So now you know all that, now I’m going to launch into why Solar and Wind are probably not the answer…at least not the one we really want.
Like I said before, in part one, electricity must be consumed right when it is made, and cannot be stored. This, in itself, is enough to detract from the idea of large scale wind farms or solar power plants. Because of the variability of solar activity and wind activity, and the fact that the Loads on the Grid vary over time, you have no reliable way to match peak energy production to peak energy consumption, at least how we do things now. However, solar and wind (and any time of power production for that matter, but I’ll get into that later) power can be generated by individuals for their personal use. This is one of the concepts supported by Smart Grid: The idea that you can cover your home in solar panels and put a few wind turbines in your back yard in order to generate electricity for yourself.
The drive behind the idea here being two fold. 1. Get some of the Load off the Grid because the Grid is old and has trouble during peak usage times. 2. Let people deal with their own peak usage and just have the power companies handle the Baseline Load. Nice ideas, but there are a few catches. 1. Just because you have solar panels and wind turbines doesn’t mean the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, hence you aren’t always making power, and you aren’t guaranteed to be making power during the peak times. 2. A lot of Homeowners Associations don’t allow visible solar panels, and you can forget about Wind Turbines, they stick up too high and are visible behind fences. 3. Solar panels and wind turbines are very expensive, with very little electrical output even when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, so they don’t tend to pay for themselves for a very very long time.
Solar and Wind are not the answer for Smart Grid. Heat Pumps on the other hand are actually not a bad option. And I’m not talking about Air Heat Pumps, which is mostly what you will find if you google “Heat Pumps”. I’m talking about Geothermal Heat Pumps. The basic idea is that you pull energy in from the ground, using it to either heat or cool your house, and potentially water, as needed. The ground’s energy level (temperature) doesn’t change much over time or with the seasons or weather, therefore it provides a pretty much constant heat source or sink, depending on how your house’s temperature changes. You can cut off a rather large portion of your electricity bill by having one of these things doing your heating and cooling. The only problem is cost, they can be pretty expensive up front, considering that you generally have to drill some depth into the ground to install the components. However, like Solar and Wind, the government does offer tax credits on this kind of component, so there is some offset. If you are interested in this kind of energy saving device I’d say try and build it into a new home, that way you just slip it into the mortgage.
That’s my two cents on the issue. Solar and Wind suck. Try Geothermal Heat Pumps instead.
See, computers have a similar issue – we have incoming data rates, processing speed, and a maximum outgoing transmission rate. The latter two can together make us unable to send data on faster than we’re getting data in.
To correct these timing issues, we have buffers. View it as a hose going into a bathtub with a leak in it. If the leak is faster than the hose, the tub runs out of water. If the hose is faster than the leak, the tub overflows. The answer is a tub big enough to handle the fluctuations between input and output – a correct buffer size.
To pull this back to power, your entire post is based off of the fact that power doesn’t have a tub – just more hoses you can shut on or off depending on how much water you need coming out the end. Fair enough. I think I’m pretty accurate when I say that however inefficient our power generation techniques are, however inefficient our transmission techniques are, our power storage techniques also leave something to be desired.
It seems to me that if we had those storage techniques, we wouldn’t have to worry near as much about usage regulations or the limitations of active generation – the storage buffer would cause the wildly swinging usage graph to become a constant requirement line – storing when the line is above the usage, draining when the line is below the usage.
So… What are we doing to build these power-bufferish storage devices?
When was the last time you looked into solar technology? The last few things I’ve heard was that now that people are actually putting money into research, solar tech has made leaps and bounds in its solar to electrical output. So much so that I’ve heard more than one science blog mention that solar panels are actually becoming rather cost efficient on the smaller scale.
And to mimic Trip, where are the buffer batteries? Ever since you started describing the grid it has made me wonder, why haven’t we put more research into actual energy storage in order to better even distribution? Have you done or heard about any research in that area?