Something For Nothing

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

This is not about green vs. wind vs. coal. It’s about LOGIC.

Today’s Toronto Star ( http://www.thestar.com/business/article/632642 ) has Yet Another Article about wind farms. The article suggest at the start that it might be leaning towards “Hey! Maybe wind farms aren’t the answer!”, but buried in the middle of the article I find this:

“Ontario is looking at building hydroelectric pumped storage facilities that would act as huge water batteries, capable of storing massive amounts of energy from wind and dispatching the power as needed.”.

I’ve thought about this. I’ve even written a letter to the folks who run the Kinzua Dam about their pamphlet claiming 4-way transfers of energy.

In Kinzua’s case, they generate electricity and sell it to consumers. If they can’t sell it to consumers, they use it to pump water into a huge man-made reservoir atop the dam, and use this reservoir as potential energy when demand increases (although it’s hard to see how an 800-foot diameter tank can greatly assist a 25-mile long lake!)

In Kinzua’s case, the water is always there; water is forever flowing into the lake, even in the dry season. It has a perpetual 24/7 source of energy, which fluctuates, but is consistent.

Wind farms do not have a continual source of energy (OK, if you consider all the wind farms in North America as one gigantic wind farm, then the wind is always blowing somewhere …).

Back to The Star. Using water reservoirs to store wind energy seems like a good idea, until you realize that wind farms alone cannot substitute for the massive amounts of energy generated by coal, hydroelectric and nuclear plants.

That is, a Wind farm can never have a surplus.

So what’s the point of building a water reservoir to hold a surplus you are never going to have?

Bad Thinking!

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