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THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Discussions of conventional and alternative energy production technologies.

Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Wed 15 Mar 2017, 10:53:58

Simon - And speaking of Aussie problems dealing with the dynamic nature of the energy situation here's another view: "Australia’s electricity market is not agile and innovative enough to keep up". From http://theconversation.com/australias-e ... p-up-72870
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Mon 20 Mar 2017, 23:31:00

S - Have you seen this? From
https://onestepoffthegrid.com.au/german ... ty-market/

"Just months after launching its residential battery storage offering onto the Australian market, Germany battery maker Sonnen has flagged the introduction of a household solar and storage deal that threatens to disrupt the traditional retail electricity model. The deal, called “Sonnen flat,” offers free power to households using the company’s integrated solar and storage system, including for any electricity drawn from the grid when the sun goes down and stored energy is used up.

In return, Sonnen has access to its customers’ installed battery storage capacity to use as a sort of virtual power plant, to provide grid balancing services to network operators – most of the time, without any discernible impact at the customer’s end.
“The deal is, you buy a Sonnen battery to go with your solar and don’t pay for electricity any more,” Sonnen Australia head Chris Parratt told One Step Off The Grid in an interview this week. “That’s the way we see the market going,” Parratt added. “Eventually your electricity costs will look like a mobile phone plan.”

Meanwhile, Sonnen starts to look less like a battery business and more like energy retailer, with any losses incurred by giving customers free power more than compensated for through revenue made on the balancing power market – known in Australia as Frequency Control Ancillary Services, or FCAS – where prices are higher than in the regular markets.
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Newfie » Tue 21 Mar 2017, 05:32:53

Here's a question I've never heard asked let alone answered.

Given the world resources what is the total combined storage capacity of batteries?

In other words, if you dedicated all the available resources to batteries, how much total storage could you come with AND what is the life span of that system?

I have 4 GC6 batteries in the big boat for a combined capacity of 430AH new. They last about 5 years. On average I really only have about half that power, 215AH available because the batteries are only infrequently fully charged and you don't want to run them down too far. I try to use my heaviest loads when it's windy and/sunny so I'm drawing straight off the wind gen or panels.

I'm assuming real world scaled systems would be similar.

So if we need 4 GC6 batteries for our fairly low energy life style for 2 people, 2 batteries per capita, then we would need about 15 billion batteries every 5 years for Earth's population, or 3 billion GC6 equivalents per year.

Assuming you can do much better on large scale, let's call it 1 billion GC 6 equivelents per year.

How long before we ran out of the capacity to build new batteries?
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Tanada » Tue 21 Mar 2017, 09:21:19

Newfie wrote:Here's a question I've never heard asked let alone answered.

Given the world resources what is the total combined storage capacity of batteries?

In other words, if you dedicated all the available resources to batteries, how much total storage could you come with AND what is the life span of that system?

I have 4 GC6 batteries in the big boat for a combined capacity of 430AH new. They last about 5 years. On average I really only have about half that power, 215AH available because the batteries are only infrequently fully charged and you don't want to run them down too far. I try to use my heaviest loads when it's windy and/sunny so I'm drawing straight off the wind gen or panels.

I'm assuming real world scaled systems would be similar.

So if we need 4 GC6 batteries for our fairly low energy life style for 2 people, 2 batteries per capita, then we would need about 15 billion batteries every 5 years for Earth's population, or 3 billion GC6 equivalents per year.

Assuming you can do much better on large scale, let's call it 1 billion GC 6 equivelents per year.

How long before we ran out of the capacity to build new batteries?


Assuming your math is correct and that dead (as in worn out or shorted out) batteries are all recycled to replace the new ones the industrial capacity should not be a problem. IMO the problem would be twofold, you would have to convince the average human being everywhere that a low energy battery sustained intermittent energy lifestyle was better than using cheap fossil energy and using a lot more power for appliances than your intermittent battery lifestyle would permit. For people without power that sounds great, but everyone in every city with a regular apartment anywhere already had line electric current, as does nearly all rural residents in Europe, North America and Australia plus a lot of the rural folks everywhere else. IOW the vast majority of humans already have line electricity and you have the difficult task of convincing them to give that up in favor of wind/solar and a low energy lifestyle. Even if you convince yourself that only 60 percent of humans now have line electricity that comes out to 4,500,000,000 humans who will all fight giving up that 'western' lifestyle in favor of wind/solar on the scale you are talking about.

Your only chance IMO would be to get that wind/solar/battery system installed on the people without access to line electricity first to remove the incentive to install the grid out to their wide scattered rural locations. Doing that would work all the bugs out of the system and teach you what needed to be done to improve the system and make it less expensive. You could then extend it to the rest of the rural population keeping their line electricity to produce night time power to offset cloudy and calm days when the solar and wind are not producing enough to charge the battery systems.

Even if you pull all that off however the world just a couple years ago passed the tipping point where more people live in cities than rural locations, and line electricity is the only practical way to power people in multi story structures even if that is supplemented with wind/solar in the margins. People move to the cities for work and amenities, one of the big amenities is clean water and another is line electricity.
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Tue 21 Mar 2017, 09:42:16

T - The Germans may have figured out how to meld the two situations. Here's the hook: "Meanwhile, Sonnen starts to look less like a battery business and more like energy retailer, with any losses incurred by giving customers free power more than compensated for through revenue made on the balancing power market.."

From https://onestepoffthegrid.com.au/german ... ty-market/
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Tanada » Tue 21 Mar 2017, 10:14:42

ROCKMAN wrote:T - The Germans may have figured out how to meld the two situations. Here's the hook: "Meanwhile, Sonnen starts to look less like a battery business and more like energy retailer, with any losses incurred by giving customers free power more than compensated for through revenue made on the balancing power market.."

From https://onestepoffthegrid.com.au/german ... ty-market/


Sounds great so far as it goes. Once upon a time I argued that the utilities might come out ahead if every pole transformer had an installed battery that would charge overnight when demand was low and feed back into the grid at peak demand. A system like that would do away with the need for peaking plants to power AC on those muggy and hot summer days every afternoon, or to heat up the baseboard electric during cold snaps on long winter nights. Unfortunately the accountants killed such ideas because one centralized peaking plant is something they understand how to maintain and get extra money for using on demand. Thousands of individual battery packs at least back when I was daydreaming about it around 1990, would require a few hours extra training for the linemen and lots of expense for all those transformer/battery combo units that would be installed as the old transformers were at the end of their cycle life.

The internet/cell phone model where you buy block time of a month instead of units of use would be a massive overhaul of how electricity is sold. I recall back in the 1980's when the Internet was first becoming available to Joe6P that your plan was not monthly, it was hourly. You could buy 5 hours, 10 hours, 25 hours for the month and if you needed more you paid through the nose for it. That was the era when everyone would download as much of the data as their hard drive could hold, log off, read and reply to email and message boards, then log back on for 5 minutes to upload your replies and download any new emails. Only Universities and Government Installations had continuous access. Then one day this cruddy service called AOL came along with a different business model that allowed people to chat live online with other subscribers and the Paradigm shifted massively.

If this German company can pull off a similar shift in how electricity is marketed more power too them, pun intended. The thing is AOL came along in the first decade of easy consumer access to the Internet where this German company is facing off against an industry with more than a century of running the current business model.
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Tue 21 Mar 2017, 11:12:25

T - "If this German company can pull off a similar shift in how electricity is marketed more power too them..." The key hurdle seems to be the ability for individuals (homeowners and businesses) to at least get credit for power the put back into the system. Actually that favors the German plan better the the individuals being paid. Second hurdle: those credits being transferrable.

Seems to go a long way towards grid storage problem: have a few hundred thousand small batteries feeding the utilities. The trick then is to get those individuals to pay for the solar and battery. But the "free electricity" will get the attention of the individuals enough to get them to study the details of what "free" means.

I suspect the "free" (or at least much cheaper) part is similar to the Georgetown, Texas, plan to go 100% renewable 24/7. By allowing the solar/wind builders to finance by agreeing to a long term purchase contract the alt builders can use the electricity credits built up when the sun is shining or wind is blowing to provide fossil fuel sourced power at night or during dead wind days.

In both the Georgetown and German dynamic the long term advantage it what allows the huge upfront cost to be financed.
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Newfie » Thu 23 Mar 2017, 10:59:21

Tanada,
Your assuming we have enough resources to make those batteries in the first place. I don't know we do,mor dont.

And yes they can be recycled, but at what cost? I'm pretty sure it can't be done forever, but it may be a long time.

I bring it up because it's one of the questions I never see answers. Like what do we do with the old wind turbine in the ocean. How long will they last? What do we do with the old foundations? How will we get enough energy to replace them in the future?

IMHO all these futuristic solutions need to be accounted for in a complete life cycle basis.

Hell, do we have enough energy just to clean up the mess we have already made?

If sea level rises 60 feet and invades NYC and many other locations,made we just going to let all that pollution from the wreckage go into the oceans?
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Thu 23 Mar 2017, 18:25:30

baha - "Here in the US grid-tied solar is at parity with the grid. The only thing stopping it is unfavorable policies by the utilities, and politics." And again I get to brag about ERCOT in Texas. Essentially ERCOT not only controls the grid but forces common sense cooperation by all parties: consumers, generators, utilities, etc. And does so with a simple big stick: cooperate or you don't get to participate in the Texas electricity market.

The carrot/stick from ERCOT itself: "Balanced market rules are a basic element in Texas competition. Clear, predictable and well-designed rules help foster a stable electricity market. Electric Reliability Council of Texas market rules are developed by participants from all aspects of the electricity industry. The rules and amendments are reviewed by the Public Utility Commission of Texas to ensure that they satisfy the public interest."

And the interesting bit of history: the root of ERCOT began decades ago during WWII. Texas responded to the increased demand for electricity in the eastern grid. Texas, with its own grid, was dominated by 3 different providers that coordinated efforts to transfer power from us to the eastern manufacturing war machine.
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby hvacman » Fri 24 Mar 2017, 17:28:09

Newfie wrote:Tanada,
Your assuming we have enough resources to make those batteries in the first place. I don't know we do,mor dont.

And yes they can be recycled, but at what cost? I'm pretty sure it can't be done forever, but it may be a long time.

I bring it up because it's one of the questions I never see answers. Like what do we do with the old wind turbine in the ocean. How long will they last? What do we do with the old foundations? How will we get enough energy to replace them in the future?

IMHO all these futuristic solutions need to be accounted for in a complete life cycle basis.

Hell, do we have enough energy just to clean up the mess we have already made?

If sea level rises 60 feet and invades NYC and many other locations,made we just going to let all that pollution from the wreckage go into the oceans?


Newfie - If you are talking about lead-acid battery materials, per the USGS, total world lead "reserves" are 89 million tons and "resources" are about 2 billion tons. Global Production in 2015 was 4.7 million tons.They have a definition for "reserves" and "resources" in a separate appendix that I haven't reviewed yet, but it probably is similar to the definitions for petroleum reserves and resources, with various caveats for economic vs technical, etc. You know the spiel...Rock gives the resource/reserve definition speech about as frequently as Trump tweets;)

https://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs ... 6-lead.pdf

Here is the pdf link to the USGS definitions for reserves and resources:

http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/ ... pp2016.pdf
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby sparky » Fri 24 Mar 2017, 23:57:32

.
Great , we just got rid of lead in the fuel and now we are going to swim in the stuff
I'd rather go the Iron alkali way , they are good , rugged and proven batteries ,with very long life ,
used as emergency support in many railways application ( the cold don't affect them as much )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2 ... on_battery
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Zarquon » Sun 26 Mar 2017, 05:54:24

Newfie wrote:Tanada,
Your assuming we have enough resources to make those batteries in the first place. I don't know we do,mor dont.

And yes they can be recycled, but at what cost? I'm pretty sure it can't be done forever, but it may be a long time.

I bring it up because it's one of the questions I never see answers. Like what do we do with the old wind turbine in the ocean. How long will they last? What do we do with the old foundations? How will we get enough energy to replace them in the future?


To express it in car batteries is probably rather misleading, but of the 80+ million new cars sold last year, each one came with a battery. And if you add replacement batteries for the 1.2 billion cars on the roads already (assuming that only 1 in 50 needed a new battery) gives you 320 million car batteries that were produced in 2016. Not counting those for trucks, planes, ships, and KaiserJeep. A billion a year seems not much of a stretch.

But then nobody suggests lead-acid batteries for grid storage, anyway, since - as you pointed out - they don't last long. I've read about vanadium-flux batteries for that purpose that last 20+ years and are introduced commercially now.
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Newfie » Mon 27 Mar 2017, 16:04:24

And what are the resources/reserves of those batteries?

Lead acid may not last long but it seems we have a bunch of the raw materials available and they can be recycled. And it's fairly low tech.

But also my math was based on our relatively meger consumption rate. We are pretty well subsisting on 2- 90 watt panels (I previously mistakenly said 2-180 watt panels) and a wind generator (which is working better now that I figured out something about the controller.). We use pressurized kerosene for cooking.

So my estimate was to sustain that level. Not anything like normal USA household main usage.
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Surf » Wed 29 Mar 2017, 02:42:05

So if we need 4 GC6 batteries for our fairly low energy life style for 2 people, 2 batteries per capita, then we would need about 15 billion batteries every 5 years for Earth's population, or 3 billion GC6 equivalents per year.

Assuming you can do much better on large scale, let's call it 1 billion GC 6 equivelents per year.


The problem with your math is that they are many different types of batteries on the market and the ones your are using are not the best available. Already electric car lithium batteries exceed your batteries in terms of capacity and life. Additionally there are new batteries coming on the market that will last longer than lithium battles designed for stationary backup. Flow battles are becoming available and the chemicals they used don't degrade or wear out. They could last decades. The amber molten metal battery has been tested at very high charge and discharge rates with 100% depth of discharge. These test conditions would kill your battles in only a couple of months. The Ambri battery however has shown essentially zero loss of capacity or life. The Ambri battery may the the first immortal chemical battery. They are however too heavy for cars but will work for stationary storage of electricity.

Another example is the molten used for concentrated solar thermal battles. The molten salt simply stores massive amount of heat. Solar thermal power plants with molten salt storage allows the turbine to operate 24hrs a day. On cloudy days you could burn a manufactures fuel made from excess electricity or burn biomass to keep the turbine operating. The molten salt storage system never wears out

the technologies list above don't require any high tech or rare materials. All are also easy to recycle. There is easily enough material to make these systems to meet all our energy storage need.
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Wed 29 Mar 2017, 04:00:31

California is making progress. On March 23, at 11:25 AM the record number 56.3% of electric grid power was being produced from renewable sources, in order of importance hydro, solar, and wind. The total grid power consumed in the state that day was 563 GWh, of which 186 GWh (33%) came from renewable sources.

California has set goals of 50% of sustained total grid energy consumption by 2030, and is way ahead of that particular goal. There is currently a bill in the state Senate to move the goal to 100% by 2045.

https://electrek.co/2017/03/27/california-solar-wind-renewable-electricity-record-high-peak/

http://www.desertsun.com/story/tech/science/energy/2017/02/20/california-senate-leaders-new-bill-100-clean-energy/98157028/

Energy storage will play the major role in achieving this goal. Most of the new growth in renewables is from distributed solar and wind, which are highly intermittent sources. The hydropower by contrast is dependable and predictable baseline power, vulnerable only to drought conditions.

Whether the best scheme is distributed energy storage to go with distributed power generation, or large central storage, is a subject being simulated on an HP supercomputer (PEREGRINE) in the NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory).

https://hpc.nrel.gov/users/systems/peregrine

PEREGRINE is an interesting water cooled computer. The heat extracted from the computer is dumped into the heat pump system used for space heating and hot water in the NREL building.

Image

This is the heat pump system on the level below the computer:

Image

http://www.achrnews.com/articles/128397-supercomputer-that-uses-waste-heat-to-warm-its-building-wins-rd-100-award
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Wed 29 Mar 2017, 15:59:12

I got to drool over the water cooled hardware (the HP Apollo 8000) and got a bare glimpse of the follow-on product before retirement, something I can't talk about until the product announcement. The stuff I personally worked on was air-cooled, medium sized, and completely fault tolerant. It runs all the stock and commodity exchanges, exists in all the banks, all of the airline reservations, is the database-of-record in most of the online sales, and a good portion of the social networking transactions. If you use money or the web at all, you use my work products, which were originally called Tandem NonStop Computers, but then became briefly Compaq products, then the HP NonStop product line. I worked on what were called OLTP computers, which stands for OnLine Transaction Processing.

Basically anything you do in real time needs an OLTP machine. HP is now the only vender for those, and that is one reason that they are the #2 tech company in the world after Apple. If you are going to bet your business on the computer being online and available all the time, you had better have a NonStop computer. During my career at Tandem/Compaq/HP, we took the availability percentage number for our NonStop systems from "five nines" (99.999%) to "seven nines" (99.99999%). Another way of expressing that is that in 2015 we averaged less than 1/3rd of one second per year where the computers were not availble for transaction processing.

Ours were the only computers trusted for counting money the world over. That says something that I am very proud of having been a part of. But it is a part of the web infrastructure you never see. But everything happening on the web is dependant on a NonStop system located somewhere in a chilled room in a secret location, quietly counting money, with layers of client computers and servers between it and the users.
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Wed 29 Mar 2017, 19:24:06

Before I got my BSEE and got into computers, I was an ET2 in the USCG. I was a LORAN-C navigation system specialist. It was of course, a system obsoleted by GPS. The equipment we used was hybrid solid-state and vacuum tube digital gear. (Look up "beam switching tube" to understand how one builds a "divide by ten" digital logic with one BST and ten double triode vacuum tubes.)

One of the auxilliary functions of the system was a teletype circuit with a very slow data rate of about 5 wpm. It was sufficient to communicate with USN nuclear subs under the Northern icepack, both boomers and attack boats. We often saw random pulses racing through our monitor oscilliscopes, before being broadcast by our 2 megawatt 100 KHz VLF transmitter, which is how we knew that the teletype was in use. We were part of a strategic weapons system, with missiles only minutes away from destroying every military asset the USSR possessed - except for their own subs such as the Typhoon boomers, and their missiles which would destroy the USA in the chilling MAD dance.

We dodged that bullet I hope, and can use that fissionable material to make lots of electricity. Speaking of ARPANET, I was present and studying computers at the University of Illinois Advanced Computing Center at Champaign-Urbana, when the ARPANET was mostly being accessed by 300-baud teletypes, and the software weanies were figuring out how to attach scanned porn as text files. The rest is as they say, history.
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby kublikhan » Fri 31 Mar 2017, 14:57:37

Last year saw 54.6 gigawatts (GW) of wind capacity installed across the planet, with global installed capacity now standing at almost 487 GW. China installed 23.3 GW of new capacity, a 42.7 percent share of the market. A distant second to China in terms of new capacity was the U.S., where 8.2 GW was installed.

While China, the U.S., Germany and India continued to show a strong appetite for wind, the 54.6 GW of new capacity added in 2016 was still less than the 63.6 GW added in 2015. "Wind power continues to grow in double digits; but we can't expect the industry to set a new record every single year,"
China and US lead way with wind power installations, says global energy report

Image

Once final data are in, EIA expects 24 gigawatts (GW) of new generating capacity to be added to the [US] power grid during 2016. For the third consecutive year, more than half of these additions are renewable technologies, especially wind and solar.
Renewable generation capacity expected to account for most 2016 capacity additions
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby kublikhan » Fri 31 Mar 2017, 15:25:02

Newfie wrote:Here's a question I've never heard asked let alone answered.

Given the world resources what is the total combined storage capacity of batteries?

In other words, if you dedicated all the available resources to batteries, how much total storage could you come with AND what is the life span of that system?

I have 4 GC6 batteries in the big boat for a combined capacity of 430AH new. They last about 5 years. On average I really only have about half that power, 215AH available because the batteries are only infrequently fully charged and you don't want to run them down too far. I try to use my heaviest loads when it's windy and/sunny so I'm drawing straight off the wind gen or panels.

I'm assuming real world scaled systems would be similar.

So if we need 4 GC6 batteries for our fairly low energy life style for 2 people, 2 batteries per capita, then we would need about 15 billion batteries every 5 years for Earth's population, or 3 billion GC6 equivalents per year.

Assuming you can do much better on large scale, let's call it 1 billion GC 6 equivelents per year.

How long before we ran out of the capacity to build new batteries?
Batteries make up a tiny fraction of grid energy storage. Much more energy is stored with pumped storage:

Pumped storage is the largest-capacity form of grid energy storage available, and, as of 2017, the DOE Global Energy Storage Database reports that PSH accounts for over 96% of all active tracked storage installations worldwide, with a total installed nameplate capacity of over 168 GW.
Pumped-storage hydroelectricity

US Grid Energy Storage
Pumped Hydro: 20,400 MW
Thermal: 648 MW
Batteries: 380 MW
CAES: 114 MW
FlyWheel: 58MW
Total: 21,600 MW
U.S. GRID ENERGY STORAGE FACTSHEET
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby ROCKMAN » Tue 18 Apr 2017, 11:30:49

An update for folks that continually pooh-pooh wind power:

In Texas 25% of the electricity consumed last March was supplied by wind power according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. That was the biggest share ever for renewables in the Lone Star State. And now solar is beginning to boom in Texas.

And remember two important aspects. First, Texas consumes more electricity then any other state. In fact 50% more then #2 CA. Second, Texas wind power growth was based solely on its economic viability. Essentially the public in Texas feels no obligation to reduce GHG generation: if wind had not expanded we would have just burned more NG and lignite. Texas didn't wait like so many others for commercial storage systems to become economic: it maintained its fossil fuel burners to deal with any intermittency issues.

Obvious, under the right physical and economic conditions alternative energy source can be very viable.
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