Electric Cars, Gone With The Wind
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 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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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.
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.
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?
Wasn't there an idea to place many small turbines along major arterial roads and harness the wake of passing vehicles?