Wind turbine re-start a breeze

I just love having the traditional power suppliers shown to be second best. This is rather related to the IEEE article that I posted yesterday.

http://torontostar.ca/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?GXHC_gx_session_id_=f3ca5ed62020d43a&pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1061460310359&call_pageid=968332188492&col=968705899037

Wind turbine re-start a breeze


JOSH RUBIN
STAFF REPORTER THESTAR.COM

Some nuclear power plants have taken more than a week to come online after last Thursday's massive blackout. For Toronto's only commercial wind turbine, it took less than 24 hours.

The Windshare turbine, which has been running at Exhibition Place since February, was spinning away and generating its full 750 kilowatt capacity by early Friday afternoon, said David Timm of the Toronto Renewable Energy Co-operative.

"From the time our engineer got here, it took us about 15 minutes to get everything working again,'' said Timm, a TREC project manager. TREC co-owns 50 per cent of the turbine, and Toronto Hydro owns the other half. The co-operative raised $800,000 of the turbine's $2 million cost by selling shares to members of the public.

Unlike nuclear power plants or coal-operated power plants, a wind turbine only needs a little help from Mother Nature to start up, Timm explained.

...snip...

"In this season of discontent in the electricity business, only wind power seems to stand out as a global success story. While petroleum prices were convulsing in response to war and labor strife, and nuclear plants were stoking controversy in the Middle East and Asia, wind turbines were quietly becoming the fastest-growing energy source in the world. They now provide more than 31 000 MW of power, a total that has swelled by almost 30 percent in scarcely a year's time..."

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/aug03/wind.html

100s or 1000s in CA? I really have no idea about it!

Thanks

at least as best I can tell - "Unlike nuclear power plants or coal-operated power plants, a wind turbine only needs a little help from Mother Nature to start up" - so maybe that's the time it takes for them to start spinning fast enough to generate juice?

> I think 'mother nature' takes care of starting them

Along similar lines, somewhere else around here, I posted a
note describing how Public Service Company of New Hampshire
comes back from an absolutely complete power failure. I won't
repeat the whole note here, but the "black start" plant that
they depend upon to get things rolling again is the Amoskeag
Station hydro-electric dam.

That is, their big thermal energy plants (the coal, oil, and uranium
burners) can't start themselves up; they depend on electricity
from hydro to get things "bootstrapped".

Atlant

> Do you know if it takes 15 min. for each turbine?

They're easy to start because modern wind turbines don't directly
generate the AC power that they deliver to the grid. Instead,
their power is delivered through sophisticated solid-state control
electronics that allow a nice, smooth, automatic re-connection.

This means that there's almost no issues with "phasing" or "power
flow" as you bring them back onto the grid; they simply start "soft"
and ramp up to delivering whatever power the current wind conditions
permit.

This is in sharp contrast to the directly-connected, almost-gigawatt-
capable AC alternators that are used in traditional thermal and
nuclear power plants. They have a huge rotating mass and their
re-connection to the grid must be carefully timed so as to prevent
huge physical forces from physically ripping the equipment apart.

Atlant

This is the best answer as to why Wind Turbines are able to come back
online quickly.

Nuclear powerplants are slow to restart after a five or six hour shutdown because of an effect known as Xenon poisoning. When a nuclear plant shuts down there is a slow rise in the concentration of the radioactive isotope Xenon-135 which absorbs neutrons and prevents further chain fission reactions. This concentration peaks after about ten or twelve hours and a few hours after the peak, it is possible to restart the reactor, though not necessarily at full power. Thus in the recent blackout, even if the power grid had been restored, their would have been some delay in restoring the generating capacity. In practice, since the grid was not restored until well after the Xenon peak had passed, it was a relatively small issue.

Engineers at Chernobyl disabled all of the reactor's safety systems during a test in order to avoid problems with Xenon poisoning. This is why all of the control rods were removed from the reactor at the time of the accident.

Nuclear power is only marginally suited to addressing fluctuating power loads. Small systems, such as wind turbines and solar cells are far better suited, (as are, unfortunately, small fossil fueled generators) for peak demand. This is especially true of solar cells, since power demand rises with the demand for air conditioning, which is in turn greatest when the sun is shining brightly.

Nuclear power is ideally suited than either wind or solar however for base load power generation, and in fact is better suited for such purposes than are wind turbines and solar cells. (Wind turbines work only when the wind is blowing and solar cells only when the sun is shining.) The best way to run a nuclear reactor is flat out, at high power.

Thanks for that information, NNadir. And welcome to DU!

Atlant