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Danish Goal: 50% of Electricity from Wind
tres3 writes "The Danes have an ambitious
plan of producing 50% of their national electrical needs from wind by 2030. The website has tutorials on everything related to wind energy you can imagine. The index gives you an idea of the detail of the site. It includes land and sea wind turbines as well as details about the machinery needed and where to locate it. There are over 100 pages so I didn't link to them all. [ed. note: thanks] A picture says it all."
Ireland also plans to get 10% of their power by wind. You can read a BBC article here.
The rotational pollution caused by windmills is unacceptable! The rotational energy will throw the rotational axis of the Earth out of kilter, and penguins will be in Equidor within hundreds of years. Sure, Linux fans will love that, but I don't think Equidorians could harvest their frozen bananas that way.
Stop this nonsense, it is killing our planet's life! Save the poles!
Table-ized A.I.
The AERO concert with Jean Michel Jarre two days ago was staged in a windmill park in the north-western part of Denmark.
Unselfish actions pay back better
Actually, the interaction of the ocean and land generates wind quite frequently.
The land tends to be warmer than the ocean during the day, so an on-shore breeze is generated (air warmed by the land rises, air from the ocean rushes in to replace it). The opposite effect is seen when the land cools off in the evening - an off shore breeze is generated.
Since Denmark is surrounded by ocean on 3 sides, one could assume that they have an abundance of breeze to make this work. I wish them success.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Now if we can only convince Environmentalists that wind power is a good idea.
Think I'm smoking crack? Well check out this story from the NY Times about the enviro fight against windmills in Cherry Valley, NY:. html?ex=1031568343&ei=1&en=0920b9cbdc48601 9
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/28/nyregion/28WIND
And there is this story about enviros against wind power in Moosic Mountain Ridge, Philadelphia
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/3693755.htm
If you want a good site to view on how the Enviromentalists have shifted from Science to Socialistic Demigogery check out this site from GreenPeace co-founder Patrick Moore:t rickmoore.html
http://www.fcpp.org/publications/conversations/pa
I love this quote from Dr. Moore:
"Many factors including a lack of science education, a need to perpetuate themselves and "means justifies the end" thinking. The worst aspect is what I describe as the environmental movement has been hijacked by political activists who are using green rhetoric to cloak agendas that have more to do with anti-corporatism and class warfare than with ecology or the environment."
Remember this is the co-founder of Greenpeace. Not exactly your average "evil right-wing" nutcase.
Brian Ellenberger
Sure. Tell me more. You have some information or statistics that involve modern windmill technology?
You're familiar with modern wind technology, correct? Large blades, turning slowly. Certainly some birds might smack into them (the same way they do to buildings and cars), but we're not talking about the little, fast-moving windmills of the 1970s and 80s.
I'm tired of hearing this one trotted out every time somebody talks about wind. Show me the numbers, dammit!
They're certainly going to pollute the visual enviroment
Maybe we can disguise them as trees. Or put Budwiser advertising on them. Then they'll fit right in with the rest of the country :)
This is nice. They are in fact implementing known technology for the benefit of all, AND DOING SO IN an aggressive visionary project. It is unfortunate that most of the industrialized world is not as nimble in implementing technology, when the benifits don't neccessarily fit neatly in an accountant's bookkeeping. We admire ourselves as humans with descriptions such as adaptive, modular etc. But our culture is not, when it comes in conflict with immediate rewards like profit. This Danish wind power project is an example of human culture rising to the challenge and becoming, indeed, an adaptive and modular culture. Now if we just had an aggressive program for developing cheap, clean and abundant energy.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
By having a focus, Danish industry can seek to acquire the IP such as patents to build up a top industry. As in other industries the idea is to go so far down the learning curve that it becomes more economical for other countries to buy the technology from you rather than develop it themselves.
That is why conservatives who bash alternative energy are stupid. Any reading of US history shows massive government involvement to nurture any industry whether through protective tariffs, cash for infrastructure, land grants, whatever. To make money you have to spend money. A so-called conservative who espouses capitalism should understand that.
I think the subject says it all. While impacting native wildlife is a differnet issue, if it was simply staring at white towers vs. not being able to breathe, I know what *i'd* choose...
It gets 43% of its electricity from hydroelectric dams, 22% from geothermal, and another 4% from other renewable sources.
The city really focuses on finding plausible, cost-effective power sources, but for some reason it doesn't get any of its power from the wind. Perhaps the Santa Clarans know something the Danish don't?
- TV setup. My television, amplifier, and Tivo alone took up
1.6 Amps = 185 watts, while they were completely idle. The Tivo was not
recording anything, and I verified that it was not doing anything by
telnetting in and observing that the load average was 0.00. Does it
really require 1.6 amps just to spin a hard drive and wait for a
10mW infrared signal??
- Computer monitors. I run XFree86 4 in dual-head mode. My two
monitors take up 2.6 Amps = 300 watts while they are on, and a whopping 70
watts when they are turned off at the switch. It's worth noting that they
produce about a third of the light, and twice the heat, of two 150W light
bulbs.
- Computer hardware. The power strip supporting my 1.6Ghz Athlon
and 1Ghz Duron draws a whopping 4.4 Amps, or 500 watts, while
both systems sit at zero load! Apparently, AMD expended significantly
more effort making sure their processors were well-equipped to start house
fires when the heatsink falls off, rather than making those Linux kernel
"CPU idle" calls actually do anything.
- Uninterruptable power supplies. These were the sleeper hit of
my power measurement experiment: with full batteries and no devices on the
load side, my UPSes drew 50-80 watts of power each. I understand that
filtering power comes at a cost, but these things really should be designed
to be at least a little bit more efficient than the average space heater.
So, this brings me to my main point: why is it that my cell phone can run for two weeks without a recharge, my digital scale can run for 10 years (guaranteed) on a single battery, my thermostat, analog clocks, and smoke detectors can run for 2-3 years between battery changes, but my computers and consumer electronics have to suck up as much power as my toaster while they are completely idle?As long as our toys are designed to waste as much energy as legally possible, even the most well-intentioned power conservation efforts are doomed to utter failure.
-sting3r
I applaud the Danes for their bold, foward thinking Energy 21 energy policy. Bush's policy on the other hand, involves meddling in the middle east or drilling in our national parks and preserves.
Being the man of vision that he is, Bush, should reconsider our depenence on oil from the middle east and its impact of our foriegn policy. Like a drug addicted individual the US governments choices sometimes are far from rational.
For example, we call the Saudi's "our fiends". Bullshit! They would slice our thoat in a heart beat if we were not their biggest customer. They are a twisted theocracy that rejects womens rights, democracy, personal liberty, religious freedom, etc. We have nothing in common.
If the man would come out with a Kennedy like vision and plan of developing renewable technologies such as wind, solar, geothermal, wave, conservation, etc. and even clean and safe nuclear we would be much further down road to world stability, peace and prosperity. Instead he wants to start another war and one which has the potential of being a messy urban war where civilian casualities are unavoidable if you want to win.
There are also countries much smaller that Denmark. Luxemburg springs to mind...
Please don't feel bad about being confused about our small nations. We - inversely - tend to get confused about the myriad of world-dominating, corrupt and arrogant major nations, who are ruled by capitalist oligarchies, and show a (to us)... shall we say SLIGHTLY relaxed attitude towards getting small details (such as major national elections) right ;)
We're currently producing 10-15% of all electricity in Denmark with wind-energy and nobody wants that number to increase currently due to the problems we are facing.
The main problem is that we actually get so much wind-generated electricity during a storm that we cannot get rid of it, this unbalances the power-grid and results in voltage and frequency instabilities.
The secondary problem is that you also need electricity when the wind does not blow. This could mean keeping large centralized power-plants around, paying a lot of maintenance costs, waiting for the wind to die.
Various suggestions abound, and the Engineers weekly newspaper here in Denmark has been the home of a fierce debate for the last couple of months about the merits of these and wind-generation in general.
The fact that all sorts of micro-plants and co-generation is popping up like mushrooms is in fact a very interesting problem for the electrical grids: How do you balance supply and demand, when you have almost as many suppliers as consumers ?
Poul-Henning Kamp -- FreeBSD since before it was called that...
Because if the US didn't pollute so much, everybody else would have nothing to do.
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
Athlons have circuitry to disconnect from the system bus when idle (on a signal from the Northbridge, which gives the signal when the OS enters the ACPI C2 idle state), reducing clock rate and essentially going into a standby mode (~5W power consumption). Unfortunately, it's not enabled by default, partly due to minor performance problems (~3% is the normal performance hit), and partly due to intermittent problems with some motherboards, especially when using PCI bus-mastering cards that require low latency (such as video capture cards). I'm not sure why it's not available as a BIOS option though.
In any case, you can enable it manually by setting the relevant bit in the Northbridge. For Linux, see the Athlon Powersaving HOWTO for a variety of methods to enable it.
For Windows, there's a utility called VCool, whose site was at vcool.occludo.net, but it appears to have disappeared in the past week or two.
When idled using the setpci trick mentioned in the HOWTO, my Athlon 1.33 GHz, which used to idle at 57 C, now idles at 33 C (case temp is 31 C, so it's generating very little heat and by extension using very little power, especially compared to what it used to do).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The report was from Sven Auken, a leading member of the social democrats, and the primary hate figure for the then opposition, now current government.
The new right wing government have basically stopped or severely reduced funding for all environmental programs, and the current "wisdom" is that the emphasis on wind power was a mistake, because it (despite Denmarks 50% markedshare of the world production of wind mills) hasn't been short term profitable.
The new government appointed Bjørn Lomborg as head for the only new environmental institution.
Your citation of Dr. Moore shows what, exactly? That some in the left wing disagree with some others in the left wing? Oooh! Just because Greenpeace gets more involved in politics in the process of protecting the environment, and this old-schooler thinks they should proceed a different way, that doesn't mean Greenpeace is doing anything wrong. The thing about the lacking science education is true up to a point, but exactly how many science Ph.D.'s are memebers of Greenpeace? One that I know personally, and I bet you there are tons more. Yes the average environmentalist hippy doesn't know much about science, that's unfortunately a fair observation, but why should we hold them to a special standard regarding this? After all, only a right-wing nutcase could possibly think the average Greenpeace hippy knows less about science than the President of the United States.
If you had bothered to look on this page (same site) and read the second paragraph you would have found out that the goal is to get 35% of our energy from renewable sources, that is wind, waves, solar etc..
My opinion? See above.
A device running at 120VAC can consume 4 Amps *without* consuming 480 Watts.
:)
How? Well, most real-world devices are slightly (or sometimes not so slightly) inductive loads - this causes the current draw to lag after the voltage "peak" supplied.
In the DC world, your formula is valid: P = U * I, effect equals voltage times current.
In the AC world, it is still valid but it cannot be used the way that you used it. You multiplied the voltage with a current that was drawn at a different time - what you need to do is to find out the "power factor", the phase distortion (or whatever the english word for that is), of your devices.
The formula becomes:
P = U * I * cos(d)
where d in most household devices would be anywhere from near-zero to 0.3 or so.
The minimum cos(d) is regulated by law, at least in Denmark and probably everywhere else, since the power companies have a hard time measuring and correcting phase distortion.
Anyway, what this all means is, that your devices probably only consume 60-80% of what you *think* you measured.
It's still a lot though, I'll give you that
windmills affecting jet streams? fascinating. the jet stream's like 30,000 feet up in the air sport.
god i never thought how many of you non-ap students were going to speak and reproduce and vote when i went to high school in america. and that was over a decade ago before ronald reagan's gutting of america's public education could really have an effect. it's freakin' scary. no wonder kyoto didn't make it in america.
windmills affecting jet streams. dear god.
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