Good News About Windmills

by hilzoy

One of the fun things about having a blog is that when I find an obscure story that I think ought to be more widely known, I can just write about it, and voila! my millions throngs dozens of readers all find out about it. So when I read this, I thought: hey, I should post this, for all those people who have worried about the possibility that clean, wonderful wind power could produce seafowl carpaccio as an unfortunate side effect. Apparently not:

"Uncertainty surrounding wind power's impact on wildlife--particularly the potential for deadly collisions between birds and turbines--has tarnished its image and even delayed some wind farms. Indeed, the first large offshore wind farm proposed for U.S. waters--the Cape Wind project in Massachusetts's Nantucket Sound--has been held up in part by concerns that its 130 turbines could kill thousands of seabirds annually. Now a simple infrared collision-detection system developed by Denmark's National Environmental Research Institute is helping clear the air.

The Thermal Animal Detection System (TADS) is essentially a heat-activated infrared video camera that watches a wind turbine around the clock, recording deadly collisions much as a security camera captures crimes. The first results, released this winter as part of a comprehensive $15 million study of Denmark's large offshore wind farms, show seabirds to be remarkably adept at avoiding offshore installations. "There had been suggestions that enormous numbers of birds would be killed," says Robert Furness, a seabird specialist at the University of Glasgow, who chaired the study's scientific advisory panel. "There's a greater feeling now among European politicians that marine wind farms are not going to be a major ecological problem, and therefore going ahead with construction is not going to raise lots of political difficulties." (...)

TADS was mounted on a Nysted wind-farm turbine that was situated in the most common flight path, and during more than 2,400 hours of monitoring that concluded last fall, it spotted only fifteen birds and bats and one moth flying near the turbine, and it recorded one collision involving a small bird or bat. Furness says that this provides confidence in estimations by Danish researchers that the Nysted wind farm would kill few common eiders."

If you think about it, that's an astonishingly small number of collisions, given that it involves 130 huge wind turbines whose blades, according to the article, can slice through the air, and thus through a bird, at 80 meters per second at the tip. It has been clear all along that a lot of birds are smarter* than we think; this is one more bit of evidence.

The humans involved are fairly clever too:

"What makes TADS practical for continuous operation is software Desholm wrote to activate recording when a warm object enters the video camera's field of vision. According to Furness, the need to sift through thousands of hours of film was a major limitation for researchers who had previously tried infrared monitoring. He says that other automated collision monitoring that relies on vibration sensors on the blades and towers has failed to produce a reliable system. "This is the first system which has really functioned," says Furness."

This study will have to be repeated at different locations, and with different species, before we can safely extrapolate from it. But it's wonderful news for those of us who care about both cutting our consumption of fossil fuel and birds.

* This second link is to the Alex Foundation, named for Alex, a parrot who has been the subject of a lot of interesting studies by his owner, Dr. Irene Pepperburg. The studies are fascinating, but my favorite parts of them are not, say, Alex's learning to use the concepts of number and color, or even his suddenly deciding to use the word 'none' to mean something like 'zero' when it had been used in his presence only to mean something like 'no basis for an answer', but the moments when Alex's personality shines through. For instance: Alex sometimes gets bored -- and who can blame him, having to name the color or number or material of objects over and over? Sounds pretty boring to me. Sometimes he just stares at the ceiling and refuses to answer, or starts preening furiously. But he did something more imaginative during an experiment in which he was asked to identify the color and material of various objects on a tray. It's from The Alex Studies, p. 147:

"In each of two additional trials (one on color, one on material), however, he did not respond correctly on the second try. He produced instead each of the wrong possible answers from the appropriate category, repeated each wrong answer, then grabbed the tray liner and tossed all the objects to the floor."

A parrot after my own heart.

Comments

[Katherine]

Yep. The older style turbines did kill more birds. They made open lattice work towers that raptors perched on, and they would get sucked up into the blades. But they've now made: 1) solid towers that birds can't land on; 2) taller, slower moving windmills. So it's not so much of a problem anymore.

(caveat: this is from memory and several years old)

[rilkefan]

Infrared... Hmm, are pterodactyls endothermic?

[ajay]

Rilkefan: almost certainly, yes. Flying's very energy-intensive, so endothermy's pretty likely. Also, some of them had hair.

But the real answer to the question "are pterodactyls endothermic?" is "Not any more, they're not."

[cleek]

so... Bush is... a parrot?

[liberal japonicus]

Here's a page about Alex and Irene Pepperberg, the researcher who works with Alex. Fun stuff.

[dbomp]

If only the feathered things didn't fly into buildings

[Dantheman]

"If only the feathered things didn't fly into buildings"

And then have their companions engage in necrophilia.

[Gary Farber]

"He produced instead each of the wrong possible answers from the appropriate category, repeated each wrong answer, then grabbed the tray liner and tossed all the objects to the floor."

How did this description of a blog troller get here?

[John Thullen]

This story can't be true.

First, aren't the Danes Europeans? And isn't Denmark a mixed economy, sort of a social democracy in which most of the incentives for inventing innovative technologies have been sucked from the profit-making enzymes in the Danes' precious bodily fluids? Doesn't NERI receive half of its funding from beleagered taxpayers who are left with one cheese wheel between them?

I guess they need something to do while standing in line for months to see a doctor and receive medical attention. Cowering from Osama's bid to restore the Caliphate must have become boring.

Nah, I don't believe it. Their system wouldn't allow it.

[liberal japonicus]

Maybe they were able to do this because they were able to draw cartoons mocking the prophet. Something about all people yearn to be free to be anti-Islamic.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

Good. Now if we could only solve the battery problem wind power could be great! :)

[Baskaborr]

Sebastian,
In case you missed it, the EU is starting an interesting program related to that battery problem. Simply stated, use the power generated by the wind turbines to cool cold storage warehouses a few degrees below their normal operating temperature when electrical demand is low, when demand is high, let the warehouses warm back up to normal operating temperature, thus reducing the power demand by the those warehouses. The EU report estimates they can buffer 500 Megawatts for each degree below normal they cool the warehouses. The warehouses aren't really batteries, but they are potentially very effective at making wind a more effective component in a mixed generation system.

[Baskaborr]

Sorry, sad case of premature posting... I meant to include a link to the nature article.

[KCinDC]

How did this description of a blog troller get here?

Gary, the post is about windmills. Of course the ObWi denizens would immediately think of trolls.

Woohoo! Typepad is letting me comment again!

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

Baskaborr, I hadn't heard of it, and I don't think I understand how that would help. That makes more sense in a power generation plant where it costs more money to shut it down or scale it back than it does to run it continuously (the problem with doing that being that you have to have someplace for the excess electricity to go). I would think that might be useful for tidal or geothermal power generation.

For wind the problem is almost the opposite. The problem is that you can get lots out of the windmill some of the time and not very much at other times, and you can't control which times are which. A battery would draw power at high-wind low-usage times and then give it back at high-usage low-wind times.

The warehouse thing can't give back a different time's excess energy. If I'm understanding it properly it can reduce the draw on electricity now that it was maintaining from before. Am I understanding this properly? Do you have a link that goes into detail?

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

Oops, there is the link. We must have cross posted. Now I'll read it and see what it is about.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

Whoops, it is behind a paywall, anyone who has access want to summarize?

I guess for non-food, you could somewhat smooth the cooling into high-wind hours some of the time while not using it at other times to make it work sort of like a battery.

[Gromit]

SH: Now if we could only solve the battery problem wind power could be great!

Here we go again. Why does it seem that you always talk about new energy technologies as if any single technology must be able to replace all or even most of our current energy supply? It's not like we rely (or could rely) on a single technology now.

And it's not as if our current sources of energy, or your preferred source, don't themselves have enormous achilles heels (rapid release of sequestered carbon and finite fuel supply on the one hand, serious public health risks and extremely-long-term radioactive waste storage problems on the other). Yet I don't see you clamoring for us to shut down our coal-fired and nuclear plants in the absence of a perfect alternative. So suppose we can profitably get power from wind up to our capacity to use or store that power (estimated between 10% and 20% using current tech, if I recall correclty). What wouldn't be great about that, even if the warehouse thing doesn't pan out?

And I suspect there are a lot of applications like these warehouses that require more or less continuous energy supply, but which might be able to store a bit of energy here and reduce consumption there to build some flexibility into demand. We just have to get the incentives right and get out of the mindset that energy is something you can just keep digging up out of the ground.

Sometimes I get the impression that you have a fetish for capital-or-resource-intensive forms of energy production to the exclusion of forms that might end up being more democratic. Which I suppose makes sense from a purely capitalist point of view, but makes no sense from a national security point of view, since more diverse and less resource-dependent energy production would be much less vulnerable to attack than what we have now.

[Brett Bellmore]

"If I'm understanding it properly it can reduce the draw on electricity now that it was maintaining from before. Am I understanding this properly?"

Simply put, if you cool the deep freeze down more than it has to be, when excess power is available, then it doesn't have to consume any power at all while warming back up to normal operating temperature.

Really much better for utilizing cyclically available power sources like solar, or leveling demand from things like lighting so that more of the total power production can be from baseline powerplants. I can't see it being of much help with leveling wind power, though it could buffer things a bit so that you didn't have to match wind with expensive gas turbines.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

I read the article, and it is pretty much as I thought. A good idea, but misleading to call it a battery. Essentially it is taking a fairly constant energy need and spacing it out when possible to off-peak hours. It is a really good idea if you are already going to be cooling something. It is described as 'storing energy' and I think the journalist must be confused when he hints that you would build them just to save energy. The idea actually has wide application for power sources that are intermittent, but you wouldn't build them TO store energy, you are juggling the energy use you need over the course of a day or so such that you aren't using peak time. It is a really bright management tool.

"Here we go again. Why does it seem that you always talk about new energy technologies as if any single technology must be able to replace all or even most of our current energy supply? It's not like we rely (or could rely) on a single technology now."

I wasn't being sarcastic. I really meant: "Now if we could only solve the battery problem wind power could be great!"

Wind power and solar and other intermittent sources would be lots better if we had better batteries. It is the kind of unintuitive scientific breakthrough that would really juice up other green ideas.

[liberal japonicus]

I'm thinking that one problem is that we are dealing with two different conceptions of batteries. While a quick google suggests that the standard definition is electro-chemical, but some people think of anything that stores energy as being a battery.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

I don't mind either definition, but the cooling concept doesn't store energy in a way that is retrievable back from the the warehouse.

[liberal japonicus]

I was going to say something about being able to withdraw energy on demand versus simply storing energy in a way that it could be released under specific circumstances, but it got too convoluted. Still, I think that some of the folks taking issue with you have a more expansive view than you on what constituted batteries/energy storage technology.

I personally think that flywheels are cool, but that is probably because they are relatively easy to understand.

[Slartibartfast]

I don't mind either definition, but the cooling concept doesn't store energy in a way that is retrievable back from the the warehouse.

Sure, it's retrievable. Question is, does it make any sense to retrieve it? I mean, since it's gone through what amounts to two heat-pump cycles in the process.

[Gromit]

Sebastian Holsclaw: I wasn't being sarcastic. I really meant: "Now if we could only solve the battery problem wind power could be great!"

My mistake. Sorry for misreading your tone.

[Hartmut]

Another storage way is to pump water up the hill when energy is available in abundance and let it go down and run turbines, when energy is scarce. Requires of course the presence of suitable hills.
Before someone thinks that's an idea out of the academy of Laputa (where this is used for the production of power), there are such plants around and in use for decades already.
Another method (used on a small scale until now) is the concentration of certain solutions that give off heat when diluted again. In the case of sulphuric acid it is about 1 MJ/kg (about 0.28 kWh).

[Gromit]

Sebastian Holsclaw: I don't mind either definition, but the cooling concept doesn't store energy in a way that is retrievable back from the the warehouse.

Think of them as on-site batteries, rather than batteries that serve the grid at large (except by reducing consumption when power generation is low, of course). The energy isn't retrieved for use by the power grid, but it is retrieved by the facility itself. And since the facilities would otherwise be constantly drawing power from the grid, as long as the facilities are productive this is effectively the same as giving power back to the grid. But you are right, you couldn't just build these facilities for the purpose of storing energy.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

Gromit, you are right. I would classify it as an efficiency development rather than a storage development. I like efficiency developments! We should try to smooth power consumption for all sorts of reasons, intermittent greener power sources being only one of them. There are probably quite a few similar concepts out there that could be very helpful if used. Like if there were a really efficient glowing paint that absorbed energy and leaked it out as light later. If you needed something lit all the time, you could shine lights on it in non-peak hours and let it glow back in peak hours. (There is not to my knowledge actually such a paint). The principle is widely adaptable and rarely thought about.

But I think of it as an efficiency innovation because it is a way of smoothing power usage on something you are already doing. Designing plants that you are going to build with such principles in mind could have a great pay-off over time. But it isn't really a storage innovation because you couldn't build them just to increase storage capacity--it isn't nearly as flexible as a real battery.

But this isn't either/or. We should try for both.

[Slartibartfast]

As I pointed out earlier, you can in fact get energy back out of the system in the form of electrical power. With added inefficiencies, certainly, but it's theoretically possible.

Power is obtained from exploiting differences in potential, not from exploiting actual energy.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

"As I pointed out earlier, you can in fact get energy back out of the system in the form of electrical power. With added inefficiencies, certainly, but it's theoretically possible."

Theoretically yes, but you would have to design the warehouse to convert temperature difference back to electricity, which would be a much bigger, much more expensive (and highly inefficient) process than was being discussed in the article. If you were going that kind of ugly route, it would probably be better to use electrolysis to make hydrogen and oxygen and then recombine it in an explosion to make electricity. (I wouldn't want to work at the plant though!) :)

[liberal japonicus]

Though with a lot of these sorts of innovations, they need a push, but when some of us suggest that the government should involve itself in giving that push, I think we have come in for a large share of scorn from you.

As an example of that kind of push, in Tokyo (can't remember if it is city as a whole, or in particular wards) all new government buildings with flat roofs must have 20% of their area with 'green roofs' (i.e. living plants) and private buildings, 10%. That government intervention has led to a lot of innovation. Even something like mandating reflective roof colors would, I think, get a lot of sarcasm from you. This is just an observation, but I think it accounts for Gromit's misreading of your tone.

[Slartibartfast]

Theoretically yes, but you would have to design the warehouse to convert temperature difference back to electricity, which would be a much bigger, much more expensive (and highly inefficient) process than was being discussed in the article.

Nah, you'd just rig it up like a heat pump that runs both ways, so to speak. You might not use the same engine to both compress and expand the coolant (meaning: for forward and reverse operation) but the general concept applies.

Converting temperature differences to electricity is what we do pretty much everywhere, Sebastian. The technique varies, but the funamental idea remains.

[Slartibartfast]

But yes, agreed: this apparently isn't the planned approach. That's not the same as saying it can't be done this way, though.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

"Though with a lot of these sorts of innovations, they need a push, but when some of us suggest that the government should involve itself in giving that push, I think we have come in for a large share of scorn from you."

No. It is just that your definition of 'a push' is rather different than mine. For instance my idea of a push in this area would be to mandate the access to variable electricity pricing based on peak non-peak hours that the very largest businesses have. This would encourage all sorts of innovation based on the fact that electricity has different demands at different times.

You ideas tend to be much more akin to forcing everyone to do very specific things. That isn't very flexible, it tends to get mucked up with political concerns, and it doesn't get to the unexpected solutions very well.

You don't see mine as a push at all, which is a part of the problem.

[liberal japonicus]

Perhaps. But I think you should be a bit careful about asserting what I or others see. Though I don't see 'mandating access' as much of a push, I do think it is a push. My problem is that I don't think it is very transparent, and thus amenable to behind the scenes manipulation. Doing something like requiring a certain percentage of area or mandating a certain amount of energy to be shed by a roof in all new buildings as being rather flexible as to means, but having clear benchmarks for what the goal is. Focussing on goals helps make it clearer what is being aimed at.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

"Though with a lot of these sorts of innovations, they need a push, but when some of us suggest that the government should involve itself in giving that push, I think we have come in for a large share of scorn from you."

"Perhaps. But I think you should be a bit careful about asserting what I or others see."

Pot. Kettle. Etc.

[liberal japonicus]

Sorry if I wasn't clear Sebastian, I was referring specifically to this
You ideas tend to be much more akin to forcing everyone to do very specific things.

You don't see mine as a push at all, which is a part of the problem.

I find that just a bit over the line, but I'll continue to take it as part of your charming online persona.

[ajay]

it would probably be better to use electrolysis to make hydrogen and oxygen and then recombine it in an explosion to make electricity.

Explosion????

Fuel cells aren't exactly obscure technology, you know.

[Brett Bellmore]

"Nah, you'd just rig it up like a heat pump that runs both ways, so to speak. You might not use the same engine to both compress and expand the coolant (meaning: for forward and reverse operation) but the general concept applies."

But the efficiency would be abysmal. For instance, if your cold warehouse was right at freezing, and the outside air at a comfy 72 F, the absolute maximum efficency you'd get running a heat engine between those two temperatures would be 6-7%. A more realistic efficiency would be a couple of percent.

No, the scheme makes sense as load leveling, but it would be mind bogglingly stupid as a form of power storage.

Here's the key point, though: This sort of load leveling would happen pretty much automatically in a market economy, if you just started charging variable rates for power over the course of the day. It's only the idiot rate structure imposed by regulation that causes people to be indifferent to whether they expend power at peak demand times, or when demand is lowest.