I definitely appreciate the discussion, idylwyld. In regards to your first paragraph, I wouldn't see myself as a glass half empty guy in regards to renewables, more of a glass half empty guy in regards to society in general. I just don't think that, no matter how much people like you or I (or likely most of the others here on a canoing forum) try, we will be able to push the rest of the world off the path that they are on. That sounds pessimistic, and I guess it is, but I really do see a major societal crash in my daughter's life time, if not my own. Working day in and day out within the grid, I urge everyone I can to buy a backup generator for their homes if they have no other contingency plans in place. The grid is fragile, house-of-cards fragile, and every day more and more smart technicians responsible for maintaining and repairing the system either retire or quit, and very very few enter into the trade. On the continent, there is somewhere in the neighborhood of 14,000 vacancies in the field of Power Electrician/Electrical Technicians alone, not to mention the mechanics and millwrights and system operators. Yet every day, someone else comes out with a new "must have" gadget to add to the hundred other gadgets plugged into the wall. The vast majority fail to recognize the extent of the problem, and the vast majority of them wouldn't be able to understand the problem in the first place. There's too much money on the table, and I just don't see the people in charge of making the decisions choosing balance over profit. I hope and pray that I'm wrong, but I have a persistent feeling that I'm not. All I can do is prepare myself and my family and friends. Ok, doom and gloom over...
In regards to your second paragraph, that illustrates the very first comment that I made here:
Quote:
The first thing that needs to change is how we as a society use electricity.
In response to your reasoning that if the wind isn't blowing in Alberta, it likely is elsewhere, that's absolutely true, but with the current market and regulation structure, it's up to Alberta to back up Alberta's shortfalls. It's not that it would be completely impossible to co-ordinate power sales contracts between many different producers and transmission entities, but it would be a logistical nightmare, with the CURRENT set up. Opportunity exists, fair enough, but I see our brightest minds focusing more on how to produce a pill that melts fat away or keeps erections longer rather than reforming the electrical grid. More pessimism, but I've been in the industry long enough to have had a lot of the optimism beaten out of me. And you're 100% right, the system is struggling and major major problems exist that need to be corrected whether we add renewables or not.
HVDC systems are used for one of two purposes. Long distance power transmission from remote source to load centers, and in this respect Manitoba Hydro was and is a world leader:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_River_Bipole (I happen to work at the Northern End of that system, providing technical training and technical support to Electrical Technicians and Power Electrician apprentices) This technology can be used anywhere where there is a source of energy that is a very long distance from populated load centers. Geothermal, tidal, desert-based solar thermal, whatever.
The second use, and probably more applicable in this discussion, is to increase stability on interconnected systems by "de-coupling" connected grids. These installations are back to back, meaning that the high voltage AC system on one side is rectified in HVDC, travels on less than 50 ft of buswork to a converter where it is converted back into AC. Every grid interconnection entering/leaving Texas follows this scheme, it is essentially a power system that can still import or export power from it's neighbors but is unaffected by whatever happens outside of it's borders, voltage level, frequency concerns, transient faults.
The major problem with these systems is that they are insanely expensive. The cost is justified in our case by the tremendous increase in efficiency (3-5% losses compared to 17-30% losses over 1000 km). I'm not sure how back-to-back system economics work out, but obviously they do somehow or they wouldn't exist.
I'm unfamiliar with high-temp superconductors, and I have mixed feelings on smart grids. The problem with batteries is that they don't last forever and introduce an entirely new set of environmental concerns. I would expect to see more movement on ultracapacitors as a storage medium of the future, but I can't see them ready in the foreseeable future. I agree that there are opportunities for baseload renewables in some areas, but the peak demand and peak solar times don't exactly line up. The load profile (in Manitoba anyway, and I would imagine is fairly standard) is high demand early morning as people wake up and machinery starts up, dropping off until a dip at noon, another slight peak around 1-2 or 3 (solar peak) as production picks up again after lunch break, leveling off until another peak around supper time, as everyone returns home.
I read the article, and I'm happy that there is movement in the dynamic compensation front. I hope the trend continues. It is about time that wind farms were held accountable for their affects on system loading and system stability, and it seems like they have a plan in place and it is advancing quickly. These are definitely good things.
One thing that you may or may not realize, though, is that the energy density for these installations is extremely low. It does add up, I'll give you that, but with an 80 MW farm here and a 10 MW farm there, you have to cover a large part of the continent with these machines to make a real difference. I am aware of and fully support roof-top solar initiatives in densely populated areas, they provide local power for otherwise unusable space. If you look at the amount of physical space required to produce 100 MW of wind or solar on productive land and compare it to a coal plant or a nuclear plant that pushes out 5000+ MW, there's no comparison at all. The need of energy isn't growing by a handful of MW's here and there, it's into the thousands, and although windfarms have a relatively small ground footprint, it does add up and that's loss of arable land that could be used for food production.
To try to bring everything back on track, I do whole-heartedly agree that renewable technology is growing, and needs to continue to grow. My gut feeling though is that as a stop-gap measure to carry us through to when they can stand on their own, nuclear, in my opinion, is one of our best bets. Not the old reactor designs, but the breeder type designs that are used overseas that reprocess their "waste" into useable fuel. This technology *CAN* be used to produce weapons grade material, but essentially makes nuclear waste a non-issue. For technology AS IT EXISTS TODAY, it will have the biggest, fastest impact.
Good debate though, you are pretty knowledgeable in these issues and it shows, rather than a lot of others who just think that we would all be OK if we add a few wind turbines and solar panels. I appreciate your optimism, and I hope that you are more correct on the future than I am.