Slashdot Mirror

You can read it here:

https://docs.wind-watch.org/br...

If you choose to actually read it, you will find out, that there are absolutely no extraordinary claims in there.

1) The energy density is stated relative to the amount of pure Lithium and they need about 8.5Wh per gramm of lithium or about 120 Gramms of Lithium per kWh. Which is in line with ordinary lithium batteries. The difference is merely, that lithium-ion batteries mostly consist of anything but lithium. The graphite anode alone is about 10 times as heavy as the lithium it can store.

2) The concept is a Lithium-Sulfur battery, in which the cathode consists of lithiumsufide. This is a well known and established concept, that has some major problems with liquid electrolytes, as some of the polysulfides that form as the cathode releases lithium ions are actually liquid themselves. Which causes parasitic discharges and damages in to the cathodes. This battery has a solid electrolyte.

It is also not a panacea. There is a reason why the title isn't "A safe rechargeable battery with insane capacity" but "Alternative strategy for a safe
rechargeable battery". It is a new approach to develop a practical battery with this technology and it looks rather promising, but far from perfect. If you read it, the battery cycled for 1000 hours. Where each cycle consisted of 10 hours charging and 10 hours discharging - so it releases its energy rather slowly (as well as taking it up). There were also only some 40-ish cycles in total.

I don't know who wrote the article or whom they interviewed to write it. But they never read or understood the article that Goodenough actually wrote.

They are 4 miles off shore; who gives a shit.

Location doesn't matter, but if anyone cares about cost;

Yet when Deepwater proposed to sell its wind energy to National Grid, the cost was more than twice the going rate for electricity.

https://www.wind-watch.org/new...

This has been going on for months and months. I wondered how long it would take Slashdot to finally surface it.

This is Brightsource in Mohave. Feinstein et. al. held it up for years to protect turtles that were supposedly endangered.

Now it's frying birds. Certain species could be wiped out because they happen to inhabit the area.

This is the no. 1 best contemporary example of exactly why renewables will never displace more than a trivially small fraction of electric supply in the Western world; land use and its effects on ecology. Every form of wind or solar consume vast amounts of land, permanently altering the ecology of the region. Whether it's the "wind farm [that] imperils rare grass" (no, really — rare grass) or desert birds igniting in mid-air, the same greens that demand renewables will insure its failure.

Windandsolar is a pipe dream.

Hey, mdsolar ... you there man? Why you want to kill all the birds man? Quick! Go find a scary Fukushima leak story and post it!

Go ahead, pick "troll" or whatever. I have karma for the ages.

Do you really think Germany was down 60GW of wind power at any one instant?

This is a graph of actual wind production figures in Germany at daily resolution for 2011. Even if you don't speak German, the three yellow lines in there represent: nameplate installed capacity (29.06 GW), average power (5.145 GW) and minimal power delivery at 99% confidence (0.918 GW), all at 1 day resolutions (the problems get much worse at finer resolutions). I'd call 1/30th of the install nameplate capacity pretty much zero. With larger installations on a country the scale of Germany (not a small country by any account) what will change is only the absolute values, but the relative proportions of them are going to stay mostly the same. Even if you take the average into account the average production as your goal, wind varies between days easily by 5x or more. Take for instance the troth in the middle of April (04) - that's nearly a week long drop to 1/5th the average output. Who's gonna jump in and pick up that effort? Also, look at the average power in relation to nameplate installed power, about a 4-5x relation. Germany requires 50-80 GW of constant production a day. So are they going to install 300 GW or more of nameplate wind capacity just to get the averages right? That'd be more than a doubling of their current installed capacity of 180 GW across all energy sources. Who's gonna pay for that? And who's gonna smooth the output and how much is that going to cost?(*)

So you see, I have done my homework and actually analyzed real data. Have you done yours?

(*) That same video shows a statistical calculation, taking real wind & solar production data from 2011, combining them and calculating the price of adding storage to the grid that would get around 4/7 of the average in reliable power. Results: ~100 billion Euros for 430 new pumped hydro plants (to replace 3-4 nuclear plants which would cost a fraction of that) or >250 billion Euros if battery storage were used. Keep in mind: these are based on actual combined wind & solar production curves, so you can't just dismiss them as being theoretical - this is based on actual data. You know, reality is that thing which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

Only 12521 more wind turbines more to go and you will be able to equal the reactors output.

Footnotes:
https://www.wind-watch.org/faq-output.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Power_Plant

Jaczko isn't credible. He is a head case that drove his colleagues, including his fellow Obama appointees, to publically and unanimously condemn his tenure as NRC chairman while seated right next to him during congressional testimony. They forced him out because they'd had enough of his shit.

So now he is going to be a professional anti-nuke gadfly. Last week good 'ol Senator Harry Reid resurrected the head case and put him on the NNSA board so he can make that group dysfunctional and say scary things about the stockpile. Now that he's out of the shadows he's taking more shots as nuclear energy as well.

If you read the linked story you'll eventually learn what, specifically, his problem is with contemporary operating reactors; they are large and have enough residual heat to damage fuel after shutdown. The notion that our power reactors are too large is not new. It has been well understood since the beginning of nuclear energy production. Jaczko is talking about it because that's his job now; use the credibility of his "Former Chairman of the NRC" moniker to make headlines by saying scary things about nukes.

Incidentally this discussion raises the question; how large can a reactor be without risking fuel damage? The answer is about 60 MW thermal for traditional PWR light water designs. Common power reactors are 2000 MW thermal.

BTW, we aren't going to do anything about any of this. We're not replacing the reactors, or coal or gas or building out green energy or anything else. We're a balkanized welfare state nation occupied with feathering our environmental nest while evacuating our industrial base to Asia. The power system you have now will be approximately the power system running when you die. Maybe a reactor will melt and we'll replace our nukes with more gas consumption. That's about as much as you can expect.

Ask Big Energy why they must build more conventional plants when they add wind to the grid, and why those conventional plants have to be running while the wind farms are generating.

Ok, the answers to that one are so blazingly obvious I wonder why you bothered to ask. The obvious answer is that demand is increasing all the time so they need to build more plants anyway. Also the wind doesn't blow all the time, so it needs to be supplemented. As for those plants running while the wind farms are generating... Hmm, maybe because they cost a lot to build, the companies that built them want to run them as much as they can and sell the power?

Seriously, the stuff you're saying comes off like a bit of a crazy rant. I certainly get that some people don't like these wind farms being built next to them. How that equates into the wind farms being some giant conspiracy to erect towers that don't really generate power (which seems to be what you're implying), I have no idea.

I apologize - perhaps this will explain my viewpoint.

The conventional plants aren't being built to meet new demand, but as a backup to the wind farms. When a large portion of power provided on the grid is from wind, there must be an almost equivalent capacity available as spinning reserve, because the grid is a demand driven system. In other words, the reserve must be up and running, and ready to be switched onto the grid at a moment's notice if the wind dies. In Texas, that usually equates to a gas or coal fired generator. So, how do wind farms remove any carbon dioxide from electric generation, when the conventional generators have to run, even when not supplying anything to the grid? Why not just build the conventional plants, and forget about the wind?

The reason the developers build wind farms is that the Gum'mit makes it highly profitable to do so. Besides the Feds supplying almost all of the funds, there's also accelerated depreciation, carbon credits, local goverment tax abatements, and so forth. One of the first guys to jump on the wind farm bandwagon was Ken Lay, of Enron infamy.

I advocated wind generation for nearly forty years. When I took a serious look at it, I found that it makes no sense in a grid system. The entire "wind" movement is a method of moving tax dollars into the pockets of companies who don't need them.

Here is one (of many) links which may help explain: http://www.wind-watch.org/news/2011/11/22/wind-energy-realities/

At what point will the technology provide more useful energy output than is required to manufacture and maintain the system? Will it substantially reduce fossil fuel usage, or is it another ruse, like the wind farms?

Oh dear, a Slashdot poster has made what appears to be a false claim about the EROI of wind farms.

Time to google around a bit and see if there's anything to it....

This analysis reviews and synthesizes the literature on net energy return for electric power generation by wind turbines. Energy return on investment (EROI) is the ratio of energy delivered to energy costs. [...] Our survey shows an average EROI for just the operational studies is 19.8 (n=60; std. dev=13.7) This places wind in a favorable position relative to fossil fuels, nuclear, and solar power generation technologies in terms of EROI."

So, to sum up the above summary -- parent poster is wrong. As a matter of historical record, the average wind farm produces about 20 times more much energy than it expends on construction and maintenance.

Oh dear, a Slashdot poster appears to share the same opinions as the Big Energy Companies. Please google a little further and take a look at http://www.wind-watch.org/ for a different point of view. BTW - I live in West Texas - we're surrounded by these beasts. It's all a scam foisted on us by companies like (early adopter) Enron. The winners are the developers, the losers are the customers neighbors, and wildlife. Ask the folks in North Texas, who had to deal with a brownout a few years ago when the winds died. Ask Big Energy why they must build more conventional plants when they add wind to the grid, and why those conventional plants have to be running while the wind farms are generating. Ask the residents of Great Britain and Europe how wonderful wind is. Ask how much carbon does wind energy eliminate from overall emissions. (/soapbox)

Yes, but the wacko environmentalists do prevent us from getting nuclear, wind, and hydroelectric.

So, we either "stay the course" with oil or we learn how to use an ox and plow.

Personally, I'd rather have a nuclear station in my backyard.

how windmills screw with feng shui

Where do you find this shit man? This is one of those moments when you feel reassured as to your "faith" in critical thinking, thank you.

Since this is an energy-saving technology, surely it has some fatal yet under-appreciated drawback that fully justifies my foregone decision never to change my habits or lifestyle for any reason and makes fools of the "greenies" in my own mind! You know, like how Hummers are actually more eco-friendly than the Prius, and how windmills screw with feng shui. I've always found an excuse to view all environmentalism as self-defeating before, don't let me down this time slashdot!

What fucking nonsense is this? Nuclear is the SECOND CHEAPEST WAY TO GENERATE POWER, and just barely beat out BTW: http://www.raeng.org.uk/news/publications/list/reports/Cost_of_Generating_Electricity.pdf

I'd like the newer reactors to be used as well, but we have fucking tree hugging FUD spreading hippies actively trying to shut down plants which are producing power. http://www.wind-watch.org/news/2008/11/26/closing-vy-could-raise-power-costs/

Notice that renewable energy would cost DOUBLE what we get from Vermont Yankee now.

The problem is you can't build towers out in the middle of nowhere. You need a place close to transmission lines,with easy to access for heavy equipment (not just the 300-400 ton cranes, but the trucks hauling in the tower sections and blades are all tens of thousands of pounds too), and a place you can still access regardless of the weather (snow, heavy rain, etc..). What this generally means is wind sites are built along highways or freeways that high voltage lines parallel. Unfortunately, that means towers are generally placed near the outskirts of cities and since tower failure is nothing new and not limited to any one tower manufacturer that means accidents are going to be fairly common.

Here is a link to the physics of what you are asking. Short answer = some effect to local environments. Here is the link: http://www.wind-watch.org/documents/wp-content/uploads/Roy.shtml

Remember tho in the US, power companies aren't allowed to be profitable.

really? I had no idea.

and the line of blather you're pushing is pretty damn far off the mark

Is it?

http://www.exyoung.com/Journalism/WindFarm.htm
http://www.timesargus.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080710/NEWS02/807100355/1003/NEWS02
http://www.redorbit.com/news/business/1434788/wind_farm_project_could_double_in_size_developers_expect_to/
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/story?id=48596
http://www.iberianature.com/spainblog/2008/06/wind-farm-construction-in-capercaillie-habitat-paralysed-by-judge/
http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=16203
http://www.wind-watch.org/news/2007/12/31/wind-farm-plans-pose-big-threat-to-harbour-porpoise/
http://renewableenergylaw.blogspot.com/2005/02/kansas-wind-farm-faces-another-lawsuit.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/22/windpower.greenpolitics?gusrc=rss&feed=uknews
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6875711/

I'm not even trying hard. Just put

court halt "wind farm"

into Google. No FOX News involved. And no, these aren't the NIMBY cases; I skipped those. These are enviro's killing wind development over "rare grasslands", various birds, etc.

The evidence for the intolerence of "all the greens" for basically any development at all, including so-called "renewable" energy is obvious. Pull your greeny head our of your ass and pay attention.

Unfortunately, the state government is in the pocket of the coal industry, which is also very big in ND. Wind farms put coal workers out of jobs. So they don't let many wind farms get built and they don't give the infrastructure necessary to do so (such as a way to tap in to the power grid).

The problem with wind in North Dakota is that it is in North Dakota. It has nothing to do with coal companies trying to kill it. The problem is getting the wind power from North Dakota to someone who needs it. That is a very difficult and extremely capital-intensive problem.

The current system that we use to fund our transmission system is simply not equipped to deal with this sort of chicken and egg problem. Here's a short list of the real reasons that North Dakota is not the short-term panacea to our energy problems:

1) North Dakota citizens do not want to pay billions to build new transmission line that will simply ship their power into other areas. (Rightfully so.)

2) No single wind company is big enough to fund the transmission upgrades by themselves, which leads to amazingly complicated squabbles over who gets to use whatever available transmission capacity is available, and attempts to screw over the competition in a scramble to get there first.

3) Wind is an "intermittent" resource (part 1). Try running a company where 20 percent (or more) of your employees may or may not show up on any given day. Moreover, on same days every single employee will come rushing in all at once; on other days, not a one will show up. (Never mind the engineering challenges of building an electrical system that can physically accommodate huge influxes one minute and then dead zones the next!)

4) Wind is an "intermittent" resource (part 2). Try running a company where 20 percent of your employees only show up in the evening / early morning hours. Sure, the majority of your customers (e.g. load) show up between 10 am and 4 pm -- but the wind tends to blow most in the early morning and later in the evening.

5) Integrating wind into the power system can lead to serious operational problems: http://www.wind-watch.org/news/2008/02/28/power-grid-narrowly-averted-rolling-blackouts/. On February 28, 2008, the wind in Texas dropped from 1,700 MW to 300 MW over an extremely short period and came close to causing blackouts.

6) Transmitting power over long distances is problematic in terms of transmission line losses. (Yes, someone will inevitably raise the prospect of a DC-tie line -- but from a practical view, that's many, many years off in the future and hugely expensive.)

Please don't misunderstand -- I'm very pro-wind. But people need to understand that it's limited and will not be the automatic solution to our energy problems.

The Seneca Nation of Indians in Western New York is already looking into building a hydro and/or wind plant on their land. http://www.wind-watch.org/news/?p=11561

The bottom line at the moment is that no one knows.