I recently attended an panel discussion of leaders working on environmental projects and was particularly intrigued by the CEO of a company called Bullfrog Power. Their outfit use generates 100 % clean energy (primarily through Wind Power) which it then offers to put into metropolitan power grids on your behalf if you pay them (at a premium) for your electricity instead of the usual power company.
My question is this: if this company was successful in converting a significant portion of local metropolitan homes (which happen to been here in Toronto Canada) to use green power, couldn’t the existing power-company just sell their unused electricity to other provinces or the United States? So ultimately, even if all of Toronto started using Bullfrog’s green power, wouldn’t the amount of pollution remain the same, and the ‘dirty’ energy just sold abroad?
The sale of so called “green” power at a premium or surcharge price to the consumer is an attempt to recover the excess cost of wind power over conventual means such as coal and hydro. All of the power generated by your provider is lumped together for distribution.
TVA has contracted for a wind-farm on Buffalo Mountain. They have one hydro storage on Raccoon Mountain to accommodate daily load fluctuations. If you want to pay for a block of “green” power you are welcome to join the other “greenies,” otherwise what is not sold at a premium price is lumped together with all the power consumed costs and charged to all the other users at a common rate schedule.
It is a game from start to finish, or you can call it a scam if you like, there is little if any difference. *
It is only flawed if people are using more power because their power is “green”. Even if the power company then sells it’s excess power to the US, it is that much less power that the US has to produce.
spingears misses one major point of course, by willingly signing up to pay a premium for the “Green” power, you are encouraging more “Green” power generation.
This is similar to the state of NJ helping me (a lot) to pay for my solar panels. There is no cost benefit to the state at this point and the pay back for me is not as good as many investments I could have made. However, the state and early adopters like myself are priming the pump for additional and cheaper Solar Panels in the future. Hopefully the near future.
The people demand so much power, as long as the supply is there the amount of power produced is constant (ignoring transmission inefficiencies). If you buy wind power from this company, they have money to place new windmills and that would be a bigger chunk of the total power produced, so a gas turbine plant may not have to fire up because of the extra windmill power.
One question about wind and solar power, due to their very nature it would seem like they won’t produce constant power. What smooths out the irregular power these things produce? I assume it’s something like a gas turbine plant, which can be started up fairly quickly, but starting and stopping a gas plant does introduce inefficiencies over keeping it at a constant run, also a steam turbine plant is overall more efficient then a gas turbine, so are we really replacing a:
efficient steam turbine (coal, gas, oil, waste fired or nuke)
with
windmills AND a less efficient gas turbine???
kanic: as mentioned upthread, some utilities use a hydro storage scheme. pump water uphill into a resevoir overnight, when power is cheap, and make electricty during the day when the water flows downhill. Of course, you lose a bit this way, but it’s one way to store that surplus energy.
in re the OP, there is a limit to how far you can export that excess energy, so at some point, there will be less generated. However, “green power” options are a ruse by utilities to dodge stricter mandates for renewable energy by showing that customers don’t want it. Well, not to many people, perhaps 5-10%, would pay a premium for “green” power, but we are all paying a premium for “dirty” power generation in countless ways.
I wish there were something similar in Ohio. My research has shown that in order to qualify for any kind of federal benefit the solar energy has to go to both passive and active energy, and right now only passive seems to make a lot of sense in terms of cost/benefit with the technology that’s out there.
The UK, OTOH, where there is far less available sunlight, has had solar energy/wind energy and consumer tax breaks for years. . . .
The power is smoothed out by whatever power plant is used to “load follow” by the control area operator. (A control area is usually the local company’s section of the power grid) That load following generator (sometimes called the swing generator) must be capable of adjusting its output quickly.
Most of the time that job is given to gas turbines, smaller less efficient steam turbines, or neighboring systems. Larger, more efficient, plants would be step-loaded to keep the swing generator within its range of operation.
The wind turbine doesn’t necessarily dictate that less efficient generation should be on to compensate for its irregular output. That’s already necessary due to the changes in load created by customers. What wind (and solar) energy sources do is create a more volatile load pattern that demands faster response times by the swing generation.
So, if the swing generator can react quickly, wind generation can benefit the customer without harming the utility.