A good friend of mine is part of the in-house counsel staff at the North Carolina Electrical Cooperative Membership, the organization that represents the electrical cooperatives in NC. When Rick was a partner in one of our large Raleigh firms he was a labor law specialist but, to no one's surprise, Rick has become very knowledgeable about matters related to the power industry.
A few weeks ago, while at lunch, I asked Rick for his perspective on the viability of alternative fuel sources for mass use. I was thinking of T. Boone Pickens' plans for wind farms or massive solar farms when I asked this. Fortunately Rick has no engineering background so he did not confuse me with technical explanations. Rick said that power plants have to provide a certain level of power based on maximum anticipated useage. In other words, if, on a typical hot and muggy August day in the North Carolina Piedmont, one million homes in Raleigh normally run their central air conditioning our power plants have to constantly generate enough power to provide the electricity for those one million homes' AC units (even if only 800,000 happen to actually be running their air conditioners). So, if one million homes require a bazillion kilowatts of power then the power company (or companies) have to have that much power constantly available. Rick told me that it's more complex than this but since he's a labor lawyer and I'm an accountant we kept it simple.
According to Rick, the problem with alternative power sources (solar, wind, gulf stream)is that these sources of energy constantly fluctuate. So, if you have a massive solar farm down in the Sand Hills providing power to the City of Fayetteville and a few large clouds happen to pass by then the power provided by the solar farm decreases and thus you have a brown out. Rick's conclusion is that these alternatives are viable only on a smaller scale and are not feasible for providing power to cities or towns.
This makes sense to me but what do I know?
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2 comments:
Interesting, but not surprising. I would think that we could store power somehow, but I don't know how.
I think what may end up occuring is that each individual home will require some kind of alternative energy source (wind/solar) on the home itself. FOr my house, I would need between 3 and 5 small wind turbines to fully power my home using no outside electricity.There are actually really good tax credits out there that can reduce the cost to nearly nothing in some states.
If they can figure out a way to store the energy generated by wind and solar, it would help. Maybe have a "solar energy reserve" as a backup.
Interesting conversation...
My friend and I arrived at the same conclusion. We think that solar and wind are best used on individual houses, small groups of houses or commercial buildings.
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