to provide adequate power to a household of four would cost approximately $10,000. Given that the average new home price in Calgary is roughly $340,000, that represents an incremental increase of 2.9% ! The ROI, based on my household electricity & gas usage would be approximately 5 years !

Retro-fitting an existing home would be more expensive, only because of the need to change the way we heat our homes. Gone would be the inefficient forced-air furnace, and in its place in-floor-radiant heat. So the costs would be somewhere between $15,000 and $20,000. The ROI is longer, but still well within a single generation.

In return, we could have clean, renewable energy. We could have no rolling blackouts, and we could have spawned a new set of industries to replace the utilities. Companies which build, install & service renewable-energy solutions for homes & offices. Further, one would presume that the economies of scale would come into effect - the prices of photovoltaic cells would drop, etc. due to efficiencies in mass-production.

Very Utopian, indeed !