Comment Wind + Coal (Score 1) 479
Wind power is unsuited for peak load (can't reliably turn it on when you need it). It is unsuited for base load (varies too much). It is really only ideal for something that can be ramped up and down with availability of power.
To me the answer is obvious - wind power must be used to power some high volume, continuously variable production process, where one doesn't care about the moment-to-moment production rate, just the long term average. The process must be highly automated, to avoid the need for having human labor idled when the wind dies down.
If hydrogen production via electrolysis were efficient enough, and if hydrogen were easy enough to transport without huge losses, that would be a reasonable example. The latter could probably be solved by converting hydrogen to propane or another convenient fuel, but the former so far appears to be unsolved.
Another continuous production process suitable for wind power consumption might be compression and cooling for gas liquefaction. While the equipment is complex and expensive, I believe this might be efficient enough to be practical. But then the question becomes, for what purpose would one use such large volumes of liquid nitrogen, liquid oxygen, etc?
One possibility would be "Clean Coal". "Clean coal" would best operate by burning coal with pure oxygen, so that the majority of it's exhaust gas consists of hot CO2, making it substantially easier to sequester the CO2. But producing pure oxygen from air is difficult - too much nitrogen. Liquefaction of air to extract liquid oxygen (LOX) is one approach - but if that means one needs to burn more coal to power the process, requiring more LOX and producing more CO2 to be sequestered, it may not be a good deal. But if one had a clean, carbon-free method to produce LOX, no additional coal would be required, minimizing the total amount of LOX consumed and CO2 produced. Further, the LOX needs to be warmed before being injected - which can be done by chilling the hot CO2 exhaust, reducing the power required to compress CO2 to a liquid for shipment and sequestration.
In this way, Wind and Coal could be natural allies - in both a technical and political sense. Note that I am not saying coal has no other disadvantages. But perhaps in combination with Wind and CO2 sequestration, the scale of advantage versus disadvantage tips in favor of coal. And while closer than most "alternative" energy sources, Wind unfortunately does not appear to quite make it into "economically viable" on its own.
