Missouri City Goes 100% Wind Power

Following the opening of a new 5 MW four-turbine wind farm last week, Rock Port, a town of 1,395 in North West Missouri, has become the first U.S. town to get all its electricity from wind power. The $90 million Loess Hills Wind Farm, was built by St. Louis-based Wind Capital Group and the John Deere Corp.

When fully operational, the four Suzlon 1.25 MW S-64 wind turbines will have the capacity to generate 16 million kilowatt hours a year. Historically, Rock Port electrical customers use approximately 13 million KwH annually.

Missouri Joint Municipal Utilities will buy excess power from the farm, expected to eventually generate 16 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year. As part of this powerpurchase agrreement  MJMU will supply Rock Port's power needs when the wind turbines are not generating at capacity.

Comments

[Annelise and Libby]

WOOHOO Missouri City!! Bring it to the rest of the world...:)

[Cyril R.]

This works very well for a few small towns, but will get disproportionally more difficult with higher percentages of wind power in the larger grids.

Fortunately, it looks like CAES is very compatible with US geology. There is need for more detailed commercial project studies on this subject.

[DaveMart]

This is a good first attempt.
It would seem to me that in addition to the CAES Cyril refers to a lot could be done for load balancing locally by the integration of other sources - here is a German experiment:
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jeremy_leggett/2008/02/renewed_energy.html
This uses biogas, which is much more efficient than ethanol:
http://biopact.com/2007/12/biomethane-presented-as-most-efficient.html
Fuels compared

and also solar power - there is going to be a considerable peak summer load at this latitude.
In this connection the ideas of Nanosolar for municipal power are interesting:
http://www.nanosolar.com/blog3/2008/04/16/municipal-solar-power-plants/
Note the three avenues for cost saving:
Ground mounting the panels, having the voltage right without transformers and reducing transmission line costs.
It would probably need to be done as an experiment first, as it would cost a fair amount to finance early examples, but it seems possible that small towns in the American mid-west could be pretty energy self-sufficient.

[Cyril R.]

Thanks for those references Dave. They were truncated though, so here they come again:

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jeremy_leggett/2008/02/renewed_energy.html

http://www.nanosolar.com/blog3/2008/04/16/municipal-solar-power-plants/

Biogas looks like a good idea to me. This is much more efficient than burning corn ethanol in big SUVs.

A lot of people worry about sustainability in biomass production.

Well a certification system could be implemented so that only waste biomass (from food crops, so no dedicated biofuel crops on arable land) and non-foodcrop-suitable land would be used. And no cutting down rainforests either, or ecologically sensitive areas.

With proper nutrient managment and legislation, and agrichar, nutrient depletion shouldn't be a problem either - not a lot of nutrients in biogas. The biogas can be produced near the source in small to medium scale plants, so the nutrients can be processed and returned to the soil quite easily. Piping biogas can be done with convention and even existing NG infrastructure. It's very efficient even over longer distances.

I think small scale distributed PV makes a lot of sense. Rooftop PV is great but there are not enough high insolation, perfectly aligned rooftops so we'll need a lot solar farms as well.

There are also a couple of ways to increase the output of these farms. For example, adding a mirror behind the panels. And covering the ground with white colored plants (ooohh, flowers!) or white seashells, or whatever, to reflect some of the light that hits the ground onto the panels. That could also solve the albedo issue, although it's not really a rational concern at least not now.

[Cyril R.]

Er, that would be "conventional". A convention wouldn't pipe much biogas, except maybe a convention of flatulent people ;)

[NS]

This is really awesome that all the electricity needs of an entire city will be produced by wind power, a truly clean, sustainable source of energy. Really this is something to be emulated.

[TheSunHarvest.com]

During peak wind they could store energy as hydrogen and us it when needed. I would love to see more of this inovation and self sufficent solutions. Great example.

Hydrogen and fuel cells are expected to profoundly impact life in the 21st century.

This is because of the pervasive potential of hydrogen and fuel cells to power automobiles, buses, trains, boats, personal computers, communication equipment and other power-consuming appliances of modern-day living. The overall market size for fuel cells may infact grow beyond that of computers, microchips, and software, evolving into an industry of unprecedented growth potential.

The reason for the tremendous commercial potential of hydrogen and fuel cells lies in the numerous benefits inherent to the technology.

Four key industry drivers have the potential to profoundly impact the growth of the hydrogen and fuel cell industry:

Escalating concern over climate change and environmental pollution.
Increased desire to reduce our reliance on foriegn oil supplies.
Increasing global deregulation of the energy industry.
Increasing fuel cell investment and activity by well-capitalized companies who have high stakes in the emergence of hydrogen technology.

[Bob Wallace]

Before the boo bugs get here, let me suggest a change in the way this is presented.

"Missouri City Produces as Much Electricity from Wind as They Consume."

That would get around the periodicity/storage/other source stuff that's sure to be thrown against the wall.

[mtburr]

Further to what Bob Wallace said, I'm wondering what the article means by "capacity." I haven't worked the math to figure it out from their numbers. Given the size of the town, four turbines _might_ be enough, if it's a good wind resource area. But if they're talking about nameplate capacity instead of actual expected generation -- maybe 25 percent of nameplate capacity -- then this is a smoke-and-mirrors announcement.

I'm very pro-wind and I'm disturbed by some disinformation I've seen coming out of wind advocates lately. If the wind industry doesn't tell the plain truth and avoid obfuscation, it's headed for trouble.

[Cyril R.]

mtburr, they are definately talking about energy not power:

When fully operational, the four Suzlon 1.25 MW S-64 wind turbines will have the capacity to generate 16 million kilowatt hours a year. Historically, Rock Port electrical customers use approximately 13 million KwH annually.

[Robert McLeod]

The capacity factor of this project is:

16E12/(4*1.25E6*3600*24*365)
=
0.1016

which is pretty terrible. Typically wind resources with the lowest capacity factors also have the worst intermittency issues.

It's generally a good idea to do the math before you go around knocking down imaginary strawmen, in my humble opinion.

[Robert McLeod]

And I forgot to convert kWh to Joules now didn't I? Argh, forehead slapping moment.

(16E6 [kWh]* 3.6E6 [J/kwh])/(4* 1.25 [Watts]* 3600[s/hr]* 24[hr/day]* 365[day/year])

=

0.3653 capacity factor

Which is pretty high.

[TPjr]

I agree with you, Bob Wallace: "Missouri City Produces as Much Electricity from Wind as They Consume." But $90M for 1,395 people = $65,000 per person or about $250,000 for a family of 4. Where does that money come from? And how long before we get 3x or 4x cost improvement? It's exciting to see the progress, however.

[Samantha Jacoby]

Too many communities and companies don't realise the significant renewable energy investment opportunities available to them. I encourage the CFOs, CEOs and Managing Directors to join their peers at the Renewable Energy Finance Forum-Wall Street, held in NYC on June 18-19, 2008. Executives from the biggest names in renewable energy financing will be presenting: GE, BP, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, First Solar, LDK Solar, UBS, etc etc. Learn more at http://www.reffwallstreet.com.

[Bob Wallace]

TP, new power from any source is expensive. I suppose this community penciled it out and determined that it was a good investment for them to borrow some capital for wind and then service the loan rather than purchase electricity from another source.

Right now money is cheap and fuel is doing nothing except getting more expensive.

As for overall cost of wind, according to recent statements by those in the industry the cost will start to fall soon. Right now the infrastructure (plants, machinery) are still being developed. Right now the industry needs subsidies from the government to reach an economy of scale.

But, personally, I'm betting that solar undercuts wind in terms of price alone.

[mtburr]

Robert McLeod wrote:
"It's generally a good idea to do the math before you go around knocking down imaginary strawmen, in my humble opinion."

Fair enough, and probably I should have just asked the question rather than opining. While a 36 % capacity factor is quite high, it's perhaps conceivable if they're doing a sort of massive "net metering" calculus to get to their annual load.

I just get very tired of reading press releases where some company quotes a total turbine capacity figure and then restates it in terms of households that capacity represents. At first glance this looked like it could be the same type of obfuscation, more cleverly worded. If your arithmetic is correct (I'm no EE), they are being merely optimistic and not actually deceptive.

MTB

[J Anthony]

Bob Wallace (Comment 4/28/08, 10:44 am):

Thanks for your previous response on BEVs (4/27/08, 9:18 am); it makes sense.

While successful large-scale renewable energy deployment would indeed be a desirable outcome, I still find myself skeptical, at least for intermittent sources (hot dry rock geothermal might be a go…). Since you seem a well informed RE advocate, I wonder if I might politely (with as little wall-throwing as possible ☺) advance my reservations for your comments.

What would happen if we replaced all fossil plants with wind/solar without building any more nuclear plants? I’ve heard the arguments about geographic and wind/solar diversity, but I still find it hard to believe that there wouldn’t be times and places where RE power was inadequate (are there statistics from Denmark or Germany on this?).

For such a large-scale deployment, could storage make up the deficit? Hydro is pretty much at its limit, especially with increasing droughts (and nobody wants more dams). CAES involves fossil fuels, which we’re trying to get rid of. Hydrogen is very inefficient (maybe 30% round trip efficiency?), and where would we store huge volumes of it? Ausra has proposed hot water storage, but that’s untried, and works only for solar thermal, not the popular distributed PV. What I see happening in such a situation is that institutions and affluent individuals would provide their own storage via private fossil fuel generators (which we’re trying to get rid of), or maybe massive batteries, and the poor would have to do without power during the blackouts.

What about providing large overcapacity? (IIRC, Ausra is advocating 3x overcapacity to deal with winter in the warm climates of California and Texas). That leads to the issue of costs. RE systems, especially solar, are hardly competitive without subsidies. With overcapacity, electricity costs would increase several times. Now, you might say, our affluent society will just have to accept those costs to avoid global warming. But there is still the issue of raising capital -- from limited capital sources -- for building the RE plants. Whatever capital can be practically raised, the cheapest non-fossil alternative (least $ per average MW) will provide the most global warming abatement, because we can deploy more of it. Nuclear is almost certainly cheaper than RE with overcapacity or storage, and so would serve us better for expeditious carbon abatement.

A last alternative for large scale RE deployment is to have grid backups from fossil and nuclear power, as is done today, using the argument that less of those sources would be needed in a backup role. Again, the problem is cost. To handle periods when the RE system produces little power, the backup would have to be a parallel system capable of handling full grid load (and even if full backup is only used occasionally, a significant fraction of its capacity will have to be kept on spinning reserve). The two parallel systems will cost more. If the backup was entirely nuclear (this wouldn’t work for fossil!), you could use it full time for a fraction of the cost of the RE plus nuclear system, and so get much more global warming benefit for the available $.

We also have to look beyond the affluent Western world. Even if North America, Europe and Australia were willing to support the costs and intermittency difficulties of RE, it’s very doubtful if China and India would. If the only alternative were RE, those countries would very likely continue with coal power plus some nuclear, and all our efforts with RE would be in vain, as their emissions would swamp our savings. If, on the other hand, the West pushed hard on nuclear, and through mass production and innovation produced nuclear technology as cheap as Chinese coal power, we might be able both to save the world climate and make significant bucks for ourselves.

[Cyril R.]

But $90M for 1,395 people = $65,000 per person or about $250,000 for a family of 4.

There is a lot of confusion here. $ 90 million is a typo; the turbine blades are 90 feet. It appears all the journalists have copied this verbatim.

There are no wind projects that go for $ 18000 per kW. It's rubbish, about an order of magnitude off. My guess is it's $ 9 million or $ 1800 per kW.

[Bob Wallace]

J - I think you've thought it through pretty well. I'm not sure that I can add a thing to what you already know.

What we (we as in people like you and me) don't know is how often there isn't significant (potential) generation over a large geographic area. What sort of time intervals of very low input would a non-fossil, non-nuclear grid experience?

If that interval is low then we wouldn't need lots of storage or backup. Remember that wind and wave are often high when sun is low - winter storm conditions. Hydro and geothermal are pretty constant. And tidal slacks occur at different times in different places.

As I understand things, natural gas plants are relatively inexpensive to build (just expensive to run due to fuel costs). I would think that it wouldn't be prohibitive to have enough NG standby to fill in the gap.

Remember that we can turn on the gas plants long before storage runs dry and effectively extend the storage period. We don't need 100% backup standby. If, for example, the longest ever measured non-wind/sun/etc. period was 36 hours we could build 18 hours of storage and have "18 hours" of backup generation.

While it would be nice to get totally off fossil fuels, I'm not sure it's a goal we should pursue in the short term. Let's get the use down enough to cut down on atmospheric pollutants and enough to extend our supply of NG to far in the future.

We already generate a significant amount of our power with NG (20%?), so that amount of standby/backup is just waiting to be sidelined by greener sources.

[curt]

Very encouraging. Such projects, when successfully finished, are truly amazing promotion by itself for other cities all over the US. That's a prove, that renewable works well, even though, not supported enough by Gov.

[Harvey D]

The installed cost for four 1.25 MW units totaling 5 MW should be 5 x 1000 x $1800 = $9 million NOT $90 millions.

Four towers being a rather small wind farm, one could add up to 20% or another $1.8 million.

Good doing Missouri City. Others should follow.

[Kit P]

“What would happen if we replaced all fossil plants with wind/solar without building any more nuclear plants?”

Well what if you got paid by signing a voucher one penny at a time? What if your drinking water supply system was replaced with with an eye dropper? What if your grocery sold rice one grain at a time?

You might tell me that there are better ways of doing those things. But what the environmental impact was less? It does dot matter because the task of getting paid, eating, and drinking water could not get done. It is called doing without. There is about a billion folks in on this planet who are expert at doing without. Getting paid a penny at time is not a problem. The lack of clean drinking is something you get used. If dysentery kill you children, starvation will.

The category of producing electricity called 'renewable energy other' is an insignificant source if electricity because it is not a very good way of making electricity. Wind, biomass, hydroelectric, fossil and nukes are used because they are practical ways of making electricity.

Storing excess renewable energy is not really a problem we have.

[JohnPeter JP Elverding]

Over here (Netherlands) we'd expect to pay $4M for a 6/8 Mw mill (stand alone) that would generate approx. 2-4 MW per year. One of these windmills is tested not far away from here with an axel height of some 140 meters (460 feet) and the tip of the rotor at 200 meters (600 feet or so)
At these heights yields improve because of the winds at these altitudes.
They are not yet being sold, but the delivery of current models (3-4 Mw) will take up to 24 months. Sp plenty of times to do the math and overcome protests from people who don't want thier horizon cluttered with them.

[David]

I will believe that a community is going "100% wind power" when there is no electrical energy input besides wind power.
My prediction ? "MJMU will supply Rock Port's power needs when the wind turbines are not generating at capacity." will be most of the time. What the wind business doesn't need is more silly and misleading hype like this.
I say this as a wind power proponent, one who has truly used "100% wind power" to fill my cattle's water troughs for many years.

[Kit P]

“to fill my cattle's water troughs for many”

Very interesting David. I have speculated for a long time why the mechanical driven wind water pumps have not been maintained.