Researchers Find Substantial Wind Resource Off Mid-Atlantic Coast

[jpak]

http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/527052/

Newswise — The wind resource off the Mid-Atlantic coast could supply the energy needs of nine states from Massachusetts to North Carolina, plus the District of Columbia--with enough left over to support a 50 percent increase in future energy demand--according to a study by researchers at the University of Delaware and Stanford University.

Willett Kempton, Richard Garvine and Amardeep Dhanju at the University of Delaware and Mark Jacobson and Cristina Archer at Stanford, found that the wind over the Middle Atlantic Bight, the aquatic region from Cape Cod, Mass., to Cape Hatteras, N.C., could produce 330 gigawatts (GW) of average electrical power if thousands of wind turbines were installed off the coast.

The estimated power supply from offshore wind substantially exceeds the region's current energy use, which the scientists estimate at 185 gigawatts, from electricity, gasoline, fuel oil and natural gas sources.

Supplying the region's energy needs with offshore wind power would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 68 percent and reduce greenhouse gases by 57 percent, according to the study.

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[rurallib]

1. Will Exxon buy it and keep from being used?

They have the money.

[kristopher]

5. Exxon?

The real obstacle to development is the coal lobby and those living along the coast that are resistant to changes in a place they value.
However, in the end the resource will be developed as the economics of the situation play themselves out. The cost of wind energy is guaranteed to be stable over decades; and is already lower than anything except coal. The amount of installed capacity has been growing at between 25-50% for over a decade and there is no reason to think it is going to slow down any time soon.

[Sirveri]

24. We will see how guarenteed wind is when global warming hits.

Global Climate change doesn't just make it warmer, it changes entire weather patterns.

[woodsprite]

2. I'm from DE - Please, nobody make a Biden remark.

[VWolf]

8. You mean like this?

Biden: I like wind power. It's clean ... and articulate.

[woodsprite]

11. Nah, I was thinking more along the "full of hot air" type. n/t

[phantom power]

3. I wish they would publish standard deviations with their means. Would that be so hard?

[kristopher]

6. What do you want to know?

Standard deviation from what mean?
I'm fairly well informed on this research so if you can clarify your question I'll try to address it.

[phantom power]

10. They predict a mean power output of 330 gigawatts...

Here is the relevant paragraph:

The scientists' estimate of the full-resource, average wind power output of 330 gigawatts over the Middle Atlantic Bight is based on the installation of 166,720 wind turbines, each generating up to 5 megawatts of power. The wind turbines would be located at varying distances from shore, out to 100 meters of water depth, over an ocean area spanning more than 50,000 square miles, from Cape Cod to Cape Hatteras.

Since this is wind-power, I'm wondering what the standard deviation is, about this mean of 330 gigawatts. They also say that they could put all these guys on a big electric bus, to damp out the local variations. It made me curious about how much damping they think they can expect. Over 166 thousand turbines and 50K square miles, I assume it might be significant. Of course the damping achieved would itself have a mean and standard deviation...

[kristopher]

12. The method

The method used to calculate the output was based on 21 years worth of wind data as recorded by the MidAtlantic bight NOAA buoys. That data was recorded at about 8 meters so it was necessary to convert it to winds at 80m. The hourly data from one specific buoy was then mathematically matched to the output curve of the newest offshore turbine available (the RePower 5M) which provided a power yield that was averaged. This figure was then multiplied by the number of turbines that could be installed with near term technology taking into account areas of conflicting use such as fishing grounds, shipping lanes etc.
Hope that helps.

[phantom power]

13. That's pretty interesting...

but one other product of that analysis should have been some kind of standard deviation. As in, 330 gigawatts, with a standard deviation of 10 gigawatts. Or 330 gigawatts, with a standard deviation of 100 gigawatts.

If I were a power grid engineer, who was seriously considering this project, I'd need to know that, so that I could plan redundant power sources.

[JohnWxy]

14. I agree with you in general. I would like to see some measure of variance mentioned when anaverage

is quoted. In this case however, given that we're talking about 166,720 wind turbines over 50,000 sq miles of ocean, I think you can be assured the s.d. is going to be pretty small and given the large area of coverage, back-up power may not even be a consideration (i.e. power would be being generated from most of that area at any given time). Another approach of course, is using power storage such as vanadium-based redox regenerative storage systems (VRB Power). But given the area of coverage 50,000 square miles I really wonder if power storage would be necessary.


"installation of 166,720 wind turbines, each generating up to 5 megawatts of power. The wind turbines would be located at varying distances from shore, out to 100 meters of water depth, over an ocean area spanning more than 50,000 square miles, from Cape Cod to Cape Hatteras."

[phantom power]

15. I am not at all assured that the SD would be small.

But I simply don't know. There is no doubt in my mind that the people who did that computation got a SD out of it. Shame that we don't know what it is. It would be very instructive.

[kristopher]

19. There should be doubt in your mind

Where, in the method I described to you, do you see any type of statistical sampling that would yield a SD?
There is a process that uses a statistical model that relies on the number of hours the wind is at given speeds, however that method is much more cumbersome and lacks the desired property of being able to match the historical wind data to the historical data on electricity demand, which is also recorded hourly. An earlier project (which I participated in) compared the two approaches.
Also, although the idea you floated about a developer wanting an statistical base to use in their decision making is true, that doesn't apply in this case. The object of the exercise was to determine the scope of the resource for purposes of national energy policy planning. Think about it, each of those turbines costs about $5-6 million and the area looked at talks about nearly 200,000 turbines. This will be developed in batches of 50, 200 maybe 500 turbines per project, The method employed is a great one for preliminary scoping, but any financing in the foreseeable future is going to require about 2 years of data collected from a station at the proposed site about 250 feet above sea level.

As to the storage issue, so far there isn't a need. The grid, as it exists, is designed to respond to fluctuating supply and demand; for example it is common for plants to go offline without notice. It used to be thought that the system only had the ability to tolerate around 4-5% of the supply coming from wind; however, with better management due to computers, more knowledge about the nature of wind and again computer modeling allowing increasingly accurate short term sind forecasts, and the real world knowledge we've gained from places like Denmark (over 50% of their supply is from wind) we are now thinking that a the system can handle a minimum of 20% of its supply from wind.
More information is available at www.oceans.udel.edu/windpower

[jpak]

16. There would also be a lot of transmission lines coming ashore

Each one could be equipped with a large flywheel storage UPS to dampen fluctuations in power output as well.

[kristopher]

20. Power lines and storage

The individual turbines feed into an offshore platform where the power is aggregated and sent to shore via one underground cable. So you would probably only require one cable every 50 miles or so of shoreline (that's a guess).
The most probable means of storage would be
1) V2G - the use of electric car fleets' for storage
2) CAES - Compressed air energy storage - google it along with "alabama".

[phantom power]

26. Their scenario for "electric car fleet" storage seems pretty flimsy to me.

Where is this enormous fleet of electric cars going to come from? Who is going to make them, and who is going to buy them?

As usual, these people basically wave their hands at the load-balancing storage issue.

[JohnWxy]

27. I was 'surprised' that that would be proposed. But there are available means of storage much more

practical than plug-in hybrids. (what did they think the owners of the hybrids were going to do? Respond to a call for more power to the grid and plug in they cars to be drained by the power grid - asssuming that was even possible). I mean stored power that isn't available to the grid is not very practical.

But , flywheels, Vanadium Storage and other technologies (being developed -e.g. capacitor storage) will be able to meet that need. Vanadium storage is available right now and is cost effective.

[phantom power]

25. Here is a response I got from one of the report authors...

Well, I was right to suspect that the standard deviation was high, but I was wrong to assume that they actually computed it. I'm still astonished by that, although they appear to implicity express variance in ELCC. Somehow.

Dear (Mighty Mighty Phantom),

The standard deviation is high. The distribution is shown in Figure 2 and depends on the number and dispersal of interconnected wind farms. The full study is attached, not clear whether you had access to it.

In utility power generation, the measure is "Effective Load Carrying Capability". The standard deviaiton is not used and we did not compute it. The ELCC is lower for most wind than for hydro or thermal plants, and thus wind typically receives a lower "capacity credit" payment, even if paid the same per MWh of energy.

You might consult some of the texts listed on our syllabus to get background in wind analysis, for example Manwell et al. See http://www.mast.udel.edu/628/

[One_Life_To_Give]

17. Using std dev assumes

Using std dev assumes that both the author and the reader understand what they are. I dopn't recalol Journalism majors being expected to learn statistics. Nor do I recall that the average american and perhaps even the average person with a bachelors understand statistics.

[Frustratedlady]

4. Iowa is proposing a 40,000 acre wind farm

http://www.livescience.com/environment/060831_ap_wind_farm.html

[OneBlueSky]

7. substantial wind off the Atlantic coast? . . . NO SHIT!!! . . .

hell, I could have told them that . . .

[kristopher]

21. Really?

Could you also tell them how much power that wind could produce and approximately how much it is worth?

[valerief]

9. There's a ton of windy pols blowing hot air out of Washington DC, which, I hear,

Bush is changing from District of Columbia to Dick Cheney. That's right. Washington, Dick Cheney.

Time to leave the U.S. I'm gonna do some homesteading on the North Pole. It should be a temperate climate in a year or two.

[rman]

18. Next: Researchers Discover Solar Energy

[ArmchairMeme]

22. hahahahaha

:)

[applegrove]

23. A little good news for today. Thanks. It was needed.n/t