Bottled Wind Could Be as Constant as Coal

[oandapartycock]

Bottled Wind Could Be as Constant as Coal

* By Alexis Madrigal Email Author
* March 9, 2010 |



Wind power has made incredible inroads into the U.S. energy system thanks to big, efficient machines standing hundreds of feet tall. But the future of wind power may be underground.

In the abandoned mines and sandstones of the Midwest, compressed-air storage ventures are trying to convert the intermittent motions of the air into the kind of steady power that could displace coal.

Compressed-air energy storage uses air compressors to store electricity generated when it’s not needed. The air, stored in large underground formations, is like a spring that’s been compressed and can deliver a large percentage of the energy that is transmitted to it, when it is needed.

The first and only such plant in the United States went online in 1991, and though the technology didn’t take off, it did prove that it worked. And now, combining cheap wind energy and compressed-air storage could create a potent new force in the electricity markets.

“This is the first nonhydro renewables technology that can replace coal in the dispatch order,” said David Marcus, co-founder of General Compression, a new company that received $16 million in funding from investors including the utility Duke Energy to build a full-scale prototype of their energy storage system, which would be deployed with arrays of wind turbines.

The dispatch order is how grid operators decide which power plants to switch on. They have to balance the amount of generation and consumption or they risk the grid’s stability. The amount of power people use goes up and down, but it stays above a certain level all the time. To meet that need, utilities buy consistent always-on power from the large, cheap coal and nuclear power plants that are the backbone of the electric grid.

The electricity they need to meet the peaks in energy demand is generated by what are known as peaking plants, usually powered by natural gas. When the wind is blowing, it is usually the cheapest peaking power available, so it keeps the natural gas plants shut off. If they want to replace coal plants in the pecking order, though, they’ll have to work all the time.

And to do that, they’ll need a way to unlink themselves from the on-again, off-again nature of the wind.

“It’s a fractal problem,” said Marcus. “You have intermittency problems on every time scale.”

That problem has brought compressed-air energy storage roaring back. Marcus’ company has a long way to go before they can turn their prototype system into the kind of technology that can be deployed at the nation’s vast wind farms. But compressed air storage of one type or another is on the verge of becoming a mainstream power technology.

The nation’s largest energy storage option right now is pumped hydroelectricity. When excess electricity is present in a system, it can be used to pump water up to a reservoir. Then, when that power is needed, the water is sent through a turbine to generate electricity. The U.S. electric system has 2.5 gigawatts of pumped hydro storage capacity, but most of the good, cheap sites are already occupied, and creating new reservoirs is not environmentally benign.

While wind farmers say storage isn’t technically necessary until the amount of wind power on the grid exceeds 20 or 30 percent of the electrical load, private analysts, the Electric Power Research Institute, and the Department of Energy have identified grid-scale storage as a key need for the rapidly diversifying electricity system.

And going forward, compressed-air energy storage looks like the cheapest option available. Independent analysts have come to similar conclusions.

“CAES is the least cost, utility-scale, bulk-storage system available. If other factors such as its low environmental impact and high reliability are considered, CAES has an overwhelming advantage,” one Department of Homeland Security physicist concluded in a 2007 paper in the journal Energy (.pdf).

In the last four months, four projects have gotten new funding. In December, the rights to a long-awaited project in Norton, Ohio, were purchased by First Energy, a large utility in the area. The Norton project could store 2.7 gigawatts of power in an abandoned limestone mine.

In California, PG&E received a $24.9 million grant from the Energy Department to build a 300-megawatt plant in Kern County. New York State Electric and Gas received $29 million for a similar facility in the town of Reading, New York, using an existing salt cavern there. The Iowa Stored Energy Project received a $3.2 million forgivable loan from the state and will finish drilling its first research well in the next month. The plan is to attempt to store energy in porous sandstone, just like the 1.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that lie beneath the surface of the United States.



The man behind the technology slated to be used in the two Energy Department-backed projects is engineer Michael Nakhamkin, founder of Energy Storage Power Corporation. He designed the only U.S. compressed air storage plant, in McIntosh, Alabama.

That plant was built in the late 1980s by a very small southern utility, the Alabama Electric Cooperative. They had a unique problem, Nakhamkin said, in that their daytime load far exceeded their nighttime load, the opposite of the regular pattern.

The big coal plant they needed to meet the daytime demand made too much power at night. Turning down the plant at night wasn’t a good solution because coal plants work most efficiently at full capacity, and turning them down makes them dirtier. And even with the plant at full power during the day, the utility still had to buy power from other companies to meet their peak daytime demand.

But with a storage plant, they could use the extra electricity made at night to satisfy their daytime peak demand.

Based on the first commercial plant (.pdf) ever built in Huntorf, Germany, the Electric Power Research Institute and Nakhamkin’s engineering firm came up with a plan to store compressed air in a salt dome in Alabama. They created a geological pocket 900 feet long and up to 238 feet wide in the dome by pumping water into it to dissolve the rock salt. When the (briny) water was pumped back out, the salt resealed itself and they had an air-tight container: “The solution-mined cavern is a large subterranean pressure vessel,” as an EPRI report explained.

During off-peak times, electricity runs a compressor which pumps the air down into the cavern. Then, when energy is needed, the air is released from the reserve to power a fairly standard turbine, with a little help from natural gas. The system has worked for more than 25 years.

In 1991, when the plant went online, there were high hopes that the technology might catch on among utilities.

‘We expect the CAES plant technology pioneered in Alabama to lead to widespread application in this country,” said Robert Schainker, the manager of the Electric Power Research Institute’s Energy Storage Program in a press release announcing the plant’s completion. ‘Three fourths of the United States has geology suitable for underground air storage. At present, more than a dozen utilities are evaluating sites for CAES application.”

But with low fossil fuel prices and little intermittent renewable energy on the grid, there wasn’t much incentive for utilities to build the plants. The plant saved money for the Alabama Electric Cooperative, but it wasn’t “critical savings” as Nakhamkin put it.

“Rich people don’t talk about how to save five or 10 dollars,” he said.

Planning for the Iowa Stored Energy Project began in 2001, but at the time, it just didn’t make economic sense for the small municipal utilities involved.

“Without a lot of renewables, the business model for CAES is not that strong,” Holst said. With wind sometimes producing as much as 15 percent of Iowa’s electricity, the case for the business gets stronger every day.

Nakhamkin thinks the time has come for compressed air to take off, particularly with the new plant designs that incorporate the data from the McIntosh plant.

“We analyzed several years of plant operation and from this, we generated a second generation of CAES technology,” he said. “It’s much more reliable and much more adjustable for the smart grid, for solar energy and a variety of wind power plants.”

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/20...#ixzz0hk4icyIh

[Glenn Dandy]

How many dicks have you wished you sucked this week?

[oandapartycock]

Originally Posted by Glenn Dandy

How many dicks have you wished you sucked this week?

WTF?

Fuck off. How many beers have you downed tonight?

[Ludwig]

Not if Big Coal has any say in the matter, and they do.

[Glenn Dandy]

Originally Posted by oandapartycock

wtf?

Fuck off. How many beers have you downed tonight?

20 but atleast I'm not gheeey!

[kloraferm]

I thought it was a kind of interesting article, but I couldn't help, when I saw the title Bottled Wind automatically thought "Farts in a Jar"
(I will never actually grow up)

[oandapartycock]

Originally Posted by Ludwig

Not if Big Coal has any say in the matter, and they do.

Simple. Incentivize them to develop it.

Originally Posted by kloraferm

I thought it was a kind of interesting article, but I couldn't help, when I saw the title Bottled Wind automatically thought "Farts in a Jar"
(I will never actually grow up)

Last restaurant I worked I used to like to fart into empty food containers and walk up to unsuspecting coworkers and ask them to "smell this" to see if it was still good. Awesome prank if you can pull it off.

[Joker1919]

Originally Posted by Ludwig

Not if Big Coal has any say in the matter, and they do.

You know what Ludwig you guys that spout shit about Big Coal this and Big Coal that don't know shit. I work on heavy equipment for a living and the majority of the shit I work on comes from surface coal mines. So if this pipe dream of wind power and alternative energy comes along me and thousands of other people that depend on the work would be fucked. I realize that these companies don't give a shit about me or the places they are but you know what, I don't give a shit what else am I supposed to do I love my job and I don't want to move from where I live so I guess I'll just have to deal with it. Well that is until these scum fuck environmentalist shut coal down and i have to suckle at the teat of ma government like most of the socialists out there. So next time you spout off about big coal and what its doing to us think about the little fuckers like me that are making a living off it.

[Joker1919]

Originally Posted by oandapartycock

Simple. Incentivize them to develop it.

Last restaurant I worked I used to like to fart into empty food containers and walk up to unsuspecting coworkers and ask them to "smell this" to see if it was still good. Awesome prank if you can pull it off.

Most of the time I don't agree with some of the shit you say on here..but goddammit sir that is fucking funny.

[Three Hole Puncher]

Originally Posted by Joker1919

You know what Ludwig you guys that spout shit about Big Coal this and Big Coal that don't know shit. I work on heavy equipment for a living and the majority of the shit I work on comes from surface coal mines. So if this pipe dream of wind power and alternative energy comes along me and thousands of other people that depend on the work would be fucked. I realize that these companies don't give a shit about me or the places they are but you know what, I don't give a shit what else am I supposed to do I love my job and I don't want to move from where I live so I guess I'll just have to deal with it. Well that is until these scum fuck environmentalist shut coal down and i have to suckle at the teat of ma government like most of the socialists out there. So next time you spout off about big coal and what its doing to us think about the little fuckers like me that are making a living off it.

You sound like a buggy whip maker bitching about the people who are ...buying all these here newfangled autie mo-biles what are puttin' me outa bidness!

Evolve or go extinct, ya fossil.

Quit yer bitching and figure out how to work on heavy equipment for nuclear power plants... or don't and wait for the wheels are progress to roll right over you.

[kloraferm]

Originally Posted by oandapartycock

Last restaurant I worked I used to like to fart into empty food containers and walk up to unsuspecting coworkers and ask them to "smell this" to see if it was still good. Awesome prank if you can pull it off.

That's fucking funny!

[Three Hole Puncher]

Originally Posted by oandapartycock

Last restaurant I worked I used to like to fart into empty food containers and walk up to unsuspecting coworkers and ask them to "smell this" to see if it was still good. Awesome prank if you can pull it off.

My stupid ass little brother used to fart in his beer mug and cover it with his hand... then he'd walk up to the hottest chick in the bar, shove the mug under her nose, and ask her, "Does this beer smell skunky to you?"

No, dummy... we're trying to attract girls... you're doing it wrong.

[Joker1919]

Originally Posted by Three Hole Puncher

You sound like a buggy whip maker bitching about the people who are ...buying all these here newfangled autie mo-biles what are puttin' me outa bidness!

Evolve or go extinct, ya fossil.

Quit yer bitching and figure out how to work on heavy equipment for nuclear power plants... or don't and wait for the wheels are progress to roll right over you.

God damn sir I'm just 31 and your calling me a fossil. I don't see them putting up too many nuke plants in the hills of KY. I'll just ride it out thank you very much. I do appreciate your biting sarcasm sir. It gives me a good laugh.

[askewcore]

[Three Hole Puncher]

Originally Posted by Joker1919

God damn sir I'm just 31 and your calling me a fossil. I don't see them putting up too many nuke plants in the hills of KY. I'll just ride it out thank you very much. I do appreciate your biting sarcasm sir. It gives me a good laugh.

Sarcasm?

I guess you don't get a lot of sarcasm up in the hills of Kentucky, huh?

[Death Metal Moe]

If they can offer a cheaper, cleaner way to get energy, go for it. But I'll believe it when I see it work.

[Joker1919]

Originally Posted by Three Hole Puncher

Sarcasm?

I guess you don't get a lot of sarcasm up in the hills of Kentucky, huh?

Not really we are a bunch of dumb fucking mouth breathers. Should I have said maybe your biting wit?

[Three Hole Puncher]

Originally Posted by Joker1919

Not really we are a bunch of dumb fucking mouth breathers. Should I have said maybe your biting wit?

Derision works better than sarcasm... but biting wit works too.

[Joker1919]

Your posts give me a good chuckle sir how is that.

[WOWmagnet]

Originally Posted by oandapartycock

Last restaurant I worked I used to like to fart into empty food containers and walk up to unsuspecting coworkers and ask them to "smell this" to see if it was still good. Awesome prank if you can pull it off.

Lemmie guess; the answer was always "bleach", right?

[Three Hole Puncher]

Originally Posted by Joker1919

Your posts give me a good chuckle sir how is that.

A good laugh to tide you over until the next rerun of Hee Haw comes on, huh? You're welcome.

[lockjaaaaww]

I knew I was gonna be too late with a spaceballs refrence.

[askewcore]

Originally Posted by Death Metal Moe

If they can offer a cheaper, cleaner way to get energy, go for it. But I'll believe it when I see it work.

They can. But they need to set up a bunch of clones on the Moon.

Originally Posted by lockjaaaaww

I knew I was gonna be too late with a spaceballs refrence.

I'm just glad it didn't go un-noticed.