Your choices:
1 Wind; 2 Electricity; 3 Electricity
What is your resource? | What do you want to deliver? | What is the service the customer wants? |
Biomass (digestible sludge) | District cooling | Comfortable indoor climate |
Biomass (fermentable sludge) | District heating | 3 Electricity |
Biomass (solid) | 2 Electricity | Process cooling (< 0 °C) |
Geothermal | Fuel: Gaseous | Process heat/steam (50 - 150 °C) |
Sunshine | Fuel: Liquid | Process heat (150 - 1000 °C) |
Water | Fuel: Solid | Process heat (> 1000 °C) |
1 Wind | Local cooling (ind. house) | Transport |
Residual oils/fats etc | Local heating (ind. house) |
In many cases, electricity is assumed to be the main energy carrier desired by the end users, but this is not necessarily true.
For the end user, the unique thing with electricity is its flexibility or, in thermodynamic terminology, its high share of exergy. Electricity can be converted into mechanical work, into illumination, into extremely high or low temperatures, into pressure, into radiation of different wavelengths; it can be used to run home electronics, for transportation and basically any number of applications. Because of the high quality and the high availability with electricity it should be priced accordingly and the use of it should be limited to such applications where the unique features are fully valued.
Wind power generation is limited by fundamental factors to extract at the very most just below 60% of the kinetic energy in the moving air and with modern installations the total efficiencies may be as high as 50-55%, thus approaching the theoretical limit. Even so, wind power production still suffers from the momentary variations in wind speed and if the customer wants to specifically contract wind electricity the total production capacity must be at the very least 2-3 times bigger than the contracted amounts.
Hence; if the end user desires and really needs renewable electricity, the best source is hydropower stations because of their stability but the second best is wind power.