Recently, I argued that Germans are focusing too heavily on storing solar power and that we need to think more about storing everything – not just solar and wind, but just basically power from the grid. In February, my colleague Stephen Lacey published an article in February on a new turbine by GE that communicates with a power storage system.
The firm's marketing people were hard at work here; the turbine is called Brilliant. The 2.5 megawatt machine has a Condition Monitoring System, but one that goes a bit further than merely monitoring operations and detecting upcoming malfunctions. It also allows the turbines within a wind farm to communicate with each other and with the firm's Durathon battery.
At the beginning of this month, GE announced that the first three Brilliant 2.5-120 turbines are now to be installed in Texas. Surprisingly, none of the reports I found stated exactly how much the batteries can store; the press release merely speaks of "turbine-to-battery communication… predicting wind power production in 15-60-minute increments." (The link to the firm's website on the battery explains that the size "can be adjusted to suit customer needs.")
While GE says its new product is "the first wind turbine to incorporate short-term battery storage as a part of the complete turbine package," it is by no means the first time that battery storage has been coupled to wind turbines. As this report from 2011 shows, German market leader Enercon worked with battery manufacturer Saft to produce a similar system on a Caribbean island (PDF). The battery system has a capacity of more than three megawatts for two minutes to provide time for a diesel generator to be started up.
In all likelihood, the combination is not more common in Germany simply because the need has not been perceived up to now. But going forward, we will increasingly have to think of the cost of power not merely in terms of generation, but the generation + storage.
In other words, in the discussion yesterday comparing the cost of solar and nuclear, we need to consider how much power needs to be stored and what the cost would be – not only of solar and wind, but also nuclear. After all, nuclear does not ramp down, and the excess electricity at times of low demand (such as at night) is currently used for things like electric heating in France and electric lighting on highways in Belgium – a fact that makes France's recent ban on unnecessary overnight lighting all the more curious.
But while the German public continues to fiercely debate all aspects of its Energiewende, France's energy transition is not a hot topic among the general public according to this report, which says the new ban "grabbed almost imperceptible public attention."
Nonetheless, one wonders what the nuclear sector thinks. (Craig Morris)
SOURCE: http://www.renewablesinternational.net
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