by turbinetastic
Wind farms are pretty different to prior large-scale generating technology. A big way that they’re different is that we, as users, can’t choose ourselves how much fuel they need to provide us with the energy we want to use; we simply have to accept as much of the available wind energy as we can.
For some this is an insurmountable problem with the very technology. If the energy isn’t there on tap you might as well pack up and go home. To me that seems crazy. If someone offered you a £20 voucher towards your weekly shop, you wouldn’t toss it in the bin on the grounds that it wouldn’t buy your whole week’s food, you’d use it and make up the rest other ways.
Because of this intermittency problem, jobs like mine became available for the wind industry. Across the globe, whereever there are wind farms of any size, someone has to sit down with a computer and some wind measurements and try to assess what sort of production levels we can expect from them. In the early days, this was done based on some comparatively short measurement masts, using methods that were simplistic. Now, it’s a much better defined methodology, with larger masts, new technologies, and its own modelling tools to provide more accurate predictions of how the wind will vary in time and space.
The same sort of analysis techniques are used by the Energy Traders, who sell the generated energy under the system of the UK electricity market. Similarly, analysis of operational wind farms really benefits from that sort of detailed knowledge of the wind because it’s still key to understanding how far the wind farm is performing as expected.
So there are lots of benefits to the wind industry from this sort of work then. (Might be worth mentioning that these sorts of jobs are high skill, high demand and generally filled by people who live and work in the country in question.)
Even the most strident wind power advocate, though, doesn’t foresee a time when 100% of an electrical grid’s supply comes from wind power; not unless there’s a major leap forward in electricity storage. It is likely that other technologies like wave and tidal will start to mature to large-scale deployment.
When they do, those renewable resources will also need their resource assessed. And very similar techniques will be involved: make some measurements, assess their quality and representativeness, model where you have no measurements, and then feed through information about your machine and its output.
The national grid that was originally conceived to carry electricity from large-scale power plants to every home, factory and office was an astounding feat of engineering. However it was designed to match the supply to demand. The requirements of matching a variable supply with a variable demand are relatively new. Because wind power is the first renewable technology to get a substantial penetration into the generation market, the grid is learning to be more flexible. As we begin to use other renewable technologies — and we will — those lessons will transfer and we’ll have a system that can cope with the demands we ask of it.
Wind energy doesn’t have to be 100% of the answer to be a very important part of today’s and tomorrow’s technology mix.
Turbinetastic’ is a wind industry professional who has kindly agreed to syndicate their posts to this blog. This post was originally published on turbinetastic’s own blog on 05/05/2012.