Twenty months now I’ve been writing here under this name and covering, strangely enough, renewable ammonia as a fertilizer and fuel much more than wind issues.
I thought I might go back to my roots a bit this evening, defining stranded wind for the folks who aren’t up on it, and talking a bit about the work we’ve done so far. We've had a recent breakthrough and I'm very excited about it.
Stranded wind, as a concept, is simple enough: it’s a wind energy resource found in an area that lacks the population to consume the energy produced and also lacking the transmission resources to get the energy to a market.
My home, such as I have one, is in Palo Alto County, Iowa. 564 square miles of prairie mostly turned to fields, six square miles of water, and a population of just over ten thousand. That’s three thousand fewer people than when my parents moved me there as a small child in the very early 1970s.
The gold in the northwest corner is the class four winds that average 18 miles an hour year round. See the two large blobs? See the smaller bit of gold tying them together? That’s the ridges on either side of the West Fork of the Des Moines river. My home lies right in the middle of that gold strip on the gentle bluffs of the western side, well above where the occasional floods can reach.
My parents bought this farm house, which turns ninety this year, and lived elsewhere for the first year while they replaced the roof and cleared the debris from it being uninhabited through much of the 1960s.
This doesn’t look like much, but it’s a thriving town by the region’s standards, with two small manufacturing operations, a bank, and a restaurant that isn’t also a bar. As we discussed earlier this year the town uses just over two megawatts at peak.
Last year I got a nice look at a some wind turbines at Iowa Lakes Community College. A modern utility scale turbine running flat out will provide all of the power the city of Graettinger can use. There are over a hundred planned for the east bank of the river and more than that planned for the west side, and that’s just what would be visible from the top of the town’s grain elevator. The region is a hotbed of wind activity.
These projects aren’t initiated unless they’ve passed a study by the Midwest Independent System Operator, the body that coordinates the operation of the electric generation, transmission, and distribution networks that service the plains states. But look at the Dakotas ...
North and South Dakota cover 148,000 square miles with a population of just 1.4 million. Iowa has twice the people crammed into a third of the area ... but crammed isn’t really the right word to use.
So the upper plains are the Saudi Arabia of wind, but we’ve got no way to get it to market, at least not on power lines. We went looking for things that could be done locally and ammonia jumped right out as the best choice. We use eighteen million tons a year in the U.S. with 90% of it going for fertilization, primarily for the corn and wheat crops. Our thinking in this area culminated in the National Renewable Ammonia Architecture, but we didn’t draw a solid connection between ammonia production and wind energy.
The problem is this: wind turbines produce power on what is known as a Weibull curve. A 2.5 megawatt unit in a place with 40% capacity factor produces one megawatt average over the year. The Wiebull curve describes when the energy is produced – turbines are making some power an average of 85% of the time. This variability means a facility purely driven by wind is going to be idle much of the time. The current commercially available ammonia synthesis processes don’t like variability and the finance people cringe at 100% of a plant that can only be run at peak throughput a small fraction of the time.
After much thinking on this we’ve filed a couple of patents, one of which I can discuss, and the other which I can only hint at for the moment.
The first obvious use of stranded wind is to facilitate the creation of biodiesel from corn oil. Biodiesel is one part methanol for every ten parts vegetable oil. Ethanol plants produce a steady flow of clean, cool carbon dioxide and it’s not hard to make methanol if you’ve got that and a little bit of hydrogen. A single wind turbine and a single electrolyzer is a good fit for the fifty million gallon a year ethanol plant. The easy storage of carbon dioxide means the variable nature of the wind isn’t a problem and when natural gas prices, and thusly methanol prices were high the idea penciled out quite well.
What had eluded us until just two weeks ago was an industrial scale application of stranded wind that would work. I can’t disclose methods or anything, but I’m confident we have a winner in process control space that will let us produces ammonia, tens of thousands of tons at a time, and we won’t need a grid connection much more than 10% of the wind plant output.
When you buy electricity you pay for the generation and for the transmission – they’re two separate things. The transmission and distribution charge, typically abbreviated to T&D, is around $0.015/kwh. This is similar to the PTC, or production tax credit, of $0.02/kwh which funds our current wind boom. Using the scheme we describe the benefits to the operator are such that they can nearly double the PTC – there’s just no need to hook the wind turbines to the grid when there’s an immediate on site use.
That’s a terrible tease after all this time, isn’t it? All I have to say in response is this – the last two months have taught me that while we’re the only ones publicly advocating a return to renewable ammonia, there are plenty of others who’ve already quietly done the research on it and determined what preconditions are required to make the investment. Trying to make a business of this we get no traction as scouts for those who can afford to invest; we need some innovation beyond the strategic understanding of what is coming in terms of oil and natural gas depletion. I’d begun to worry that we had little to offer beyond cheerleading, and I don’t look so good in a pleated skirt, but this recent development gives me hope that we’re actually going to have some direct, personal financial benefit from our efforts.
In closing I have to say this – innovation doesn’t come from vested interests represented by men in suits sitting in board rooms. The seeds of what we’ve accomplished came in forest camp, and on mountain trail, and field and farm yard. The answers are NOT to slap a coat of paint on the same ol’ game that got us into the mess we have now. We need plans that are properly studied, validated, and then executed.