[Yesterday: 3 miles on the greenway]<\/p>\n
We drove home from Oak Ridge yesterday, so I am back in my regular spot doing my regular stuff.<\/p>\n
Before going on this trip I had learned some interesting stuff at the office.\u00a0 I work at an electric utility and they are looking at moving more and more toward “renewable” energy sources.\u00a0 The presentation was about battery storage.\u00a0 It is possible to buy big shipping-container-sized battery units.\u00a0 It takes a lot of them to do anything serious.\u00a0 I think he said a unit that size was good for 2 MWh, two hours at one mega-watt output.\u00a0 I think that is the right figure.\u00a0 A small coal-fired power plant is 200 MW, so to replace your power plant for a one hour break would require a hundred of them.\u00a0 That’s not a very impressive figure.\u00a0 And they are lithium batteries so there are other environmental implications related to production, storage and disposal.\u00a0 It was an interesting talk.<\/p>\n
But the part I wanted to talk about was curtailment.\u00a0 The guy said that in some power supplier agreements there will be payment to the supplier if the energy is not used.\u00a0 For example, if you are buying from a wind farm and the wind is blowing strongly, if you don’t take all that you have contracted to take, you may be looking at some serious expenses.\u00a0 You may even have to pay someone on the grid to take it off of your hands.\u00a0 He linked that to tax incentives in a way I didn’t quite catch.\u00a0 Something about, if the wind producer doesn’t produce then his tax incentive is smaller (based on production?) so he’s going to lose money not only because you aren’t buying but because he isn’t producing.\u00a0 So the rate for the energy you _don’t_ use can be much, much higher than for the energy you do use.<\/p>\n
That was a new one on me.\u00a0 The coal or gas guys, you buy the fuel and you burn it and that’s all.\u00a0 But now you’re going to pay for what you don’t use.<\/p>\n
Ok, starting up a coal power plant is a big process, and their efficiency is best if you are running it near maximum output.\u00a0 With natural gas it is quicker to start up and the efficiency is not so much an issue.\u00a0 We have a mix of coal, gas, hydro, wind and a little bit of solar.\u00a0 The bigger your proportion of renewables, the more this kind of thing becomes a problem. \u00a0 It is up to the executive-level people to keep all of this stuff in mind as they do load forecasting.<\/p>\n
The problems all happen because you can’t economically store electricity.\u00a0 If you could take all of the wind energy and store it for when you need it, the curtailment issue would go away.\u00a0 So back to batteries, pumped-storage-hydro and other technologies.\u00a0 The guy who comes up with a clean, efficient, large scale method of storing electricity will really be making a big breakthrough.<\/p>\n
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Today’s picture – we stopped in Fort Payne, Alabama and ate at a nice place<\/a> and did a bit of browsing in an antique store.\u00a0 Both were in an old mill building that has been re-purposed.\u00a0 Here is a door which I found interesting.\u00a0 It hangs on wheels on a descending ramp and it has counter weights.\u00a0 A self-closing factory door.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/SelfClosingDoor-700x525.jpg\")
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