Am I completely nuts? Or are we missing a gigantic opportunity?
When you are designing a grid level renewable energy production system you need 4 basic things:
1. A site with good production potential.
For wind production this ideally means not just strong winds but steady. Frequent gusts do not make for good production, and turbines do have overspeed safeties past which the equipment will shut down (blades turn into wind and breaks applied) to avoid damage. If the site regularly passes these speeds it will be just as unsuitable as one with too little flow. And finally the site has to be relatively free from obstructions, as air streams become delaminated ( form vortexes) when there are too many buildings or trees in the way. Obviously this refers to the situation at turbine height, which will be more stable than at ground.
2. Easy links to the existing electrical grid.
Often transmission is the most expensive component of electrical production. For a good example look at the Muskrat Falls project in Newfoundland. Absolutely enormous production potential. But the challenges of transmission to customer have made its economic viability suspect. So generally you prefer to put your high capacity renewable installation near to a High Capacity existing transmission line to minimize the capital costs involved.
3. Support from the Grid Shareholders
Transmission systems are a bit like railways. They have a maximum transport capacity no matter if the load is in production or distribution. And competition for that capacity can be fierce. This gets in to who owned the grid. In some places, it is privately owned by a company (sometimes also a distributor or producer, or both) who may or may not be willing to allow a competitor to use their infrastructure. Sometimes it is publicly owned but requires certain criteria be met to allow you to put power into the grid. In any case, to allow for renewable power to be produced you need enough support from enough shareholders to allow you to overcome most distributors natural hostility to competition. If we take Slave Lake as an example, both the government and a good chunk of the population have been kind of lukewarm on renewable energy projects (as an energy engineer, it is so fun to go home and have my parents tell me that, math be damned, Wind power is never economically viable and exists only due to ideological dislike of the oil sector). So getting the support required to allow transmission on high capacity lines from Northern Alberta to where all the customers are, would take some work
4. A Customer that will pay for your product.
In the end, energy is a product, and nobody likes spending more for it. So it has to match your customers needs. If we take Hudson Bay as an example. The closest areas with high consumption that could use your mass of wind energy are in Manitoba near Winnipeg, Ontario, especially the Greater Toronto Area, and Quebec, especially around Montreal. All in different directions and all requiring long transmission runs with associated lines loss, driving up the cost. Manitoba is too small to use the amount of power you would be producing. Quebec already has a crap ton of hydro power(with lines running in the opposite direction from Hudson Bay) that you are unlikely going to be able to compete with on price. In Ontario you have another problem. Wind production peaks on a day scale at night, and on an annual scale during the winter. But, like most places with a large industrial component, Ontario’s grid demand peaks during the day. So you would be supplying the greatest amount of power when Ontario needs it least. That is why Ontario has an expansive support for solar power, since solar production peaks at the same time as demand.
Obviously, all of these are relative. If the market is there you will accept less than perfect conditions. But in general production in remote areas will not be competitive with more local sources.
Gravitational storage: use excess power to haul weights uphill, let them descend later to generate power. An array of steel towers with concrete masses moving up and down like elevator counterweights should conceivably be able to store hundreds of megawatt hours.
It is not the amount of storage possible, it is the cost per unit of stored energy. We can store absolutely massive amounts of energy in many ways. The trick is doing so economically. Gravity storage is a bit of an emerging technology and has only shown itself feasible in certain situations so far. It has a ways to go before it is proven viable on a large scale.
The better idea is to use pumped storage hydroelectricity which is two reservoirs of water at different elevations where some is let out into a lower one to generate hydroelectric power in power deficit and pump some up from the lower into the higher in excess power.
Also massive desert states like New Mexico and Nevada, why not plaster them in solar power?
Pumped storage is very situational. You need a pretty large head between the two reservoirs and a small amount of lateral distance. That requires very steep grades with appropriate sites at both the top and bottom. Not a lot of places have the topography required.
The only thing I could see is snow is really heavy and maintenance after hail storms.
When I was back in college a few years ago there was a conference or demonstration about micro wind turbines. Something that would be able to generate power at like Not sure how that panned out though. Might have been too good to be true.
My professor used to go on rants about micro scale wind turbines. Opinions obviously vary but micro scale can often have simple payback periods in excess of the expected project life. In other words you would not make your investment back. Now that obviously depends on the details of the situation and with rising power costs, and (ideally) falling equipment costs with increased production, those numbers may be starting to change. I haven’t done a comparative estimate in a few years.
