Electric Cars, Gone With The Wind

Bertel Schmitt
by Bertel Schmitt

Ah, the amount of ingenuity electric cars trigger. They need to get charged. Cheaply. They need to get rid of the bad rap that creating electricity isn’t the environmentally friendliest endeavor on this planet. So what about wind power? Comes with its own set of problems. Mitsubishi and the Tokyo Institute of Technology got together and devised a method to use excess wind power to charge electric vehicles while saving the power company gobs of money, a.k.a. the dreaded capex problem. The result? A true wind-wind situation!

Windmills produce power when the wind blows. The wind doesn’t give a hoot about peak demand. It blows whenever it feels like it. Power created during low demand times, for instance at night, either goes out the wind-ow, or get it gets stored in batteries. Those batteries are way expensive, they are “are as costly as power generators,” says The Nikkei [sub]

The wind-wind solution? Use the batteries in electric cars. Why pay twice? A system collects data both on power generation and electric vehicle recharging. If there is sudden demand, the power that charges the car batteries gets cut off until excess power is sloshing around the lines again. A field test of the system has already been conducted in Hokkaido, says the Nikkei. We assume, successfully.

A large windmill can charge 200-300 electric vehicles a night. Mitsubishi wants to commercialize the technology in remote islands first. Small grid, and the geography of the island keeps range anxiety at bay. Now imagine the new excuses: “Sumimasen, so sorry, can’t come to work today. We were in the doldrums last night.”

Bertel Schmitt
Bertel Schmitt

Bertel Schmitt comes back to journalism after taking a 35 year break in advertising and marketing. He ran and owned advertising agencies in Duesseldorf, Germany, and New York City. Volkswagen A.G. was Bertel's most important corporate account. Schmitt's advertising and marketing career touched many corners of the industry with a special focus on automotive products and services. Since 2004, he lives in Japan and China with his wife <a href="http://www.tomokoandbertel.com"> Tomoko </a>. Bertel Schmitt is a founding board member of the <a href="http://www.offshoresuperseries.com"> Offshore Super Series </a>, an American offshore powerboat racing organization. He is co-owner of the racing team Typhoon.

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  • Brandloyalty Brandloyalty on Apr 30, 2010

    If you have hydro electric (dams) on the same grid as wind turbines, then all you do is use less water to generate power when the wind is turning the turbines. Use the saved water to generate more power when the wind dies. "Smoothing" this way is really simple and completely answers one of the urban myths about wind power. But it does make sense to have the option to store "excess" wind-generated power in batteries if those batteries happen to be in cars that wouldn't otherwise need to be fully charged. The next decade probably will see everyone getting smart electricity meters.

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    • Brandloyalty Brandloyalty on May 02, 2010

      I was thinking that we don't expect hobbies or vacations to be cost effective. So the Danes may have decided to embrace wind power even if it can't be justified in narrow, short-term economics. I also thought of the old windmills in Holland. Did they fail to see that building and using thousands of those things didn't make sense because the wind didn't blow all the time? This has been an interesting discussion. It certainly opened my eyes to the complexity of the issue, (and partly due to the complexity) how vulnerable the data is to manipulation, and the probability there are people being paid to spread disinformation on the subject. (Not pointing fingers.)

  • Fred schumacher Fred schumacher on Apr 30, 2010

    The use of battery powered vehicles as electricity storage sinks is an idea that is very appealing to the electricity production and distribution industry and, at first glance, appears doable. However, in real life, it won't work: it would increase the number of charge/discharge cycles, shortening battery life, and leave a vehicle, which already has limited range, with an uncertain amount of energy stored in its batteries when its needed to be used. Wind power is a baseload electricity provider, the same as coal and nuclear. When wind turbines are interconnected over a large area, power output is smoothed, providing reliable power. (See the Stanford University study "Supplying Baseload Power and Reducing Transmission Requirements by Interconnecting Wind Farms" available at www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/winds/aj07_jamc.pdf) California's wind turbines are small and old technology. Modern turbines can put out a peak 5 megawatts on 300 foot towers and spin at a slow 23 rpm. On the Great Plains, where wind power has the most potential, power capacity factor averages around 40%. That is the total power produced over a full year as a percentage of maximum rated power. Right now, wind is the lowest cost form of new electricity generation. The biggest impediment for Great Plains windpower is the lack of collector power lines. It's not the big 400 kV lines that is the problem, but the absence of 30 to 60 kV distribution lines. That's a function of our low population density. I believe that the best way to manage windpower is not to attempt to store electricity, an ephemeral quantity best produced as it is used, but to over-build the system, so that more turbines are installed than is needed for baseload. Unneeded turbines would be feathered or taken off-grid to be used to produce nitrogen fertilizer by the Haber-Bosch method. This would turn windpower into an analogue of hydropower, which can be used for peak-load power production. However, for such a system to work, a regional super-authority would be required to manage the system and distribute revenue.

    • Redmondjp Redmondjp on Apr 30, 2010

      Fred, You are dead wrong about wind being base load! Base load energy sources are those running 24/7 at or close to 100% output. Yes, if you have many turbines spread out over a large area, you can smooth out the peakiness of the output somewhat, but the simple fact is that wind energy is not and never will be base load, period. Energy storage in some form or another is KEY in the large-scale use of this energy resource. The electrical utility grid CANNOT store energy, and at the various utility control centers regionally-located around our country (in the PNW it's in Vancouver, WA), system operators are constantly balancing the supply/demand scales on a minute-by-minute basis (realistically, about every 15 minutes). The addition of wind energy makes their job even harder, as they don't have control of when the wind blows and when that wind energy will come into the system (causing them to have to turn down other supply sources if the demand for that energy isn't there at that time). There are pump-storage facilities now which are probably the most economical, as they can take advantage of the wind energy produced at night and then recover that energy later when the demand is higher. One of these facilities has been operating east of San Francisco now for a long time. Supercapicitor (or double-layer, or "ultracaps") energy storage is probably the next-best option for smoothing out the peaks of wind energy. Flywheel storage is another possible option which has been researched for many years. I'm an EE with 20+ years in the industry and one of my best friends is a large wind farm manager down in Oregon--we talk shop quite often. I'm not anti-wind by any means, but it is one of the most difficult sources of energy to use--heck, even solar is much easier to manage as its output is MUCH more predictable than wind. And the wind turbine machines themselves are highly complex (compared to a generator in a dam, for example) and require a lot of maintenance to keep operational. For this reason alone I am doubtful of the long-term viability of wind as a significant energy source. What is truly driving this energy source is the mandate for "green" energy which is in high demand right now due to various laws being passed in several states. Much like the Chicago Carbon Exchange that has been set up by Algore to profit from the trading of carbon credits, it's not science or technical merit that is driving the use of wind energy right now. The other poster has it right--once the current driving forces go away and we let the markets decide, I think a lot of wind farms will eventually be abandoned as too expensive to maintain (much like they were in the first go around during the late 70s - early 80s). Please note again, I'm not anti-wind, just expressing what I see going on.

  • 1996MEdition 1996MEdition on Apr 30, 2010

    What happens when the wind turbines are using up all the wind? Will my flag hang flaccidly? No cool summer breezes? Will my fall leaves no longer blow into the neighbor's yard?

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    • Daanii2 Daanii2 on Apr 30, 2010

      Strange as it seems, a wind turbine does have a definite "wind shadow." That is why turbines are spaced fairly far apart in the big wind farms. (Although turbulence is also a factor.) And you won't find any big turbines next to residences. They are industrial sites. They are not good neighbors.

  • Psarhjinian Psarhjinian on Apr 30, 2010

    Wasn't there an idea to place many small turbines along major arterial roads and harness the wake of passing vehicles?

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    • Daanii2 Daanii2 on Apr 30, 2010

      Interesting article, psarhjinian. But the numbers do not make sense. As you can tell from the picture that accompanies the article, these turbines are not going to be kept turning by traffic. These are the kind of green schemes that look good, and so get funded, but turn out to be a waste of money.

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