Here at the Stranded Wind Initiative we're interested in wind that is stranded, or in an area where there are not enough transmission lines for the available power to be sent to consumers.
A related concept is firming, in which the energy from a variable renewable resource, such as wind, is stored in some fashion, smoothing the flow of power.
Iowa's Stored Energy Park is working on one of the several possible methods for accomplishing this ...
Here in Iowa the wind blows most strongly in spring and fall, with winter being somewhat less than those two seasons, and summer being the worst of all in terms of electricity production.
OK, so what is wrong with that picture? Air conditioning use causes spikes in the summer and that is when we have the least overall wind energy available ... and if you examine summer in detail you'll find that cloudy, windy, rainy days with low air conditioning usage are when we get the energy from the wind.
The industry calls what needs to be done here firming, but we feel that the more descriptive phrase time shifting might be more easily grasped. The foremost thinker on these topics that we know is Bill Leighty of the Leighty Foundation. The foundation has published a great deal of work in the area and remains the foremost vanguard on this front.
So, per our FAQ there are five possible solutions for this problem: pumped hydro storage, compressed air storage, hydrogen production, ammonia production, and flywheels. Today's we'll turn away from our passion for ammonia and consider pumped air storage.
We've long used pumped hydro to store variable renewable energy. The winds blowing east on the Lake Erie are perfect for this given the bluffs that sweep up several hundred feet not far from the shore. A small impoundment is created in a valley, the wind pumps the water up, and the water drives a turbine when electricity is needed during low wind times.
Western New York has a couple of hundred feet of vertical difference in the land in ... a couple of hundred feet. Here in Iowa's wind country if you want to see 200' of vertical you'll end up driving a hundred miles; we just don't have the topography for using this method to store our wind energy, so we must look to other means.
We don't have the hills and water needed, but we do have a sedimentary sea bottom deep beneath the glacial till that lies beneath our topsoil. The Iowa Stored Energy Park has asked the Iowa Power Fund for $3.2 million in order to drill two test wells and perform other work involved in site selection.
What they're looking for is a layer of permeable sandstone suitable for the storage of compressed air with a layer of less permeable cap rock, such as shale, silt stone, or some other fine grained rock that will seal the stored air underground for future use.
So ... no magical technical breakthrough, just wells, which we've drilled for hundreds of years, and air compressors, which we've made for a couple of centuries in various forms, and then a renewable energy problem is solved. Notice what isn't here; big profits for big oil.
We face a tremendous fight, up hill, both ways, twelve miles walking through the snow barefoot, in order to do simple, common sense things like this, and it's all due to the pervasive corruption in our federal government today.
The PTC, or production tax credit, of which you've probably never heard, is a $0.02/kilowatt hour ten year long program which funds all wind farms in the U.S. today, but this will lapse at the end of the year. Previously we've seen a boom and bust cycle in the wind business, with companies ramping up when the credit is available, then laying off or folding up entirely when it is pulled. The stabilization of this tax credit would be easily accomplished by fairly and consistently taxing big oil rather than the current subsidization of that industry. We won't see that until George W. Bush and the last dregs of the Republican Revolution of 1994 are swept from our government.