Heating with Wind power

Jupidu · Posted: Wed Dec 12, 2007 5:13 am Post subject: Heating with Wind power

I hope i used the right verb (to heat = to make homes warm in winter and then the doing-form?) to describe or to introduce my idea.

It has to do with storing electrical energy

There are already technical solutions: E.g. a dutch institut explained several months ago, that it would be possible to "store" the surplus of wind power (especially during autumn and winter - the season of strong winds at least in Europe) e.g. in big cold storage depots. These buildings do have a very good insulation and therefore they are loosing quite few "cold energy" when they stopp cooling for about half an hour or even an hour (certain difference in temperature is allowed). In times with a lot of wind these buildings can be "precooled" so that in times with a lot of demand (around midday) the maximum of electrical power needed can be reduced (=> lower price for electricity for firms and private housholds if everything is calculated justly).
Like electrical storage heaters the cooling machines can be controlled by so called "kill switches".
Even better is it to do it in a decentralized manner.
Older heat storages oven do have a whole where a (electrical) heating cartridge can be inserted. I think this was built as a sort of security redundancy (interruption in a natural gas pipeline or in case oil runs out Wink

).
So why don't use all this heat storages with electrical heating to store the surplus of wind power?
Wind mills don't have to be shut off, wind millers can earn money, you can save oil or natural gas, a decentralized solution relieves the net, etc.

Even better: everybody can build his own electrical extra heating (up to about 4kW!) by transforming old generators (e.g. from cars or trucks) into a small electrical supply. Out of wood or old plastic tubes wings can be constructed. A pole near the house (or small one on the roof) for the little wind mill. Then a thicker cable from the wind mill to the heat storage and: Tara!
Even in times of blizzards, when the net is broken down you can heat your home (but there should be a tube to pass the pump to make it possible for the hot water to circulate naturally in the tubes and in the radiators.
There are some very good small booklets (only in german but for sure there are some similar ones in English) where this is described:
http://www.einfaelle-statt-abfaelle.de ("Ideas instead of waste").

And to insulate old houses to save heating energy: A simple framework build around the house and fixed at the walls, then put loam (should rest on a pile during a winter) or mud mixed with straw between the joists/beams.

kokoda · Heavy Crude Joined: Aug 24, 2006 Posts: 422

A simpler solution would be to go out and buy some thermal underwear.

WisJim · Posted: Wed Dec 12, 2007 8:13 am Post subject: Re: Heating with Wind power

I remember people bulding wind generators back in the 1970s to use to heat buildings. Usually gave it up as they didn't want to spend the time and money to build a quality machine that could survive the strong winter winds, and the tall towers needed to get the unit up above the turbulence that is so hard on wind generators. For the money, insulation and passive or active solar heating and good building design will do the job, instead of using an expensive sophisticated wind machine. And any machine capable of putting out enough power to heat a structure is going to have to be well built, meaning costly.

edited to add:
On the other hand, a wind generator used for heating only could be a mechanical system rather than electric, or if electric wouldn't need as sophisticated of regulation system as the voltage could run wild, within limits, but it still would need to be built well enough so that winter winds didn't destroy it. Personally, I feel if you had a tall enough tower for the generator to put out good amounts of power, and a sturdy set of blades and generator, it might as well put out usable electrical power year around, rather than hjust using it for heat.

tsakach · Heavy Crude Joined: Mar 09, 2005 Posts: 326

I would start with a well-insulated thermal mass before becoming involved with an expensive and complex wind energy system.

Next, I would look at options for tapping geothermal energy, where just a few feet below the surface, temperatures stay relatively constant throughout the year. Although a geothermal system can be expensive if you go with a commercial installer, maybe a simpler solution exists that you could do yourself.

Then, a possible use of wind energy for heating or cooling would be to use wind energy as part of a geothermal system. Essentially this is about moving heat from one place to another, concentrating and storing it in the process.

Jupidu · Last edited by Jupidu on Sat Dec 15, 2007 1:13 pm; edited 3 times in total

I should have explained more about my motives, why i am posting this and what is my background. But i didn't want to write too much in a single posting.
Now i have the salad.

Okay, to improve the view i will explain more: I did write this posting because of my experiences and knowledge in Germany with the hindering of the renewable energies in a lot of aspects.
In Germany and in whole of Europe exists a very good (electrical) net (a lot of intersections and lines). It was constructed for the case of an emergency (50 or 60 years ago), when there would be a big failure in the net of one of the european states. But in the year 1998 all chiefs of the governments of the then European Union signed a treaty to open the european net for privatization.
Nowadays the european net isn't capable anymore to handle a big failure in one of the countries because it is already on the brink of collapse because of the inner-european electricity trade (taking place at the "electrical" stock exchange EEX in Leipzig: http://www.eex.com/en/). But this isn't the task the net was designed for.

In Germany we do have a monopoly of four giant energy companies which are just proposing they would acting like in a real market where the prize of a good is adapted to the demand.
In reality the net in Germany is divided in four big zones - for each big player. So it happens sometimes that in one zone there is too much electricity while at the same time there is too less electricity in another zone. But only God knows why it isn't possible for these big companies to level the differences. The result is, that in the zone with too much electricity e.g. wind mills have to be shut off while in the other zone hydro storage plants and natural gas fired plants have to be activated to produce very expensive electricity.
For each quarter of an hour always the price of the most expensive produced electricity in a special plant (e.g. in a natural gas plant) determines the price of all other Kilowatthours produced in the same quarter of an hour.
Now one can imagine why the big companies don't want to lose the power of controlling the net.
One solution to ease the over-producing of wind power especially in autumn and winter in the North of Germany, where about two thirds of all wind power plants of Germany are installed (near the coast with a lot of hours of strong and steady winds), is e.g. to "store" the wind energy in such cold storage depots and in all households which do have an electrical heating cartridge in their heat storage.
The european project (among the companies is e.g. a dutch institute: http://www.tno.nl) Nightwind (Storage of wind energy in cold stores): http://www.nightwind.eu/pageID_4054349.html

Im speaking of an solution in a big scale with thousands of Megawatts. The four big energy companys are hampering with all possible arguments the enhancing of the electrical net for the near future when all the offshore windparks in the North Sea are going online. They collect every year about an third of the price of every produced Kilowatthour in Germany as a fee for maintaining the net. This is the amount of about 18 (eighteen) Billion Euros. To maintain the net they are spending each year about two or three Billion Euros, but they are nevertheless complaining about the costs.
A lot of wind millers are already instituting legal proceedings against the energy companies because more and more times their wind mills are shut off because there is "too much electricity produced".

That much to my idea about heating with wind in a big scale.

To the small scale i can understand that it seems to be quite complicated to build a wind machine by one self.
I never done it by myself. I am a mechanical engineer but electricity never was my favorite subject. Not in school and not in university. But i know that a lot of people who are no engineers or not even technicians for electricity all around the world have a lot of knowledge in the things.
I'm almost 40 years old and i think that i can judge when someone knows about technical things he is speaking of or writing about.
In the booklets all the wind machines do have an automatic safety mechanism when the wind gets too strong. Well in a case of a tornado blowing away houses or other things you don't need anymore a wind powered heating.
The authors have a lot of years of experience in building the wind machines because they started using the machines by themselfes. The machines and the mechanisms are steadily enhanced.
They can be built with very little money and therefore they do have a very high benefit-cost-ratio. And if you built the machine by yourself or together with your neighbours you also don't need never the help of a technician, who are getting more and more expensive (a big part in a bill is always the visit of the technician alone) in the coming years of rising gasoline prices.

In the USA the states of Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, etc. do have a very high potential of installing a lot of wind power.
Like building long pipelines all over the country it shouldn't be that problem to build e.g. a High-voltage direct current line. A lot of that current can be used in the states directly in households (heating) or in cold stores or other similar installations.
So a lot of heating oil or natural gas can be a replaced by wind power.
An important remark: I'm admitting that this is more a solution for a short period of time. But wind power plants can be built very quickly (about two to three weeks to install one 5-MW-windmill), when the planing is complete. And this plants are delivering the energy, which was needed for their construction, in a very short period of time back (a few months at good locations with about >5m/s Wind in the average).
In the long run much better would be to power heat pumps (up to four kilowatthours of heat for one kilowatthour of current). To use a heat pump a house should have radiators with a great surface (and also a good insulation) so you need only a low water temperature (about 40° Celsius) in the radiators to deliver the same amount of heat like in usual radiators with a water temperature of about 60° Celsius.

Edit: From January on i will pay 0,202 Euros per Kilowatthour (about $ 0,29) as a customer of a green company (Since two years i am a customer of this company. Since seven years i get my electricity from green companys). Other customer at usual companys pay about 1-2 Euro-Cents less per Kilowatthour.

pstarr · Posted: Sat Dec 15, 2007 11:59 am Post subject: Re: Heating with Wind power

Tanada · Posted: Sat Dec 15, 2007 2:32 pm Post subject: Re: Heating with Wind power

JRP3 · Heavy Crude Joined: Oct 23, 2006 Posts: 395

Would a trencher get deep enough? I guess it depends on the ground, but I've rented a couple trenchers for electrical lines and I was only going about 2 feet and it took me half a day or so for a 400 ft run. Of course the machine did have some problems and I spent some time wrestling a giant chain back on the bar Shock

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Tanada · Posted: Sat Dec 15, 2007 4:01 pm Post subject: Re: Heating with Wind power

JRP3 · Heavy Crude Joined: Oct 23, 2006 Posts: 395

I think you're supposed to get around 5 feet deep, depending on your location. I suspect you used larger trenchers than I have. The walk behind would barely get 2 feet and the ride on struggled with 4. I was dealing with rocky ground which makes a big difference.
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Building the AMPhibian
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cephalotus · Posted: Sun Dec 16, 2007 10:48 am Post subject: Re: Heating with Wind power

It's said that "smart systems" and "vehicle2grid" concepts (electric vehicles conected to the power grid) will have to pay a key role in the German power net in comming years, when our input off fluctuating renewable energy sources will reach above 30-50%.

Storing the electricity is quite expensive, controlling demand is much cheaper.

Electric heaters are the wrong way, beause they are not effective (based on prime energy usage), but heat pumps in combination with cheap (heat) buffer systems can be a solution to this.

The advantage for the user is, that you can get energy much cheaper if it is available in abundance through smart metering systems. The advantage for the energy provider is that he needs to built less expensive balancing capacity.