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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.
This is a subsidized price. The article says students can pay this, but it doesn't say what the cost is to produce the power. I expect that even at $0.045/kWh the payback on the windmills is 15 years.
-AD
From the article: "If you have any interest in our environment, it only makes sense to put out the little cost that it takes," Travis Kimball said. "It's the absolute least you could do."
No, the absolute least you could do is nothing - which most of the Colorado residents are doing it seems. While it doesn't surprise me that initial takeup is going slow, it is a little disappointing. Giving uni students the choice is a good start, but Mr. Citizen would probably be more likely to spend the extra money on a bigger TV - than cleaner electricity.
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
Does that take into account the amount of energy lost when transporting electricity from the point of generation (farmland) to the point of use (everywhere except farmland)? Also what would the monetary cost of doing this be?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Only if we still HAVE an environment at that time :P
Oil is going to be around a lot longer, there are massive deposits too far away to reach. But the question is can we survive with all that carbon in the atmosphere?
-- Checking emails and kicking cheats `till the day I die.
Use the power to pump water uphill and store it in a reservoir or heat a large amount of water. There are plenty of ways to store large amounts of electricity.
Which is dandy if you've got someplace to store the water (for starters).
There are plenty of ways to store electricity, sure. The problem is finding cost-effective ways of storing electricity.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
While your argument looks good on the surface, it relies on the assumption that all of these turbines would be quite close to each other. The larger the geographic spread of these windmills, the more assured you are to be getting at least *some* power *all* of the time. It's the same reason that investors like to keep a variety of stocks in their portfolios. The probability that a single area will not have sufficient wind to generate power is relatively high, but the chance that all the air in the entire country will suddenly just decide to stop moving is basically 0. Yes, this does require building alot more windmills, and thus invest alot more money, but that dosen't stop the concept from feasible.
"Operating systems suck: you're better off using only the BIOS" --trainsaw.com
Good Laugh. Think of an ocean that is more than 100000 feet deep (~30000M deep). Do you think that structures that are less than 100 ' (30 M) (less than .1% of the depth) on the Ocean floor stand, could stop (or even slow down) the water that is moving. Our atmosphere is simply an ocean of air.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
What WILL happen is that eventually oil because more expensive to pull out of the ground as the reserves get lower. At that point, other sources of energy get more economical, and we inevitably switch over.
That is what they mean when they say "run out of ouil". Oil that is too expensive to obtain might as well not exist. As for "switching over", look around you and notice how many of the goods you own are made out of plastic. When oil becomes very expensive, you will have to either pay a lot of money for those items, or find a way to make them out of some other material. Given that there is no obvious substitute for oil as a manufacturing ingredient, it would be best if we stopped burning it for electricity and saved it for uses where there is no substitute.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The carbon did essentially start in the atmosphere, but the climate wasn't the same then. But do we want the climate to be the same as it was then?
-- Checking emails and kicking cheats `till the day I die.
While you are technically correct, it's sort of a moot point.
Perhaps environmentalists should instead say "when oil becomes extremely scare", but that doesn't have quite the same emotional effect.
In either case we need to start thinking about ways to deal with the inevitable loss of cheap oil before it actually comes to pass. Otherwise we will be stuck in the position of having increasingly expensive oil and yet haven't put the time/money/research into alternative energy infrastructure. It is better for the economy to attempt a smooth transition over a long period of time.
-Spyky
I always thought of wind power this way: If you have a month with good output from the wind farm, then you burn less coal. If you are supplementing fossil fuels with wind then you are indirectly banking any excess within unburned fuel.
IMHO, Oil is also heavily subsidised by the govt.
Oil has hidden costs that is never taken into consideration, because it's borne by the govt & not the oil company.
I am talking about the cost of fighting wars for
oil.
Seriously, there are some legit arguments out there but you are just off in tin-foil hat land. To respond to your points:
1) Wrong. We cannot, at this point, build a mechinacly perfect device. Nanotechnology at least will be required to do that. We can build very good devices, and we DO. Perhaps (likely) you are too young to remember cars from the 40s, 50s, 60s, etc. They required an amount of matenence just unheard of today. You realise that for well made cars liek Accords, they frequently go 100,000-150,000 miles and require NO major service, just oil changes and the like? Try that with a 60s muscle car, not happening.
Further, as with most things, the cost of precision in parts (which is what leads to less wear) is linear for a bit, then steeply exponental. There is a certian point at which it just isn't worth it to make things better. For X dollars you can have a car that lasts on average 100,000 miles whereas it would take 4X dollars to make it average 120,000 miles.
2) You think companies make money off of flouride? I think my friend that YOU have been giving the chemical companies money, albeit of the small, illegal, methlab variety. Flouride isn't patented, is cheap as hell to produce and is added in very, very, very small quantities to the water. There is fuck all money to be made in it. The money is made in perscriptrion drugs that are patented.
3) Please don't. You are worse than most. You don't even start with a reasonable argument and then take it to absurdity, you just start off in lala land and get worse from there. There are arguments that we have an overly capatalistic society but flouride in the water is sure as hell NOT one of them.
Get a grip.
Hmm.
Personally, I'd love a few more nuclear fission powerplants. I live in PA, near one (Limerick). Those suckers are great. Scares the tourists (always worth a chuckle), but its redeeming value is that those clouds hovering over the powerplant are white, not black.
I am John Hurt.
While this would be nice, the process of using hydrogen as a fuel is realistically not that efficient. First of all, electrolysis of water to hydrogen gas + oxygen is only about 30% efficient, if I recall.
Also, hydrogen is quite difficult to store. Hydrogen is not very energy dense, meaning that it really can not store a lot of energy for the amount of volume that it takes up, even under fairly high compression. Add to this that compressed hydrogen is relatively dangerous and requires expensive tanks, this adds to the cost. Even morseo if the hydrogen is to be used for transportation.
However, some technical solutions may be found to facilitate storage, or even increase efficiency of electrolysis. The question would come down to this: is it more efficient to drive essentially the whole power grid by wind, storing it as hydrogen (or some other method) in times of excess in order to convert it in lean times, or might it be more effecient to build wind turbines so that at peak power, they provide most of the energy for the power grid, and at other times more easilly stored sources of energy (fossil fuels, bio-diesel, etc) are used to fill in the deficit.
Realistically, if we are to keep increasing our power consumption, we are going to have to utilize as many forms of energy as we can, and use them where they are the most appropriate. In places with steady winds, wind forms can be constructed. Places with very little cloud cover would be ideal for some form of solar energy. Geothermal energy where available. Biodeiesel can be made from waste organic materials, as well as fresh materials (E.G. corn oil + alchohol) grown specifically for that purpose. Nuclear power (both fusion and fission) both have the potential to produce incredible amounts of power, but they both have their drawbacks which may be overcome by technology. And then of course we have the old standby of fossil fuels, but those are a fairly limited resource, and should only be used where absolutely necessary (at least in an ideal situation,) or where the other energy sources are counterindicated for some reason.
And on top of all of this, we will have to develop more efficient ways of doing things. Design cities in a more efficient manner. Of course make vehicles and other tools more efficient through technology and consumer choices. Provide incentives for using electricity in off peak hours of power consumption (or rather penalties for using electricity during peak usage periods.)
There does not seem to be one magic bullet for our energy need problems. And I highly doubt that we will find one in our future. The real answer lies in careful evaluation of all the pieces and using every tool available to make the system work, and keep it working for as long as we want to keep society going as we know it. Now, some may question whether we _SHOULD_ keep society growing and growing, but I'll leave that to the philosophers. Or at least a different thread.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
1. You build wind power to reduce the use of fossil fuels, not to make the grid blackout-resistant. Widespread blackouts are caused by faulty control mechanisms, not the method of power generation. Why even bring this up?
2. Having a company in financial difficulty do *anything* can be problematic. This issue is of significant concern.
3. On what do these sources base their conclusions? Studies of bird deaths due to wind turbines show pretty minimal numbers, even with the old CA turbines that were unusually dangerous for raptors. Estimates are around two birds per year per turbine (compared to somewhere around 10/year per mile of road with average traffic). Maybe you should dig up your roads and walk everywhere instead--but that's no good, you need to get places, but electricity comes for free from nowhere! Er, wait.
4. If there's really not enough wind, then building these towers is really stupid. Building wind farms where there is no wind is a good way to bankrupt one's company once again. However, are the NWS stations on ridge-tops? You can have huge differences in wind-speed based on local terrain. You make a good case against building a wind turbine on top of the National Weather Service stations. You need to provide more information, however, to show whether the 30 year records are relevant. The company's
report claims that the ridge crest is a local wind corridor. Wind corridors are real, so your objection is only valid if they are wrong that it is a wind corridor, or if they are right but that even so there is insufficient wind. (Also keep in mind the difference in wind velocity as you go from ground-level to 80m above the ground.)
5. Ice is apparently a red herring. There simply isn't evidence that thrown ice is a danger, despite many installed wind farms in ice-prone areas. Besides, there are good physical reasons to think that ice would not be thrown a great distance (e.g. turbines are based on airfoils, and ice coatings don't preserve the airfoil shape, which is the whole problem with plane wings icing).
6. I have heard the new large 80m-ish Danish turbines. They're not that loud, and I don't personally find the noise that annoying. It's mostly sort of whooshing as the blades go past; the new designs have very little mechanical noise (unlike some of the old eggbeater designs in CA). It's hard to even hear them from a reasonable distance away (a few hundred meters). Why do you think that they are LOUD?
Anyway, it's nice that you're helping your dad out and all, and it's good for people to be involved in their community, but are you really arguing against it for the reasons you've given? Or is it instead because you don't like the look of giant windmills on the top of your ridge crest, and figure that if you can shoot it down you won't have to see a coal-fired power plant there instead?
People do this kind of thing all the time, often without realizing it. E.g. people where I used to live wanted to cut down all the trees for "fire protection", despite the fact that the shrub and annual grass that would have replaced the trees were a bigger fire hazard than the trees. Curiously, there was an extremely strong correlation between people who wanted to cut trees for "fire protection" and those whose views stood to improve the most, but only a weak correlation between people whose houses were near trees and the same desire.
Aesthetics are important. If that's the real reason you or your dad is fighting this, best to recognize it now so you can recognize when you're prone to believe something false because it provides an excuse for your position. Then if you still want to spread misinformation to the city council, or whatever, well, that's up to you. That happens all the time. At least you can be intellectually honest with yourself (and with readers here).