产业观察

去年美国约250亿千瓦时风力发电受到闲置，以免谷时电价经常会变成负值。250亿千瓦时约等于7亿加仑汽油的能量，就这样被白白扔掉了。而2011年被闲置的风电有可能超过400亿千瓦时。

之所以有这样的风力发电和传输脱节是因为风电场的建设大约在一年左右，而输电设施的建设至少需要5年或6年，因为建输电设施更需要得到政府的许可和避免反对者的限制，这些都更费周折。在美国有诸多公司在建输电设施，很难把流程简单化了。

储能的创新是我们这个时代振奋人心的事情。它有可能真正把清洁能源最终都用上。

“Approximately 25 TWh (yes, 25 terawatt-hours) of wind energy was curtailed (idled) in the U.S. last year to keep the off-peak grid energy price from frequently going negative.  That is about equal to the energy in 700 million gallons of gasoline just being thrown away. Curtailed wind energy in the U.S. appears likely to exceed 40 TWh in 2011″.

The reason there is such a disconnect between wind and transmission is that a wind farm can can be built in a year or so, but transmission can take at least 5 or 6 years, because the permitting is even more bogged down by multiple bureaucracies and by NIMBY resistance than wind farms themselves. Transmission is owned by so many entities in the US that it is hard to streamline it.

The wasted power is frustrating enough for a nation that really could use “the equivalent of 700 million gallons of gasoline a year” in clean energy. But also, from the point of view of wind financing, it is a negative factor.

Although it is technically easier to idle a wind farm than a coal plant, the frequent idling cuts into profits more, making it costlier than it needs to be to build more clean wind energy. When coal plants have to shut down, at least they save fuel costs. But wind farms need to ship all their potential wind to make money, because (since wind is free) “fuel” is not factored in as a cost of business.

Wind farms are going up in vast tracts of empty land where wind is strongest, and until now, that has been mostly deserted land that our ancestors did not settle (because it was too windy!) and so villages did not grow into cities there. But transmission was developed where population was concentrated, not where wind is.

This story at Greentechmedia was about one of the many solutions to the storage problem – installing manufacturing operations at wind farms, in this case to make a “windfuel”.

Storage innovation for this wasted energy is the exciting story of our time. There’s a wealth of innovation aimed at putting all this clean power to use.