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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.
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
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.
You're suggesting that we should take caution before using wind power because it can change the local climate as opposed to fossil fuels?
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."
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.
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.
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...
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Profit!!
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
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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
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.