Tag: wind

Vintage Wind Park Sankey Diagram

A vintage black and white Sankey diagram for an efficient wind park is shown in this post on the Hypergeometric blog aka ‘667 per cm’ blog.

Out of the several Sankey diagrams shown, this one was new to me. So I dug a little deeper into the original source.

Published originally in: Koroneos, Christopher & Katopodi, E. (2011). Maximization of wind energy penetration with the use of H2 production — An exergy approach. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews. 15. 648-656. 10.1016/j.rser.2010.06.022.

The authors from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece argue that Sankey diagrams can also be used to visualize exergy flows, and that they can be used to compare “exergy losses of an efficient and an unefficient wind park”.

The one above has “an excellent exploitation of wind energy for an organised park that operates efficiently and effectively”. They further discuss what factors contribute to losses based on an exergy analysis, and show several exergy Sankey diagrams.

Read full article here.

Wind to Gas Sankey Diagram

Didn’t know what wind gas was until I saw this presentation on “Towards 100% renewables and beyond power: The possibility of wind to generate renewable fuels and materials” by Michael Sterner of Fraunhofer IWES institute. Page 16 has this diagram:

The process described is actually a way of storing energy. Electricity from wind power is used to produced hydrogen and converted to methane. As such it can be stored (e.g. in gas pipelines) and is available to generate electric energy during peak hours. Efficiency is only 36%, but alternatively wind turbines would have to be cut-off if they can’t feed their power into the grid. Other storage alternatives (such as pumped storage power) are capacity limited.

An overall interesting presentation, access the PDF here.