By Joe Salimando www.eleblog.com
Recently, after my visit to the Wind Power show (discussed briefly here on Energy Solutions), I proceeded to create 12 blogs from my event notebooks for another client, tedmag.com. See the 13th post of the group, which provided a guide to the 12 items (you might read a few of ‘em).
All told, they’re probably at more than 10,000 words. As a reporter, I’m proud to inform the electrical industry audience of all that I saw and heard. But as a writer, I’m aware that . . . 10,000 is one huge bundle of words.
Too many? I don’t know. However, I am aware that “verbose” is not a compliment.
Then – to further put the word total in perspective – I came across a July 8 piece posted to a Canadian newspaper’s site, Wind’s Bad Day. It amounts to all of 378 words – and, within that, made an excellent point, the likes of which I’ve tried to make a few times on the tedmag.com site:
Because wind systems will always have days when they will contribute essentially nothing, and because society will not want power blackout on those days, the only prudent course for the managers of the electricity grid is to value wind’s capacity at essentially nothing.
You want storage with those turbines?
Yes, the 378-word piece is a criticism of wind’s role in creating an alternative to coal (or nuclear) power. That does not – at all – necessarily mean we should stop building wind power plants. However, it does mean that a rational approach to reshaping the grid is to explore a lot of other alternative energy types (there are a lot out there) and realize that every time we add a bunch of turbines, we’ve got to have . . . something else as well – if we want the electrical power system to remain stable, reliable, and instantly responsive.
An obvious conclusion – which I noted in a two-part piece back in late April (see part one and part two) – is that Energy Storage is going to be HUGE in the future. Or, to say it another way: No local or regional power grid will add a lot of wind turbines without the need for heaps of storage as well.
If “energy storage” makes you think next about “mega-stupendo mountains of lead-acid batteries” . . . well, that’s not what we’re talking about here. See this Dept. of Energy page for a start, for info on things like “emitter turn-off thyristor” and a shopping list of “basic research needs” on the subject.
Or download this two-page PDF, which outlines storage R&D projects that have already been blessed with DoE grant money:
- Large Battery System (3 projects, 53MW)
- Compressed Air (2 projects, 450MW)
- Frequency Regulation (1 project, 20MW)
- Distributed Storage (5 projects, 9MW)
- Technology Development (5 projects)
Some electrical contractors will build wind turbines that they (or others) will tack onto the local/regional or national grid. And a logical – unavoidable, if you ask me – future will see still other ECs engaged in building significant numbers of power storage facilities, and tacking them onto the system.