The Wind-Car Trials

November 05, 2008

 

One fifth is commonly held to be wind's limit in the power mix, given wind's tendency to blow at times but not at other times. If you could store wind power for later use, could you push the mix higher, could you make wind more than a fifth of the electricity production capacity mix?  Store it in a battery, perhaps?

If you had a country with electric cars and wind, could you use the car batteries to store the wind? If so, would wind be cheaper because you don't need to back it up with conventional power plants ?

Let's try. Let's blanket a country that gets a fifth of its power from wind with electric vehicles. Let's get Denmark to do so in 2011. And let's get the potent startup Better Place to drive the plan.

The Oil Embargo pushed Denmark from being completely dependent on foreign oil in 1973 to being energy independent today, in large part because a fifth of their electricity comes from wind. Better Place has intentions of putting a full scale Electric Recharge Grid in Denmark by 2011, with tens of thousands of electric vehicles to match.

When they do, we'll get to see if it's possible to buffer wind with car batteries at the grand scale of an entire country. How fortunate that Denmark responded with foresight to the Oil Embargo so that the wind is in place to permit the experiment. If the experiment works, there'll be a Place for all that pent up venture capital hunting for the good green bet, and all the regular capital, and manufacturing capacity, and labor looking for jobs, and governments looking to craft forward-thinking energy policy.

Photo: Y on flickr

Comments

[Space]

Mr. Chris Davis and Mr. Andy Bochman,
The topic you are presenting about new power not demanding for money paying or even stop stations is a Wow idea. I looked at that page to see that you chose (Y's) photo, who is a great photographer and i was lucky enogh to enjoy th topic as well.

Thanks for choosing that photo, and double Thanks for your great work.

Regards, Space
:)

[Chris]

Space, it is fun to hunt up photos for our posts, there is so much rich art out there (stuff like Y's), and we get stuff from all over the world: India, New Zealand, England, Chile, and many more.

If I understand your comment about the costs of new power: I'm not sure anyone knows yet what the new cost structures would be like, but it's easy to imagine setups where you could sell electric power you produce or store, maybe even to make money! Also, it's easy to imagine that once the costs of getting the infrastructure in place are borne, new power might be:

* cheaper because of the source of the fuel (wind,sun)and the lower maintenance requirements.

* cost stable (while wind and solar are intermittent and thus unstable with respect to time, they ought to have better price stability than things like oil and natural gas).