<story><title>How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/23/business/energy-environment/big-windmills.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shaqbert</author><text>As the production costs with windpower decrease due to the technological progress, the question of grid storage and grid interconnection becomes more pressing.&lt;p&gt;E.g. in Germany, they frequently have days of negative energy prices, where producers need to pay to feed energy into the greed because of overproduction of energy on windy&amp;#x2F;sunny days [0](in German). Without storage and grid interconnection, there is only so much renewable energy from intermittent sources like wind and solar you can handle.&lt;p&gt;[0]:  &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.energybrainpool.com&amp;#x2F;bereits-103-mal-in-2017-negative-preise-am-stromspotmarkt&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.energybrainpool.com&amp;#x2F;bereits-103-mal-in-2017-neg...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vidarh</author><text>Germany has at least one example of an aluminium producer testing dialing the power use of their melter up&amp;#x2F;down by 25% in response to input from the grid [1]:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Trimet says that implementing its technology across Germany’s four aluminum smelters, three of which it owns, could provide a demand response capacity equal to a third of Germany’s 40 gigawatt-hours of pumped hydro storage.&lt;p&gt;There was a lot of confusion about this one when it was published, but as the article points out, they&amp;#x27;re not using their molten aluminium pools as a liquid battery - they&amp;#x27;re merely dynamically adjusting the electricity usage of their hydrolysis cells, which also requires some other adjustments to keep the process going, but it&amp;#x27;s still a lot of power and more responsive than what they do today (which involves taking the smelters entirely offline for short periods).&lt;p&gt;It helps that their test plant is near Hamburg in the North, &amp;quot;close&amp;quot; to most of Germany&amp;#x27;s wind turbine capacity which helps alleviate transmission&amp;#x2F;interconnection problems to the South.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.greentechmedia.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;read&amp;#x2F;german-firm-turns-aluminum-smelter-into-huge-battery#gs.aOAMAos&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.greentechmedia.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;read&amp;#x2F;german-firm-tur...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/23/business/energy-environment/big-windmills.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>shaqbert</author><text>As the production costs with windpower decrease due to the technological progress, the question of grid storage and grid interconnection becomes more pressing.&lt;p&gt;E.g. in Germany, they frequently have days of negative energy prices, where producers need to pay to feed energy into the greed because of overproduction of energy on windy&amp;#x2F;sunny days [0](in German). Without storage and grid interconnection, there is only so much renewable energy from intermittent sources like wind and solar you can handle.&lt;p&gt;[0]:  &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.energybrainpool.com&amp;#x2F;bereits-103-mal-in-2017-negative-preise-am-stromspotmarkt&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.energybrainpool.com&amp;#x2F;bereits-103-mal-in-2017-neg...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Brakenshire</author><text>As turbines get larger, not only do the costs go down, but the reliability of supply goes up. It becomes more economical to place them out at sea, where winds are more reliable, and the size allows them to run more effectively off low speed winds. These turbines are claiming 60%+ capacity factor, compared to 20-30% for smaller, onshore turbines.&lt;p&gt;The UK is already up to about 15% of its electricity from wind right now, these developments will open that up significantly more. Obviously at high levels of penetration there are going to be issues, we&amp;#x27;ll just have to see how far we can go, but even 25-40% of electricity would be a huge contribution.&lt;p&gt;Combine that with the new and existing nuclear, another 15%, some biomass and tidal lagoons, with the rest from gas (which produces half as much CO2 as coal) and it will go a long way towards meeting the UK&amp;#x27;s 80% CO2 reduction target from 1990 to 2050.</text></comment>