Grumblebum
We’ll all be rooned said Hanrahan… That will be the case if we keep listening to the greenies and the lunatic left.
The effects of wind generation are not well understood by the general public, and the Greens have not got a clue. The whole subject is shrouded in sacred climate mystique, a smoke and mirrors subject, with unjustified, unquantified, ill defined, uncosted and unjustified savings and supposed benefits for our society.
The best way to get you up to speed on this subject is for you to take the time and watch Youtube video on the attached link.
This video is about the operation of the Eva Creek Wind Farm in Alaska, and is relatively recent as it came online in 2012. By world standards it is a relatively small wind farm, at 25 MW, but it illustrates well many of the problems with putting wind power generation into HV power grids.
Case Study – EVA CREEK Wind Farm – an inconvenient truth
The actual lecture is about 50 mins long, with questions afterwards. Key learning outcomes from the lecture:
- Cheap money is used for finance (well below market rates) so that is probably equivalent to subsidies from our government funded clean energy foundation.
- Operating entity is a not for profit organisation – no tax.
- Regulation costs are NOT included – this is an “add on”, just to make the wind energy generators usable. This skews the true financial cost structure of wind energy. Critical point is what they call regulation – which means that there has to be an equivalent power generation system (hydro, coal, gas turbine, interconnector) run in parallel with a wind farm to cover its loss when the wind speed drops off. That is why wind energy is unreliable.
- Real practical problems are encountered controlling a power grid stability with unpredictable rates of increase / decrease of its generation capacity. Relates to “power system stability” – a whole new ball game of control complexity.
- Considerable power generating time is lost when wind speeds are too high – loss of earnings in a true, honest financial case.
- The load following plants have major problems re starting after trip conditions, so this means there has to be a backup load following plant in order to keep the system grid stable – major control problems.
- Availability of this plant 99% – it is a new plant.
- Utilisation is just 34% (would you spend $1mill on a new truck for a transport business if you only used it 34% of the time?
- Considerable wind generation potential, in terms of dollars it could earn, are wasted because of the difficulty in controlling the power grid stability and fuel costs for gas turbine generators.
- Gas turbine generators (with combined cycle back ends) work best at almost full load, so they are less suitable for load following. Reducing gas turbine loads causes control of turbine to be unstable, trip outs, maintenance problems, increased cost and unreliability.
- Small scale steam driven plants are better for load following as they can regulate output much quicker to follow wind farm output rise and fall in power generated.
- Wind Turbine Manufacturer SENVION.
If you look on the Youtube vertical side bar, there are additional videos of this
site and information on construction activities.
There is also another Science Channel video of this plant that was aired on Sky Channel about a week ago. It showed how maintenance was done (informative if you can find it).
This lecture explains how gas fuel prices for gas turbine generating plants have a large effect on the cost of power generation in a mixed regime power generating grid. This would help explain the recent flurry of federal and state government energy ministers meeting and thrashing out a stabilisation of domestic natural gas prices. Now we know why there were squeals of pain!!
Now that several state governments have sold off our natural gas reserves, and overseas investors gobble up the resource to export it, Australia is left as a beggar to source gas to run gas turbine generation plants so that we can use the wonderful clean green energy. Well, I’ll be buggered.
Conned people, the snake oil salesmen have had us, and we have been sold a dud. Rise up against the useless green w—ers, and vent your scorn upon them and the political classes who have buckled at the knees in accommodating these ridiculous demands.
“O’Neil squatted down and chewed a piece of bark…..”
“Grumblebum” is a white Anglo-Saxon male baby boomer whose ancestors came by sailing boat from UK in the 1880’s and settled in the southern states. Some of them even took the gospel to SA. They farmed (not always successfully) and built the land, and passed onto myself their heritage of democracy and laws based on Judeo-Christian principles. I am just wondering why I am being harangued into forfeiting this by a bunch of under-educated, historically illiterate, unwashed and unemployable knuckle draggers from the political left.
Photo by footloosiety 
