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Wind Power Falls Under $0.01/kwh
js7a writes "Colorado State University's Rocky Mountain Collegian reports that, "as of June [the price of wind power] dropped to 1 cent per kWh." Even without further expected improvements in turbine technology, the U.S. would now need to use less than 3% of its farmland to get 95% of its electricity demand satisfied by wind power. Plus, wind power is the only mitigation of global warming, because if the whole world converted to wind power in 15 years, the amount of power being extracted from the atmosphere would be more than the increase in greenhouse gas atmospheric energy forcing since 1600. Don't say goodbye to coal and oil, yet, though; unless cell technology increases substantially, when we run out of oil we will convert coal to synthetic fuel." Update: 09/15 13:40 GMT by T : Note: the "1 cent" figure refers to the premium paid for the power over conventionally supplied electricity, rather than the final per-kWh price.
The wind energy is not exactly bought directly, though:
Platte River is a community-owned, wholesale power supplier to the cities of Fort Collins, Loveland, Longmont, and the Town of Estes Park. You can sign up for the wind program in any of these communities, and the wind energy you receive will come from Platte River's Medicine Bow Wind Project.
As regarding fulfilling a great deal of energy needs from wind their website has this to say:
While it is theoretically possible to produce enough energy from wind turbines to supply all our needs, it's not technically feasible at present. This is because wind is an "intermittent" resource, i.e., the wind doesn't blow all the time. Since electricity can't be stored in large amounts, we still need other resources to ensure that energy is available when people need to use it. Research continues on the effect of wind generation on electric system reliability. A recent study of California wind farms found that wind can make up as much as 10% of total electricity capacity without significantly impacting the reliability of the electric grid.
I found the web site for the energy company to be a pretty interesting place to get a fair amount of detail about how an energy company harnesses energy from the wind and blends into their grid.
Cheers,
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
Well the theory is that with global warming, weather becomes more severe. That is, with more energy being dumped into the atmosphere, more water evaporates from the ocean at a faster rate which results in more circulation, etc etc. Wind power will *slightly* decrease the severity of the weather, just like the hairs on your arm keep a strong wind from making you too cold.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
... Watch this the next time it is broadcast on your local PBS station.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/extremeoil/
I wathced this last night..
Oil is going to be arround a lot longer then you think...
- No Sig for you!
From the CIA World Factbook, USA:
Land Area: 9,161,923 sq km
Arable Land: 19.3%
So that's 1,768,251 sq km of farmland, 3% of which is 53048 sq km.
Don't want to be down on wind power or anything, but there's still quite the engineering challenge here.
Offshore Wind Energy report by Deltf Univ, Netherlands, on the economics of a wind power system offshore in Europe.
Page 5 gives the cost of producing power, including capital costs, at Eur 0.051/kWh (~5.5 US cents/kWhr). This gives a payback of about 7-8 years. So, NO, the power doesn't cost USD0.01/kWh.
-AD
It has been about 8 years since I lived in Ft. Collings, but the power was not subsidized. We paid extra for it initially (about 12 years ago), and about the time that I left Ft. Collins, the price was plummeting.
The real problem is not the price / KwH, but the fact that it is intermittant. In Colorado, we are one of the better states for energy/power esp with wind, but it still is intermittant. Until we create low cost energy storage this will not be truely viable
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The main problem with wind power is nobody wants them around.
In MA, http://www.capewind.org/ is trying to build a wind farm, and is running into all kinds of opposition from "environmentalists."
Basically, the problem is NIMBY.
If you're going to build wind farms, you're going to have to put them far, far away from the upper-middle class, preferably among the poor.
Of course, capewind is far, far away from everyone. But nobody even likes the idea of these big fans out there, spoiling the ocean view for those who might be sailing around in the area. Heavens, the horror!
I put an anemometer up for a summer at my house that got a pretty constant light breeze, and captured data for a summer. I figure a wind generator (at maybe 80 feet up) would have given me on average 3% of its rated power.
Have a look at (United States) this map before you put up a generator.
Fuel cells have the problem that they wear out and are expensive to produce. If you want to store energy using hydrogen you're better off disassociating water to produce hydrogen gas, then burning that later in a generator. This is of course all best done at some central location, as opposed to on-site, unless on-site is all there is. If you have sun, water, and wind, you have quite a bit of energy available to you for not much cost. The hydrogen will be a little "dirty" unless you're distilling water and separating it, but since all you're doing is burning it, that won't really affect much.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The oilsand projects I'm working on cost, typically, $1B per 22k bbls/day.
Iraq is now producing about 1.5 Mbbls/day of crude. Let's assume that the $85B is a capital cost to keep this oil moving (which is nonsense, but you insist in including these costs in the oil capex. So be it). This means that the capex to develop a 1500k bbl/day plant should cost $65B. So, yes, the cost is a little bit higher than developing oil in a safe place like Alberta or Alaska but it is not orders of magnitude higher.
-AD
The issue is about how to convert that hydrogen back into electricity. Fuel cells are one method which essentially work like a battery directly converting the chemical energy into electrical energy. The suggestion is that we would be better off just burning the hydrogen in a conventional generator (i.e. using the heat from burned hydrogen to create steam and drive turbines..or just directly using hydrogen in the turbine like a jet engine).
If we are really thinking of doing this on a large scale I don't think the expense of the fuel cell will be as important as the *potential* increase in efficency. However, whether we can really get the higher efficency is another matter.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Fuel cells need to be larger to produce more, and making them larger means using more materials, and those materials are usually expensive things like platinum. The larger the scale, the larger the cost - I don't think fuel cells are ever going to be all that scalable. They'll be most desirable in smaller applications.
Internal combustion engines, on the other hand, are highly scalable. In fact the most efficient ICE is some diesel engine that's the size of a house and is over 50% efficient, if I properly recall. If you have a use for the heat you can make the process of combustion highly efficient. For example, you could use the heat to distill water or something. Thermoelectric generation of electricity is even less cost-effective than fuel cells from what I can tell so that wouldn't be much help.
I do believe that fuel cells will eventually reach a higher level of efficiency, but what we really need is a way to make them last orders of magnitude longer.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This is not true, and hasn't been true for decades. Many hydro systems that have a forebay (pond) above the plant and empty out into another lake, have the ability to reverse their turbines when power is plentiful at night and pump the water back uphill. The same water is then run through the turbines again when power is needed.
And how efficient is this? Efficient enough that it's done a lot of places!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Bird windwill deaths are real, but extremely overrated. The bird deaths in california were landing and resting on support wires for a certain type of windmill (which is obsolete anyway, most don't use support wires in the airframe).
The windfarm in question was in a migration path of a particular species, and only affected local predater hawks because they were preying on the resting, tired,fat, birds. Until the obsolete windmills were replaced. a simple sollution was worked out, in which the windfarm was shutdown during a few weeks in the fall for migration of the food. Oddly enough, the few hawk deaths were worth it for the hawks, who found the resting birds to be plentiful and Yummy.
Still, windmill caused bird deaths are a fraction of a fraction of the bird deaths caused by 1.) big clear glass windows, 2) Pollution, 3) Automobiles, 4) Powerlines and transformers, 6) air pollution (yes tweety gets lung illness too) 6) invasive species, and 7) Cheney and Scalia on duck huntin' trips. And 8) 8? I forgot what 8 is for......
If you read the article, it's pretty clear that they're talking about how much you pay above-and-beyond the regular electric bill. It used to be 2.5 cents above. Now it's a bargain at only 1 cent above. What you get for your money is the knowledge that you're using renewable energy.
Coal is good for the first choice. It's relatively cheap, relatively safe but takes a couple of days to get going.
Gas is good for the second choice as you can start up a turbine and having it running at full efficiency quickly.
Wind is good for neither of these. It can't be relied upon to provide baseline or peak output because the wind is always blowing. So it requires some way of storing the energy produced to really be a serious part of energy grid without other things to back it up.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
conventional combined cycle plants (gas turbine + steam turbine) have thermal efficiencies above 54%. The latest generation with steam cooled gas turbine parts can achieve a thermal efficiency of 60%. See the following pdf files at gepower.com
u rb ines_cc/en/downloads/gasturbine_cc_products.pdf
http://www.gepower.com/prod_serv/products/gas_t
Hydrogen will rapidly diffuse through just about any material, even things that are very "solid" looking like glass or metal. The size of the molecules in question plays a significant role in determine how quickly a given material will move through another material. This phenomenon causes all manner of problems in a wide range of areas where hydrogen isn't welcome. Welding and hydrogen embrittlement being an especially good example. Hydrogen is also very reactive, forming hydrides with most metals. These hydrides weaken the microstructure of their host materials, reducing their ductility and toughness and making them less safe/suitable for storing high pressure gas.
It is not correct to simply compare spending by the Feds in Education and Defense. You need to look at funding by all sources, state, local, and federal. http://www.policyalmanac.org/education/archive/doe _education_spending.shtml
In 1999-2000, k-12 spending by the US was $373 billion. Billions more are spent on post-secondary education. Since local and state governments do not spend on national military, you can see that the DoE spending of $400 billion (2004) is probably less than the $400+ billion (2000) we as a nation spend on education.
Even this analysis is incomplete. My point is that if you have a fleeting grasp of the statistics, you can paint a misleading picture, as if the U.S. is a war-hungry country.
Slashdot posted a link to a pathetically incomplete news article, so it's not surprising to see all these incomplete responses. They don't even compare the price of wind to the price of conventional power at that school except to say it's more, and they don't mention that the price is subsidized.