7 ms·

Denmark: 1,000 Megawatts Of Offshore Wind, And No Signs of Slowing Down

108 points by ttuominen 14y ago

simonsarris 14y ago
I remember seeing the windmills for the first time in person when I was in my teens, on a flight from Boston to Copanhagen. I saw another "field" of them as my boat left port in Denmark. They were incredible to look at, just mesmerizing. They were beautiful, gorgeous in more than just their form. That something so bold and elegant could create meaningful amounts of power blew my mind. I remembered reading about lakes and ponds in New Hampshire that had no persistent human contact but tested positive for mercury from coal plants. Looking at these windmills was like staring into a vision of the future. Looking at them, I had never felt so optimistic about technology before. When I got home I went on the internet to read about wind power and see if there were any initiatives in my home state or Massachusetts. The negativity I found in the papers was its own mind-boggle. Do you know what they complained about? The view.
- scarmig 14y ago
  I don't get it. It's easy to guess that "well, the rich of course are going to manipulate the political process to protect their privileged position, even if it means those less well off and society at large will be the worse for it." Which is plausible at first, considering who fossil fuels hurt and whom wind farms "hurt." But it's not like Europe doesn't have entrenched economic interests, and it's not like those entrenched interests wouldn't have captured the political process. What's so special about the USA that gives ridiculous outcomes?
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - mjn 14y ago
    There are a lot of differences, but I think two economic factors help it in Denmark (ok, I ended up writing mostly about the 1st): 1. If you think of the country of Denmark itself as a large corporation of sorts, its goal in the international market is to go high-end. The workforce is too high-wage to compete on regular manufacturing, cheap worldwide food prices mean the traditionally important agriculture sector now contributes a mere 5% of GDP, and it doesn't have the oil of Norway. So it's the only choice really: to be a leader in high-skill services, R&D, and high-end manufacturing. [This paragraph is an aside:] This view underpins lots of stuff that goes on in both the governmental and industrial sectors. As one example, there is a goal that within 20 years, 100% of Danes will earn a college degree, and 50% (!) will go on to get a masters degree, in order to position the country's workforce as highly educated, almost like a 6-million-strong consulting shop. They're willing to pay for it, too: there is no tuition, and students receive a modest living stipend. The similarities to a company are surprisingly deep, e.g. the unemployment program is even run a lot like an HR department, viewing un/underemployed people quite literally as potential "human resources" who can be used to plug labor shortages elsewhere, with the right matchmaking and training. On the services side, it's been reasonably successful, though honestly in part due to good fortune in making the transition: Carlsberg and Maersk are huge parts of the Danish economy, despite the fact that actually brewing beer and building/sailing ships are long-gone as mainstays of the economy. They managed to transition into having Danes as the managerial class of global companies when the manufacturing jobs moved elsewhere. It's not hard to imagine an alternate-history scenario where Copenhagen ends up as a poor post-industrial city full of derelict shipyards, instead of a rich post-industrial city full of loft conversions in former shipyards. Wind energy has been a lynchpin of the R&D and high-end manufacturing part of the strategy for a while now, from both the public and private sides. Denmark's location makes wind a reasonably good choice among the various things you might want to pursue in the energy sector (I wouldn't recommend a solar-based strategy here). And so it's become not only big domestically, but a major export business. Denmark-based Vestas has long been the #1 worldwide wind-turbine manufacturer, one of the few global "#1s" in a country of 6 million. You can aso see it in the "branding strategy" of both the government (http://denmark.dk/en/green-living/wind-energy/ http://denmark.dk/en/green-living/wind-energy/) and the industrial sector (http://www.windpower.org/en/ http://www.windpower.org/en/). And it spills into other things, e.g. "smart grids" to manage the variable load of wind energy are now a big R&D initiative at the university I'm at, with hopes that Denmark will become a leader in smart-grid tech too. So what I'm getting at is: domestic wind farms are rather multi-purpose. They do serve a primary function of actually generating energy. But they also serve a secondary function of building up the wind-export sector, and another secondary function of building up a certain image that Denmark wants to project, of a 21st-century R&D and high-end manufacturing hub, and of generally being "ahead". 2. Many of the wind farms are organized as consumer cooperatives, so have broad-based ownership, which produces built-in supporters. For example, the farm offshore of the island of Amager (just east of Copenhagen) is co-owned 50% by the municipality, and 50% by a cooperative with 10,000 members.
- nawitus 14y ago
  While the view may be a rather weak argument, wind power doesn't make much sense. Nuclear power is just a better way to produce energy. It's cheap, stable and just as environmentally friendly. It's too bad that politics prevent it's usage, adoption and development in so many countries. There's very little research on thorium power, too, which would solve most of the remaing negative points about nuclear power.
  - gnaffle 14y ago
    "Just as environmentally friendly"? Since when did Wind power require long term storage of waste? Nuclear power depends on public trust (which is reflected in politics). That trust was just about built up again after Chernobyl when Fukushima happened. Now we'll probably have to wait another 20-30 years (except in China and India, which as both actively pursuing nuclear energy).
    - nawitus 14y ago
      >"Just as environmentally friendly"? Since when did Wind power require long term storage of waste? Never claimed it did. However, the single property/factor of "does it require long term storage of waste" does not determine environmental friendliness, although it's certainly a factor. There are a multitude of factors that people base different weights on. Carbon emissions is a good starting point, and nuclear is even with wind on that one.
      - gnaffle 14y ago
        So, if wind energy doesn't create waste, doesn't require mining and enrichment and doesn't have a chance of causing a major environmental disaster, how can you claim nuclear energy is "just as environmentally friendly"?
        mpyne 14y ago
        What fantasy world do you live in where the components (both structural and electrical) of a wind turbine require no mining? Either way though this whole discussion is just ridiculous. Nuclear isn't competing with wind, it's competing with fossil-fueled thermal generation. All of the wind energy that Denmark is producing per this article is less than 1/6th of a single Canadian nuclear power plant (Bruce N.G.S.).
- Detrus 14y ago
  They do complain about views and noise in Europe too. But with a functioning government their concerns are overruled by the majority who doesn't have a view of the coast. I love looking at windmills too but then I don't look and listen to them all day. As far as power generation I'm amazed the ground windmill approach is as popular as it is. It's not efficient. It has serious limitations. Seems like a craze. But then the incredibly inefficient coal plants were a craze too. Electric lights and vacuum cleaners, how did we live without them! We can make coal plants far more efficient. A 10% efficiency increase would be bigger than the renewable industry in the US. We can also make wind kites which make a lot more sense. Lets see if we bother.
  - gngeal 14y ago
    "I love looking at windmills too but then I don't look and listen to them all day." Is looking at them significantly worse than looking at the car traffic on a major street in the rush hour? As far as the sound is concerned, I doubt that the effects are anything more than purely psychological. There are established hygienic limits for a reason.
    - droopyEyelids 14y ago
      Be careful to dismiss things as 'purely psychological'. Psychological disturbances affect people as much as physical disturbances, and in the end a psychological disturbance is a physical disturbance in the brain.
      - gngeal 14y ago
        Yes, but in that case, you go to your psychologist/psychiatrist/neurologist to take care of yourself, not to your local energy provider.
      - jchrisa 14y ago
        The aesthetic is the political...
    - Carlee 14y ago
- moakleaf 14y ago
  People are actually not super excited about windmills in Denmark either. Noise, vibrations, and view are the problems.
  - mjn 14y ago
    As far as view goes, I actually really like the modern ones offshore. I don't like the older ones, which look like landscape clutter. For example the old Tehachapi wind farm in California (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tehachapi_wind_farm_3.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tehachapi_wind_farm_3.jpg) reminds me of an old oil field, like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Oil_wells_just_offshore_at_Summerland,_California,_c.1915.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Oil_wells_just_offshore_at.... But as far as the new ones: I recently moved offices in Copenhagen, to a 5th-story office looking east towards the Øresund. I think the offshore wind farm there adds substantially to the view (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middelgrunden http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middelgrunden). It's especially nice on overcast, windy, gray days, when you can see the white turbines rotating in the fog. But it's nice on sunny days too, at least in my opinion. Here's a snapshot from my window: http://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-snc7/598966_10100473049926079_1195961214_n.jpg http://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-snc7/598966_1010047304... And if you get closer, e.g. at Amager Beach, it's even nicer (again imo). It's like a modernist kinetic sculpture or something, an aesthetically pleasing series of 20 massive but sleekly styled turbines in a row.
    - ashkav 14y ago
      isn't it funny that the first windmills are reminiscent of oil wells, and current solar projects (in the US) are large solar arrays, blending again with the existing large-scale infrastructure? maybe this similarity is lofty associated, but i find it interesting.
    - krschultz 14y ago
      The bigger ones seem to rotate slower which helps a lot aesthetically. I'm pretty sure the tip is still moving the same speed, but the RPM is lower.
  - biehl 14y ago
- deleted 14y ago
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- drakaal 14y ago
  Visit somewhere in California where a pristine mountain side with trees and red rock was just 10 years ago, and not it is nothing but wall of spinning white blades of bird killers. Wind is like water. You can't just slow it down with your turbines and expect no environmental impact. Putting them on the windward side of a mountain reduces the rain fall on the opposite side. Birds die in the blades. It isn't all rainbows and butterflies.
  - to3m 14y ago
    As these things go, it's one of the more unobtrusive options. Compare it to, for example, an open cast coal mine. (It's even probably cheaper to knock down the turbines than it is to fill the pit back in.)
  - ars 14y ago
    Cats kill FAR FAR FAR more birds than windmills do. If you actually cared about birds you would support cat kills (not just sterilize and release). But few people do.
    - adventured 14y ago
      To support this point (and this is just in the US): http://www.npr.org/2013/01/29/170588511/killer-kitties-cats-kill-billions-every-year http://www.npr.org/2013/01/29/170588511/killer-kitties-cats-... "Previous studies had suggested that cats kill about 500 million birds a year. Marra's group came up with something very different. "We estimate that cats kill somewhere between 1.4 and 3.7 billion birds a year," Marra says. "For mammals, it's upward of about 15 billion." "Marra says based on those new figures, cat-caused mortality far exceeds deaths from other sources, like collisions with cars or wind turbines.
    - drakaal 14y ago
      How many Golden Eagles, Perigan Falcons, and Owls Do cats kill?
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  Do you know what they complained about? The view. You love technology. But not everybody does. Some people like to live in the city, some people like to live in the country. Some people like to keep technology from enveloping their entire lives. Is one viewpoint inherently more right than the other?
Bockit 14y ago
> ...throttle back their hydro plants and store more water behind dams for later use. I find the idea of using a dam as a battery quite interesting.
- oellegaard 14y ago
  I'm pretty sure this is done at a large scale in both Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. While storing energy have always been a huge problem, I'm surprised this is not more popular.
  - gnaffle 14y ago
    This is correct. Norway exports power in wet seasons, and imports it in dry seasons. But if there is less rain and dam fill-up than expected, they will throttle down on production to save the water in order to sell it at a higher price later on.
  - riffraff 14y ago
    AFAIR it's done in italy too (~1/5 of the national power is hydroelectric) and I am reasonably sure all the big plants work with dams/reservoirs, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entracque_Power_Plant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entracque_Power_Plant
  - mpyne 14y ago
    Well it needs a lot of water (which can be problematic for the areas which solar is most competitive in) and a lot of unused area. It's a very reasonable solution when you meet those constraints though.
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  A lot of hydroelectric in the US pumps the water back up at night (when demand is low) so that they can use it to generate electricity the next day. Just south of the Bay Area, you can see such a facility on the road between the 101 and the 5, at Pacheco Pass. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Luis_Reservoir http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Luis_Reservoir See also : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped_storage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped_storage
oellegaard 14y ago
> "who are smart enough to pay attention to the accomplishments of this small island on the North Sea." We're not an island* :-( * We do have 1419 islands, though.
- alexholehouse 14y ago
  That is breathtakingly poor journalism/general knowledge
  - bliker 14y ago
    'murica
    - adventured 14y ago
      Ah yes, because most people in Denmark know whether Rhode Island is actually an island or not, and they know all about Oregon (or Oklahoma, or New Mexico or Nebraska or Ohio). I don't see how one journalist's mistake leads to that comment.
      - jeltz 14y ago
        Yeah, it is unfair to say all Americans know nothing about geography just because one journalist knew little geography and was too lazy to look it up. By the way Rhode Island makes a poor comparison since that is a trick question, it is called "Island" but isn't one. Denmark does not have "Island" in its name.
      - mpyne 14y ago
        Because it's considered poor form (if not racist or sexist) to attribute someone's mistakes on a whole population group... unless the population group in question is "American". It's probably a better problem to have than some of the other problems we might have though.
        jchrisa 14y ago
pieter 14y ago
Off shore wind power is about 25% of the wind power capacity of Denmark, the rest are 'normal' wind turbines. However, they'll contribute more to the total energy output. Off-shore wind turbines generate about 35-50% of their maximum capacity on average, compared to 20-30% of normal wind turbines.
Systemic33 14y ago
Recently when there was a windy weather situation, Denmark produced enough power from wind turbines to cover 82%[1] of the entire power usage in denmark. [1] DANISH http://ing.dk/artikel/vindmoeller-slog-rekord-i-gaarsdagens-blaesevejr-157196 http://ing.dk/artikel/vindmoeller-slog-rekord-i-gaarsdagens-...
muratmutlu 14y ago
Can someone explain why Denmark would have to pay other countries to take excess electricity rather than getting paid for it?
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  I'm not sure, but it seems like Enron must be involved there somewhere.
- kolinko 14y ago
  There are certain times when there is a surplus of energy in the network (usually at nights iirc). With a lack of good storage mechanisms, energy vendors need to actually pay companies to use the energy at certain times. Otherwise, the energy excess would damage the network. If Denmark doesn't have enough companies that could take the energy, they have to send the energy to be used up somewhere else. It's quite likely that at the same time in other countries a similar situation occurs, so nobody really wants the extra electricity. Hence Danes need to pay other countries to get rid of it.
  - seunosewa 14y ago
    Can't they just switch off unneeded windmills?
    - mpyne 14y ago
      Possibly, but they'd have to be designed to be remotely controlled (possibly at an individual level). They'd also have to be specifically engineered to withstand the sudden reduction in countertorque when the windmill is removed from the grid and then to lock the blades against windmilling while shutdown. And of course, to reverse the whole process on command.
      - ams6110 14y ago
        I would assume the blades can be "feathered" so as to catch very little wind and not impart a rotational force, as on a prop-drive aircraft when one of the engines needs to be shut off. There has to be some way to take them out of services for e.g. maintenance.
kolinko 14y ago
Just imagine how many Bitcoins you'd mine with that.
venomsnake 14y ago
Also known as a single nuclear reactor. While I am all for renewables the real problem is storage and buffering. The solutions in these areas are improving but not nearly as fast as needed. A cheap supercapacitor with less than 10% daily discharge rate could go a long way in positioning renewables to shine.
- AndreasFrom 14y ago
  Well, a single nuclear reactor minus the waste that needs to be stored for thousands of years.
  - venomsnake 14y ago
    Hmm ... it was more of a scale comparison, not endorcement of nuclear fission. But anyway breeders are a partial solution to that problem and we haven't actually put a lot of effort into the waste disposal.
  - ars 14y ago
    Windmills make tons and tons of waste - there are entire mountains made from mine tailings and slag (obviously not all from windmills, but don't think windmills are free of waste). Nuclear power has much less waste.
- Zigurd 14y ago
  That's a good point that it amounts to a single nuclear reactor. It would be interesting to compare: Capital requirement Insurability Maximum damage to the environment in case of a disaster Decommissioning costs Maintenance costs Construction schedule
  - straight_talk 14y ago
    Maximum damage to the environment in case of a disaster for a 1MW reactor with a lot of waste fuel stored on the site is rendering the Northern Hemisphere (where almost all such reactors are) inhabitable.
TomGullen 14y ago
Can someone explain why you would ever pay someone to take surplus power? Is it because they don't want it To go to waste? Otherwise can't they just get rid of it somehow?
- joyeuse6701 14y ago
  I suppose it is cheaper for them to pay another country to take the power and maintain the rates they are charging for energy than to have to pay the people back when it goes negative. They are trying to get their investment back. That's a good question and they've mentioned one solution being transferring the energy to Sweden or Norway and they'll dial back the hydros and store more water in their dams. Of course I wonder if they could just selectively put a windmill in neutral to solve the same problem.
- david2777 14y ago
  It's not a steady supply over power, it fluctuates with your supply and demand for it, so it takes work for another grid to take that power from you. If you send them power they have to scale their plants down to prevent the problem you're having. Then when your supply goes down and you no longer have an excess of power to send they have to scale their systems back up to make up for the power you're no longer sending. They can't store it or get rid of it easily. It's one of the reasons people don't like wind and solar power, it works great when the wind is blowing and the sun is out, but it fluctuates too much and causes heavy swings in power generation that have to be dealt with somehow.
- ghouse 14y ago
  If you are a nuclear power plant, you have very little operational flexibility. If there is too much electricity, it's less expensive to pay someone to take it than it is to reduce the output of your inflexible generating asset.
- ars 14y ago
  They are not paying for someone to take the power - that's poor journalism. It works like this: Every energy producer bids a price for their power, the lower your price the higher you are on the order book. Then energy consumers will meet the demand by buying from the producers in the order of their price. Once they have filled their power demand they pay everyone the price of the last price they needed to fill their needs. So by setting a negative price they ensure they are always on top of the order book - but they don't actually have to pay for their power since other power sources have positive prices, and that's the price that is actually paid.
btb 14y ago
And all those windmill parks are heavily subsidized, which contributes to the Danish electricity prices being the highest in all of EU[1], 0.3 euro per kwh. Its basically a state-guaranteed high yield for the pension funds etc that put them up, paid for by the consumers in DK. [1] http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php?title=File:Electricity_prices_for_households_consumers_2012s1.png&filetimestamp=20130219105040 http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index....
- ttuominen 14y ago
  It should be noted that globally, fossil fuels are also heavily subsidized. [1] [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/27/imf-want-to-fight-climate-change-get-rid-of-1-9-trillion-in-energy-subsidies/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/27/i...
- snowwindwaves 14y ago
  Wow, that's about 10x more than in USA And Canada (excluding Hawaii and Kentucky). I wonder what people would choose given the option between cheap and not from natural gas, as this is going to be the situation in USA for the next 20 years due to shale gas
  - ams6110 14y ago
    It is very expensive, as are most things in Denmark. My relatives there tell me that at night they sit in a small room with a candle to avoid running the lights and heat.
mattangriffel 14y ago
Why did Denmark have to pay other countries to take its excess energy? What am I not getting here?
- tiredofcareer 14y ago
  Grid oversupply is bad (just as any overpowered circuit is generally bad). There isn't a way to dump power or store it, so they had to dump it on other countries who then had to adjust accordingly on their grid. You might think of it as a nice gesture, but it isn't; the other country has to power off plants or otherwise adjust to handle the excess as well. There isn't an "energy garbage can" or dummy load at power grid scale. Running a power grid is a 24x7 dance of supply and demand, which is why people that hate renewables like wind are quick to lament its variable nature. It's the same in high-capacity systems planning in our line of work; systems that have variable latency are a lot harder to plan capacity for than systems with fairly constant latency. Just substitute "supply" for "latency", and you're now a power grid operator.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
vilda 14y ago
Just in case you're wondering how a price for energy can be nagative: It is not. Someone else is paying full price for it. The producer is guaraneed to always sell the enegry into the grid at a fixed price. The market is broken.
vitobcn 14y ago
Denmark is the country within the European union with the highest penetration of wind power in electricity consumption (almost 26%). However, in absolute terms both Spain (22 GW) and Germany (29 GW) vastly exceed Denmark (4 GW) and are two of the largest "wind markets" worldwide (as of end 2011) [1]. In particular, Spain has made a tremendous effort investing in wind energy (tax incentives, subsidies, etc. were granted), and it's amazing to see that in about 15 years, this type of energy went from 0 to about 20% of the total energy produced within the country [2]. Including also the rest of renewables to the mix, it seems obvious that in the coming 15-20 years, it should be possible to generate more than 50% of energy from renewable sources, e.g. solar energy in Spain achieved power grid parity in terms of cost last December [3]. In spite of the current economic downturn, these are pretty amazing times we are living in! [1]: http://www.ewea.org/fileadmin/ewea_documents/documents/publications/statistics/Stats_2011.pdf http://www.ewea.org/fileadmin/ewea_documents/documents/publi... [2]: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/es/timeline/957d498ae7ff03d7e2b98930deb1c861.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/es/timeline/957d498ae7... [3]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterdetwiler/2012/12/26/solar-grid-parity-comes-to-spain/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterdetwiler/2012/12/26/solar-g...
- potatos 14y ago
  In the United States we have Iowa, where >24% of electricity last year came from wind, and where there's more nameplate capacity of wind than the entire demand of the nation of Denmark. For what it's worth.
SmokyBorbon 14y ago
Only 210 megawatts until Denmark gets time travel.
ok_craig 14y ago
I'm pretty naive on the science of these things, but I have a concern: is there any possibility that increasing use of wind energy could have negative affects on the environment by essentially taking energy out of our atmosphere? Could our winds gradually slow down over time? Maybe it's just such a small fraction that it doesn't matter. Or maybe wind energy is essentially another form of capturing solar energy, because the winds are created by temperature differences, which are created by the sun hitting the earth, and that energy is constantly renewed? I don't know, but I'm curious. Any insight about this would be appreciated.
- alexholehouse 14y ago
  I'd have thought amounts of energy involved are so vanishingly small compared to atmospheric wind in general that it makes no difference.
  - jarek 14y ago
    A while ago we thought the same thing about greenhouse gas emissions or human activity raising global atmospheric temperatures. I like wind power, but that's not a very strong argument without numbers.
    - alexholehouse 14y ago
      No you're right (and nice comparison) - I just wanted to trigger conversation because someone had downvoted the question, which I thought was pretty unfair. I just didn't/don't have time to do any actual research to get hard numbers.
- adventured 14y ago
  The short answer is: no. Any windmill impact from changing wind patterns or reducing wind power is radically less than eg building homes (given we build millions of homes annually), or simply driving vehicles (of any sort, given the numbers of vehicles globally). You could never build enough windmills to cause a problem. The only real environmental concerns are killing animals (insects?), and construction / manufacturing related.
adventured 14y ago
Maybe this is a dumb question, but isn't there some industrial use that surplus energy spikes could be used for domestically? Water desalination perhaps, since it's energy intensive.
- michael_miller 14y ago
  The most compelling use case for excess energy is to store it. There's a big research area in developing batteries for temporary grid storage. Compared to standard batteries, the goal is to trade off weight for cost, so that it's practical to capture the delta between {peak demand, actual demand}. See [1] for such a battery. [1] http://www.stanford.edu/group/cui_group/papers/Yuan_EES_2013.pdf http://www.stanford.edu/group/cui_group/papers/Yuan_EES_2013...
  - Intermernet 14y ago
    Thanks for that link, I hadn't seen that before. It seems similar (with different materials) to LMBC's (Now Ambri, http://www.ambri.com/ http://www.ambri.com/ ) battery tech. Are these things actually rolling out yet? Anyone know of any large scale deployments of this (or similar) tech ongoing, or planned for the near future?
drakaal 14y ago
Why didn't they just say Gigawatt? The author couldn't decide on the capitalization of "of" in the title so maybe they just didn't know 1000 Meg is a Gig.
aj700 14y ago
I'm English. I live in Denmark. Yes, on this, we win: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2240rank.html?countryName=Denmark&countryCode=da&regionCode=eur&rank=1#da https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
EEGuy 14y ago
A quick check on wind turbine design for power generation [1] confirms to my satisfaction that all wind turbines should be throttable down to zero electrical output and then with good mechanical brakes [2] taking away the remaining kinetic energy sufficient to stop then lock the rotor. I've read elsewhere (sorry, no reference) that stopping the rotor can be necessary in emergency windspeed conditions. Per [2]: > Let’s compare the emergency braking requirements of a >1.5 MW wind turbine under maximum wind conditions with >those of a 40-ton mining truck. Imagine driving a >fully loaded truck down a steep gradient of 25% (1:4) >at 85 mph when a road sign warns of a cliff a quarter >mile ahead. The engineering required for effective >braking in both cases is much the same. Braking for >the wind turbine is, in fact, more demanding. Beyond mechanical brakes, the available control strategies and actuators normally applied toward maximizing power output per [1] can instead be applied toward bringing the power output to zero and the rotor to a halt, such as: * Apply generator torque control (dumping power to the grid) sufficient to slow the blades down to near zero * Then or as the blades slow down, stall or furl the blades using pitch control * Apply the brakes to lock the rotor * Yaw the whole machine 90 degrees off the wind OK so if they're stoppable, what is up here? Others more familiar with Danish market, operators and regulatory conditions might speak better to this, but I'll surmise that the turbine operators get paid when they produce energy, whether Denmark needs it or not. So the turbine operators never stop their turbines, night nor day. When that creates an excess of energy the grid engineers must do something. The article mentioned slowing hydro output elsewhere and heating the water used locally for district heating. This creates an environment where there should be a financial incentive to create technologies for storage or highly variable use of this nightime and other times highly variable excess electrical energy. Hundred-megawatt data centers [3] with quickly variable compute capability come to mind, but making stored hot water hotter (the district heating 'dummy load' approach) seems to me a lot simpler, cheaper and immediately practical, if a bit wasteful of the low-entropy energy that electricity is. --- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine_design [2] http://news.altramotion.com/?p=242 http://news.altramotion.com/?p=242 [3] http://gigaom.com/2012/01/31/the-era-of-the-100-mw-data-center/ http://gigaom.com/2012/01/31/the-era-of-the-100-mw-data-cent...
vitaminj 14y ago
As a grid engineer, I find the Danish case to be somewhat unique because of their strong AC and DC interconnections to Germany and Sweden. Basically, they can free-ride on the large european grid (UCTE), which stretches from Portgual to Russia, to maintain network stability while increasing domestic wind penetrations above 50%. I think a more interesting case study is Ireland, which has far weaker interconnectors to the UK and operate mainly as an island network. Like Denmark, they are also trying to integrate large amounts of wind (a goal of 40% by 2020, which is equivalent to over 6GW peak), but unlike Denmark, Ireland also have to deal with the resulting stability issues. An EirGrid engineer I spoke to recently mentioned that frequency stability is already a big issue for them. The main solution proposed in a 2010 study [1] amounted to maintaining a sufficient operating inertial reserve, which would potentially mean curtailing wind generation at times. In the future, I would look to Ireland rather than Denmark for solutions to integrating more wind into the grid, because they are already at the pointy end of it. [1] EirGrid Facilitation of Renewables study, http://www.eirgrid.com/renewables/facilitationofrenewables/ http://www.eirgrid.com/renewables/facilitationofrenewables/

108 points by ttuominen 14y ago

I remember seeing the windmills for the first time in person when I was in my teens, on a flight from Boston to Copanhagen. I saw another "field" of them as my boat left port in Denmark. They were incredible to look at, just mesmerizing. They were beautiful, gorgeous in more than just their form. That something so bold and elegant could create meaningful amounts of power blew my mind. I remembered reading about lakes and ponds in New Hampshire that had no persistent human contact but tested positive for mercury from coal plants. Looking at these windmills was like staring into a vision of the future. Looking at them, I had never felt so optimistic about technology before. When I got home I went on the internet to read about wind power and see if there were any initiatives in my home state or Massachusetts. The negativity I found in the papers was its own mind-boggle. Do you know what they complained about? The view.

scarmig 14y ago
I don't get it. It's easy to guess that "well, the rich of course are going to manipulate the political process to protect their privileged position, even if it means those less well off and society at large will be the worse for it." Which is plausible at first, considering who fossil fuels hurt and whom wind farms "hurt." But it's not like Europe doesn't have entrenched economic interests, and it's not like those entrenched interests wouldn't have captured the political process. What's so special about the USA that gives ridiculous outcomes?
- deleted 14y ago
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- mjn 14y ago
  There are a lot of differences, but I think two economic factors help it in Denmark (ok, I ended up writing mostly about the 1st): 1. If you think of the country of Denmark itself as a large corporation of sorts, its goal in the international market is to go high-end. The workforce is too high-wage to compete on regular manufacturing, cheap worldwide food prices mean the traditionally important agriculture sector now contributes a mere 5% of GDP, and it doesn't have the oil of Norway. So it's the only choice really: to be a leader in high-skill services, R&D, and high-end manufacturing. [This paragraph is an aside:] This view underpins lots of stuff that goes on in both the governmental and industrial sectors. As one example, there is a goal that within 20 years, 100% of Danes will earn a college degree, and 50% (!) will go on to get a masters degree, in order to position the country's workforce as highly educated, almost like a 6-million-strong consulting shop. They're willing to pay for it, too: there is no tuition, and students receive a modest living stipend. The similarities to a company are surprisingly deep, e.g. the unemployment program is even run a lot like an HR department, viewing un/underemployed people quite literally as potential "human resources" who can be used to plug labor shortages elsewhere, with the right matchmaking and training. On the services side, it's been reasonably successful, though honestly in part due to good fortune in making the transition: Carlsberg and Maersk are huge parts of the Danish economy, despite the fact that actually brewing beer and building/sailing ships are long-gone as mainstays of the economy. They managed to transition into having Danes as the managerial class of global companies when the manufacturing jobs moved elsewhere. It's not hard to imagine an alternate-history scenario where Copenhagen ends up as a poor post-industrial city full of derelict shipyards, instead of a rich post-industrial city full of loft conversions in former shipyards. Wind energy has been a lynchpin of the R&D and high-end manufacturing part of the strategy for a while now, from both the public and private sides. Denmark's location makes wind a reasonably good choice among the various things you might want to pursue in the energy sector (I wouldn't recommend a solar-based strategy here). And so it's become not only big domestically, but a major export business. Denmark-based Vestas has long been the #1 worldwide wind-turbine manufacturer, one of the few global "#1s" in a country of 6 million. You can aso see it in the "branding strategy" of both the government (http://denmark.dk/en/green-living/wind-energy/ http://denmark.dk/en/green-living/wind-energy/) and the industrial sector (http://www.windpower.org/en/ http://www.windpower.org/en/). And it spills into other things, e.g. "smart grids" to manage the variable load of wind energy are now a big R&D initiative at the university I'm at, with hopes that Denmark will become a leader in smart-grid tech too. So what I'm getting at is: domestic wind farms are rather multi-purpose. They do serve a primary function of actually generating energy. But they also serve a secondary function of building up the wind-export sector, and another secondary function of building up a certain image that Denmark wants to project, of a 21st-century R&D and high-end manufacturing hub, and of generally being "ahead". 2. Many of the wind farms are organized as consumer cooperatives, so have broad-based ownership, which produces built-in supporters. For example, the farm offshore of the island of Amager (just east of Copenhagen) is co-owned 50% by the municipality, and 50% by a cooperative with 10,000 members.
nawitus 14y ago
While the view may be a rather weak argument, wind power doesn't make much sense. Nuclear power is just a better way to produce energy. It's cheap, stable and just as environmentally friendly. It's too bad that politics prevent it's usage, adoption and development in so many countries. There's very little research on thorium power, too, which would solve most of the remaing negative points about nuclear power.
- gnaffle 14y ago
  "Just as environmentally friendly"? Since when did Wind power require long term storage of waste? Nuclear power depends on public trust (which is reflected in politics). That trust was just about built up again after Chernobyl when Fukushima happened. Now we'll probably have to wait another 20-30 years (except in China and India, which as both actively pursuing nuclear energy).
  - nawitus 14y ago
    >"Just as environmentally friendly"? Since when did Wind power require long term storage of waste? Never claimed it did. However, the single property/factor of "does it require long term storage of waste" does not determine environmental friendliness, although it's certainly a factor. There are a multitude of factors that people base different weights on. Carbon emissions is a good starting point, and nuclear is even with wind on that one.
    - gnaffle 14y ago
      So, if wind energy doesn't create waste, doesn't require mining and enrichment and doesn't have a chance of causing a major environmental disaster, how can you claim nuclear energy is "just as environmentally friendly"?
      - mpyne 14y ago
        What fantasy world do you live in where the components (both structural and electrical) of a wind turbine require no mining? Either way though this whole discussion is just ridiculous. Nuclear isn't competing with wind, it's competing with fossil-fueled thermal generation. All of the wind energy that Denmark is producing per this article is less than 1/6th of a single Canadian nuclear power plant (Bruce N.G.S.).
Detrus 14y ago
They do complain about views and noise in Europe too. But with a functioning government their concerns are overruled by the majority who doesn't have a view of the coast. I love looking at windmills too but then I don't look and listen to them all day. As far as power generation I'm amazed the ground windmill approach is as popular as it is. It's not efficient. It has serious limitations. Seems like a craze. But then the incredibly inefficient coal plants were a craze too. Electric lights and vacuum cleaners, how did we live without them! We can make coal plants far more efficient. A 10% efficiency increase would be bigger than the renewable industry in the US. We can also make wind kites which make a lot more sense. Lets see if we bother.
- gngeal 14y ago
  "I love looking at windmills too but then I don't look and listen to them all day." Is looking at them significantly worse than looking at the car traffic on a major street in the rush hour? As far as the sound is concerned, I doubt that the effects are anything more than purely psychological. There are established hygienic limits for a reason.
  - droopyEyelids 14y ago
    Be careful to dismiss things as 'purely psychological'. Psychological disturbances affect people as much as physical disturbances, and in the end a psychological disturbance is a physical disturbance in the brain.
    - gngeal 14y ago
      Yes, but in that case, you go to your psychologist/psychiatrist/neurologist to take care of yourself, not to your local energy provider.
    - jchrisa 14y ago
      The aesthetic is the political...
  - Carlee 14y ago
moakleaf 14y ago
People are actually not super excited about windmills in Denmark either. Noise, vibrations, and view are the problems.
- mjn 14y ago
  As far as view goes, I actually really like the modern ones offshore. I don't like the older ones, which look like landscape clutter. For example the old Tehachapi wind farm in California (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tehachapi_wind_farm_3.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tehachapi_wind_farm_3.jpg) reminds me of an old oil field, like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Oil_wells_just_offshore_at_Summerland,_California,_c.1915.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Oil_wells_just_offshore_at.... But as far as the new ones: I recently moved offices in Copenhagen, to a 5th-story office looking east towards the Øresund. I think the offshore wind farm there adds substantially to the view (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middelgrunden http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middelgrunden). It's especially nice on overcast, windy, gray days, when you can see the white turbines rotating in the fog. But it's nice on sunny days too, at least in my opinion. Here's a snapshot from my window: http://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-snc7/598966_10100473049926079_1195961214_n.jpg http://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-snc7/598966_1010047304... And if you get closer, e.g. at Amager Beach, it's even nicer (again imo). It's like a modernist kinetic sculpture or something, an aesthetically pleasing series of 20 massive but sleekly styled turbines in a row.
  - ashkav 14y ago
    isn't it funny that the first windmills are reminiscent of oil wells, and current solar projects (in the US) are large solar arrays, blending again with the existing large-scale infrastructure? maybe this similarity is lofty associated, but i find it interesting.
  - krschultz 14y ago
    The bigger ones seem to rotate slower which helps a lot aesthetically. I'm pretty sure the tip is still moving the same speed, but the RPM is lower.
- biehl 14y ago
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drakaal 14y ago
Visit somewhere in California where a pristine mountain side with trees and red rock was just 10 years ago, and not it is nothing but wall of spinning white blades of bird killers. Wind is like water. You can't just slow it down with your turbines and expect no environmental impact. Putting them on the windward side of a mountain reduces the rain fall on the opposite side. Birds die in the blades. It isn't all rainbows and butterflies.
- to3m 14y ago
  As these things go, it's one of the more unobtrusive options. Compare it to, for example, an open cast coal mine. (It's even probably cheaper to knock down the turbines than it is to fill the pit back in.)
- ars 14y ago
  Cats kill FAR FAR FAR more birds than windmills do. If you actually cared about birds you would support cat kills (not just sterilize and release). But few people do.
  - adventured 14y ago
    To support this point (and this is just in the US): http://www.npr.org/2013/01/29/170588511/killer-kitties-cats-kill-billions-every-year http://www.npr.org/2013/01/29/170588511/killer-kitties-cats-... "Previous studies had suggested that cats kill about 500 million birds a year. Marra's group came up with something very different. "We estimate that cats kill somewhere between 1.4 and 3.7 billion birds a year," Marra says. "For mammals, it's upward of about 15 billion." "Marra says based on those new figures, cat-caused mortality far exceeds deaths from other sources, like collisions with cars or wind turbines.
  - drakaal 14y ago
    How many Golden Eagles, Perigan Falcons, and Owls Do cats kill?
sliverstorm 14y ago
Do you know what they complained about? The view. You love technology. But not everybody does. Some people like to live in the city, some people like to live in the country. Some people like to keep technology from enveloping their entire lives. Is one viewpoint inherently more right than the other?

Bockit 14y ago

> ...throttle back their hydro plants and store more water behind dams for later use. I find the idea of using a dam as a battery quite interesting.

oellegaard 14y ago
I'm pretty sure this is done at a large scale in both Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. While storing energy have always been a huge problem, I'm surprised this is not more popular.
- gnaffle 14y ago
  This is correct. Norway exports power in wet seasons, and imports it in dry seasons. But if there is less rain and dam fill-up than expected, they will throttle down on production to save the water in order to sell it at a higher price later on.
- riffraff 14y ago
  AFAIR it's done in italy too (~1/5 of the national power is hydroelectric) and I am reasonably sure all the big plants work with dams/reservoirs, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entracque_Power_Plant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entracque_Power_Plant
- mpyne 14y ago
  Well it needs a lot of water (which can be problematic for the areas which solar is most competitive in) and a lot of unused area. It's a very reasonable solution when you meet those constraints though.
waterlesscloud 14y ago
A lot of hydroelectric in the US pumps the water back up at night (when demand is low) so that they can use it to generate electricity the next day. Just south of the Bay Area, you can see such a facility on the road between the 101 and the 5, at Pacheco Pass. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Luis_Reservoir http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Luis_Reservoir See also : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped_storage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped_storage

oellegaard 14y ago

> "who are smart enough to pay attention to the accomplishments of this small island on the North Sea." We're not an island* :-( * We do have 1419 islands, though.

alexholehouse 14y ago
That is breathtakingly poor journalism/general knowledge
- bliker 14y ago
  'murica
  - adventured 14y ago
    Ah yes, because most people in Denmark know whether Rhode Island is actually an island or not, and they know all about Oregon (or Oklahoma, or New Mexico or Nebraska or Ohio). I don't see how one journalist's mistake leads to that comment.
    - jeltz 14y ago
      Yeah, it is unfair to say all Americans know nothing about geography just because one journalist knew little geography and was too lazy to look it up. By the way Rhode Island makes a poor comparison since that is a trick question, it is called "Island" but isn't one. Denmark does not have "Island" in its name.
    - mpyne 14y ago
      Because it's considered poor form (if not racist or sexist) to attribute someone's mistakes on a whole population group... unless the population group in question is "American". It's probably a better problem to have than some of the other problems we might have though.
      - jchrisa 14y ago

pieter 14y ago

Off shore wind power is about 25% of the wind power capacity of Denmark, the rest are 'normal' wind turbines. However, they'll contribute more to the total energy output. Off-shore wind turbines generate about 35-50% of their maximum capacity on average, compared to 20-30% of normal wind turbines.

Systemic33 14y ago

Recently when there was a windy weather situation, Denmark produced enough power from wind turbines to cover 82%[1] of the entire power usage in denmark. [1] DANISH http://ing.dk/artikel/vindmoeller-slog-rekord-i-gaarsdagens-blaesevejr-157196 http://ing.dk/artikel/vindmoeller-slog-rekord-i-gaarsdagens-...

muratmutlu 14y ago

Can someone explain why Denmark would have to pay other countries to take excess electricity rather than getting paid for it?

waterlesscloud 14y ago
I'm not sure, but it seems like Enron must be involved there somewhere.
kolinko 14y ago
There are certain times when there is a surplus of energy in the network (usually at nights iirc). With a lack of good storage mechanisms, energy vendors need to actually pay companies to use the energy at certain times. Otherwise, the energy excess would damage the network. If Denmark doesn't have enough companies that could take the energy, they have to send the energy to be used up somewhere else. It's quite likely that at the same time in other countries a similar situation occurs, so nobody really wants the extra electricity. Hence Danes need to pay other countries to get rid of it.
- seunosewa 14y ago
  Can't they just switch off unneeded windmills?
  - mpyne 14y ago
    Possibly, but they'd have to be designed to be remotely controlled (possibly at an individual level). They'd also have to be specifically engineered to withstand the sudden reduction in countertorque when the windmill is removed from the grid and then to lock the blades against windmilling while shutdown. And of course, to reverse the whole process on command.
    - ams6110 14y ago
      I would assume the blades can be "feathered" so as to catch very little wind and not impart a rotational force, as on a prop-drive aircraft when one of the engines needs to be shut off. There has to be some way to take them out of services for e.g. maintenance.

kolinko 14y ago

Just imagine how many Bitcoins you'd mine with that.

venomsnake 14y ago

Also known as a single nuclear reactor. While I am all for renewables the real problem is storage and buffering. The solutions in these areas are improving but not nearly as fast as needed. A cheap supercapacitor with less than 10% daily discharge rate could go a long way in positioning renewables to shine.

AndreasFrom 14y ago
Well, a single nuclear reactor minus the waste that needs to be stored for thousands of years.
- venomsnake 14y ago
  Hmm ... it was more of a scale comparison, not endorcement of nuclear fission. But anyway breeders are a partial solution to that problem and we haven't actually put a lot of effort into the waste disposal.
- ars 14y ago
  Windmills make tons and tons of waste - there are entire mountains made from mine tailings and slag (obviously not all from windmills, but don't think windmills are free of waste). Nuclear power has much less waste.
Zigurd 14y ago
That's a good point that it amounts to a single nuclear reactor. It would be interesting to compare: Capital requirement Insurability Maximum damage to the environment in case of a disaster Decommissioning costs Maintenance costs Construction schedule
- straight_talk 14y ago
  Maximum damage to the environment in case of a disaster for a 1MW reactor with a lot of waste fuel stored on the site is rendering the Northern Hemisphere (where almost all such reactors are) inhabitable.

TomGullen 14y ago

Can someone explain why you would ever pay someone to take surplus power? Is it because they don't want it To go to waste? Otherwise can't they just get rid of it somehow?

joyeuse6701 14y ago
I suppose it is cheaper for them to pay another country to take the power and maintain the rates they are charging for energy than to have to pay the people back when it goes negative. They are trying to get their investment back. That's a good question and they've mentioned one solution being transferring the energy to Sweden or Norway and they'll dial back the hydros and store more water in their dams. Of course I wonder if they could just selectively put a windmill in neutral to solve the same problem.
david2777 14y ago
It's not a steady supply over power, it fluctuates with your supply and demand for it, so it takes work for another grid to take that power from you. If you send them power they have to scale their plants down to prevent the problem you're having. Then when your supply goes down and you no longer have an excess of power to send they have to scale their systems back up to make up for the power you're no longer sending. They can't store it or get rid of it easily. It's one of the reasons people don't like wind and solar power, it works great when the wind is blowing and the sun is out, but it fluctuates too much and causes heavy swings in power generation that have to be dealt with somehow.
ghouse 14y ago
If you are a nuclear power plant, you have very little operational flexibility. If there is too much electricity, it's less expensive to pay someone to take it than it is to reduce the output of your inflexible generating asset.
ars 14y ago
They are not paying for someone to take the power - that's poor journalism. It works like this: Every energy producer bids a price for their power, the lower your price the higher you are on the order book. Then energy consumers will meet the demand by buying from the producers in the order of their price. Once they have filled their power demand they pay everyone the price of the last price they needed to fill their needs. So by setting a negative price they ensure they are always on top of the order book - but they don't actually have to pay for their power since other power sources have positive prices, and that's the price that is actually paid.

btb 14y ago

And all those windmill parks are heavily subsidized, which contributes to the Danish electricity prices being the highest in all of EU[1], 0.3 euro per kwh. Its basically a state-guaranteed high yield for the pension funds etc that put them up, paid for by the consumers in DK. [1] http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php?title=File:Electricity_prices_for_households_consumers_2012s1.png&filetimestamp=20130219105040 http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index....

ttuominen 14y ago
It should be noted that globally, fossil fuels are also heavily subsidized. [1] [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/27/imf-want-to-fight-climate-change-get-rid-of-1-9-trillion-in-energy-subsidies/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/27/i...
snowwindwaves 14y ago
Wow, that's about 10x more than in USA And Canada (excluding Hawaii and Kentucky). I wonder what people would choose given the option between cheap and not from natural gas, as this is going to be the situation in USA for the next 20 years due to shale gas
- ams6110 14y ago
  It is very expensive, as are most things in Denmark. My relatives there tell me that at night they sit in a small room with a candle to avoid running the lights and heat.

mattangriffel 14y ago

Why did Denmark have to pay other countries to take its excess energy? What am I not getting here?

tiredofcareer 14y ago
Grid oversupply is bad (just as any overpowered circuit is generally bad). There isn't a way to dump power or store it, so they had to dump it on other countries who then had to adjust accordingly on their grid. You might think of it as a nice gesture, but it isn't; the other country has to power off plants or otherwise adjust to handle the excess as well. There isn't an "energy garbage can" or dummy load at power grid scale. Running a power grid is a 24x7 dance of supply and demand, which is why people that hate renewables like wind are quick to lament its variable nature. It's the same in high-capacity systems planning in our line of work; systems that have variable latency are a lot harder to plan capacity for than systems with fairly constant latency. Just substitute "supply" for "latency", and you're now a power grid operator.
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vilda 14y ago

Just in case you're wondering how a price for energy can be nagative: It is not. Someone else is paying full price for it. The producer is guaraneed to always sell the enegry into the grid at a fixed price. The market is broken.

vitobcn 14y ago

Denmark is the country within the European union with the highest penetration of wind power in electricity consumption (almost 26%). However, in absolute terms both Spain (22 GW) and Germany (29 GW) vastly exceed Denmark (4 GW) and are two of the largest "wind markets" worldwide (as of end 2011) [1]. In particular, Spain has made a tremendous effort investing in wind energy (tax incentives, subsidies, etc. were granted), and it's amazing to see that in about 15 years, this type of energy went from 0 to about 20% of the total energy produced within the country [2]. Including also the rest of renewables to the mix, it seems obvious that in the coming 15-20 years, it should be possible to generate more than 50% of energy from renewable sources, e.g. solar energy in Spain achieved power grid parity in terms of cost last December [3]. In spite of the current economic downturn, these are pretty amazing times we are living in! [1]: http://www.ewea.org/fileadmin/ewea_documents/documents/publications/statistics/Stats_2011.pdf http://www.ewea.org/fileadmin/ewea_documents/documents/publi... [2]: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/es/timeline/957d498ae7ff03d7e2b98930deb1c861.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/es/timeline/957d498ae7... [3]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterdetwiler/2012/12/26/solar-grid-parity-comes-to-spain/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterdetwiler/2012/12/26/solar-g...

potatos 14y ago
In the United States we have Iowa, where >24% of electricity last year came from wind, and where there's more nameplate capacity of wind than the entire demand of the nation of Denmark. For what it's worth.

SmokyBorbon 14y ago

Only 210 megawatts until Denmark gets time travel.

ok_craig 14y ago

I'm pretty naive on the science of these things, but I have a concern: is there any possibility that increasing use of wind energy could have negative affects on the environment by essentially taking energy out of our atmosphere? Could our winds gradually slow down over time? Maybe it's just such a small fraction that it doesn't matter. Or maybe wind energy is essentially another form of capturing solar energy, because the winds are created by temperature differences, which are created by the sun hitting the earth, and that energy is constantly renewed? I don't know, but I'm curious. Any insight about this would be appreciated.

alexholehouse 14y ago
I'd have thought amounts of energy involved are so vanishingly small compared to atmospheric wind in general that it makes no difference.
- jarek 14y ago
  A while ago we thought the same thing about greenhouse gas emissions or human activity raising global atmospheric temperatures. I like wind power, but that's not a very strong argument without numbers.
  - alexholehouse 14y ago
    No you're right (and nice comparison) - I just wanted to trigger conversation because someone had downvoted the question, which I thought was pretty unfair. I just didn't/don't have time to do any actual research to get hard numbers.
adventured 14y ago
The short answer is: no. Any windmill impact from changing wind patterns or reducing wind power is radically less than eg building homes (given we build millions of homes annually), or simply driving vehicles (of any sort, given the numbers of vehicles globally). You could never build enough windmills to cause a problem. The only real environmental concerns are killing animals (insects?), and construction / manufacturing related.

adventured 14y ago

Maybe this is a dumb question, but isn't there some industrial use that surplus energy spikes could be used for domestically? Water desalination perhaps, since it's energy intensive.

michael_miller 14y ago
The most compelling use case for excess energy is to store it. There's a big research area in developing batteries for temporary grid storage. Compared to standard batteries, the goal is to trade off weight for cost, so that it's practical to capture the delta between {peak demand, actual demand}. See [1] for such a battery. [1] http://www.stanford.edu/group/cui_group/papers/Yuan_EES_2013.pdf http://www.stanford.edu/group/cui_group/papers/Yuan_EES_2013...
- Intermernet 14y ago
  Thanks for that link, I hadn't seen that before. It seems similar (with different materials) to LMBC's (Now Ambri, http://www.ambri.com/ http://www.ambri.com/ ) battery tech. Are these things actually rolling out yet? Anyone know of any large scale deployments of this (or similar) tech ongoing, or planned for the near future?

drakaal 14y ago

Why didn't they just say Gigawatt? The author couldn't decide on the capitalization of "of" in the title so maybe they just didn't know 1000 Meg is a Gig.

aj700 14y ago

I'm English. I live in Denmark. Yes, on this, we win: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2240rank.html?countryName=Denmark&countryCode=da&regionCode=eur&rank=1#da https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

EEGuy 14y ago

A quick check on wind turbine design for power generation [1] confirms to my satisfaction that all wind turbines should be throttable down to zero electrical output and then with good mechanical brakes [2] taking away the remaining kinetic energy sufficient to stop then lock the rotor. I've read elsewhere (sorry, no reference) that stopping the rotor can be necessary in emergency windspeed conditions. Per [2]: > Let’s compare the emergency braking requirements of a >1.5 MW wind turbine under maximum wind conditions with >those of a 40-ton mining truck. Imagine driving a >fully loaded truck down a steep gradient of 25% (1:4) >at 85 mph when a road sign warns of a cliff a quarter >mile ahead. The engineering required for effective >braking in both cases is much the same. Braking for >the wind turbine is, in fact, more demanding. Beyond mechanical brakes, the available control strategies and actuators normally applied toward maximizing power output per [1] can instead be applied toward bringing the power output to zero and the rotor to a halt, such as: * Apply generator torque control (dumping power to the grid) sufficient to slow the blades down to near zero * Then or as the blades slow down, stall or furl the blades using pitch control * Apply the brakes to lock the rotor * Yaw the whole machine 90 degrees off the wind OK so if they're stoppable, what is up here? Others more familiar with Danish market, operators and regulatory conditions might speak better to this, but I'll surmise that the turbine operators get paid when they produce energy, whether Denmark needs it or not. So the turbine operators never stop their turbines, night nor day. When that creates an excess of energy the grid engineers must do something. The article mentioned slowing hydro output elsewhere and heating the water used locally for district heating. This creates an environment where there should be a financial incentive to create technologies for storage or highly variable use of this nightime and other times highly variable excess electrical energy. Hundred-megawatt data centers [3] with quickly variable compute capability come to mind, but making stored hot water hotter (the district heating 'dummy load' approach) seems to me a lot simpler, cheaper and immediately practical, if a bit wasteful of the low-entropy energy that electricity is. --- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine_design [2] http://news.altramotion.com/?p=242 http://news.altramotion.com/?p=242 [3] http://gigaom.com/2012/01/31/the-era-of-the-100-mw-data-center/ http://gigaom.com/2012/01/31/the-era-of-the-100-mw-data-cent...

vitaminj 14y ago

As a grid engineer, I find the Danish case to be somewhat unique because of their strong AC and DC interconnections to Germany and Sweden. Basically, they can free-ride on the large european grid (UCTE), which stretches from Portgual to Russia, to maintain network stability while increasing domestic wind penetrations above 50%. I think a more interesting case study is Ireland, which has far weaker interconnectors to the UK and operate mainly as an island network. Like Denmark, they are also trying to integrate large amounts of wind (a goal of 40% by 2020, which is equivalent to over 6GW peak), but unlike Denmark, Ireland also have to deal with the resulting stability issues. An EirGrid engineer I spoke to recently mentioned that frequency stability is already a big issue for them. The main solution proposed in a 2010 study [1] amounted to maintaining a sufficient operating inertial reserve, which would potentially mean curtailing wind generation at times. In the future, I would look to Ireland rather than Denmark for solutions to integrating more wind into the grid, because they are already at the pointy end of it. [1] EirGrid Facilitation of Renewables study, http://www.eirgrid.com/renewables/facilitationofrenewables/ http://www.eirgrid.com/renewables/facilitationofrenewables/