If you have money you can power a modern home with sun-sourced electricity. If you have lots more money you can power a whole neighbourhood, street lights and all. You can run fridges, stoves, televisions, radios and cellphones without Eskom coming into your life at all (a blissful prospect).
But there are inconveniences. You need space for expensive batteries to store the electricity the sun provides, but the sun fails to shine at night and doesn’t do much on cloudy days.
Photovoltaic (PV) panels will need to cover your roof or garden to gather enough power to run a modern household. You need a big plot; a flat with lots of north-facing walls would be better. But then multi-storey buildings have lifts with electric engines. Your rent or levy will be high.
You will need a large number of inverters to change direct current (DC) into the alternating current most appliances use. A three-car garage space might just be enough to house them. You might buy a new fridge and stove that operate on DC, but they are not cheap.
There is a better way. Combine a PV array with bottled liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), and use light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Stoves and fridges can be run on LPG. Don’t have a fancy electric pump to increase your water pressure. And have a small wind generator, just in case. An occasional hailstorm can wreak havoc.
One small problem is banking on a steady supply of LPG so you will not be completely “green”. You will also be using a wicked petroleum product, and indirectly emitting dangerous inert CO2 (from the manufacture of steel gas cylinders, steel fridges, rubber tubing, and the plastics – a petroleum-based product – used in LED manufacture). You can’t have everything.
So for domestic use, PV panels, plus a small wind generator, batteries and inverters and LPG are fine, except for maintenance costs, and replacing the lot after 10 years or so. Batteries rarely last more than three years.
Going solar
Crank up the scale and such a system could run a supermarket. Applying it to a factory is another matter – unless you’re Elon Musk.
Going into wind and solar power on a national scale (as China has done) is another matter. The evidence suggests it is premature, as German citizens found out when their electricity bills soared. Wind and solar are not quite the panacea some claim them to be, especially when it comes to providing base-load electricity.
China’s National Energy Administration admits that building thousands of wind generators caused problems. Its wind power sector has boomed in the last 10 years, doubling every year, and becoming the poster child of green enthusiasts. However, the Chinese national grid has not been able to keep up.
Connecting wind generators to the national grid is expensive, so only three quarters of the wind farm output feeds into it. But it keeps on producing. Indeed, 15 percent of all Chinese wind power was wasted last year. That is billions of kilowatt-hours. That was last year. A slowdown in the Chinese economy has made it worse.
So this year, to reduce this excess capacity, construction of new coal-fired power stations has been stopped. Cue loud cheers from Green enthusiasts.
Not so fast comrades. China has also stopped building wind generators, not only because they have too many but because of serious damage wind power does to their power grid.
This is the great secret nobody mentions: wind power makes grid operators nervous. It can be unsafe and makes the grid dangerously fragile. You could call this an unintended consequence.
Curiously, this has been known for some time. Ten years ago, a Chinese electrical engineer called Zhe Chen, recognised as a chartered engineer in Britain and a member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, pointed out these flaws.
He noted the rapid growth of the wind power industry and warned of the negative effects on an electricity grid, particularly on system operation and control, system stability, and power quality, the erratic times wind power was available, the difficulty of controlling the voltage, and the stability of the grid itself.
On the grid
“The available power depends on the wind speed, but it is important to be able to control and limit the power at higher wind speed to avoid damage,” he said. Being able to feather all wind generators’ blades from a central point is expensive.
He noted that a turbine could be designed to convert as much power as possible in all wind speeds, but it would be too heavy, and warned that “integration of large-scale wind power may have severe impacts on the power system operation”.
But the main problem with wind power was voltage variations that would limit the amount of wind power which could be fed into an electricity grid.
Has this problem been solved? If so, someone should inform us. If it hasn’t, maybe someone should inform the wind power enthusiasts – perhaps someone from the ranks of the traditionally reticent electric engineers running the Eskom grid.
Are wind generators’ flaws being kept a secret so the happy times of wind generator salesmen and manufacturers will continue unabated? Surely not.
These flaws are evident whenever wind turbines are used for grid electricity. Essentially the wind operators get paid to disrupt our electricity supply.
There are more flaws in wind generation of electricity to be fed into the grid. One that is not mentioned at all by enthusiastic supporters is that wind generators need electricity to run them.
Meanwhile, Germany’s wholehearted leap into “clean energy” no matter the cost has given China a great idea. It is proposing to build ultra-high voltage power transmission lines to export power to as far as Germany. It would mean building massive dams, and coal-fired power stations. The Chinese know that Europe’s electricity is getting more and more expensive so, like the good capitalists they are, they see a profit to be made.
Some have said that wind generators are “moments to delusion”. It would seem both a succinct and accurate description.
* Keith Bryer is a retired communications consultant.
** The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Independent Media.
BUSINESS REPORT