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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.
...started looking into Wind power recently.
Nothing big mind you, but I'd like to get a cabin up north in the middle of nowhere, and I'd love to power it via wind. Sure, generators are a possibility but all the noise sort of destroys my reason to go out there - to commute with nature.
Plus, I wouldn't have to worry about bringing fuel with me at all either - just let the wind do it.
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"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
This is really nice on paper. However, wind power isn't all its cracked up to be. First off, you don't want power output to rely too heavily on weather conditions. I want my electricity to be stable. Not that what we have now is stable either...
Also, there are definite weather and atmospheric side effects of absorbing all that wind power into giant fans.
Hey, there's a lot of wind down south now. Why don't they run down there and setup some turbines tonight so tommorow we can get a bunch of free juice?
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Since electricity can't be stored in large amounts
Could hydrogen fuel cells potentially change this?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
How many birds, and can it be prevented? Though it is possibly a problem. Take everything into account. Cars kill deer, lets not use them either [troll sarcasm]
-- Checking emails and kicking cheats `till the day I die.
Oh, and for the millionth time, would the proponents of wind power factor in the cost of energy storage into their ridiculous claims that it's possible to affordably replace fossil fuel and nuclear generators with wind right now?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
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.
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.
I was wondering about this. Seems to me that all the carbon currently sequestered in fossil fuels was probably part of the atmosphere initially (seems like CO/CO2 are part of the primordial ooze). So, basically it was the rise of photosynthesizers which created the oxygen atmosphere and removed the CO2 from the air. All we're doing is putting it back. No less "natural" than the removal, but possibly very detrimental to our health.
http://www.newbelgium.com/frames.html
New Belgium brewing, completely wind powered.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Imagine 3% of U.S. farmlands with windmills on them. All of the sudden, the wind is slowed down because it has to turn numerous giant windmills.
Nope.
The atmosphere is DEEP. Aircraft routinely fly at 40K feet. Depending on where you want to say space begins, the earth's atmosphere is around 100KM deep.
The tallest building in the world is only about 1400 feet high, so if all our wind turbines were as tall as the Petronas towers, their penetration into the atmosphere is still miniscule.
Now, if you want to talk about a real evironmental impact of wind power, you could discuss birds flying into turbine blades, which happens quite a bit in California, I hear.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I wonder what the effect on wind currents and weather would be if the whole world used wind power as the majority of their power needs. Basicaly wind turrbines slow the wind down as it passes. I wonder what noticable effects having less wind would have?
IWFTEC (I work for the electric company). It's great that wind generation is taking off but it isn't without cost, the utility I work for charges twice for wind power what it charges for "regular" power; yes, people pay it, gladly (odd eh?)
The issue with wind power is that it is, in effect, a run-away generator. To balance the system, another generator must be able to move to keep the grid stable (anyone remember First Power?) The _kicker_ is that a generator with 80%-90% is necessary to regulate the wind farm. The bigger the farm, the bigger the generator (and higher percentage) necessary to control the grid. So, in a perfect situation, if you've got 500 MW of potential wind power, you'll need 350-500 MW of conventional generation. Furthermore, most generators don't work very efficiently unless they're 70%-100% of their capacity.
Okay, I suck but these are the facts, if we're going to connect every control area together, we need a stable grid, for a stable grid, we must have the abilty to control, and do without, the "green" power. Utilities are for profit businesses and only the government can get away with running at a loss, even for idealistic reasons.
Hydrogen has significant pipeline problems... it tends to LEAK out of them because it is such a small molecule... seals just don't work.
A better solution is to steam reform carbon dioxide into methane and add that to our existing infrastructure, or play around with Sodium Borohydride and put that through an underground pipeline system parallel to our oil pipelines. But the capital expense there may make the steam reformation a better interim solution.
This article has to be taken with a huge grain of salt - the numbers are not only misleading here, they are just plain wrong.
First of all, wind as an energy source is limited primarily by the ability to store it, and low transmission wattages.
Secondly, there is no way that 'only 3% of the US resources could provide us with equivalent amounts of electricity.
*All* wind, *everywhere* has been estimated at about 2-3 PW, and all wind near the surface (within 1 km) at about 1.2 PW.
From that 1.2PW, 70% of it is over oceans and hence unusable, and perhaps 10% of that 30% is in position (100m from the ground) to drive windmills. That comes out to about 3% of the 1.2 PW.
Then, there is the question of wind speed and blade spacing. Too high a speed, and windmills can't function. Too low, and windmills can't function. Put wind mills too close together, and they interfere with each other.
Hence, its been estimated out of that 36 TW, perhaps a 5th of that can be used - at profitable levels. This is about 6.2 TW - if we put windmills everywhere that we could hold them.
Given that we use 10 TW equivalent in fossil fuels, that's about 60% of our total power - and that doesn't include any of the other factors like conversion efficiencies, storage efficiencies, intermittancy problems, and low transmission wattages.
We can convert - at theoretical maximum - 60% of that 6TW into electricity, or 3.6 TW. Now, this is about our electricity consumption today, but we haven't stopped there - efficiencies of storing wind power are 50% or less, and no good technology has been developed to store it.
So - the upshot? We could put windmills everywhere, all over the US, and still they would not solve our energy problems. They might take a chunk out of the usage, but they come nowhere close to solving the problem..
My guess is that people are just cherry-picking the best sites, and that wind is being subsidized in the process. Which, given our current state of peril, is a dangerous thing to do.
Use it to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen...of course storing massive quantities of hydrogen might be a little dangerous.
Splitting water and storing as a gas is not an efficient way of doing things.
Because hydrogen is such a small atom, when stored as a gas, hydrogen leaks out of almost any container at a significant rate (I seem to remember ~10% per day).
When bonded to metal and stored as a metal hydride, hydrogen is incredibly heavy, and this is not a very efficient means of storage.
When bonded to carbon, you get various fossil fuels. This is the most efficient way of storing massive quantities of hydrogen at the current time. And yes, it is dangerous.
Seperate 2H's from an O. When you want your energy back, simply recombine them. Sure, the product is the evil Di-Hydrogen Monoxide, but the efficiency of this storage method is much higher than the transmission losses of current high-tension power lines.
I live in Ludington Michigan. They built the world's largest pump storage plant here about 40 years ago. It is 1 and a half miles wide at it's widest point. They pump water from Lake Michigan up to the man made lake at night and generate electricity during the day. They get back around 66% of the electricity they use to pump the water but that electricity would have been wasted as the demand is less at night and they must keep the boilers at a constant temperature so they do not like to reduce them at night. They have put several wind measuring devices around the county to see if they can produce electricity. It is interesting that we did not have a problem with our electricity during the big power outage.
My home town in the North Island of New Zealand is serviced by one of ten Wind Farms in the country. This one is the largest in the Southern Hemisphere, featuring roughly 100 turbines on a ridge 10 kilometres away that are barely noticable from the central city.
From memory the wind farm generates about 70% of energy requirement of the city, it's outlying townships and farms. As an added bonus, it's cheap for the consumer.
Because New Zealand is a Nuclear Free Zone the alternatives to Wind Power are primarily Geothermal which accounts for 18% of the national total, Hydroelectric which accounts for about 75% and Natural Gas making up the bulk of the remainder.
Most of what I have to say has been mentioned by various posters, but I wanted to put it all together.
That 3% of the farmland we would be using is unfortunately mostly located in North Dakota and surrounding states. The problem is transmitting the power from North Dakota to the rest of the country.
The power output of a windfarm is, of course, dependent on the wind. It varies throughout the day and by the season. For off-peaks, other sources are still needed, either in the form of more turbines, more sources of other kinds, or some temporary storage. All involve significant capital investment.
Offshore farms are also an option. The Danish produce a significant portion of their energy using turbines anchored offshore. Noise and safety concerns are reduced, and the turbines can be made bigger since the blades don't have to transported by road. The conditions aren't as favorable in the US as they are in Denmark, but a lot is still available. I for one think they would look a lot better off the coast by Long Beach than all those oil rigs.
A lot of people have asked about climate changes. No serious studies have been done, but I would expect the effect to be negligible. They only affect the air up to around 200m and they fall far short of exhausting all of the wind's energy in that zone.
As simple as they seem, wind turbines have advanced quite a bit since all those little mills were installed in California. People complained about noise. Blades fatigued and broke. Birds flew into them. GE's new turbines are far quieter, spin higher up than most birds fly, and extensive fatigue testing is required on all new designs. They are really quite fascinating...and huge
Visit NREL's site for information on current wind development.
FYI, for those who think wind power has zero-to-very-low ecologial impact:
There have been some serious changes to migratory bird populations in California since the wind-turbine farms started springing up along the mountain ridges. Lots of birds die by hitting the towers or the turbines themselves (note: I don't think they get "sliced", the blades aren't so fast), and many others just plain adjust their flying patters around the ridges. This also has an effect on INSECT populations in the California heartland, which can be bad for AGRICULTURE, which has farmers fairly concerned...
There's no free lunch, gang.
plus sweetheart oil and gas leases plus tax breaks and credits plus gov't loans. The oil and gas companys run the US energy policy as well as our foreign relations.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
...cars of the future and how they would be powered, etc. they showed a pilot project for onsite hydrogen production right at a regular gas station. they used grid supplied electric to work what is in essence a reverse fuel cell arrangement to get the hydrogen from water. Had a regular pump out front so that fuel cell cars that used hydrogen could stop and fill er up. So, to answer your question, yep, wind power at rural location A could send it's juice to urban gas station B to run fuel cell car C. You obviously get transmission losses and such like, but you also eliminate the need for tanker truck refueling at the stations, and you redice pollution both at the macro level of "the sky in general" and the micro level of the urban areas that are normally sort of pollution traps.
Wind is nice because it's so scalable, and at small joe homeowner size, battery banks aren't much of a space or maintenance issue, and it's a really nice way to have a real decent whole house UPS system.
In a lot of places a hybrid system of wind and solar is pretty good. Usually in the winter, you get more wind and a lot less sun, and vicey versa in the summer, so for year round you might want both. Commercially though, wind has it over all the other schemes I have seen, so far any way.
Well this is good news. Being that the u.s. peaked their production in the 1970's and globe will in the next 15-25 years. We need to start weening ourselves off oil. Whiile we have all the cheap resources we need to invest into renewable energies to provide our basic utilities. One way or another we will have in put the resources into it. We are just putting off the inevitable.
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because if the whole world converted to wind power in 15 years
Amazing how the whole world lives in areas where there is strong enough and steady enough wind to run reasonably local wind power generator farms.
As someone who lives in Colorado and has visited the wind farm in question, I can tell you that the northern Colorado / southern Wyoming areas where they have those generators are seriously windswept. Nonstop, hard wind. Not everywhere has such an area nearby, which shoots an unfortunate hole in the proposed worldwide plan.
As a side note, that area has one of the nation's highest suicide rates that is often blamed on the nonstop wind making people lose their minds.
They do that in Switzerland. They create a ton of energy during the spring from all the cascading glacial melts, and sell it to neighbors when its scarce. Then in the summer, when energy is cheap, they use it to pump up stores of water back into the alps, so they can release it at more oppurtune times. Perhaps thats the missing step...
????
Profit!!
Well, since we're comparing energy and power, that doesn't really make sense. And as others point out, redirecting mechanical energy around doesn't reduce heat dissipation, so its nonsense on that basis as well.
Anyway, the reason we are worried about greenhouse gas forcing rather than direct thermal pollution is because the power of the surface anthropogenic greenhouse forcing (about 3 watts per square meter and climbing) exceeds the direct human utilization of energy by some orders of magnitude.
Exercise: Calculate per capita wattage of 3 watts per square meter worldwide divided by 6e9 people. That is your current share of artifical greenhouse heating, assuming you are a mean contributor. If you are North American or Australian, you may reasonably quadruple it for good measure.
mt
Arguable. Hydrogen fuel cells are better than 75% efficient at turning chemical energy to electricity, whereas burning it to create steam to turn a turbine to turn a generator, you're lucky to get 30%.
Yes, that has to be traded off against the lifetime of fuel cells vs turbomachinery and generators, although the former have essentially no moving parts and hydrogen (vs natural gas or other fuels) doesn't poison a fuel cell catalyst or electrodes very quickly.
-- Alastair
You may argue that the benefits out weigh the risks but nevertheless there is a downside and that is why, at least in the UK, less than 10% of drinking water is fluoridated.
I go to Colorado State University (Computer Science of course) and I live in the dorms (well... a single dorm room I guess). Anyways, back to topic - they offered for everybody to buy wind power at $17/year. They buy enough wind power to power an average dorm room (I should have bought 40 bucks worth because I have more than 1 car in here) and dump it into the general power the university buys. I did it, and it gives me a little bit of warm fuzzyness.
People like to talk about how clean and safe nuclear power is. However, in many ways it is amazing that a functioning nuclear reactor has not yet been targeted as an act of war. In my opinion it will happen eventually, especially if/when nuclear power spreads is the less stable parts of the world.
Bombing a functioning nuclear reactor makes sense from a war standpoint - when the USA invades a sovereign country it makes sure to bomb the power plants first. Of course the radiation risks from this can be high (possibly depending on reactor design) - and if we power civilization with nuclear energy it almost becomes certain it will happen. This is a very significant long-term risk to consider, in my opinion.
One method of energy storage I haven't seen anyone mention yet is flywheels. Basically it consists of a big cylinder made of a carbon-fiber composite that is suspended inside a vacuum chamber on magnetic bearings, so that it can spin with very, very low friction.
To store more energy, electricity is applied to a motor which causes the flywheel to spin up. To get energy out, the motor is reversed as a generator and the electricity is sent off to do whatever. Flywheels can provide more energy storage per unit volume than batteries, although I don't know about hydrogen fuel cells -- but flywheels are pretty simple technology and tend to be very low in nasty chemicals (compared to, say, lead-acid batteries, or even the catalytic components found in fuel cells).
The carbon-fiber itself, even if spinning at several thousand RPM, will basically explode into sand if it happens to rupture or exceed its design limitations. There would be no chance of a high-velocity flywheel careening out of its containment chamber and killing everything in its path (as cool as that would be).
It's not a highly developed technology yet, but mostly because we have little need for large-scale energy storage (because we have enough power plants that can provide peak production when it's usually needed), but flywheels combine well with intermittent generation technologies like wind and solar.
Of course, any good energy solution should be comprised of a reasonable mix of different generation, distribution, and storage methods, to avoid a monoculture; having enough wind turbines to meet (at most) 50% of our peak generation means that we're using that much less coal, oil, and other nonrenewable resources. I personally am in favor of safe nuclear reactors (like pebble beds), but nuclear is so much harder of a sell in the U.S. these days that we might find wind, despite its costs, more feasible as an alternative to fossil fuels.
Just some ruminations on the subject, anyway.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
If we continue to eschew Nuclear Power in the US, the Mexican government will start building several nuclear power plants (using "safe" technologies) near the US border.
They will export both electricity to the grid, and generate huge quantites of hydrogen (which will become the new "portable" fuel). that will be transmitted to the US.
This will result in a tremendous rennisance of Latin America, and result in a generally graceful transition from fossil fuels to an electric and hydrogen economy. This will "solve" the energy problem for the US. It will move money that is currently going to small groups of people in the Middle East, to our hemisphere, and create prosperity here at home.
China will be doing the same, as well as India and Pakistan and probably South Africa and Japan.
The oil economy will come to an end, and the nuclear economy will prevail.
What environmental damage? Some dead birds? Big deal - house cats kill more than a billion birds every year in America alone. What wind farms would do would be insignificant in comparison to the damage done by irresponsible pet owners.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Yeah, my lab experience with hydrogen has been that it's not a big deal to contain. We used to use a very small lecture bottle of hydrogen as the supply for exchange gas in cooling down helium systems. The bottle probably hadn't been filled in the 10 years before I got there, and probably not in the 13 or so years since. Most of the loss has probably been from accidentally putting too much gas into the front side of the regulator before dumping it into the experiment.
I've done a fair bit of plumbing for hydrogen systems (for measuring properties of metal hydrides) and have been able to make quite tight systems for high pressure, high temperature H2. We were actually very carefully accounting for the H2, since we needed to know how much went into and out of the hydrides. The system was full of valves, fittings, and welds. You have to be aware of what hydrogen can do to materials, but if you pick the right materials it's fine.
Dewars for storage of any liquid cryogen generally have vents (and burst disks in case the vacuum goes bad). This isn't because the stuff is hard to contain, but because they aren't made to hold high pressure, and there is always some heat leaking in that evaporates the liquid (increasing the pressure in the dewar if it's not vented). If you were doing power production you would probably plan a way to use this H2 rather than blowing it off.
Hydrogen can also be stored in metal hydrides (quite effectively), which can be less of a pain to deal with than dewars full of liquid.
(As an aside, you can even make containers to seal superfluid helium, which is *way* harder to contain than hydrogen. Helium is a pain in gaseous form, but the superfluid state is an extra big pain.)
Anyway, Denmark is an important route for migratory birds. It also has a lot of wind turbines. Yet the wind turbines fail to kill any significant amount of birds. Buildings are much more of a concern.
The ice thing is interesting. I have never heard of it being a problem, even back when people were silly enough to build turbines close to houses. My guess would be that ice is most likely to get thrown off when the blade vibrates because of passing the tower. That would limit the throwing distance. Also, people don't generally spend much time in the vicinity of turbines in conditions of freezing rain.
Oh and if the landowners end up with 400 foot towers that aren't paid for, I'd suggest taking them down and selling them as scrap metal. That ought to cover the lost rent for many many years.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Here in Denmark the power companies have started to see wind turbines placed in big windfarms as stabilising the grid, whereas they the old individual turbines destabelished the grid.
True that when we burn fossil fuels that we are just putting it back where it came from. However, in geologic time scales, we are putting it back all at once. That is the problem. We are taking large stores of C02 that took millions of years to be created and extracting it and pumping into the atmosphere in the blink of an eye.
It's like we are feeding the atmosphere a giant spicy beef burrito - we are unfortunately going to find out the hard way what will come out the other end.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
There is no infinite supply of oil, and the oil that is being found now is getting harder to find. Oil and molten lava do not mix well, so we don't have to look very deep to find all the oil there is.
As the joke says, the economist is the guy who smiles while plummeting from an airplane - because he sees that there is an opportunity and someone will turn up to sell him a parachute soon. Sometimes there is no parachute. Things are finite. Saying otherwise is just silly, whether there is a lot of a resource or not.
As for platinum, well again it's all such a chicken and egg issue. If we had cheap access to space we could probably harvest precious metals in bulk from the asteroid belt making them no longer precious on earth and allowing for cheap fuel cells. But of course if we had cheap access to space we could just put up solar satellites and get electricity directly from there.
And speaking of space, that's where we see the best evidence that hydrocarbons are created by planets devoid of life. So, there's likely a nearly endless supply of hydrocarbons within the Earth itself which will eventually make the existing worries about non-renewable resources seem ridiculous since they're probably all renewable.
But the point, of course, is cost. And here is where this story is quite impressive.
Although people are not complaining about the wind running out with farms, they do complain that they have a bad ecological effect.
The farms supposedly cause problems with natural habitat and birds flying into them and stuff. So all the environmentalists say too many farms cause damage.
You look for a more green solution, and the green's bash it.. Guess power co.s will just keep burning coal until they shut up and realise a small improvement is better than nothing.
The grid is fine for powering electrical gadgets, although I want to get a 100W solar panel for my notebook and aquarium. However, heating is another thing.. right now we heat with wood, but it's labour-intensive.
I want to move the house to a wind-powered heating solution.. I live in rural area so neighbours aren't a problem. I am usually very skeptical of alternative energy claims, but wind is attractive enough for me to invest a little money in a test. Rather than convert the power, to store the heat I am using a 1000gallon tank in my basement. I'm looking to get between 10 and 20kW of power from my windmills on a nominal basis. I may also do tests with solar collectors, but they would provide energy gains only about ~4h per day in this part of the world.
Wind is a primary motivator in how fast my house loses heat, but the windier it gets, the more power is produced.
Heat distribution will be through in floor hydronic heating distribution. It won't replace the wood, but I bet it can reduce the amount of energy used by a LARGE factor, and provide me with nearly unlimited hot water.
..don't panic
I had a similar experience. There is a relatively new coal fire plant outside of town (it has scrubbers, they say). During a hurricane, the company that maintains the local grid cut it off for the region. Despite the fact that the plant could easily power the city and surrounding counties, they could not because the grid was down. Result? They lost power, too. They say it was kind of odd being in a power plant where the lights where out.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
Some facts on the 14 cylinder version: Total engine weight: 2300 tons (The crankshaft alone weighs 300 tons.) Length: 89 feet Height: 44 feet Maximum power: 108,920 hp at 102 rpm Maximum torque: 5,608,312 lb/ft at 102rpm A single cylinder is 1820 Liters
The pictures are even more impresive:
Saying Apple is better than MS is like saying Botulism is better than rabies.
You *can't* store hydrogen in tanks
2 /i mages/h2tank_thumb.JPG
a nd /hydrogen_tank_small.jpg
OF course you can. Two sentences later, you tell HOW you can:
you end up having to make massive tanks with super-thick walls
And you are wrong there, too. Hydrogen tanks can be made any size.
http://www.venturer.rutgers.edu/students/engine
http://puhep1.princeton.edu/mumu/target/mulholl
Besides, the whole point isn't to store the hydrogen for long periods, just to store it until the next windless period, which might be just a few hours, or maybe a few days. So 'perfect' storage is not needed.
Companies like Duke Energy are struggling and constantly in the news due to their efforts to scrape a more dollars out by any means possible. Why, then, aren't they pushing for things like this? Why aren't they pushing electric cars? Not only would these technologies help increase their profits and their standing (in most people's eyes), but would (in the case of electric cars) increase the demand for their product. I would think that would be the ultimate goal for the energy companies: to safely produce clean power AND make us rely on that instead of fossil fuels.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
Same reason why no company has build the perfect car that last forever. Could we, absolutely? Will corporate america allow it, hell no!
Well, I think this is a common misconception about how capital operates.
The idea here is that Foo Motor Corporation might consider creating the Omega car, but the loss of their future profits in making replacement cars automatically stops them. While it is true FMC is going to consider the loss of future revenues in its decisions, these future revenes are discounted, based on how long they take to come in and how risky they are.
It's the financial version of the bird in the hand theory. Suppose I can, with a reasonably safe investment, take a dollar and turn it into two dollars in ten years. In a sense, this means that one dollar in the hand today is worth two in the bush ten years from now, and perhaps four in the bush twenty years from now. Suppose FMC makes two billion dollars in a year then goes out of business producing the Omega, but the status quo is two billion dollars in ten years. That's a no brainer -- two billion dollars in ten years is, financially speaking, only one billion dollars in the short term. Even if they could make only half a billion in short term profits before they go out of business, they still might decide to do it, because if the Omega car is possible, one of their competitors might make one and drive them out of business with no short or long term profit.
So, what keeps the Omega car off the streets is not planned obsolescence, it's the fact that this car could not be manufactured and sold at a price that justifies the effort. If it did, then FMC would create the Omega, then take the proceeds and get into a different business. Planned obsolescence does happen -- engineers do have to have some kind of timeframe for how long something is supposed to last. However style is a bigger form of planned obsolescence than operation. Capital has no problem at all destroying long term productive assets if the short term gain is high enough; the mobility and fungibility of capital assures that it will simply seek the next source of returns. That's its greatest strength and its greatest weakness.
The problem comes when you look at assets that have value aside from pure finance (if you even believe such a thing exists). Suppose a course of action destroys a community. So what? Capital simply moves to another community. Suppose a course of action ruins an entire country? Well, capital can move to a different country. Suppose a course of action destroys most of the planet? Well, capital can buy the nicest plots of what is left. I'm not anti-capital, I'm just pointing out that if you assume that things have value aside from their measurable financial productivity, it leads you to different conclusions than if you assume that everything has a clear price.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Up in VT they had a similar issue. All the environmentalists were up in arms because they wanted to put up more wind farms to reduce the load on nuclear because imagine what the environment nuts would do about a second nuclear reactor. However they didn't like the wind solution because of the possibility of bird deaths. The real problem comes from the first windmills put up had nice little perches for the birds to sit on. 20 years ago in CA a windfarm was set up with this problem. Bird deaths per yer? 1-2. OMG! one or two birds died... it's horrible, you can't use that!
Really they just don't want to spoil their view. Vermonters don't really care about the environment, they care about the view that they have.
I think the savings we get both monetarily and environmentally outweigh one or two birds a year. besides, the new windmills don't have nice places for birds to sit so the risk to birds is probably even less. Most "green's" are a bunch of crotchety wackos that make people that want to actually do something about the environment embarrased.
As I think I first read here on /., wind power (and tide power) both have been shown to have significant impact on global weather. While its not a temperature impact, it does take energy out of the atmosphere (or water) which will change weather.
Today is a gift. Save the receipt.
So what is the ultimate source? It must either be something that came from nothing for no reason, or else something that was never created (and therefore doesn't exist.) Unfortunately neither option makes any sense.
There is, of coarse, an optimal mean time to replacement somewhere between daily replacement and never replacing, I suspect it is less frequent replacement than we are currently using.
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
I don't have the figures ready to quote, but I heard that a majority of the costs of installing this wind farm have been legal bills. This of course will result in less economic efficiency, further fuelling (excuse the pun) the propaganda of the naysayers that wind is a losing proposition.
We need to have legislative support to block these types of lawsuits before they can harm alternative energy. We need to have a voice to shut down the NIMBY evil groups and shame them.