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I doubt the world has the manufacturing capacity to maintain that trend. What's the source for the historical data? This source projects an increase from 113 GW to 404 GW between 2020 and 2050 (US only). That's a factor of 4 in 30 years; a factor of 10 per decade would yield an increase of a thousand-fold in 30 years.

This source says "U.S. wind power has more than tripled over the past decade". That's a factor of 3, not 10, and it's from the American Wind Energy Association.

The World Wind Energy Association says, "The overall capacity of all wind turbines installed worldwide by the end of 2017 reached 539’291 Megawatt" (539 TW, not 959).

I'd be very pleased to see the world move away from fossil fuels as quickly as feasible. I'd be even more pleased if the result were greater decentralization (such as replacing large power plants with distributed solar panels). I just don't think it's going to be quick or easy. And it isn't just that fossil-fuel businesses are Evil; it's more than people in general don't like change, especially when the change seems to make things worse, and especially when it's forced on them.

Texas pretty much leads the nation in wind energy generation.

Sure, there's still a healthy oil extraction economy, but oil is a finite resource, and we'll all move past it eventually.

Technology and new extraction techniques for tight oil have prolonged the petroleum economy, much the same way innovations in agriculture have prolonged the inevitable human overpopulation disaster, but the can hasn't been kicked that far down the road.

I have no clue what "governments own numbers" you're referring to, but wind in the US (concentrated in the midwest, a region that extends into central Canada) is $32-62/MWh (aka, 3,2-6,2 cents per kWh). And dropping.

The limiting factor is that, as mentioned, it has to be paired with peaking and/or storage (with a particular emphasis on responsive peaking). But that comes along with a megacharger regardless, since you have to store power for such rapid discharges.

The US is #1 in the world in wind: http://www.awea.org/MediaCente... We just don't have offshore wind production (not really needed)

And that is the plain and simple truth. We'll probably have wind energy for offshore islands on the east coast, but not much else.

The US is #1 in the world in wind: http://www.awea.org/MediaCente...

We just don't have offshore wind production (not really needed)

Don't forget 8.3% wind for texas. http://www.awea.org/MediaCente...

Also cheaper than nuclear, (most) natural gas, geothermal, solar thermal, biomass, hydro, etc.
Just about the cheapest electricity you can install.
http://www.awea.org/Resources/...

What a dumbshit. What state in the US has the largest wind farm generating capacity? California? No. It's Texas. Get your facts straight. http://www.awea.org/Resources/...

It's also really easy to go 100% wind power on your electric bill. Sure, the exact electrons that came from wind generation are unlikely to go directly to you, but you pay the wind farm rate and they get the money, just like any other power provider you could choose in TX (there are quite a few, actually).

What a dumbshit. What state in the US has the largest wind farm generating capacity? California? No. It's Texas. Get your facts straight.
http://www.awea.org/Resources/...

Renewables are not cost effective

That is no longer true, what part of wind costing 2.5c per kwh don't you understand?

I don't know where you are getting your numbers from, but when I look at the following: http://www.awea.org/Resources/... It shows that Natural Gas is still slightly cheaper than Wind. This from a site that is obviously pro-Wind power. I'm digging out their original source material. But, what this site assumes is that you build both kinds of plants. Build your wind farm, just remember the wind doesn't always blow so you need to pop for a Natural Gas plant too. I don't see the savings when you still have to build the NG plant....

But look at my original post.... "All of the above" where it makes financial sense. When and where it's cost effective, build it. Wind is still not quite there and requires subsidies to make it close. I'm betting your number reflects the subsidized price, not the actual price, in the USA.

Perhaps these numbers will help you. http://www.awea.org/Resources/... Mounting turbines higher is helping with capacity factor.

This plant is 45 MW. Assuming 90% capacity factor for nuclear vs. 25% for wind, you'd need a 160 MW wind plant for the same average output. (All of the top dozen wind farms are at least triple that.) Assuming $2M/MW for wind (second source), that's $320M for something equivalent to this $226M nuclear plant. I assume the nuclear plant cost includes waste disposal, although fuel, maintenance, and decommissioning costs would seemingly be lower for wind. For nuclear there is the question of pricing in possible catastrophe.

The problem with wind farms isn't just the silly people surrounding it but the ecological risks and damage done. In NA our bat populations are critically endangered and being destroyed by the pressure differential caused by various wind farms, if you bother to count the bodies. It sounds OK until you realize that bats are incredibly useful, they pollinate more than bees do, they control more insect pest populations than anything else. A single bat can eat many thousands of mosquitoes in a night.

In countries with more wind farms the damage is magnified. See Costa Rica. If only more people even gave a shit.

Do you have actual data to back up how many bats are being killing by wind gennies? I recalled people opposed to wind gennies saying they killed a lot of birds. However studies have shown cats kill more birds than wind generators. The article Do wind turbines kill birds? has a chart of statistics showing how many birds are killed by different things, from cars, wild and feral cats (but not pet cats?), to windows. Some may have a problem with the chart though, out of seven killers of birds 5 of the statistics are provided by the American Wind Energy Association, one by treehugger, and one by American Bird Conservancy. Sciam asks the question Are Wind Turbines Getting More Bird and Bat-Friendly? It partially answers by saying stake holders from AWEA, ABC, and National Audubon are working on ways to reduce bird and bat mortality rates.

Falcon

I'm not a fan of cats either. They are feral pests that should go. High-rises are stationary. Windmills are natural. The bird brain has eveloved some capabilities: Either it is a tree, rock or land and is largely stationary. Or it is alive and highly mobile. Wind mill blades never deviate from course. It falls between a tree and being alive, and the birds lack sufficient understanding/collision avoidance systems. I am open to the possibility that these may be learned over the long term.

Ah, yes, but what about bats?

You have all those same costs with wind farms. Have you considered the Toshiba 4S Reactor?

Even AWEA admits that it is not cost-competitive. They instead invoke unquantified "hidden subsidies" (really post-market costs, subject to customer mitigation) to justify their front-loaded costs.

from the article, translated :
"If nuclear power plant operator would have to insure itself against an atomic accident with billion-damage, the calculation would shift clearly to favour of the renewable ones."
besides, 'what wind could ever be,' that's a bit premature don't you think : wind power is getting cheaper by the day. anyways: wind is already at 5-7 cent per kwh (the article is already 3 years old, which means the price has come down quite a bit since then).
http://www.awea.org/faq/wwt_costs.html
'Now, state-of-the-art wind power plants can generate electricity for less than 5 cents/kWh with the Production Tax Credit in ma' that's 5 + 1.5 cents in subsidy, that's 6.5 cents tops without the subsidy.

Personally I prefer injecting a volcano with water and driving a turbine with the steam. Apparently these days they're using sewage effluent instead of water, which prevents river pollution as a fringe benefit. No, you don't really need a volcano, but you do need something like it for geothermal energy to work.

It's cheaper than coal (3.5c vs 5.5c/KWh), doesn't get in the way, has minimal pollution issues compared to other systems. And it's available 24/7. Geothermal provides the US with 3,040MW of energy now, and nearly 4,000MW more are in development. While this is a tiny fraction of the current electricity generation there's no reason why we can't do more of it. Wind power by comparison generates 10 times as much power and is claimed to cost "less than 5c/KWh" and DOE claims that up to 20% intermittent wind power can be integrated to the grid for as little as 0.5c/KWh additional.

As further fringe benefits the dry steam produced can be used in Hydrogen production, as a heat source for homes and greenhouses, and in other manufacturing or agricultural processes. We're not really getting everything we can out of the geothermal steam that's generated now.

On the downside the East coast of the US is out of luck unless they drill deep, because they're seriously lacking in subsurface temps.

*Just* in the US, *just* in year 2008, 8.3 gigawatts (8,358 megawatts) of wind power went in. There was more before, more this year, and more is coming. You may dismiss it if you want to, but that's a hefty amount in most anyone's book, and world wide it is much larger. China for instance is installing even more than that.

There's no single one technology that will be the "energy fix" or the silver bullet. It will require "all of the above", plus more.

(above is my simple reply, below is more in depth if you'd care to read it, I just like writing)

To me, and this is just my personal opinion, nuclear has one *extremely serious flaw* (besides being overhyped how cheap it is when they can't get private insurance and a whole lot of them do NOT have decommissioning funds available and will be needing "bailouts" most likely, and so on), it is inherently a very contentious technology globally, and we face the prospect of an enlarged middle eastern war, that also has the potential to go to nuclear weapons, over who has access to nuclear technology. Said war would also immediate severely hurt the global crude liquid fuels supply, driving prices to unheard of levels,(as in the fast price rises last summer would be a joke in comparison) as a significant part of the global supply passes daily through the Hormuz Strait, which would instantly be one of the hottest battlefields ever in the case of an attack on Iran, who aren't pushovers like the decimated Iraq military were. They have significantly more, and significantly better quality, anti ship and anti armor and anti aircraft capability. Just some of their good anti ship missiles can hit targets with the best protection available, the Israelies found that out the last time they went into lebanon. The silkworm, the sunburn and the super sunburn, and they might have the squall rocket torpedo as well. And such a war over who has access to nuke tech or not is a real issue that must be taken into consideration when discussing nuke tech in general. This possibility of war over nuclear tech is in the headlines daily. The two aspects of nuclear technology simply can't be seperated realistically. If you can do one, you can do the other without much more effort, they are entwined. This is a problem, and head under the covers and ignoring it won't make this pretty serious boogieman go away.

On the other hand, no one is going to war over wind power (or solar). No one cares. It is a complete and total non issue. Which is quite attractive in these days of high tech war potential. No one is threatening any one else with severe economic sanctions or outright armed attacks over windpower anyplace. No one cares who has windpower or not. You don't need armed guards for the next several centuries to guard windpower "waste". You don't need cadres of soldiers with antiaircraft missiles ringing windpower development labs or production facilities or installed towers. You don't need international "inspectors" taking note of your windpower development. No need to hide stuff in bunkers and engage in global brinksmanship. No need to be the big international hypocrite because you have windpower tech, but the dude over there, or so you claim, can't be "trusted" with it, even though you are the only one to ever use "aggressive windpower" in a weapons of mass destruction attack.

And so on, you get the drift there I'm sure.

Economically, if a few of your thousands of windchargers go down or the wind isn't blowing someplace, pfft, again, a non issue, whereas, if your one nuke plant shuts down for repairs or maintenance, an entire huge city worth of power is lost for the duration. Just last year we came this close to a pretty bad cascading failure event from one nuke plant having problems in Florida. And the Japanese have found out that a lot of the "industry standards for safety" are inadequate when it comes to big earthquakes, an

Let me correct that: Nuclear-sourced energy is the only option. The issues with energy sources are:
  - Availability during specific, only-slightly-predictable (mostly weather-based) times of demand
  - Transmission from gen to load zones. wind has big problems with this.
  - Construction footprint, hydro and wind also suffer compared to a typical nuclear plant of relative capacity
  - The current US consumption (29000 TWh in 05) need is way beyond current and predicted wind+hydro 25 year generation plans (example).
  - Newer (ESBWR, other Gen IV) reactors have radically different designs than TMI and 60's tech. The downside is the designs are quite untested in the real world.

  We're going towards a more diverse portfolio, for sure. But only nuclear can replace gas/coal for the heavy lifting, IMHO.

So a gigantic blade doesn't go flying in to someone's house.

When you are talking machines as big and as heavy as this, you want to test outside conditions in a safe environment[...]

You test an outside case, and you do it somewhere that nobody gets hurt.

This is why I'd recommend the western half of Kansas and Nebraska for this ... average wind speeds are 6.5m/s or higher across the entire region, and random bits of shrapnel have next to no chance of hitting a person or a structure. There are plenty of places where you can stand and see a mile or more in every direction by climbing on top of a rock or a car, and not see any sign of habitation except for a road (empty). http://www.awea.org/faq/usresource.html

At a cost of $5.85 billion, and assuming a lifetime of 40 years, an interest rate of 6%, this nuclear plant will have an annual mortgage of $389 million. With a nameplate rating of 1100 MW, if it runs 92% of the time, it will produce 8.9 billion kWh per year, so the capital repayments will amount to $0.044/kWh, assuming it doesn't go over budget. Assuming an optimistic cost for fuel around $0.005/kwh, this gives a total cost of $0.049/kWh, neglecting the cost of maintenance, waste disposal, and any risk of contamination or weapons proliferation.

Now let's look at a new wind farm. A 50 MW wind farm would cost around $96 million (at $1923/kW), which yields an annual capital repayment of $7.5 million (assuming a lifetime of 25 years). If the plant runs at a 35% capacity factor, it will produce 153 million kWh per year. So the total cost will be $0.049/kWh.

So, which would you rather spend $0.049/kWh on -- a nuclear plant that might go over budget, might leak radiation at some point during its life, whose waste will need to be carefully controlled and permanently stored somewhere that hasn't yet been identified; or a wind farm whose costs are much more certain and which comes without all those ancillary risks?

Yes, any individual wind farm will not provide a firm supply of power. But if a lot of wind farms are used, and they are combined with solar, geothermal and other renewable resources, they will provide a fairly stable power supply. There is also a lot of potential for reshaping electricity loads to match the supply of power (e.g., recharge electric vehicles when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining). And finally, if you must have a firm supply of power, you can convert a wind farm into a completely firm supply (at 35% of its nameplate rating) by spending about 10% extra and building rarely-used natural gas peaker plants ($634/kW * 35% = $222kW).

To be fair, about 42% of new generating capacity that went onto the US grid last year was wind power. So even while it's a small share of our total, we're scaling up rapidly.

As a counterpoint to my own above point, though, that number is expected to fall significantly this year, as a combination of our horrible financing environment and delays in the production tax credit (it's quite small, but that little bit makes all the difference right now**) have postponed many projects.

To counter that counterpoint, it's expected to rise significantly again in subsequent years as the US government makes loans available and looks to establish a long-term framework rather than the boom-and-bust cycle of on-again, off-again production tax credits.

** - Wind subsidies are are a tiny percent of total national energy subsidies, despite how rapidly we're putting windpower onto the grid. The lion's share of renewable energy subsidies goes to ethanol. Nuclear power would be even worse off than wind if not for all of the breaks and government services provided for the industry.

But all of these comments on the legitimacy of global warming/cooling/climate change all ignore one very simple, inescapable fact: Most "carbon-neutral" energy forms can be generated locally. Windmills use the wind in your area. Solar panels use the sunlight from your roof. This is also true for geothermal, ocean-wave, and bio-fueled energy. All can be generated locally, with local resources.

Au contraire. You are failing to distinguish between utility-scale and non-utility scale generation. Distributed generation, micro grids, etc. are all fine ideas -- but the renewable component simply does not produce the amount of electricity, on a reliable basis, necessary to meet electric demand.

In fact, the major problem with renewables (other than their intermittent nature) is that large-scale wind farms and solar generation facilities are located in the middle of nowhere. Getting that power to load (i.e., users of electricity) is hugely exprensive and a real engineering challenge. Don't forget that our electric system in this country is still relatively primative and was designed to by integrated utilities to serve their own load in carefuly defined geographic areas. The system was not designed to transmit power hundreds of miles across the systems of multiple utilities. It's not as simple as just flipping a switch.

According to the primary wind energy trade association, the top give states in terms of wind capacity are: (1) North Dakota, (2) Texas (predominantly rural west Texas), (3) Kansas, (4) South Dakota, and (5) Montana (followed by such densely populated states as Nebraska, Wyoming, and Oklahoma). Even AWEA states that wind can only be used to provide 20 percent of the electricity we need -- and that ignores the need to have back-up generation on the days the wind does not blow.

Two major initiatives -- one in Texas and one in California -- give some sense of the location problem. The Texas energy regulators "CREZ" program is planning to spend over $6 billion to build upgrades necessary to build new transmisison lines to get wind to market. This is because the wind in Texas is largely located in the western positions of the state, while demand is predominantly to the east. This $6 billion is money that will eventually be paid by Texas consumers in the form of higher electricity prices.

The California problem is similar. California is requesting regulatory permission to spend billion in upgrades to the transmission system to interconnect (i.e., hook up a generator to the transmission system) what they call in California, Locationally Constrained Resources. These include most of the major wind and large-scale solar resources in the state. The California Public Utility Commission has a nice summary of the program. In California, the generators pay the initial costs of interconnection; however, these costs are then socialized to all energy users in California over 5 years. Again, the ultimate cost to California consumers is billions of dollars. Look at the large-scale solar projects scheduled to be built by OptiSolar for PG&E -- they are largely in the middle of nowhere.

Please not that I am NOT arguing that this is a bad investment or that it should not be done. But switching to renewables is going to be a long and economically painful process. People have to understand that no existing renewable resource, or even combination of resources, is reliable enough to supply the enormous amounts of power we consumer every day. Even if we built enough wind and solar *capacity* (i.e., theoretical ability to generate power) to power the entire nation, we would need to maintain as backup enough coal/nuclear/hydropower/natural gas to kic

Sorry but axial generators are NOT an ideal solution at all - very inefficient. You will also find that your neighbors may not like you putting up a tower that sits so high above the surrounding trees - as it must in order to get clean air and be free of debris. On top of that the cost of the crane required to loft many of these is expensive. Add to that the fact that not *many* areas get enough wind to be useful and you'll find that wind isn't too great - especially for just a shed!

This isn't the best chart but perhaps this will help http://www.awea.org/faq/usresource.html

P.S. Wind isn't 24X7 in many places either. I have a wind gauge on my roof on top of a pole and can go for hours with ZERO wind, I go DAYS without useful winds for power generation too.

From what I've read, the energy payback on windmills is quite reasonable - around 3 to 6 months. It's less than one month for Gas / Nuclear, and more like a couple of years for solar.

See here - http://www.awea.org/faq/bal.html

Solar? forget solar, we could plaster the dakotas with wind turbines and use HVDC lines to send the power to everybody....

that article suggested HVDC can cover 1,000 KM with only 3% losses. if every place within 1000 KM of north dakota, texas, kansas, south dakota, and montana were hooked into a massive class 3 or better wind farm setup, we could use up to 1,000 times more electricity per person...

keep in mind the top 5 states all have areas (marked in red in the pdf) where the wind conditions are so consistant that we don't need much excess capacity for when the wind isn't above 13MPH

Today's energy usage ahref=http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epates.htmlrel=url2html-23150http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epates.html>

All Energy Sources (thousands of KWh) 4,064,702

that's 4 billion KWH/year...

energy potention of the top 20 US states (in anual billions of kw/hours) http://www.awea.org/pubs/factsheets/Top_20_States.pdf

1 North Dakota 1,210 11 Colorado 481
2 Texas 1,190 12 New Mexico 435
3 Kansas 1,070 13 Idaho 73
4 South Dakota 1,030 14 Michigan 65
5 Montana 1,020 15 New York 62
6 Nebraska 868 16 Illinois 61
7 Wyoming 747 17 California 59
8 Oklahoma 725 18 Wisconsin 58
9 Minnesota 657 19 Maine 56
10 Iowa 551 20 Missouri 52

Large wind systems require average wind speeds of 6 meters/second (13 mph)

with sufficient investment in wind farms, we could build a system for using hydrogen combustion to replace dependance on oil and gas, and coal... in order for us to use .1% of our national wind resources, we'd have to completely stop depending on any form of fossile fuels.

so, environmental impact isn't a worry, unless you're worried about the occasional bird caught in the turbine blades... we couldn't possible stop enough of the wind to have an evironmental impact...

And what is the average cost of wind power anyway?

According to the American Wind Energy Association's FAQ, "What are the Factors in the Cost of Electricity from Wind Turbines?", wind costs can be under 5 cents per KWH. I don't have an electric bill handy but I think I pay something like 10 cents per KWH.

If you check out the map here: http://www.awea.org/pubs/factsheets/Top_20_States.pdf you'll see that Rock Port isn't even in a moderately good wind location though it is not too far away. Since energy goes pretty much like velocity to the 4th power, going from sub-moderate to good increases the extractable energy by a factor of 2.44 and over 30 years you get a little less that $0.08/kWh. But, the price does seem high and I wonder if it includes the cost of money and land rent?

Allow me.

Consider that wind energy comes indirectly from solar conversion in the air, and thus is considered "renewable". The Sun will expand to consume the Earth before it runs out of wind-generating potential (in X billion years).

Yeah right. You'd have better luck arguing about Iraq being to enrich Bush's contractor buddies. We could have done Iraq very much differently and gotten the oil cheaper, safer, and more reliably if it had truly been about the oil.

As you say, Iraq isn't all about oil. It's also about making defense contractors like Blackwater and all the mercenaries they employee rich too. At the same tyme they avoid any prosecution for human right violations and other crimes. The US has been doing this for years, in Columbia contractors are used to spray herbicides on coca fields, but a lot of it is sprayed on villagers food crops. It would of been cheaper to just let Saddam run Iraq like he did in the 1980s while the Reagan and Bush Sr admins supported him. Back then he was spraying Kurds and March Arabs with chemical weapons, he gassed Iran, and did a bunch of other nasty stuff but the US's support only ended when he invaded Kuwait, a Sheikdom not a democracy.

This is also a false attack in the part that oil is a trivial source of electricity in the USA - Coal is #1, followed by Natural Gas, Nuclear, and hydroelectric. Petrochemical production is 1.6% - Mostly from standby generators.

But what effects one energy sector effects others as well. I don't understand it but someone else shared a link explaining, now I can't find it.

Name an electricity provider that gets 'billions' in subsidies other than solar/wind.

1. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA - FEDERAL
   "USA, FEDERAL, Annual. (Multiple fuels). Green Scissors: Cutting Wasteful & Environmentally Harmful Spending. 2004 report. 2003 report. 2002 report. Summaries of wasteful government programs, including many in the energy area." "Subsidies evaluated worth $37 - $64 billion per year to U. S. energy sector."
2. Energy Subsidies How do energy subsidies distort the energy market?
3. Energy Policy Act of 2005
4. Ten most distortionary energy subsidies
5. No Need for Energy Subsidies
6. "Reforming Energy Subsidies"[pdf]
   In the United States, for example, renewables and energy conservation together receive only 5per cent of total federal energy subsidies, according to studies carried out by the Government in 1999."
7. Running On Empty: How Environmentally Harmful Energy Subsidies Siphon Billions From Taxpayers
   January 31, 2002
8. Federal Energy Subsidies
9. "Energy Subsidies: Lessons Learned in Assessing Their Impact and Designing ..."
10. "Energy Subsidies: A Call for Better Data"

I hope that's enough for you.

It appears that coal has reached peak energy production http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/08/many-more-ghos ts.html in the US already though this might change if a lot of new power plants are built. The energy per unit mass mined will certainly continue to decline. The world coal energy production may peak around 2030. On the other hand, bringing new nuclear power on line has a long lead time and it may face a market where in cannot compete on price as soon as it starts producing or within just a few year there after. In this circumstance, offering federal loan guaranties seems the height of folly. The solution would look to be a greater than 45% growth rate in renewables and a transition of transportation to more efficient electric power. Since wind is expected to install 3 GW in the US this year: http://www.awea.org/newsroom/releases/AWEA_First_Q uarter_Market_Report_2007.html and solar PV installed 0.14 GW in the US last year http://www.solarbuzz.com/Marketbuzz2007-intro.htm (0.2 GW this year at 45% growth) we are seeing the equivilent of 2 or so nuclear plants a year while the NRC seems inclined to handle applications for new nuclear power one at a time. It is difficult to see then how new nuclear power finds a market unless coal plants are shut down. By the time any new nuclear plant comes on line, solar, at 45% growth, will be installing at a rate equivilent to the new nuclear capacity. In order to make and economic case for nuclear power then, one needs to show which coal plant it will shut down and that it can operate long enough displacing coal to make financial sense since all other new generation will likely be less expensive (wind already is). But, solar alone can cover current generation in 22 years so the longest operation period that a reactor can anticipate is about 16 years, much shorter than the design lifetime. That then raises the cost of new nuclear power by about a factor of three. Long lead times make for investment uncertainty when competing disruptive technologies are involved.
--
Save money renting solar power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

This is one of those grand myths that the public just can't shake. Photovoltaic's have a very good energy return on investment (EROI).

The energy payback peroid for various PV cell types are:
Crystal Silicon: 3.3 years
Multicrystal Si: 0.8 years
CIS: 0.4 years

To put that is perspective of EROI:
Photovoltaics (Si): 60:1 - 10:1 (based on above)
Wind: 60:1
Coal(US average): 9:1
Nuclear (light water): 4:1
Oil (mid-east): 10:1 - 30:1
Oil (US): 3:1 or less

And that is keeping in mind that the lifespan of PV is calculated at 30 years, an arbitrary number picked to equalize it with the life of a coal or nuclear power plant, however are panel warranties are 20-30 years alone. There is no reason to believe that the average lifespan of a PV panel won't be 40-60 years or more.

• "Collisions with automobiles and trucks result in the deaths of between 60 and 80 million birds annually in the U.S."
• "Together, human infrastructure and industrial activities are responsible for one to four million bird deaths per day!"

I submit that you have absolutely no clue what you're talking about.

Everything I can find says that wind farms eventually create between 20 and 40 times the energy needed to build them. 40 times over, 50 times over, 17-39 times over.

Your sources?

Furthermore, several groups have looked at EV batteries as a significant source of power during daytime peaks when the cars are parked and plugged in at work.

In my opinion, This is one of the most overlooked advantages of widespread use of electric cars.

The fact that electric cars are efectively integrating energy consumption is one of their greatest advantages. Unlike computers, lights, and just about all our current electrical appliances which require a specific minimum amount of power at any instant in time, a car's battery can effectively integrate the dips and surges in power from a volatile electrical supply without loss of functionality. This means that locally wind power and solar power is much more useful as an energy source than say, trying to power your home directly from it.
At the moment it seems it takes about 4 to 8 hours to charge typical storace devices safely. Considering you may have the car in your garage at home for at least 8 to 14 hours a day, you have some room for slack in how constantly the power has to be supplied to it. If the charging time could be reduced further or something like supercaps or flywheels are used in conjunction with the battery chargers then you can get even better leveling of peaks in power.

Even if there is an overall short fall in wind power in a particular region, there will almost certainly be wind somewhere else - and the grid can transfer this power to where it is needed.

After a quick look at a wind distribution map for the US it seems that there's a fair bit of energy to be had out there, just in wind power alone. Wind turbines are cheap - a lot cheaper than solar. It's the batteries that are needed for storage that costs. Since you will allready have those with electric cars that's not such a problem. Wind won't supply all your energy needs - but it doesnt have to - all it has to do is make a big dent in the average annual amount of electricity you buy. That's the real advantage of electric cars - you get a whole lot of options about where the energy they use comes from. Factor in tidal, solar and geothermal energy sources, and there's a whole lot of energy to be had that's just lying around waiting to be collected.

The sum bay be down, but chances are the wind will be up, or the waves will be pounding. Even if they aren't, there will be a whole lt of cars plugged in somewhere that can help level out the instantaneous emergy demand.

What's really needed is a smarter energy grid, and smallscale distributed production. Think every house with a few square meters / tens of square feet of solar panels and/or wind turbines.

But the thing is, it does not matter what the cause is. If the cycle continues it will certainly, without a doubt, lead to the death of us as a civilization, whether we were the cause or not.

I am fairly certain, given the existing data, that there has been and will continue to be some level of anthropogenic climate change in the past 150 years. The amount and direction of the change, and its root causes, are still far from clear (does recent warming have more to do with decreased particulate matter [soot] than with increased carbon dioxide? why have there been notable periods of cooling or stasis during this period?).

The problem I have is why this change (even if you take the higher estimates of a 4-6 degrees Celsius increase from 1950-2100) inevitably leads to the death of our civilization. It would undoubtedly be disruptive (especially in coastal areas and oceanic islands), but why would civilization collapse? Civilization blossomed during the Little Ice Age of 1550-1850, where some estimates place the global cooling at 3-6 degrees Celsius - a similarly disruptive and sudden climate change.

Higher global carbon dioxide and temperatures will likely increase crop yields. Lands lost to desertification will likely be offset by increasingly fertile areas of former tundra in Canada and Asia. Technology will undoubted advance (and at an ever increasing rate) - with 22nd century technology, power production surely be much more environmentally benign and, if needed, we'll probably have tech that will allow us to reverse the carbon trends (given real fusion power, carbon sequestration and environmental cleanup become a lot cheaper and easier).

I have no worries that climate change will wipe out our civilization. An escalating clash of civilizations, increasingly simple biotech that can be used for bad ends as well as good and nuclear proliferation are what keep me up at night. Climate change just requires some technology and willpower - once (if) it hurts enough, the willpower will be there, and I'm sure the tech will be. The important thing to do is to mitigate the damage that occurs between then and now - especially on various fragile ecosystems. We need massive biological assays (start gathering a LOT of DNA and seeds now and store them safely), protected eco-preserves and a host of other things are some things you can help do right now. I personally donate to The Nature Conservancy because they put money directly into those kinds of projects rather than activism, but there are plenty of other outlets. You could buy personal carbon offsets, invest in wind power, or buy sustainable electricity.

Stop waiting for politicians to do the right thing - do it yourself!

The average coal plant produces 600 megawatts of electricity Link. The entire output of an Ovionics Solar Cell assemply plant is enough electricity to produce 30 megawatts a year if all solar cells are used simultaneously, in sunny weather, during the day Link. That means that you have to have 20 years worth of production from that plant to get enough solar cells to equal a coal plant. Wind is a little better with the largest onshore turbines producing 2.5megawatts Link.
Or about 240 needed to reproduce a coal plant, when the wind is blowing. There are about 62 gigawatts of new generating capacity in the works, according to the CS monitor story, for the continental U.S.

But what about solar powered homes? The average home uses 10656 kw/h per year or about 1.21 kw constant load Link. The average aluminum smelting plant uses 300mw of electricity or 250,000 times as much Link. The average chemical plant uses 12mw constant load or almost 1000x as much Link. There are lots of similar industrial users. <sarcasm> Of course, who needs all those plants anyway? Doesn't produce anything usefull? All just pollution right? </sarcasm>

Sure there's plenty of little stuff we can do about the energy problems of the world but I think the problem is far far bigger than most people imagine. So basically given the above, environmentalists really have no solution to the world's energy problem except de-industrialization and I really doubt we are going to go along with that much less China, India, Russia, or Brazil. There you go, with a little math I spoiled the whole alternative energy debate. You have read the last chapter of the book on Global warming: There is no solution (except nuclear!). If you have some alternative examples show me and please make sure they include actual figures in megawatts. Not things like "wind energy potential" but instead, how long it would take to build, how much money, how much energy would be provided, etc. BTW, I'm not saying that some technological revolution isn't going to save us but please, let's get some numbers into the discussion!

In the alternative energy crowd it's actually very popular to build one's own wind turbine instead of purchasing one pre-built. There are kits available, but some design them from scratch.

Often it's rather sobering looking at a wind speed map that your region isn't quite windy enough to make a turbine pay for itself. One needs Class 4 speeds at a minimum, and then you've got to deal with city ordinances about various crap with building a large structure.

You are also wrong about wind farms. There's a huge one not far from my parents' place. The San Gorgonio Pass http://www.awea.org/projects/california.html#SanGo rgonioPass, as you can see in the link, was estimated to generate about 800 M kWh in 1998. I may not work for So. Cal Edison, but I'm judging they feel it's a fairly good ROI, since they're constantly putting new windmills in and experimenting on new types there. It's also fairly close to some major population centers, though.

As for the nuke... Be honest. "zillions" of years for the waste to be safe? Depends, but "thousands" is a much more honest estimate. The "huge catastrophe" comment? I'll take 1 little nuke catastrophe every 50-100 years over the daily harm being done by coal power plants. At least then my life insurance will pay out instead of failing to renew after my 10-year bout with lung cancer. And yes, I did grow up in a town that suffered a nuclear disaster. And yes, I know people from those crazy cancer clusters. It's still safer than coal.

Of course I'm of the opinion that rather than try to maintain and expand our infrastructure to transport energy all over the place, I'd like to see a windmill on every large piece of property, as well as a few on top of every tower or skyscraper. Decentralized, distributed computing has worked really well for a lot of projects, and I think following that model for energy production is a good idea. It'd end up driving down the unit costs for this sort of thing, put more money into R&D for this technology than the governments ever will, and just basically be a Good Thing(TM). Of course to really be practical we need new energy storage systems to replace batteries, since we all know wind and solar power don't perform very well in snowy, icy conditions.

Not to mention cold fusion, and everything else that should be researched further or simply made practical.

For the record I do agree entirely with your summary, I just have problems with a few of your points.

Wind power is the only actual mitigation of increases in greenhouse gasses.

Cheap fusion already exists, and the fuel supply is expected to last millenia.

It just happens to be 93 million miles away.

Photovoltaics aren't sufficiently efficient yet to remove significant amounts of demand from the electrical grid, but PV isn't the only type of solar energy. Personally, I'd like to see a scaled-down version of Solar Two. I mean, think about a couple 3-meter heliostats (the same size as the older analog satellite TV dishes) sitting on top of your garage (or on top of a shed in the back yard; as long as it gets plenty of sunlight), focusing on some small collector on the top of the house.

A 3 meter diameter dish has about about 7 square meters of aperature. If your heliostats are about 85% efficient (you can get reflective films which do this), and the main collector/generator is 33% efficient, that's about 2 kW for each heliostat (7 sq meters * 1 kW solar energy / sq meter * 0.85 * 0.33). That's about 28% efficiency, from the surface of the heliostat to the final output. Considering the fact that most PV's (and all consumer-priced PV) are <20% efficient, that's not too bad. If your generator consists of a steam engine (Rankine or Kalina cycle) or Stirling engine, these typically product AC to begin with, so you don't have to worry about an inverter (which you will probably need with your PV, since they only produce DC).

If you use the molten salts Solar Two used, you could still get power after the sun sets (their research showed this was >95% efficient in terms of energy in vs. energy out). Alternately, you could just do net metering and knock your electric bill down.

Also, if you use the waste heat from the system to provide household heat or hot water, you get an even higher total efficiency. That aspect of it could reduce the amount of electricity you need, as well (if you have electric heat or an electric hot water heater).

Ofcourse, it's plainly obvious that those won't do by a long stretch, so then it DOES become important to know how much it can replace. Solar can't do it, not even a tenth of the required energy. Neither can wind. Or hydro.

So.... what's This Document saying then? (warning...PDF) It lists Denmark's wind power production in 2003 (page 3) as being enough to account for 20% of the energy usage in the country. That's a fifth of the energy, just from wind!

If we can come anywhere close to that with solar or another renewable, then we're getting close to the halfway mark, which would be excellent.

We use coal, oil, and natural gas because they're CHEAPER than other energy sources. When they actually DO start to run short the price will rise and we'll (incrementally) switch to using something else.

There can be other reasons for reigning back on carbon fuel usage - such as the effects of greenhouse gases and pollution. Also there are already increasingly viable alternatives - but these will find it hard to compete with dirty cheap "dig'n'burn" fuels - hence the argument for starting to impose green taxes on such polluting energy sources, and pushing for alternatives. It is almost immaterial as to whether there are hidden reserves - we know for sure that they will run out in the not too distant future, so why not bite the bullet now, and make life easier for future generations?

Alternatives? Wind can generate electricity at under £0.03/kw/hr
(British Wind Energy Association page)
(American Wind Energy Association page)
Solar towers in hot regions could supply limitless clean cheap power, Tidal power, Wave power.. Its all doable now.

Yes space exploration should be persued, although most of the benefits will be in the longer term..

Let's say it's 1 Euro/watt. That's about $1.33 USD/watt, or about $1,330/kW.

The next factor to consider is the solar insolation for your area. This tells you how many hours of direct sunlight you get, for your area, each day. In my case, the annual average is about 4.5 hours / day.

At that rate, 1 kW of photovoltaics will give me about 4.5 kWh of electricity, per day, on average.

Also in my area, electricity is about 7 cent/kWh. Consequently, that 1 kW PV array will save me about 31.5 cents/day, on average. Thats 4,222 days (about 11 years and 7 months) for payoff. If your area gets more direct sunlight, or your electrical rates are higher, your payoff period would be shorter.

That's the bare, basics of the whole thing. Don't forget: PV makes DC current, but most of your household stuff runs on AC, so you'll need an inverter. Count on a low four-figures for something that can handle the load for a small-medium household. Also, to go off-grid, you'd need some kind of batteries for energy storage (otherwise, the power goes out when the sun goes down), as well as a controller to regulate power to/from them, etc. That gets really expensive, really quick. Consequently, while you may not be able to go off-grid, you could probably do net metering and reduce (if not eliminate) your electric bill.

Lets dispel that "bird killer" myth once again with some actual numbers.

Remember, windows are the number one man-made bird killer. Where's the anti-window lobby when you need it? Heck, the very power lines that take the power away from the wind turbines are more likely to kill birds than the turbines themselves.

That gives it a EROEI of 60 over 30 years.

Very good

Wind - (Without incentives) - 4.35 cents Source
Coal - 3.5-4 cents (per an anti-GW science group) Source
(same article has claim from environmental group that ultimate cost of coal is as high as 8.3 cents per Kwh when you factor in pollution related costs)

I say keep working on wind and start retiring coal. Maybe the wind swept Dakotas are the new Texas oilfields.

Wind power could satisfy 95% of our electrical power demands with only 3% of our farmland, the vast majority of which would still be farmland.

Coal can be Black or maybe Brown, but never Green..

But seriously, there is now a massive power struggle for power - all the different interest groups are jockeying for position to be the next big "green" fuel.

My own 2c (per kw/hour) is that the very simple obvious non-polluting green alternatives - wind, tide, wave, solar, etc - have quietly evolved to a stage where they could take over as the western worlds main source of energy. Why do we need to mess around with nuclear/coal/oil? All the supporting technologies have developed sufficiently that they are either already economical, or at worse should be soon with a little more work. If you just take wind alone, the latest batch of offshore wind farms are contracted to supply power to the UK grid at 0.03 pounds/kilowatt/hour - pretty competitive, and set to come down with scale. (British Wind Energy Association page) (American Wind Energy Association page)

The latest windmills do not present loading problems for the grid, probably kill less wildlife than other things (ie tall structures in general, glass windows, cars, oil rigs etc..) & do not really mess up the landscape for 99.99% of people.

The UK alone has many times its energy needs already available in potential off-shore sites. The USA and Australia have similar huge (and worryingly largely unsurveyed) potentials - off & on shore.

And then you can look at other sources - tide, wave, solar.. For instance, Australia is building 1 km high towers that can generate power by solar power.

Ok, back to coal - can it be green? Well if you can safely bury 100% (or close to) emmissions - dont forget all the other by-products (CO, SO2, mercury, lead.. ) and you mine it in a green manner, you would have something resembling a green source of power for a short while - until all the easily minable resources were gone, then renewables become cheaper anyway..

Nuclear? Oh sure its "cheap" - until you have to decommission the sites, and get rid of the waste safely - which has to be looked after for centuries.. Billions of pounds were wasted on Nuclear power generation in the UK to no avail - the money would have been much better spent on researching renewables, which have had a pittance by comparison.