Cal Abel
23 March 2013

After watching An Inconvenient Truth and becoming aware of the push for renewable energy, I questioned the efficacy of renewable energy sources meeting global energy needs. I thought thermodynamics held the key in being able to understand this. Thus my quest began in January 2007. Today, I can report meaningful progress on this subject.

To build the appropriate model, I started with some publicly available fine grain data from the Bonneville Power Administration. I used data from January 1, 2007 00:00 to February 28, 2011 12:05 PST. The data is segregated into 5 minute blocks of the average power within that 5 minute period. Here is the excel file of the BPA wind power/capacity and grid load. You can verify this data by comparing the previous links. The date format is from Mathematica and is in “Absolute Time” : each full integer is 1 second. As a reference, 3376598400 is January 1, 2007 00:00:00 PST. The data is posted here in a parsed format only for your convenience and to aid in your analysis as the entirety of the modeling can readily be done in Excel if so desired. Continue reading →