Armory Lovins, in one of his recent talks about the Rocky Mountain Institute's "Reinventing Fire" program, confirmed that one reason for a slower pace of land-based wind generation deployment is due to a lack of required infrastructure. The other significant factor is the drop in the price of natural gas.
See this video for example:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_EKZvb7gc8[/youtube]
48:47 "Wind power now stuck in the queue awaiting grid interconnection - 300GW or so - could displace about 2/5 of the coal power. All the profitable wind power on available land could displace coal about 19 times over."
I can't find the Pickens-specific comment - it's in the Q/A section of one of RMI/Lovins recent talks. (I watched four presentations yesterday and haven't yet rediscovered the comment.
)
(Interesting to see that PV on 3% of US roofs can displace all US coal plants - and can be done less expensively and in a shorter amount of time than building new coal plants.)
edit...sorry Reddy - too many windows open.
Your quote is from another thread.
Reddy said:
I think the real issue is balancing...
Nice job - thanks for these links!
For a big-picture look at balancing in general and how it looks on the ERCOT (Texas grid - not well interconnected and not well diversified - in other words 'worst case'
), fast forward to 49:50 in the video above.
"We're often told that only the coal and nuclear plants can keep the lights on because they're 24/7 while wind power and photovoltaics are variable and thus unreliable..." "Coal and nuclear plants fail about 10-14% of the time losing a GW in milliseconds, often for weeks or months and without warning. Now, grids routinely handle that intermittence by backing up failed plants with working plants. They can handle solar and wind variability - which is forecastable - in just the same way. So my team has been doing hourly simulations and we've found that very large renewable fractions can deliver highly reliable power when forecasted, integrated, and diversified by both type and location."
Toss in some climate change and conventional generation gets worse...
http://app1.kuhf.org/articles/1312581138-Again-Conserve-Electricity-During-Peak-Hours.html
It's been so hot — even in the evenings — that the lake water used to cool some generating plants is too warm.
"They can't really efficiently condense the steam that's used to make electricity, so that causes unit D-ratings that they can't generate as much as they could if the lake were cooler."
http://energyandenvironmentblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2011/08/texas-power-grid-operator-issu.html
He said around 3,000 megawatts of generation capacity had stopped working on Tuesday, but he didn't say which plants. He said such outages aren't unusual in the hot summer, and Texas is getting some juice from surrounding states and from Mexico.
While more heat makes more wind...
One of the things we've seen pretty consistently the last several days is an increase in wind generation from the coastal wind. The coastal wind generation follows our load pattern very well. It starts coming up about one o'clock and, you know, gradually increases, you know, into the evening.