Too much wind power

Sorry if I wasn't clear, the annual Altamont output is 1.1 terawatt*hour. The theoretical instantaneous output is around 576 MW.

Today's Cal-ISO estimate is for California base load to vary from 25 to 48 gigawatts depending on time of day. If we use 35 GW as a ballpark, Altamont could provide ~100 * 0.576/35 = ~1.6% of load.

Multiply that all out for the year and California uses about 300 terawatt*hours of electricity each year, which means that Altamont provides about 100 * 1.1/300 = 0.37% of California's annual electrical demand. That's all based on today's values, I didn't dig up the actual annual numbers, so it will be probably be somewhat high, but in the realm of reason. (edit - The official number from Cal-ISO is statewide wind provides 4.25 TWh annually, equivalent to 1.5% of total demand => ~283 TWh annual demand).

The difference between Altamont's 0.37% actual delivery and 1.6% theoretical capacity is the fickleness of wind, turbine maintenance and operation, etc. and could also say something about generation capability rating of wind systems.

 

More FYI. This guy is a wind fanatic, and he still has few good things to say about small to medium scale wind.

Icarus

 

Thanks. When I do it (10-20+ years from now) I'll probably attach it to the garage. It's a separate building. And that's where all of the main electrical is right now.

 

300 terawatts seems like a lot to me... the BPA is supposed to have around 350 GW (i think i remember that...then again??) of excess power and that is talked as being a lot... they say that if everyone in the Pac Northwest had an EV, they could charge it and still have a significant amount of power left over...

either way, the dicussion is how to store it... my question is "is there a real need to store something that Cali seems to be in short supply of most of the time?"

 

At this point? No. If wind power, for instance, is providing 1.5% of demand, then it's pretty easy for the fossil fuel plants to take up the slack when the wind drops. But what happens if we can actually get wind + solar up in to the tens of percent of demand? California (or any other area) can get statewide weather systems that could disrupt either or both of those. And, despite their existence, long distance interties (to bring that excess WA power down this way, for instance) are expensive for the scale we're talking (if they weren't that power would already be in the very lucrative California market).

Do you have idle fossil capacity sitting around that can be brought online quickly? That might be viable (it is our current setup), but increases the net cost of the wind/solar. Can they come up instantly to replace 10% of supply, or do you need the equivalent of a UPS to bridge the switchover? Storage in any form increases the costs of solar/wind, so it's all about the most cost/environmentally efficient way to balance the supply when using an intermittent source. There are some similarities to the Prius, where storage, although inefficient, can allow the use of a baseline power plant rather than a peak demand plant, and where the plant can be shut down entirely during low demand periods. Turns out it leads to an overall more efficient car. Even outside the wind/solar industry, efficient storage that can be used anywhere could lead to more efficient fossil fuel generation, by allowing plants to run under steady-state conditions and using the storage, rather than peaker plants, to even out the supply.

For the time being storage isn't a big issue, but looking forward... All of the most friendly alternatives are intermittent in nature, while, as you point out, demand is pretty continuous. For the time being, the easiest, densest form of "storage" appears to be fossil fuels (or maybe uranium). If we want to get away from that form of storage, and embrace sources of supply that are highly variable, then we also need a clean method of storing and then recovering the energy. Relying entirely on wind/solar you end up needing to build plants that are capable of supplying at levels much greater than peak demand, so that they can also store for delivery when they can't produce.

You could argue that hydro fills that bill pretty well, but there are issues there as well, and getting massive new hydro facilities permitted is difficult at best. Maybe it provides the most realistic solution at this time. At the same time the search is on for something that might have fewer objections/higher efficiency/quicker response/better or easier distribution, etc. Without it we won't ever be able to rely on intermittent generation sources for the majority of our power. It may even turn out that trying to reach that goal is economically unrealistic. That's what makes the research and the coming years interesting.