An article in the Los Angeles Times points out a problem that few proponents of green energy have considered: the existing power grid was not designed to deal with the fluctuations and unpredictability of green energy power sources.
As it is, the power grid is an extraordinarily complex and fragile system. An array of highly-trained engineers work alongside a complex of supercomputers to make sure that the power generated by plants is distributed without interruptions to the individuals and businesses that use it. In the current system, the power is generated in predictable amounts and at predictable times.
The major variables in the current power grid are on the user side. A user might use more power from one day to the next. He flips switches on and off at unscheduled times. The existing power grid is designed to make power available consistently for whenever an inconsistent user might need it. But green energy challenges that paradigm. More and more, the sources of green energy are even more unpredictable than the users’ demand:
Green energy is the least predictable kind. Nobody can say for certain when the wind will blow or the sun will shine. A field of solar panels might be cranking out huge amounts of energy one minute and a tiny amount the next if a thick cloud arrives.
Green energy experts are looking into ways of making green energy more feasible for the current grid. One of the most obvious ways has to do with storage. If the inconsistent variations of green energy were stored before they were distributed to the grid, the storage facilities could make sure that power was still available predictably.
One way or the other, it will cost a lot of money to reformat the grid for green energy. Most people consider the power grid to be part of the infrastructure of our economy (like the road system), and as such, most people think it is the civil government’s job to make it work well. Because of this, green energy fanatics want to place the burden of energy transformation on the shoulders of the civil government. But unforeseen difficulties with the power grid could make the transition to green energy prohibitively expensive. Does that mean it shouldn’t be done? I don’t think so.
I think the real solution here, and one of the most promising aspects of green energy, is the possibility of decentralizing the grid. If local users were encouraged to offset their energy usage with personal or local green energy collectors and electric storage facilities, many problems with the current grid would be solved. For one, if the sun stopped shining or the wind stopped blowing, local users would be the only ones affected. As it is, the centralized grid makes local outages a general problem.
Conservatives have traditionally been adversaries of the intrusive political apparatus that surrounds green energy. I think we need to rethink our strategies. Green energy could free our power infrastructure from centralization and re-introduce a level of local autonomy and self-sufficiency that has been greatly lacking in our society for many years. The problem with green energy just highlights the problems with centralized power. Green energy requires nuances of reaction that centralized systems cannot properly address. In the same way that local energy could fix these deficiencies, local government has the capacity to react to local situations in a more robust way. Increasing the funding to centralized systems to make them even more complex and far-reaching is not the solution to our problem. We need to utilize this opportunity to flank our opponents. Give them the green revolution the local way. It might be more of a revolution than they’re bargaining for.
You anti science kooks aren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer but did it even occur to you that science will figure out a way to make green energy work?
While I personally like the idea of energy choice, green and re-usable energy, and do hope things like hydrogen cell powered cars and such do become more available, I don’t like the idea of other forms of energy (coal, nuclear, gasoline, diesel etc.) being overpriced and shunned yet green energy shoved down our throats and make us accept it as the norm.
Interesting you mention hydrogen fuel cells. Greenies like Mr Bob love them because their exhaust is water vapor. But in their ignorance they don’t realize that the number one greenhouse gas is – wait for it – water vapor!
Ban dihydrogen monoxide! It’s bad for the environment!
You think you are clever don’t you ! I just took a 16 ounce glass over ice. Found it quite refreshing. I also find it practical for coffee, tea and YOUR Kool Aid.
I could be mistaken, but the fact he KNEW the term dihydrogen monoxide leads me to believe Physick was engaging in sarcasm.
For those that are not aware, the term dihydrogen monoxide (a scientifically valid name for WATER) was first used by a high school student in an experiment to see how many people would sign a petition to ban it, without bothering to learn what they were asking to ban. He used ‘true’ statements such as it being a major component in acid rain, and in industrial waste. I don’t recall if it was true, but I once heard a local government actually considered banning dihydrogen monoxide until someone told them it was water.
actually, I’m in favor of MORE nuclear energy.
Mr. Barbie, please don’t talk about subjects you know nothing about, and use words like science, and energy you don’t understand. With enough money, one can get just about anything to work, but the consumers pocket is not that deep.
Do you morons from the “flat earth society” actually believe you understand things like science???
Get your hand out of your pants, Bob, and go back to the basement.
That was a good one.
There you go, you ole adolescent name caller.
You just cannot help yourself, can you BoobE?
We have DEMONSTRATED more understanding in these comments than you have in several months of comments.
You are absolutely right!
When the technology is ready for prime-time, then AND ONLY THEN should it be embraced. BTW, I’m a physicist and obviously NOT an anti-science kook…
If you’re a physicist I would assume you would understand that their are scientific breakthroughs yet to come that could make green energy feasible.
The operative word being could, which always also implies could not!
“,,,scientific breakthroughs yet to come that could make green energy feasible.”
COULD, not, WILL.
“their are scientific breathroughs”
There is your education shining through again, BoobE.
…..and when they do, and if they are a CHOICE, then so be it.
Physics is against that.
Sorry Bob, science can’t make something work that is just simply impractical. Gee, if we only had a huge storage facility for electricity that could release it into the grid to be instantaneously transmitted down the line to where it’s needed, or a wind turbine that would operate continuously no matter where we are, or large amounts of solar energy with huge solar panel installations that can store all that energy regardless of usage. If I only had a warp engine I could go to the nearest star. Lets get real here, MONEY is required, lots and lots of money and it likely will be utterly wasted on an impractical dream. But then again you greenies don’t care if there are major power outages as long as you’re not the ones to freeze to death in winter, right? Or would you be glad to make that sacrifice for the sake of not using the evil coal, oil, or gas?
But judging from your first sentence you must consider yourself much more knowledgeable than us, the hoi polloi.
being much more knowledgeable than a bunch of dimwits is kinda like the one eyed man being the king of the blind!
Oh man, keep on dreaming. You can’t massage reality into your fantasy.
By that standard, you MAY eventually work your way up to servant. You are not merely blind, but WILLFULLY blind.
Uh Huh, yeah.
But they haven’t yet, and why should we trust green energy until it can provide 100% of our electricity needs?
Anti science kooks (by the way, you are a puerile name caller) has nothing to do with it.
Have you ever heard of being practical?
You, of course are not.
Hello you ole atheist (skin sack full of rotting meat) liberal gay man/woman.
I think the real problem is having inefficient, costly and mostly nonfunctional shoved down our throats by a government machine that is incompetent at best and deceptive at worst. And I too love science and math.
Science found a way to get rid of dependence on wind and solar. In case you didn’t notice, windmills are older than the US Constitution.
I do not believe that Green Energy was meant for the good of America, like almost everything that has come about in the last five years. Scientists like Obama, think that they are the smartest people on the block.They make the world go round and round, there is nothing that they do not know, they may have even created the universe, cheating GOD out of HIS marvelous works. How does our” KING” fit into all of this, it literally smells of him.
Agree, and these wonderful “scientists” like Al Gore have the fix in……
The number one source of gases in the atmosphere are the oceans.
The Oceans are risind due to the end of an ice age and evil folks playing with HAARP .
/Easy Soluion upgrade and modernize the Power Grid and who says that Green Energy is UNPREDICTABLE Some oil or coal company shill!?
Are you really that stupid, Michael?
The wind is not constant …. ask any pilot or sailor.
The sun is not constant either …. clouds, night, and atmosphere all have a serious effect on solar radiation. Solar generation is only truly effective with the sun is with 30 degrees of peak location …. or have you never heard of a sine curve?
He probably has never lived near wind turbines. If you travel down the Columbia River Gorge, you will see windmills along there. They do not run all the time. Hood River, Oregon is the wind-surfing capital of the country and known world wide for it’s winds. But it still doesn’t blow all the time. The same is true with the Palm Springs area. They have had windmills there for years and years. But if you go past them, there are many times when the wind does not blow.
I will admit that the sun is a little more consistent if you happen to live in the right area. The deserts of the Southwest do have a whole lot of sun, and pretty consistent, too. Not at night, how ever, so some sort of battery would be necessary. The Frito-Lay plant in Casa Grande, where Sun Chips are made, is powered by the sun. Yes, all of your Sun Chips are made with power produced by the sun. And about your sine curve comment, it is possible to have solar cells move to follow the sun.
This are power sources that needs a lot of work and a lot of perfecting the entire grid problem. Good luck folks, and I hope we have enough money.
People who have tried using solar energy have said this.
It is not working.
The ONLY way that “green energy” will ever work is if a MASSIVE storage capability can be developed that will allow energy to be stored (with little to no loss), easily and infinitely, when there is an excess amount of energy being generated – and released back to the grid (again, with little to no loss), easily and rapidly, when more energy is needed than is being generated at that time.
This is the reason that “green” energy will certainly work on a small, one, to a few homes sized, scale … but will never work on a large, city sized scale without having large gas or coal-fired power generation plants up and running at idle to be kicked in at a moments notice. The problem with having the coal or gas fired power plants up, running, on stand-by is all of the energy being wasted without producing electricity.
So, now, the grid utilizes a very small amount of “green” energy and has a much more difficult task adjusting the power generation to demand.
No Michael, not some shill. It’s pretty ignorant to make such as statement. Unpredictability originates from the unpredictability of the wind and clear skies. Trying to make this locally predictable, really? Does that even make any sense except to say that if you have no consistent wind or if you have more cloudy, rainy weather you’re just SOL? Man, as an engineer I find this green crap to be so idiotic. I want you greenies to do without power and I’ll have mine, thank you very much.
Actually that seems to me to be the only way to make wind and solar work. I have done a lot of research on the subject and the most efficient way to use wind/solar seems to be with a home-based grid-tie system. When your “green” energy is producing more electricity than you are using, it feeds back to the grid. When it is producing less than you are consuming, the grid backs you up. A law was passed in Nevada to allow county governments to subsidize the installation of such a system, with the payback attached to the property tax, so that even if you sell the property the new owners would still have to pay back the subsidy. A great idea, unfortunately, the housing market crash, which was much worse here than pretty much anywhere else, left the counties so cash-strapped they haven’t been able to fund the program, or I would have already done it!
A power company that sold solar power to home owners in Kalifornia after screwing around with them for over 5 years and have now asked the home owners to shut down their solar tie in due to fire hazards,
there have already been cases of where the solar panels shorted out and started the homes on fire.
The power company sold these solar panels to the home owners and let them pay them off over time.
Now, less than 5 years later, the same power company is telling homeowners that they (the power company) cannot repair them, and the best thing to do is just turn them off.
Chalk up another loss for solar energy.
Does that mean that tthe Power Company
Actually, green energy, or users producing their own energy, is the ONLY bastion against EMP and solar flare catastrophes. We are over a century behind where we could be, all because JP Morgan refused to fund Nikola Tesla’s plan for world-wide clean energy from a single earth transmitter. Morgan was invested in oil and didn’t like the idea of giving energy away. Investors then as today realize that free energy cannot be metered, in other words it gives consumers too much FREEDOM and without a tether or enrichment of the 1%. Scientists & ivory towers still scoff at the possibility while hundreds of backyard inventors and patents show the way.
If EMP happens, all devices that use electricity will stop.
I have no idea how you think green energy will prevent this.
Green Energy, as it stands right now can only provide about 12% of our electricity requirements.
Who gets to tell the other 88% that they won’t get electricity?
The reality is that “Green Energy” isn’t green. “Green Energy” relies on rare earths and energy intensive industries to create the solar panels and wind turbines. The EPA shutdown the only rare earths mine in this country because of its toxic and radioactive waste products. Now guess where we get all of those materials, India and China, neither has anywhere near the environmental regulation that the US has. I guess the environmental movement thinks it’s alright to ship our pollution overseas.
The authors’ idea to solve the problem of concentrated green supplies, unfortunately won’t work. It sounds good, but the reality is it just won’t work. Power companies will still have to build enough conventional power plants to cover the existing load. The problem with that is that they cannot come instaniously on-line to make up the lost supply, thereby causing power outages. Another author chasing a pipe-dream.
Apparently you folks aren’t avid Star Trek fans and followers. You never see or hear of any fuel or energy problems there, unless one of the starships anti-matter containers gets compromised, then all hell breaks loose. So, if they can do it, why can’t we. We all know they couldn’t show it on TV and in the movies if it wasn’t so, so, we should get ready and get moving on this thing. If we don’t hurry, those nasty BORG guys will come and assimilate us.
I have to respectfully disagree with the author. Decentralization will not change the equation one bit, at least not in a favorable way.
Here’s why: People are not going to cut their connection to the grid. While a solar array or a wind turbine in the back yard may be a good way to cut the electric bill, for most families, a system that would supply their power demand 100% of the time with storage capacity for when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow would be hugely expensive and would likely piss off the neighbors. So we put in a cost effective system that complies with zoning and stay on the grid. Now suppose, as Minkoff would have it, large numbers of households do the same, what happens when the wind stops? The grid suddenly has to take up the slack. If the coal fired boilers aren’t already up and running, blackout!
Before we start work on a solution, we need to understand the problem. Reading the article, I can see where a layperson would get the impression that all the green power being generated is overloading the system. This is not the case, if there is no place for the current to go, the turbines and solar panels simply aren’t doing any work, in short the sun and wind energy is being wasted. So why not shut down the coal fired plants and use the clean green energy Obama is spending our tax dollars on. Once you shut down a boiler it takes a long time to get it back up to temperature, the only to have conventional power plants available on a moments notice is to have them up and running.
So now we’re back to the storage issue. Minkoff is half right, the only way we will ever make efficient use of solar and wind energy is if we find a way to store the ENERGY not necessarily the electricity. Given current technology, storing megawatts of electricity just doesn’t seem practical or safe. My thought is to store the energy as hydrogen, through electrolysis, and then get back to developing hydrogen fuel cells for homes and transportation.
As for putting the civil government in charge of the project, that’s what is the matter now. If politicians were electrical engineers, they could probably get honest jobs. Problem is, the only thing our pols are good at are lying, collecting bribes and spending our money. It will take innovation, outside the box thinking and a free market to make green energy work, Obama is to arrogant, too stupid and too busy paying off his pals to listen to a crackpot like me.
“I think the real solution here, and one of the most promising aspects of green energy, is the possibility of decentralizing the grid. If
local users were encouraged to offset their energy usage with personal or local green energy collectors and electric storage facilities, many problems with the current grid would be solved. For one, if the sun stopped shining or the wind stopped blowing, local users would be the only ones affected. As it is, thecentralized grid makes local outages a general problem.” The above paragraphs taken from the article implies that if a local user was without power it would not be a problem. Wait , does that mean if it were your local area it still would NOT be a problem. ( Oh …I thought so ) The real problem is that our power grids are marginal / fragile and the EPA is still doing everything in their power to actually destroy / reduce our very small margin . Coal fired power plants are being forced to close due to overly restrictive ,unattainable limits and faulty data with regard to risk / reward of maintaining existing plants . This same faulty data prevents the construction of new coal powered plants ,as the restrictions make it too expensive to even attempt compliance. All of this means drastic increases In the cost of electrical power. Following that is the potential for ( almost assured ) rolling blackouts that will not have power restored within hours , maybe weeks ,or even months.
I have a hybrid 12v system in my camper trailer. 300W solar plus 300W wind generator. Everything inside the camper has been converted to 12v only. Where I live, there are more cloudy days than sunny ones, and more windy days than windless days. I have never been without electricity, but running a few lights, a TV, and a 12v refrigerator is FAR different than supplying electricity to the masses using this system. Industrial plants, suck up huge voltage/watts and that takes a LOT of those wind generators, killing eagles and other birds to make enough electricity to provide for a SMALL town. Just sayin’.
dcartmill
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The following quotation is faulty in it’s basic premise.
“I think the real solution here, and one of the most promising aspects of green energy, is the possibility of decentralizing the grid. If
local users were encouraged to offset their energy usage with personal or local green energy collectors and electric storage facilities, many problems with the current grid would be solved. For one, if the sun stopped shining or the wind stopped blowing, local users would be the only ones affected. As it is, thecentralized grid makes local outages a general problem.” The above paragraphs taken from the article implies that if a local user was without power it would not be a problem. Wait , does that mean if it were your local area it still would NOT be a problem. ( Oh …I thought so ) The real problem is that our power grids are marginal / fragile and the EPA is still doing everything in their power to actually destroy / reduce our very small margin . Coal fired power plants are being forced to close due to overly restrictive ,unattainable limits and faulty data with regard to risk / reward of maintaining existing plants . This same faulty data prevents the construction of new coal powered plants ,as the restrictions make it too expensive to even attempt compliance. All of this means drastic increases In the cost of electrical power. Following that is the potential for ( almost assured ) rolling blackouts that will not have power restored within hours , maybe weeks ,or even months
The reason wind and solar are no major energy producers today is because they do not work, they are unreliable. Our civilization depends on reliable energy.
YOU CANNOT BUILD A RELIABLE ENERGY SUPPLY FROM UNRELIABLE ENERGY SOURCES.
Green energy is only useful AT the end user as ancillary power that can offset drawing power from the grid. Doing green energy locally, as in a small town is only making the problem smaller but just as real. If used only at the end user site, then the end user can draw from the grid when the in-house green energy fails to produce, in which case no one fails, ever, due to green energy.
Wind and solar are not green in any way, as they utilize rare earth elements and recyclable materials and technology and extended infrastructure and large environmental footprint and extended environmental damage and constant maintenance and relatively short lifetimes. To even call these green energy beggars the intelligence of those pushing energy sources that were abandoned previously as they do not work.
ANOTHER GOVERNMENT F–K UP , WELL WHAT ELSE DID YOU EXPECT FROM WASHINGTON LIBS, OH YES A GOOD SCREWING IS ON THE WAY FROM NOBAMA AND HIS SOCIALIST CO HORTS, BEND OVER AND GRAB THE ANKLES.
STUPIUD IS AS STUPID WASHINGTON DOES, HEY THEY ARE THE SMARTEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD IN WASHINGTON, JUST AS NOBAMA, THE SMARTEST PRESIDENT EVER, ( MY ASS)..DONKEYS BREED IN WASHINGTON, BET ON IT, TO SCREW US.
The green energy will be rolled out just like Obamacare was, no testing, only lies and promises. Just wait and see how much Obama and the Democrats care about our loss of electricity or how much more it costs us!! They probably have their own generators – the ones that the ‘ordinary’ people can’t afford!!!
You are crazy author, I need power when I need it and expect to get it.
Green Energy is not very “green”. Windmills kill endangered birds by the thousands, and the manufacture of Solar cells cause more pollution than Coal fired power generation !!!!!