Ripe for the harvest: Power-grid operators are using wind-clocking anemometers and weather stations installed at wind farms to predict wind power production hours or days in advance.
National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Better wind forecasts could prevent blackouts and reduce pollution.
As wind power becomes more common, its unpredictability becomes more of a problem. Sudden drops in wind speed can send grid operators scrambling to cover the shortfall and even cause blackouts; unexpected surges can leave conventional power plants idling, incurring costs and spewing pollution to no purpose.
To address the problem, power-grid operators are combining hyper-local meteorological data and artificial intelligence to predict when the wind turbines installed on their networks will turn. This month, New York's Independent System Operator (NYISO) announced plans to integrate wind modeling into its grid control schemes by the summer, and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) plans to fire up a similar system this summer, if not sooner. The California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO), meanwhile, plans to expand a forecasting program that already covers about a quarter of the state's wind-power capacity.
What makes these modeling systems accurate and affordable is real-time data supplied by the wind farms themselves: wind speed and direction, plus, in many cases, local temperature, barometric pressure, and humidity. Companies that specialize in weather modeling provide software that, over time, learns to correlate this data with power output and recognize the weather conditions that signal more or less power output in the near future. One of these companies, Albany's AWS Truewind, is working with California, New York, and Texas, but its competitors include 3 Tier Environmental Forecast Group; Garrad Hassan, in the United Kingdom; and WindLogics, based in St. Paul.
When wind farms were less common, grid controllers could essentially ignore their varying output, as it was all but indistinguishable from natural fluctuations in consumer use. Throttling conventional power plants up or down kept supply and demand balanced. But those days are passing fast. Take NYISO, which had virtually no wind power to contend with five years ago. Today, it has more than 500 megawatts on its grid and proposals pending that would push that to almost 7,000 megawatts. That's about 17 percent of its current power base.
Texas, which had 4,446 megawatts of wind on its grid by the end of 2007--more than any other state--has already discovered what large-scale wind-power ebbs and flows can do if controllers aren't watching. "We've had some instances recently where we've either had some very high prices in the short-term market because of our inability to forecast the wind, or where we've actually had to declare emergencies because we were concerned about reliability, in part because we couldn't see how much wind was on the system," says Jess Totten, director of electric industry oversight for Texas's Public Utility Commission.
A sharp drop in wind power was cited as a major cause of emergency power outages ordered by ERCOT on the evening of February 26, for example. Consumers drew far more power than ERCOT had projected, and several conventional power plants did not run as scheduled, but the wind-power shortfall was the last straw.
With the 2007 hurricane season under way, scientists believe their new forecasting model will make more-accurate predictions, thereby saving lives.
Researchers have used satellite data to create a map showing where massive waves are likely to appear; they hope to use it to save lives.
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javs
97 Comments
Scheduling under Legislative and Regulatory Uncertainty
The article is a good contribution to TR readers about one of the most important kinds of uncertain generation, to make them more certain. Scheduling wind and especilly solar power distributed in homes should be next. The EWPC article Uncertain Generation is Here to Stay takes the idea into the context of the Third Industrial Revolution. . . . . . . With regard to solar distributed generation, please read the EWPC article Nanosolar Breakthrough and the Old Paradigm. Research for scheduling and integrating nanosolar power to power systems planning, operations and control, will be part of the next stages. . . . . . . To understand what to do first in the wider, and highly uncertain, legislative and regulatory context, TR readers should consider reading the EWPC article Leadership Answers What to do First, whose summary is "The answer to the question of what to do first is for the global power industry to get out of the wrong jungle to produce a EWPC based EPAct as soon as possible. That is the kind of leadership needed to face the inevitable fundamental changes required to significantly reduce today’s legislative and regulatory uncertainty."
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MakeSense
99 Comments
Re: Scheduling under Legislative and Regulatory Uncertainty
Great comment! There are too many people in the power industry who think that wind is some kind of ghost that will go away if they ignore it. The mindset that wind is here to stay will promote aggressive ideas to make it as mainstream as possible.
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javs
97 Comments
Re: Scheduling under Legislative and Regulatory Uncertainty
Humble thanks, in the name of the late M.I.T. professor Fred Charles Schweppe (please hit the hyperlink get to his bio as an M.I.T. EECS Great Educator). From his bio I extracted that he “… is now regarded as one of the visionary people who foresaw changes to the electric-power industry to permit competition, long before others.” I have found and documented that the problems with deregulation and the continued value destruction by today's utilities, were and are, respectively, the result of disregarding his great wisdom. Schweppe’s visionary leadership on Spot Pricing of Electricity is the basis for the EWPC market architecture and design. Anyone who has detailed information about Dr. Schweppe death in 1988, please write to javs@ieee.org, to help me write an article on the EWPC Blog in the 20th aniversary of his death.
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