Too much wind power?
Now that's a novel problem.
About a month ago, I'm told that a couple of main roads around here
were closed down for awhile as a bunch of wind turbine parts
motored through on their way north up to Sudbury.
Seems that wind farms are cropping up all over these days.
Re: peak power usage and managing flows, etc...
Recently, Ontario Hydro said that it was moving to meters that
will measure power usage by time and you'll pay more for power
used during peak time than during low time -- to encourage
people to use power during the night, etc...
I think those are supposed to be installed province-wide
sometime in the next year or two if I'm correct.
I expect the new system will encourage more use of off-peak generated energy.
Seems to me that that could help to stagger power use and maybe
solve a lot of the problems of managing the grid.
If more people made use of power during the night... and I'm including
industry as a user -- some things can be done during the night
just as easily as during the day - that might solve some problems
in utilizing energy produced by diverse means.
I would think that, given the different properties of the various
generating systems:
Solar during daylight and especially summer,
wind during stormier weather and winter (we get huge winds in
my area in winter),
hydro-generated power in spring and summer when
river flows are greatest, etc...
Other fuel-based systems used to cover the shortfalls.
Seems that the key thing will be to encourage power use during
off-peak times, and to go to a lot better management systems
of the grid -- which is probably coming along.
If anything, diversity in power sources seems to me to
be a big plus.
imo, the killer problem is really whether we keep pace with "progress"...
as in, more people, more shopping malls, more cars... etc...
(seems to be no end in sight in that regard though).
Probably gonna have need and use all the power we can generate
from any and all sources.
~croc |
