Are these wind farms located near data centers and such use the power directly? Or do they dump into the grid and sell it as power then claim all their power usage is renewable because it is "offset"?
No, this is out in west Texas where wind is plentiful along with cheap land.
Nearly all wind and solar farms inject energy into the grid just like any other generator. In an open energy market like ERCOT (where this wind farm is located) there's a market where energy is traded.
If they inject "X" units of energy into the grid and pull out the same "X" units all is good. If not (the usual case since generation and demand need to equal 100% at all times) there are rules to govern the buying and selling of energy all generators ("market participants") follow.
Suffice it to say, grid management in an open energy market is complicated. If you really want to know more about the rules you can read more here: http://ercot.com/mktrules
I would like to take a moment to appreciate that we seemingly have a pretty open, fair, and working regulatory system to make this possible. I am sure it's not perfect, but that you can do this at all is pretty cool.
One could argue that the possibility of having such structures in place is exactly what allows such a market to exist. In fact, the fair enforcement of laws and the viability of the laws themselves is perhaps one of the strongest foundations of progress in the developed nations.
But grids are local in nature correct? If they inject X unit of energy into the local West Texas grid and they pull X units from the grid in West Virginia where they have a datacenter, are all things equal? I'm having trouble wrapping my head around this.
A lot factors into it, but yes -- essentially grids are sort of local.
The US has three grids: East, West, and Texas.
Folks ask why Texas has its own grid and we generally say "because Texas", but the real reason is just the way the grid grew in the early 20th century. Texas was isolated from the big industrial centers of the coasts and had abundant internal energy sources (coal and oil) so it just grew into its own grid and stayed that way.
Inside each grid the frequency is internally regulated. Each grid is out of sync with each other so power transfer between grids is limited. A tie between grids requires converting energy to DC and back into AC synchronized to the receiving grid. ERCOT has 5 of these ties and their capacity is a small percentage of the demand. Additionally, there's a few generators at the border of the grid than can operate on two different grids (one grid at a time). They choose where to operate depending on pricing.
> Additionally, there's a few generators at the border of the grid than can operate on two different grids
Note that this wind farm is located right on the border between ERCOT and SPP (Eastern grid member). Depending on transmission capacity buildout I could imagine them being switchable.
yep and being a generator will probably give them direct access to this market. I'm wondering if turning some of the AWS computing power toward playing the energy market isn't some of the motivation here.
Is there a flaw in treating electricity as fungible in this case? What matters is the amount of carbon that would be produced without Amazon, vs. the amount produced including Amazon.
If they were together there could be a tech angle - like how this was going to insulate their data centres from problems with the grid, or how they were going to shed load when the wind wasn't blowing, or something like that.
Otherwise it sounds like AWS and Amazon Wind Power could basically be two unrelated companies.
perhaps AWS as a whole has a reasonable constant electric load. The price per MWh fluctuates during "on-peak" and "off-peak" hours. The price really goes up when you accidentally need more power during peak demand.
I'm wondering if wind power isn't an effort to decrease the price they pay on the open market for peak power, or to at least recoup some of those costs.
The press release itself reads "Amazon will purchase about 90% of the power generated by the wind farm." so I assume the primary purpose is their data centers.
They might be buying the output, but it is unlikely that the actual MW output will be what is feeding their data center. A lot of people have trouble understanding that.
The article mentions that the previous four are grid connected but it doesn't explicitly say the same for the fifth: "The four previously announced wind and solar farms deliver energy to the electrical grids supplying both current and future Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud data centers."
I notice that you're simply asking a question. In your comment, you don't imply that one option is better than the other. And yet the two replies (so far) don't attempt to answer the question, but do attempt to argue with you...
Anyway, if anyone knows the answer, I'd like to know as well. And to be clear: I have no opinion about how things should be in this case, I just want to know how they are.
