Wind power in Massachusetts

In a comment to my last post, Ben Harris suggests that I read Cape Wind by Williams and Whitcomb. I haven't read the book yet, but I did read up on Cape Wind.

The outcry against Cape Wind is a travesty. It comes down to an unpleasant choice of how we get the energy we need. We have to satisfy our rising energy needs somehow. If you're opposed to using local energy sources to fulfill our energy needs, you have to be in favor of either reduction of our energy needs (which have been strictly increasing for all of recorded history) or getting the energy from somewhere else.

The first choice, reducing energy consumption, requires either widespread, voluntary efficiency gains among the populace, forced efficiency gains via government intervention, or the arrival of the hard times. I think it would be imprudent to plan on any of those events occurring. Our understanding of efficiency improvements falls vastly short of what we need. Even the NPR-listening Prius drivers among us are making decisions around the level of 20% improvements by 10% of the population, while the population continues to increase. We're excited about skyscrapers with green roofs, which collect water for irrigation of the plants in the lobby, and building-integrated solar, which can supply maybe 1% of the heating and cooling requirements of the building. We're not thinking about changes on the level of, "You don't get to heat your house in the winter any more."

Forced efficiency gains via government intervention seems equally unlikely to me. The current US administration argues about whether we should mandate minor increases in fuel efficiency, while allowing exemptions for vehicles over 6000 pounds. The most recent increase was from 21.6 mpg to 24 mpg, and it doesn't take effect until 2011. 10% decrease mandated in 4 years, while our vehicle usage continues to increase? This will not solve the problem.

The arrival of the hard times may well solve the problem, but I would strongly prefer to avoid having to affiliate myself with a local warlord in order to get bread, watery gruel, and a burlap sack to keep me warm in the winter. I don't think that constraining energy usage by simply failing to build more power plants, be they clean or dirty, is likely to be an optimal solution.

If we won't reduce our energy consumption, we need to get more energy somewhere. There's a temptation to think that we don't need to get energy locally, but everywhere is local to someone. If we had an uninhabited Oil Planet, we would need only design a sturdy pipeline to connect the two planets (akin to the Moon Bomb). The location of the Oil Planet is currently unknown, and nobody wants a coal plant in their backyard any more than I do. At some level, we need to collect energy locally.

It's reasonable to debate the resolution of "local." Do I need to get all my energy from my state? My town? My house? My desk?

Right now, eastern Massachusetts imports the vast majority of its energy. In Boston, the major electricity source is the Mystic Generating Station in Everett (you know, the pixelated section on Google maps, just north of the river). According to the Energy Information Administration, the 2600 MW Everett plant currently runs off of natural gas from the Gulf Coast, Canada, and the Appalachian Basin. Additional natural gas in liquid form is brought from foreign sources to the LNG terminal in Everett. According to the EIA, we also burn coal from West Virginia and Colorado. Coal is burned in the Brayton Point plant in Somerset, Massachusetts.

The limited availability of fossil fuels, the pollutants released by their combustion, and my assumption that if I don't want my tap water tainted with mercury runoff from strip-mining coal, the residents of West Virginia probably don't either, lead me to believe that we need to look for local alternatives for energy.If you're going to satisfy your energy needs locally, what's the best choice?

In Massachusetts, we get about 40% of our electricity from natural gas, 50% from coal and petroleum-fired power plants, and 5% from nuclear power. The remaining 5% is from hydro, solar, and wind. Nationally, the percentages are similar, but more hydro and nuclear, less natural gas.

The non-renewable options aren't pleasant. We don't have coal, oil or gas-- you have to go at least as far as western Pennsylvania to find it. Robert Milici of the USGS says of the areas east and north of the Appalachians that, "these provinces do not produce oil or gas and are not currently viewed as prospective for oil and gas." The USGS only studies 5 major coal beds; nobody is digging up coal in Massachusetts.

Nuclear power is waning in New England. Since the 1991 shutdown of the 540 MW Rowe nuclear plant in western Massachusetts, there is only one nuclear power plant in the state (Pilgrim, nominally 690 MW, in Plymouth), and one just over the state line in Seabrook, New Hampshire. The Seabrook plant is larger, nominally 1150 MW. Another New England nuclear plant, the 900 MW Maine Yankee plant in Wiscasset, was shut down in 1997 due to lack of economic viability. The spent fuel rods are still there under armed guard, as they will likely remain until at least 2017. There are two plants, totaling around 2000 MW, operating in Connecticut and one 650 MW plant in southwestern Vermont. There are currently no new nuclear plants planned [PDF] for New England.

There's not much opportunity for large hydropower in Massachusetts-- we're a mostly flat state, especially toward the eastern end. The Idaho National Laboratory puts its total estimate of hydropower potential in Massachusetts at 132 MW, which is about a third the size of Cape Wind. Furthermore, the estimate include sites like Moody Street in Waltham, that face worse public acceptance problems than Cape Wind.

That leaves solar and wind. Solar power is great, but New England is not particularly sunny, compared to, say, Arizona or New Mexico. Cape Wind is proposing a wind farm that peaks at 420 MW. According to the Prometheus Institute in Cambridge, total US installations of solar this year are around 120 MW, with the bulk of them in California and New Jersey. (Sorry, Keith, for using peak numbers-- I know you find it galling. Post better comparisons in the comments or, better yet, start your own blog.) The point is that on the scale of renewable energy projects, the Cape Wind installation would be massive. (On the scale of coal fired power plants, which currently top out around 1500 MW, it would not be that big.)

In eastern Massachusetts, wind power is a good choice. From a power density perspective, the site chosen by Cape Wind is in a zone characterized as "excellent" by the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MTC, hereafter) and verified by the National Renewable Energy Lab. (Disclosure: the company for which I work has recently worked on a technology assessment for the MTC, and we may do more for them. However, I have not been personally involved in any of the work, it hasn't involved wind, and I didn't know that MTC had done this study until a few minutes ago.)

While I do agree with Robert Kennedy, Jr.'s assertion in the New York Times that the project ought not to be enabled by government subsidies of $241 million dollars, his characterization of Nantucket Sound as a pristine region is ridiculous. I've been there; what I recall was a bunch of champions from the Buzzards Bay Power Squadron running two-stroke engines at full throttle. Maybe if I had a compound in Hyannis like that of Mr. Kennedy, I would feel differently, but I'm in the same boat as the roughly 6.4 million non-Kennedy residents of Massachusetts.

Currently, opposing wind power in eastern Massachusetts is extremely likely to result in the construction of new fossil fuel power plants like the plant in Everett. The cost of wind power incurred on the neighborhood is different from the cost incurred by a coal plant. If your kid breathes enough crap out of a smokestack for long enough, your kid will die. I won't say that the visual damage done by wind turbines is nothing, but if forced to make the choice, as we are, I think choosing your view at the price of the lungs of some kid growing up across the street from the Brayton Point plant in Somerset is unconscionable.

The state approved the Cape Wind project in March of 2007, though the project is in federal waters, so state review is less significant than federal review. The Boston Globe predicts federal review to be complete in mid-2008. I would be proud to live in the state that supported the first offshore wind farm in the nation.

Tidal turbines in the East River facing fundamental limits

After a New York Times article this morning, Ben and I were hashing over the potential for successful tidal turbines (well, he was ranting; I was hashing).

Ben pointed out quite astutely that the requirements for a tidal turbine are actually surprisingly similar to a requirements for a wind turbine. The power density of both situations are similar. Wind velocity at a prime turbine location is in the low 10's of mph, while tides are in the low single digits of mph. However, the power density scales with the cube of the velocity, to wind gains a factor of 1000 over water. This is roughly canceled by the ~800x difference in density between water and air.

Additionally, the Reynolds numbers for both situations are similar . The Reynolds number is Re = density * velocity * characteristic length / viscosity. Water is about 100 times more viscous than air, but that gets canceled by water's ~800x higher density and 10x lower velocity.

This means that you want roughly the same blade geometry and tip speed ratio for a wind turbine as for a tidal turbine. The problem is that to get the same tip speed ratio in a medium that's moving 10x slower, you have to reduce the angular velocity by a factor of 10 as well.

The folks at Verdant, featured in the New York Times article, have figured this out; they say that their turbines peak at 32 rpm. According to an interview with one of Verdant's engineers, the turbines are about 5 m in diameter.

In the wind turbine world, Paul Gipe cites a 7 m wind turbine as having a peak speed of 310 rpm in his 2003 book Wind Power (p. 102), and Southwest Windpower's new Skystream turbine, with a diameter of 3.7 m, nominally peaks at 325 rpm. So, Verdant has the right tip speed ratio-- what's the problem?

The problem is that the power density is the same, the size is the same, the angular velocity is 10x lower, and wind turbine blades are already made of composite materials to withstand high torques. Power is torque * angular velocity, so for a constant power, if the angular velocity drops by X, the torque goes up by X. It's no wonder that Verdant's turbines are getting ripped apart. Their plan now is to use cast aluminum, which has a yield strength around 150 MPa; composite materials are an order of magnitude higher (and remember, they need to beat wind turbines by 10x, not just match them).

The New York Times quotes the founder of Verdant: "'The only way for us to learn is to get the turbines into the water and start breaking them,” said Trey Taylor, the habitually optimistic founder of Verdant Power."

Just to be clear, while I do work in the renewable energy field, I'm not a friend or enemy of Verdant; I had not heard of them before today. I don't have any investments in Verdant or any of their competitors.

Related links: Some guy's comment on Reddit

Python on the Gumstix Verdex

Being both a Python zealot and an embedded systems zealot, I've been looking for an embedded system that I can program in Python. Most of the embedded code I write professionally I write in C. Having learned Python a few years ago, I'm finding C increasingly painful, approximately in proportion to my facility with Python.

Thus far, it seems that the Gumstix Verdex may be the answer I've been seeking. The Verdex is an embedded Linux board, about 1 inch by 3 inches, based around Marvell's (previously, Intel's) XScale PXA270, common in PDAs and cellphones. It uses around 1 W of power in its quiescent state (not suspended, but not at full processor load either).

I was able to compile a new binary image including the Linux kernel, various utilities, and Python 2.4.2 and upload it to the Verdex using the Gumstix's console-vx serial interface board. (I seem to have hosed the ethernet interface at the same time, but I'll worry about that later.)

The ultimate goal (well, for now) was to test on an embedded processor Pysolar, the Python sun-tracking code I've been writing. The Verdex I have, the XL6P, runs at 600 MHz. The Pysolar test suite executed in around 1.2 seconds. On my desktop Linux machine, the same test suite executes in 0.012 s. The fact that the times vary by a factor of precisely 100 makes me a little suspicious, but it doesn't seem impossible that a desktop could beat an embedded computer by 100x.

OOXML is not fully documented by ECMA 376

Comment sent to Massachusetts about their bone-headed inclusion of ECMA 376 (OOXML) in their latest draft of the Enterprise Technical Reference Model:

Hello, I'm a long-term resident of Massachusetts; I run an engineering firm in Waltham. I have no affiliation with any company that produces any document format. I have two objections to the inclusion of Microsoft's ECMA 376 in ETRM 4.0: 1. As a citizen, I don't want to buy a certain vendor's software to read government documents. 2. As a technical professional in a competitive market, I don't want to pay the overhead of upgrading the de facto standard Microsoft Office every 3 years for no good reason. ITD had the right idea with its choice of ISO 26300 (ODF) as a single, open standard for government documents. In the engineering work that I do, we need to maintain two sets of tools-- one in metric units and one in English units. The choice of two standards for the same function provides nothing but inefficiency. ITD should not introduce similar inefficiency into government document formats. It is predictable that no other vendors will implement ECMA 376 well enough to guarantee document fidelity across platforms. To see why, consider this excerpt from page 1379 of ECMA 376: "If this compatibility setting is turned on: <w:compat> <w:autoSpaceLikeWord95 /> </w:compat> Then applications should mimic the behavior of Microsoft Word 95 when determining the space between those characters, as needed." No explanation of "the behavior of Microsoft Word 95" is given. How might a competing vendor determine all the rules that Word 95 uses for character spacing? Type all possible sequences of characters in all fonts on a computer borrowed from the Computer History Museum, and then analyze the results? This sort of incomplete specification, found throughout ECMA 376, will mean that nobody other than Microsoft will be able to implement ECMA 376 completely. While ECMA 376 is nominally open, in my judgment, it is so incomplete as to be effectively proprietary. In the language of ITD, ECMA 376 is publicly available, but not fully documented. The predictable result of ECMA 376 adoption will be a series of buggy import functions in competing software, while Microsoft Office remains the government-supported standard. The same cannot be said for ODF. Many competing products that implement ODF already exist; I've been using them for all my personal documents for several years. I understand the objection that the switch to ODF from Microsoft's closed formats will be painful, but it's a better choice than upgrading to the next Microsoft format every three years for eternity. I request that Massachusetts return to its innovative idea of choosing a single, open standard for government documents; I believe that ODF is the best choice for that standard. Thanks for your consideration, Brandon Stafford Cambridge, MA