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Yes, but it doesn't necessarily displace the fuel consumption and the CO2 emission at the same degree. It all depends on how reliably wind farms can commit to a specified production for up to the start-up time of the back-up fossil fuel plants. Otherwise, the fossil fuel plants must remain in hot stand-by with a very high fuel consumption while doing nothing.

It looks like this is what happened to Texas. They got caught with their pants down, the wind on strike and no planning between wind producers and fossil-fuel producers.

Well, that seems to be Anglo de-coordination at work again.

In a normal country,

  1. there has to be a wind predicting service (projecting ahead say on a scale of 24 hours),
  2. from that, the power from grid-connected turbines is projected,
  3. other producers plan their (stepped baseload) generation accordingly,
  4. the differences between prediction and actual weather/power generation need fine-tuning, which fits in the framework of normal power system stability management via regulating running power plants (and in which wind itself is now included, too). (In Germany, that's usually done in the 15-minute regime.)

At regional level (which is relevant here), changes due to weather are on the timescale of hours, just enough time to fire up that gas plant in case of total wind silence. This is a different issue from quasi-instant power loss (like shutdown due to high wind or malfunction for a single turbine, or power line disruption for an entire farm).

Even the fastest combined cycles gas plants take more than four hours from a cold start to come on-line at their full rated power if you want to remain within somewhat acceptable NOx discharge levels and stress on the turbines (General Electric US patent 6978620B2 2004).

But warm start (start after overnight shutdown, NOT from running on standby) can be as low as 40 minutes.

*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.

by DoDo on Tue Mar 4th, 2008 at 06:44:12 AM EST
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