Big wind to the rescue
Contact energy’s plans to built a big momma (650 MW) wind farm in the Waikato is exactly the sort of thing we need to respond to ever rising oil prices and greenhouse gas emissions. A mini-me (100 MW) gas fired plant will also tag along, which is OK I suppose as it can be fired up in 10 minutes on occasion when the wind’s not blowing. Let’s hope they take a softly-softly approach to the consent so we get some more home grown energy online before oil doubles in price again.
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October 18th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
The turbines will require continual repairs and maintenance which will make it labour intensive and as we move to a higher waged knowledge economy the costs will skyrocket. When the novelty wears off and we realise wind energy is a very expensive short term form of energy production will the “investors” clean up the mess or will it be left to you know who? Yet another thing we can put off for a generation (excuse the pun) and let our kids pick up the tab and clean up the mess, great.
October 18th, 2007 at 7:40 pm
So, burn more coal, eh, Kevin? The solution that will last for generations - if you know what I mean!!!
October 18th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
No I dont. Firstly a retraction: I have since talked to an electrical engineer who says that wind is a very viable alternative at present used a lot in europe and we are quite a long way behind the play. I am still a bit concerned that the full long term consequences have not been factored inbut it looks like a good alternative at present, as opposed to solar panels that are unlikely ever to be cost effective.
But, yes for a small country like NZ we should be seriously considering using coal for energy generation, although I would prefer it to be directly converted rather than go through the electricity step. We should be concentrating on the things we can change and advocating the large nations to do their bit for the things we cant change. We certainly should stop exporting our coal because it could last us a long time if and when we need it.
I would advocate one genration of using whatever means we need to change ourselves to an energy efficient clean green high economy. If that means we will effieiently use our coal for the next 100 years, so be it. We can do more good in the world being a rich nation that languishing at the bottom of the slippery rungs of the OECD fighting over “equity issues”.
October 18th, 2007 at 9:06 pm
Coal as a means of transitioning to a clean green economy? Are you kidding?
Sorry Kevin, generally you seem quite clued up, but here you’ve flip-flopped over wind in the space of an hour and a half…
What I want to know is, what brand of windmills are they buying? German, Danish or American? How does this dent the country’s current account deficit? Why not use home-grown technology and manufacturing, and boost the prospects of exporting cutting-edge technology, by using the Windflow 500?
(full disclosure : I own shares in Windflow. And so should you.)
October 18th, 2007 at 9:43 pm
Yes, such a shame that it will take about 5 years to get resourse concent, if they get it at all because of the RMA, that green party supported act. Oh the irony!
October 18th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
well actually Nick,
many wind farms in NZ find it easy to get resource consent, for example look at the list of wind farms (it shows ones that are in operation, under construction or in the resource consent process):
http://www.windenergy.org.nz/FAQ/proj_dom.htm
of the 12 projects submitted for resource consent, 4 are in process, 2 in appeal and 6 are approved.
or check out the GreenPeace interactive map of wind power in NZ
http://www.yes2wind.co.nz/maps/dynamic7.asp
and according to Idiot Savant,
http://norightturn.blogspot.com/2007/10/more-wind_16.html
this scheme “has a good chance of gaining resource consent - there are no outstanding landscape issues, and Environment Waikato has been pretty good about consenting windfarms (they’ve already consented two further down the coast at the Kawhia harbour)”
so, no irony here in the real world, sorry to disappoint.
October 18th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
Kevin is right however to point out that wind turbines need repair and maintenance though, but the thing is, so do other forms of electricity generation. Personally I trust the electricity generation companies to make the decision about whether it is cost-effective to build wind power stations or whether it will lose them money.
But by the speed which Contact, Meridian and Genesis are announcing wind power stations all over the place, I would say that they don’t seem to share any of the worries that Kevin expresses in his first comment.
October 18th, 2007 at 10:24 pm
What about Makra? The one in Wellington, where we have the strongest wind in the world? That one took forever to get resourse consent, and was nearly abandonned during the process due to rising cost. It doesnt matter what Enviroment Waikato thinks. All it takes is a few angry residents to start a court case.
And what about the big power line going up to Auckland, that very nearly didnt get through, and if it hadnt then they would have had to have built coal power stations near Auckland. Then there is the Marine education center on the Wellington south coast that was declined (nothing to do with electricity i know but it would have been a great asset to an otherwise barren stretch of coast).
October 18th, 2007 at 10:31 pm
The maintenance aspect is of course a strong reason to favour local technology… which has been designed for local conditions. [end of spam]
October 18th, 2007 at 10:33 pm
do you mean the Meridian WestWind project? According to my sources above the resource consent was lodged in July 2005 and the project was approved after appeal to the environment court on May 2007.
22 months. Not 5 years.
Meridian is now moving into the construction phase. Generates enough power for 100,000 homes. Status: Approved - Awaiting construction
October 18th, 2007 at 10:41 pm
I dont necessarily trust homespun highly subsidised energy generation companies to do anything other than the current government’s bidding. If they make a mistake they will get bailed out by the taxpayer because there’s always more where that come from.
I have no idea what I fell into toady - I know exactly what you were talking about.
So I take it that the people who would not want to use coal as a form of energy would rather keep selling it to China and let tem burn it fast or join Sue Kedgely at a basket weaving bee once we’re in the third world. Option one has some merit if we had a government who would let business keep the coal money so they could re-invest in clean green industry. Long term I’d be surprised if it was a better option than keeping the coal for ourselves but you may be right.
Its not either/or - we may need to use both since we’ve squandered the last 15-20 years of good economic performance in building our clean lean green industrial capacity.
October 18th, 2007 at 11:22 pm
luckily basket weaving will not be required, according to Idiot-Savant who has added up the numbers NZ has “almost 1400MW of new wind within the next five or six years if everything goes through. Add Contact’s 650MW monster into that, and we’re looking at 2000 MW. This is well in excess of forecast demand growth, and should mean we meet that 90% renewable by 2025 target with ease.”
So, no need to burn the coal.
I vote, leave it in the ground to use for future chemistry or keep it until its really worth something and sell it overseas to pay for imports.
Oh and to pre-empt anyone that says “the wind doesn’t blow all the time”, there are many different ways of storing wind generated electricity for calm days … from pumping hydro power water upslope to compressed air or refrigeration.
October 18th, 2007 at 11:45 pm
Kevin,
I too have been talking to an electrical engineer, and was surprised to hear that if wind farms were distributed around New Zealand, they could reliably continuously generate 15% or more of their maximum electricity production, which evidently is quite good. This means that for 2GW of wind generation capacity, you could pretty much guarantee 300MW at any time, and would often get more. You wouldn’t need to store energy.
This really surprised me, because I would have thought that there would be times when it was calm over the whole country. However, upon further contemplation, the length of New Zealand probably works in its favour, because if there is an anticyclone with associated light winds over the north of the country, it can still be quite windy in the south.
Perhaps I have listened too much to wind power detractors, who always state that wind power can’t provide base load generation capacity. It would seem, for New Zealand at least, this is not the case. In any event, there is probably enough hydro power to provide base load electricity.
With regards your idea of slowly burning coal for domestic use, this simply won’t work, because once CO2 is in the atmosphere, it takes a very long time to be removed. The best it will do is slow down the rate of climate change.
With regards the cost, it is either pay for this type of technology (which might not be such a great cost in any case), or have a very bleak future because of global warming (and the fact the big emitters may not be doing enough does not make it morally right for small emitters to do nothing).
October 19th, 2007 at 12:29 am
Jeanette’s press release in an unneccesary example of “lies, damned lies, and statistics”. Jeanette’s basic argument is sound and the incompetence of these ministries is without doubt. There is no good reason to compare the current seasonal price spike with estimates of annual average price.
It’s bad enough that the government’s predictions are one/third below the actual average annual price. It hardly does GPs credibility any good to exagerate the numbers simply because it lets you say “less than half”, even if this does make for snappier headlines.
October 19th, 2007 at 1:09 am
Not all of Aotearoa/NZ is “behind with the play” regarding wind generation as Kevin assumes.
Like Alistair, I have shares in Christchurch based “Windflow Technology” (Mine date “way back”.)
Designed and made in New Zealand for local conditions (and with Canterbury Nor’Westers in mind), the “torque limiting gearbox” allows the units to function in “marginal” wind gust conditions.
The blades, made from laminated NZ grown macrocarpa, are smaller and stronger than imported units.
The two bladed design makes it possible for two complete units to be transported on one truck … Once again, with NZ conditions in mind.
The units are visually less intrusive than larger imported designs, and can be located nearer to populated areas and on smaller sites.
Shareholders meetings and field days are “not to be missed” occasions.
October 19th, 2007 at 8:56 am
“This is well in excess of forecast demand growth” if we stick to basket weaving as we do now. (if Idiot is right of course). But if we dont stick to basket weaving and try harder to become a sustainable country then we may need more poser. For example one possibility is to use our coal to run iron smelters to produce our own windmills and turbines.
Some wind always blows so those arguments about “what if the wind doesnt blow” are self evidently spurious. But pumping water back up hill purely to store energy? Madness, when we have energy stored as coal. Phase the changes in - reduce coal, increase other sources - dont make it either/or.
I vote get is out of the ground when we need it so we dont become a country full of head officies and government bureaucracy and so we dont need to export our prime land and become a nation of servants for wealthy retirees who have made their monehy overseas.
October 19th, 2007 at 10:17 am
um, don’t have anything more to say about coal, but I just want to point out that it is absolutely not “madness” to store energy by pumping water uphill (in times of low demand) so that it can be used in hydro-electric generation (in times of high demand). “Pumped storage” schemes are common in many places around the world, including my favourite, Ben Cruachan in the highlands of Scotland.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Cruachan
http://www.scotland.org/about/entertainment-and-sport/features/busines s/ben-cruachan.html
http://encyclopedia.farlex.com/Ben+Cruachan+hydro-electric+power+schem e
October 19th, 2007 at 10:29 am
Kevyn, I fail to see what is wrong with Jeanette’s PR in your eyes. The less than half quote is:
“In December 2005, the Reserve Bank’s prediction was that the price right now would be US$40 a barrel - less than half what it actually is.”
what is wrong with saying that?
Jeanette also gives 5 other government prediction figures: $68, $59, $66, $54 and $60. Are you annoyed because she didn’t specify the fraction of those to today’s price as well?
I agree it would be misleading to only give the $40 figure, but it is surely good science to specify all the different figures that government officials have given and the dates they gave them.
October 19th, 2007 at 10:55 am
Stuey, you are unnecessarily wasting the planet’s resources for your convenience instead of coming up with more efficient alternaatives - that’s the mad part.
October 19th, 2007 at 10:58 am
Most of the detractors of wind energy on this blog are ironically the same people who proclaim to support efficient “market” solutions.
This windfarm is an example of a market solution. Given there are no subsidies for wind, Contact has obviously sat down and calculated that the wind farm is a good investment. I’m sure their financial analysis of the wind farm took into account things such as maintenance.
Just because wind energy is environmentally friendly does not mean its uneconomic. Quite the contrary. As someone with experience in economic analysis of wind projects for a major energy generator, I am confident the economics of wind projects in NZ stack up very nicely indeed.
So the market has identified wind as a cheap source of energy and we should all be the happier for it. All you negative armchair detractors are laughable …
October 19th, 2007 at 11:00 am
All the other countries which are developing wind power are trying to figure out ways to work with it’s variable generation once they have more than 10-20% wind on the grid. There are quite a few ways of dealing with this and various countries are taking different approaches.
New Zealand is completely different because it gets 60% of it’s electricity from hydro at present, which is the perfect backup for wind. Store as much energy as you like, just turn on the tap when the wind stops blowing.
Seriously, it’s wind heaven out there, we don’t even have to subsidise it in this country. Windflow will be amazing in time, but they just don’t have the track record of the european companies. I think they should make a 1MW model and developers might take them a bit more seriously, who wants to wire in 1200 turbines when you can put up 200 instead?
…or, I’ve just had a new idea. Burn as much coal as possible and buy shares in floating houses?
October 19th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
Couldn’t agree more Tom-o-tron. Cool name BTW.
October 19th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
tom-o-tron,
I suspect that when we think of today’s wind generation we automatically tend to think in terms of the Southern Hydro model with its large generators which are long distances from the final consumers of the electricity. (We tend to forget the resultant wastage of the long lines.)
A mix of different sized genrerators in different locations is the way of the future. Smaller units can be closer to population centres.
I look forward to a time when I can tap into a wind generator close to my house … maybe even on my roof or in my own garden … and that I can feed the excess generation back into the National Grid, thus reducing my power bill.
October 19th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
Kevin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectric_power
There is over 90 GW of pumped storage in operation world wide, which is about 3 % of global generation capacity. Pumped storage plants are characterized by long construction times and high capital expenditure.
Pumped storage is the most widespread energy storage system in use on power networks. Its main applications are for energy management, frequency control and provision of reserve.
http://www.electricitystorage.org/tech/technologies_technologies_pumpe dhydro.htm
Greens DO have a secret that the main stream media has been extremely careful not to uncover.
A lot of us know EXACTLY what we are talking about.
That doesn’t suit the prejudices of the MSM, so its still a secret.
Don’t tell anyone.
respectfully
BJ
October 19th, 2007 at 8:11 pm
Tom-O-Tron
The floating house idea… probably stinks in reality.
http://tinyurl.com/skvoh
Not that anyone would ever believe us about it.
Breath while you still can.
respectfully
BJ
October 19th, 2007 at 8:53 pm
Floating houses is just hysteria. There are problems in this world which will get us before we see homes floating away.
Well BJ thermodynamically its a waste, but it may have a small place in smoothing out the electricity supply. So you know a bit about what your are talking…. and you know what the say about a little bit on knowledge…
October 19th, 2007 at 11:56 pm
Kevin, I’m sure your parting comment has crossed the minds of many who have been reading your contributions to date. I dare say we all manage that feat from time to time, which is as good a reason any for why the pot shouldn’t call the kettle carbon encusted.
October 20th, 2007 at 1:08 am
On the issue of pumped storage, here is a despicable thing that the Australians have started doing:
There is a drought in many areas of Australia. This means the Snowy hydro scheme is restricted in what it can generate (not enough water). Electricity can be sold for a lot more during peak hours, than during the night. So, during the night, electricity generated from burning coal is used to pump water into the Snowy hydro dams. This is then used to generate electricity at peak times. The reason for doing this is not primarily because there is a shortage of electricity at peak times; it is because a profit can be made by buying cheap off peak power and reselling it during peak hours. The same company which does this, advertises their electricity as “100% renewable”.
OK, I can understand things like this being done for engineering considerations, but to simply do it to make a quick profit at the expense of the environment is not on as far as I’m concerned. Peak hour electricity usage is predictable, it would be more efficient to generate extra electricity at peak hours by burning more coal than to use pumped storage.
October 20th, 2007 at 2:26 am
Kevin
Thermodynamically WHAT is a waste? The pumped storage? The conversion efficiencies actually work out pretty well. When you have a resource like wind (or tide) that is not perfectly regular or is cyclical in nature you have to store energy to give a smoothed supply. Not sure what your complaint about this process is, but your comment was that this was madness.
You don’t get 100% for ANY form of storage, but pumping water uphill isn’t that lossy and overall the efficiency, reliability and hysteresis tends to favor the solution where it is practical (generally where there is water and a decent upper reservoir available). That it is economically feasible is evidenced by its broad uptake.
There is a reasonably good alternative here in NZ, where we get rather more wind than most. A good transmission line infrastructure and excess capacity of wind turbines can allow wind in one place to become power somewhere else, this doesn’t store anything anywhere but answers the demand to supply matching problem.
Explain to me please, how YOU expect to store electricity?
Unless you treat me to some understanding of your objection I cannot explain this to you any better. Clearly you don’t know me very well.
Yet.
As far as things that will “get” us first, yes… there is peak oil and perhaps this will help you understand how bad THAT can be for this planet.
http://www.paulchefurka.ca/WEAP/WEAP.pdf
Though I reckon he makes a couple of minor errors, the overall premise is sound. I make it a bit smoother and not quite so nasty…. closer to 2 billion for a final number than the 1 billion he estimates… but that still makes for a lot of excess death.
So we may well not have to worry about global warming. A nuclear winter can prevent it quite decisively.
Leave the coal and the oil in the ground for our kids to burn IF THEY think it is a good idea. They’re going to need it a hell of a lot more than we do.
Greens look further into the future than any other party…. and we know more than you seem to realize.
respectfully
BJ
October 20th, 2007 at 3:38 am
stuey, what is wrong with saying that “In December 2005, the Reserve Bank’s prediction was that the price right now would be US$40 a barrel - less than half what it actually is.�?
Well, very simply, the Reserve Bank never made a prediction of what the price would be “right now”. The Reserve Bank made a prediction of what the price would be “this year”. IE, the average for all 365 days, or 52 weeks. You can visually estimate the average for the last 12 months on the graph you linked to. You can also see very clearly the seasonal variation in oil prices. In the last 3 years the price has peaked in the northern autumn at approx 50% more than the lowest price, which always occurs mid-winter. Thus to compare the annual average with the autumn peak is an unwarranted and unneccesary exageration. In fact the 5 other government prediction figures: $68, $59, $66, $54 and $60 are all reasonably close to the actual $68 average for the last 12 months.
On further investigation, Jeanette may not have been aware that this is a seasonal price spike as it is a fairly recent development.
Spot Price of Brent Crude Oil in Europe
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/oilprice.html
These stats reveal something very disturbing about these seasonal spikes. In 8 of the last 10 years prices have been lower in winter than in autumn, in the ten years before that they were lower in 5 years and higher in five years. The magnitude of the price drops has increased dramatically in each of the last 3 years. This suggests that even if peak oil may not have occurred yet, peak North Sea gas probably has with immediate consequences for heating oil prices and with a knock-on effect on Brent Crude prices.
A graph and the data are here:
http://www.petroltax.org.nz/XLS/OilPrice.xls
October 20th, 2007 at 8:46 am
Hi BJ, I realise you and the greens know quite a lot nd that is why I am always surprised by the poor left wing solutions that you, and most political parties put up to solve the problems. I realise the politics of envy and the tall poppy syndrome are nigh on impossible to turn around in NZ so I suppose most politicians figure “if anyone is going to get that vote it may as well be me”.
The global population is THE problem. GW and “peak oil” are symptoms or results of that problem. Tackling the population problem is no harder than tackling the effect (GW) but no-one, except China, is prepared to do it. Politically it may be harder.
The other effects of overpopulation are likely to get us before GW or peak oil - war, disease, resource shortages (of which peak oil is only a small part). In writing this I see that of course there will be a faction who spins it so that peak oil was the cause of whatever happens, but I consider that to be dishonest. [I guess there are a lot of people who are motiviated by the idea that it is the western population that is the problem].
I do not believe there is any satisfactory way to store electrical energy at present so I would argue to minimise it. Certanly I would argue against the initial capital and ongoing costs when those are better spent stimulating industry so we can pay our way or could go a long way to building us a nuke power station.
It is totally ludcirous to take coal or oil out of the ground and burn it to create electricity except as a last resort and I wish NZ had not done it. But apparently what we have left could last us 300 years if we did not sell it overseas.
So overcapacity seems like a damn good option to me in the short term, and once we have changed to a zero growth green economy
then perhaps one pumping station would be the right way to go for NZ.
October 20th, 2007 at 9:26 am
the history of our use/abuse of our natural resources is a history of waste/profligacy..
how we p#ssed away our natural gas being just a recent example..
and that aluminium smelter..?..
whoar..!
the optimist in me sees see solutions from storage-issues to micro-generation thru wind/sun/tide..
us turning our backs on what is to hand..sorta fits with our (astounding) history of building so many of our towns with their backs to the ocean..?
what sort of insecure mindset drove that..?
eh..?
phil(whoar.co.nz)
October 20th, 2007 at 11:28 am
Smelters are a good example - they should be build were oil, gas or coal are - not convert the energy to electricity and then heat. Combined with our push for enough energy and efficiency of utilization, we should be pushing for efficiency of conversion and transport - eg take the industry to the energy source.
October 20th, 2007 at 6:58 pm
Smelters “heat’ is a byproduct of the electrolytic reaction. The immense amount of electricity required is is about the electrons ‘pot’ential not heat. The cryolite ‘bath’ between anode and cathode is liquid and very hot. Known as the Hall-Héroult process, it is an electrolytic alumina [Al2O3] salt solution in which the aluminium forms at the carbon cathode (giving up CO2 + heat).
The real risk in aluminium production is when the ‘cell’ or pot as it is referred to deteriates and it gives of PFC’s (7000 times more greenhouse effect than CO2).
The plus side is that Al is one of the easiest metals to recycle. So don’t throw that can away!
October 20th, 2007 at 9:08 pm
phil, totally agree with your comments on the “use it or lose it” natural gas agreement. Sounds like one of the Muldoon miracles. Just like the Clyde dam. Somebody should’ve told him that Manapouri was only built after the contract had been signed with the alumium company. Fortunately the original agreement was scrapped. The original agreement was for the aluminium company to build it’s own private hydro scheme at Manapouri. Under the second agreement the aluminium company pay off the loans on the original four turbine scheme and the government would pay for two more turbines for public electricity. It was raising the lake to feed these two additional turbines that kick started the green movement in this country.
October 20th, 2007 at 11:21 pm
Phil, you know better than to go after my aluminium smelter !
The Al smelter requires electricity, not heat. Which Blair explains in way more detail than I need to know
It needs to be built where renewable electricity, particularly hydro, is reliably available. You do not turn the process on and off if the wind picks up and dies down and it takes a hell of a lot of electricity.
So having a smelter in NZ where we have a large hydro resource makes a lot of economic sense. It also makes sense in terms of resource usage and CO2 generation because if it isn’t done here it IS done by burning coal somewhere to make the electricity to make the aluminium. Which becomes a hell of a lot of CO2 to encapsulate a fizzy drink that isn’t good for you anyway.
Which is why your “whoar” (what is that word actually signifying anyhow?) at the al smelter is not justified… unless it means something good…
The comment about the gas being p!ssed away are absolutely spot on. I saw a comment by some moron in the Dom Post today about how “gas is cheaper than wind” fronting the business section. I started looking for my baseball bat. How this country can have so MANY stupid people in business suits I have no idea. Selling it overseas? Arrrggghh! (Is that the same as whoar?)
I have so little time now that my posts have fallen off of late… probably another month of that still.
Also have an active nimby nitwit movement starting here in Porirua.
Where IS that damned bat!
respectfully
BJ
[ pointing the obvious out to the oblivious for 50 years ]
October 21st, 2007 at 3:28 pm
Wind is good-give it a go. It seems to be a win-win with local farmers agreement.
As for coal- I worked for decades in coal fired power stations in Europe. Each 2000MW station burning 20,000tonnes/day. The Swedes bought coal from the same suppliers and proved, by analysis, that it was acid rain from those stations that were causing the death of their lakes. (this was denied of course and fought). Eventually Flue gas desulphurisation helped.-This, in itself, produces so much gypsum that there are fields of the stuff,-of too poor a quality to be used in plaster boards (I toured these fields a few years back).-very light stuff,very easilly airborne in our warmer climate, -probably becoming a contaminant threat to adjoining farmland.
So keep away from coal burning, as far as is practicable, and use wind to conserve our “battery” lakes.
October 22nd, 2007 at 1:28 pm
mr b rose, New Zealand would need hundreds of coal fired power stations to make any noticeable difference to the amount of sulphurous acid entering our lakes. In the time it takes for the sulphur to be coverted into acid the prevailing winds will have blown it hundreds of miles offshore where it won’t hurt anybody, and especially not Sweden. However the extra sulphur falling on paddocks and forests would be great fertiliser.
October 22nd, 2007 at 2:42 pm
Kevyn wrote:
“In the time it takes for the sulphur to be coverted into acid the prevailing winds will have blown it hundreds of miles offshore…”
When sulphur is burnt, it forms SO2. When this is mixed with water, e.g. when rain passes through the gas, it dissolves in the water very readily and immediately forms H2SO3 (suphurous acid). This readily oxidises to H2SO4 (sulphuric acid). There is no long delay once the gas finds water. (I can’t remember whether SO2 also oxidises straight to SO3, or whether SO3 is also formed during combustion but this doesn’t matter, since SO3 also dissolves immediately in water to form H2SO4.)
Relying on prevailing winds isn’t an option.
Trevor.
October 22nd, 2007 at 2:53 pm
samiuela wrote “On the issue of pumped storage, here is a despicable thing that the Australians have started doing…”
Don’t be too hard on the Australians. The water used for pumped storage isn’t lost (although no doubt a bit evapourates) so it doesn’t worsen the drought.
The reason they are using pumped storage is that coal fired power stations are good for base load but dont’ ramp up or ramp down their output quickly, so they would need to burn more coal to get the power stations ready for the peak load. It is actually more efficient to generate the power at off peak times and store it even allowing for the losses on the way that to use the coal fired stations for the peak load. Their way actually saves some coal.
They may also need the hydro stations to meet the total peak load.
Remember that the high peak prices at peak demand times are caused by having to use more costly forms of generation to meet the demand. If they could meet the demand by simply burning more coal at the same efficiency they would, and the prices wouldn’t peak.
However claiming that using pumped water is a renewable source of generation is over the top. I don’t know if they are actually claiming this or not, since I don’t know how much power they are buying and selling on the power market and how much they are selling to their own customers compared to their non-pumped generation.
Trevor.
October 22nd, 2007 at 11:41 pm
Trevor, The process isn’t quite as direct as you state and the smokestacks used since the 1960’s ensure that the resultant acid is deposited at lower concentrations over substantially greater areas. Where older smokestacks would have allowed the acid to precipitate just tens of metres away from the stack in calm conditions and kilometres away in stormy conditions, the newer stacks increase those distances by two orders of magnitude.
This is no consolation in Europe or north america but it is of huge importance in this country which is very narrow relative to the prevailing winds. Relying on prevailing winds is one effective option, siting the power stations in already sulfur rich areas or lime rich areas will substantially mitigate localised effects when inversion layers occur. The acid rain victim nations are notably lacking in these natural defences. Carbon emissions are the only real barrier to coal fired power staions in this country.
The real acid rain problem that this country has to worry about is nitric acid from transport nox emissions which contributes to nitrification of waterways and lakes.
http://www.ace.mmu.ac.uk/eae/Acid_Rain/Older/Transboundary_Pollution.h tml
http://schools.ceh.ac.uk/advanced/acidrain/acidrain1.htm
October 23rd, 2007 at 9:50 pm
I am not an expert on smokestacks, but two orders of magnitude larger than tens of metres is still only a few kilometres, and that is presumably when it isn’t raining.
Trevor.
October 23rd, 2007 at 10:03 pm
What hasn’t been mentioned is that adding 650 MegaWatts of wind generation will increase the frequency and duration of periods when the intermittant and must-run generation exceeds the demand, and the spot price of electricity falls to practically zero. This will impact on other generators, but we need those other generators to provide power when insufficient wind is available.
There are many solutions. Pumped hydro storage is one. So are flywheels and flow-batteries. However better demand-side management could reduce this problem at lower cost and higher efficiency, with shorter lead times. This includes running refrigeration harder when there is spare generation. It can also include using electricity for heating instead of natural gas or coal in industrial processes depending on the electricity prices.
Trevor.
October 23rd, 2007 at 10:11 pm
Does that happen often Trev? Is there any site where one can get numbers, statistics etc. on generation, transmission, consumption in NZ? The subject fascinates me. But the sheer mass of hydro running as base-load generation would surely negate the effect? Otherwise, the opportunities for pumped storage in NZ must be pretty limitless… is anyone doing it yet?
October 23rd, 2007 at 10:24 pm
Alistair wrote: “Does that happen often Trev?”
Sorry, I can’t give you an answer on that, but I do know it happens now and as we increase our intermittant generation, it will happen more.
I have a number of sites I could give you, but not just now.
The hydro contributes a bit to the problem because there are minimum water flows in some rivers. The fundamental problem is variable demand, so on a mild summer night, there is little demand (other than the smelter) but there can be considerably more generation.
I am not aware of any pumped storage in NZ and I wonder how many suitable sites we actually have. The problem isn’t so much finding a lake for the top - it is finding a source of water to pump up into the lake. I’d guess that for a high enough price we could build it, but other solutions will be more cost effective at first.
Trevor.
October 23rd, 2007 at 10:30 pm
Trevor29 Says:
October 23rd, 2007 at 10:24 pm
>I am not aware of any pumped storage in NZ and I wonder how many suitable sites we actually have. The problem isn’t so much finding a lake for the top - it is finding a source of water to pump up into the lake.
The obvious place that comes to mind is lakes Benmore and Aviemore in the Central Waitaki valley. Lake Benmore is at the top of the Benmore Dam, and Aviemore is roughly at the bottom of the Benmore Dam. They’re both artificial lakes, built for electricity generation.
October 23rd, 2007 at 11:47 pm
“The obvious place that comes to mind is lakes Benmore and Aviemore in the Central Waitaki valley.”
Sounds good to me. However a location in the North Island would be better, given the large amount of hydro in the South Island and the smelter being down here too.
Trevor.
October 24th, 2007 at 12:33 am
Trevor29,
There is another possibility. This may be considered heresy now days, but we could simply regulate the electricity market, and say electricity can be sold for x cents per kilowatt hour. Perhaps we could go further, and say renewable energy can be sold for more than non-renewable energy?
In fact, maybe all electricity generation should be nationalised, and let decisions about electricity generation be made by engineers? It has always struck me than electricity generation is one of those areas where deliberate planning can provide much better results than leaving things up to the “free market”.
October 24th, 2007 at 2:12 am
Hahaha! Heresy indeed. Burn him!
Has anyone done a cost/benefit analysis of the privatization of NZ’s electricity sector? Without ideological prejudice? It’s not good enough to say “Well of COURSE the private sector is more efficient” because of the railways… nor to say “of COURSE state ownership is better” cos there are probably counter-examples too…
I’ve been doing some work recently for Electrabel, who used to be the Belgian state monopoly electrical outfit, and are now, among other things, a niche actor in the French electricity market. They are almost all hydro, having the Rhone and various small mountain dams. It sort of offends me that these are managed for private profit, rather than for overall national benefit (though you could argue that they contribute to that too, through the magic of market forces and the spot electricity price).
If the spot electricity price is what you make your profits on, that can lead to some pretty skewed priorities and investment decisions. We don’t even need to mention Enron to work that out.
October 24th, 2007 at 3:01 am
Just that the Private sector is efficient - a price watchdog is not out of order.
My experience of the Public Sector - innaccurate, innefficient, can’t change, unwieldly, breaks down, gets it wrong and won’t admit it.
Nz’s consumers probably want the opposite of all those things.
Be nice if a NZ private company could get it right.
Keeps all our money here aye?
October 24th, 2007 at 3:01 am
Trevor, A few tens of km when there isn’t enough windspeed to drive a wind turbine. Hundreds of km on windy days. I assume, from the Swedish claims that their acid lakes were a result of Britain adopting tall smoke stacks as part of it’s Clean Air Act, that the Swedes have solid evidence that constant drizel doesn’t make the sulphur fall on Britain, and that the winds are actually pushing these plumes all the way across the North Sea, and that smokestack hieght is definitely a critical factor.
I know in industrial boilers the flue gases are not allowed to fall below 170c as this would allow the steam to condense and cause acid rain within the flue. I don’t know if this is the case with power stations using pulverisers because the moisture is extracted before combustion. Anyway, in winter the water vapour lets you see how the flue gases from factory stacks disperse, and they rise until they cool to ambient temp. But that is just my observation, the Swedish research on the movement of acid rainclouds is objective and respected.
October 24th, 2007 at 3:10 am
samiuela, Your heresy was practiced from the 1950s to the 1990s. It was an unmitigated disaster with regular cycles of blackouts and savage price increases. This was all because of the one flaw in your idea. The decisions about electricity generation should have been made by engineers but they were actually made by shortsighted politicians, focused on winning this election and we’ll worry about the next election when we come to it.
October 24th, 2007 at 7:06 pm
Link to MED Wind Integration final report
http://www.med.govt.nz/upload/9548/final.pdf or
http://www.med.govt.nz/templates/MultipageDocumentTOC____4317.aspx
as requested by Alistair
Trevor.
October 24th, 2007 at 7:28 pm
There are a number of articles on Wind generation and related issues in the latest Energy Watch:
http://www.energywatch.org.nz/issues/EW45_8-2007.pdf
particularly pages 29-33.
On page 29, Contact Energy is quoted as warning that it would have to spill water from its Clyde and Roxburgh stations if additional wind generation [in the South Island] was put in place without increased transmission line capacity.
Trevor.
October 25th, 2007 at 12:06 am
Kevyn,
I can’t remember blackouts being any more common in the 1970s or 1980s. I’m not saying there were less blackouts, I am just very skeptical of your claim of regular cycles of blackouts. Maybe you were living in a rural area, not a city? I also dispute your claim of savage price increases … if the electricity market is such a success, why haven’t we seen big price cuts associated with the so called “market efficiency”?
Free market proponents always make claims like yours. They would have us believe that pre-1984 was the dark ages, and that everything was so much worse than it is today. Of course lots of things have improved in the last 25 years, but to make the claim that this is solely because of free market “reforms” (and to neglect the influence of many other factors, such as improving technology) is very biased.
October 25th, 2007 at 12:43 am
Thank you for those links Trevor… Excellent sources. So, the main emerging problem with new wind capacity appears to be the lag in transmitting it around the South Island, and, arguably, lack of capacity in the link to the N.I. Both these elements seem to relate to inertia and lack of planning in the transmission sector (the S.I. hasn’t seen any big new generation development in the last 20 years, so they’ve got rusty).
Since there is already excess generation capacity in the South and excess consumption in the North, for obvious and structural reasons, and assuming that at least half the prime wind sites are in the SI, it’s logical that new wind developments will exacerbate the imbalance, i.e. increase the transport requirement. On a national scale, it’s clear that there is enough hydro to balance a greatly expanded wind sector. What’s more, a reinforced Cook Strait link will enable wind to take up an increasing baseload role (if the wind don’t blow in Taranaki, it’s quite likely it’s still blowin’ in Otago).
October 25th, 2007 at 12:46 am
As I recall Kevyn, the blackouts in the 70s were associated with a spike in imported oil prices as well as low lake levels… am I wrong?
Pertinent to the discussion : this piece from the Financial Times, on the effect of privatization of gas and electricity in Europe on consumer prices.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/29869d28-7fe1-11dc-b075-0000779fd2ac.html
October 25th, 2007 at 8:38 pm
While it seems reasonable to assume that around half the prime wind generation sites are in the South Island, that doesn’t mean that half the new wind generation will be in the South Island. What is more likely is that more of the prime sites in the North Island will be used, since this avoids the transmission line losses/constraints. However the Cook Strait link will still be a major constraint as other sources will be needed when the wind isn’t blowing (enough) in the North Island. This is one reason that I would like to see more geothermal generation plant installed and operated more on a load-following mode rather than installing just enough plant to utilise the geothermal resource and operating it close to 100% capacity.
Trevor.
October 27th, 2007 at 8:27 pm
Samiuela was suggesting regulating the price to keep it constant. This is actually counter-productive.
What we need is a system which encourages demand-side management, by lowering the price of electricity when it is cheap to produce and raising it when it is expensive to produce (e.g. high demand and/or no wind). The key to DSM is to pass those signals to the electricity consumer in close to real time so they can choose when to use electricity and when to defer that use or choose to use other energy sources (such as gas, coal, or biomass). Ideally this would be automated. By giving the consumer (house-hold or commercial/inductrial) a financial incentive to use electricity when it is available and to install the necessary equipment, the peaks in demand are flattened and there is less wasted energy. This may be as simple as having a second thermostat on a hot water cylinder to boost the temperature higher than normal when the power is cheap plus an extra ripple-control channel on the power metering.
In general DSM leads to slight decreases in the efficiency of usage of electricity, but overall it leads to efficiency gains as more energy is used when available so it doesn’t have to be stored in some other system or generated using less efficient plant.
It also reduces the dips in the spot price of electricity, thus allowing the electricity generators to receive payment for generation that may otherwise go to waste.
Unfortunately the electricity retailers are not encouraging / permitting this as they would probably lose some revenue as consumers use cheaper power.
Trevor.
November 7th, 2007 at 12:00 am
On a blog about a new wind farm, I’m not interested in discussions about anti-smacking! I’m much more interested in why they are bundling a 100MW gas-fired generator with the wind farm, and the surprising lack of mention of that generator in the responses. However this could be part of a cunning plan - by bundling the gas-fired generator with the wind farm, they are attempting to convince us that it is just there to top up the generation when the wind isn’t blowing. However this means that the other gas-fired generators will presumably run more often and longer.
I’d rather see the geothermal generating plant expanded and run more in a load following mode and use the existing gas-fired generation to handle the peaks.
Trevor.
November 7th, 2007 at 4:40 am
alistair, The only electricity crisis I can actually recall from the 70s was winter 73. The oil price spike occured at the end of 73. This was the blackout when New Zealanders discovered ceiling insulation, in fact pink batts only came onto the market in 1969. I’m not sure if we had any blackouts after that. The last of big hydro schemes were completed in the late 70s and with the stagnant economy and then the speculative Clyde dam I think we had the rare situation of surplus generating capacity for a decade or two.
November 7th, 2007 at 5:01 am
Samiuela, my comment “regular cycles of blackouts and savage price increases” is from the Electricity Departments annual reports from the ’50s and ’60s. Basically politicians refused to increase the wholesale price to match inflation. The drop in real power prices led to demand growing faster than predicted by the department with the result that they simple couldn’t build power stations fast enough. When the inevitable but unpredictable dry year occured there would be blackouts and there would finally be a full inflation adjustment in one hit, frequently 25% or 50% increase in the wholesale price.
The claim that the electrity reforms would reduce power prices was pure political spin. There is nothing in the free market theory to support that claim. What the theory does say is that energy costs will be reduced, and that is what has actually happened. Once people realised that power prices were not going to be reduced they started investing in energy efficiency like never before. That increase in demand has produced economies of scale so the price of energy saving lights has dropped by more than half. Prices for solar water and double glazing haven’t really fallen for but they haven’t increased by more than inflation either so they are relatively cheaper compared with the price of electricity. Most free market advocates don’t really seem to know their subject very well since they constantly confuse the free market’s effect on costs to the economy with price to the customer. And the free market’s effects mainly occur in the medium or long term not in the short term. For instance, the price of electricity goes up, you invest in a slolar water heater, ten years later you have saved back the original cost and now the money you are not spending on energy can be spent in some other economic activity.