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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/
Bleem said Colorado has "lots of great wind" that could be used for wind power.
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.
...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.
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
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
I find that the middle of nowhere tends to be a windswept, dry and lifeless place... as such, it could be perfect! ;)
-Vendal Thornheart
"unless cell technology increases substantially, when we run out of oil we will convert coal to synthetic fuel." that at least the synthetic fuel will be more environmentally friendly than coal and oil then =)
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?
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
We must fight this evil invention!
In the form of Noise Pollution. Ever been close to a big windmill? Those suckers are loud!
At least a nuclear plant only makes its presence known to the locals when something goes wrong...
the sale of beans skyrockets as prices drop.
... 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!
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.
So does pollution.
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?)
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.
Sure, and fusion power, solar power satellites, or artificial photosynthesis could make the whole discussion moot in a couple of decades. Right now, no.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
can anyone parse this sentence from the write-up and translate it into a readable form for me? 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.
Woohoo... GO CSU :)
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.
Move up north here to North Dakota. We are officially the windiest state, if it drops down to 10-15 mph that is considered calm. 5 mph is dead calm, very rare indeed...
While converting over to wind power as a main source of energy production may sound appealing, there are still drawbacks. I've heard the argument that so many moving blades can kill off the birds who thought that the top of a windmill might be a good nesting site. And leave it to Americans to start suing everyone around for the damages that the windmills would cause, (from the noise they produce, the dangerous moving blades, or ruining the scenic vista).
Personally, I'm all for converting to wind power. Some complaints and a few dead birds are not detrimental enough to justify the continued use of fossil fuels. Unfortunately, there's alot of people out there looking for something to complain about, and it only takes a hand full of them to stop progress of any sort.
"Operating systems suck: you're better off using only the BIOS" --trainsaw.com
I'm surpised no one has brought up the fact that these are knowen to chew up bird, i'm sure those tree-huggers are going to have a problem with that
3 is always to late or to early to do anything
This claim has been made a lot for solar power (where it's been shown to be wrong) as well as for wind. Would you care to cite a source, please?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
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.
I would suspect that a row of wind turbines would be no more disruptive then say a row of trees or forest.
:)
So it would be permissible to put up a wind farm only if you cut down some of your trees
Or turn it around, if you cut down your forests then you must replace it with a wind farm!
Yeah right, 3% of US Mainland, which needs to be
:)
A- Flat
B- Extra Windy, in an appropriate climate
C- Unpopulated
D- Not TOO far from populated areas.
And as someone mentionned, if you concentrate too much, you could (theorically) alter local climate.
Ecological? Will someone think of the BIRDS?
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
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. This could cause global weather changes that we cannot even predict. All of the sudden, the East Coast of the US has no wind, and smog and heat becomes unbearable.
Of course, I am making this up, but I contend that there are sides of this issue that will appear later that we cannot imagine. Yes, worthy of further exploration, but possibly a panacea...
Global warming is caused more by the release of greenhouse gases which reflect solar energy back to earth than it is due to net thermal release of our appliances into the atmosphere.
Mak'tal shree lok'tak mek'ta sa'tak Oz! - Daniel Jackson
IIRC, modern nuclear energy is perfectly clean (Other than the waste, which can be safely stored, and who knows, in the distant future perhaps burning it up in the sun would be cheap enough)... And modern reactor designs seem to have a virtually nil chance of a meltdown. I seem to recall some sort of Canadian reactor that used pebbles of material or something. CANDU reactor or something?
:p
Heck, even Chernobyl only happened because they turned off all the safties; it was an inherantly safe reactor until they manually fucked it up.
Anyhow, nuclear plants don't have to be in farmland (Less power lost on transport), are clean (Perhaps a smaller effect on the environment than wind power?), are safe, and best of all, produce much more stable output.
That and hydro. Which, while it has an impact on the environment when installed, after that it seems to me to be pretty clean. Heck, Quebec serves all of it's millions of people with a few hydro dams, and we have some of the cheapest power costs in North America.
Oh, and there's also the ever increasing efficiency of solar. And heck, while we're at it, fusion will be around eventually, perfectly clean radiation-free energy, as I understand it. Yes, it's far off, but if you invest in a worldwide wind power network only to have fusion come out and be a much better option, that's a huge waste of money. In fact, take the money you would have spent on all those wind generators, and put it into fusion research
Statements like this just bug me, because it's such a fundamental misunderstanding of economics. And this attitude is SO pervasive among the enviro-people.
We will NEVER EVER run out of oil. Never. Ever.
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.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I think the point was that wind power will reduce greenhouse gases and other atmospheric pollutants that contribute to global warming (or not, if you ask the White House) that would otherwise be released by obtaining energy from fossil fuels.
Bush Lies On the Record.
And think of all the hot air in Washington that could be put to use just trying to legislate the whole thing.
Anyone seen my jagged little pill?
Or you could use the Bernoulli effect to force air thru ventiducts so you wouldn't need free standing turbines. (Ok, sounds cool anyway)
Sorry to reply to my own comment, but this study by wind power advocates suggests an energy payback time of three to six months, a small fraction of a windmill's lifetime. Even assuming they're out by an order of magnitude, a turbine should last at least 20 years and so the energy produced is way larger than the energy used to produce the turbine.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The solution to the pollution and energy problems is to reduce the population. Pure and simple.
Now go out there and ki....
Ki...KI.....KI!!!! PORGIE!!!!!
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
You mean it won't reduce global warmth.
Someone should go take thermo 1.
Yeah, and English, while you're there.
Buckets,
pompomtom
"There's an exception to every rule. Except for some rules"
i always wondered, if are going to remove a subtancial qty of energy from wind arent we going to provoque some drastic climate changes too ?
"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."
Just where did this emptyheaded "fact" come from I wonder. What does this person think happens to the electricity when it's used? Turns into magic pixie dust maybe? Almost all the electricity used today is CONVERTED TO HEAT! The miniscule amount of energy derived from electricity that is actually radiated off of the planet in the form of light(non-IR that is) which could potentially extract energy from the atmosphere and "get rid" of it is totally negligable. The idea that wind power can somehow reverse global warming is so far beyond asinine its hard to put into words.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
According to the State of Wisconsin, wind power costs 9 cents versus 4 cents for standard fuels. Of course, this is still cheaper than what people are paying here on the east coast (10-12 cents I would imagine).
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
Awesome.
when we run out of oil we will convert coal to synthetic fuel.
I doubt it. The Germans did this in the 1930's, and it was pretty expensive.
Au contraire. Global warming is the effect of the increase in greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. If you decrease the amount of greenhouse gasses, the heat radiates more readily from the Earth.
When you said electricity releases the heat back into the atmosphere, thats somewhat true, but heat naturally radiates from Earth at a pretty high rate. Greenhouse gasses are the important factors in global warming, not energy. When we say we're taking energy from the wind instead of coal or oil, we mean we're not producing the greenhouse gas byproducts.
Like when it is -30 degrees in Alberta, tends to be quite calm in an arctic Low pressure system. Same when we cook in the summer with +30 degree (C) temps. If the wind ain't blowing, then we still need Genesse running.
Washington, DC. The hot air flowing from there could power the entire East coast.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
http://www.newbelgium.com/frames.html
New Belgium brewing, completely wind powered.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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
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!
The thrid law of thermodynamics? You must be talking about some other mysterious third law of thermodyanics.
Perhaps you meant the first law? (The conservation of energy?). That applies to a closed system. As the turbine is being moved by the wind (outside the system of the turbine itself), I don't think you'll get far arguing that the first law by its very existance makes your claim true. Note, I'm not saying your wrong, just that the laws of thermodynamics don't necessarily make your statement true.
Hydro power, like that long the Colorado river has its own set of problems. It interrupts fish migration most of all. It also changes the flow of rivers which causes more (or less) silt in given areas, and may (over time) significantly reduce the ability of the dam to produce power. Changes to river flows also cause problems in temperature.
There is also a bunch of research into the fact that the large resovoirs of hydro power plants actually cause earthquakes. We are displacing so much material and adding so much weight in a place it hasn't been before that we are (ever so slightly) altering the shape of the earth's crust.
I don't know of a perfect power source, but I don't think developed nations will be adding significant amounts of hydro power. There are too many issues.
I just want to say that this bad news. Cheaper energy means fewer Americans working in the energy sector and that means fewer jobs for Americans and greater unemployment.
If you think the sound of generators are loud, there is noth quite like that THUP THUP THUP sound of a windmill at 3AM to really keep you up at night. You may rest easy know it's saving you money but your neighbors... well hopefully they live miles away. ;)
http://www.newbelgium.com/n_vibe.shtml
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
As the article itself points out, such prices have not historically been sustained, but I'm not so sure this time around...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Research proves you wrong
conservation of energy? won't wind power screw up the planet too? =p
Well I know I'll probably get modded down for not being super "green," but I think it's important to point out another effect of installing these things.
National Beauty.
The main thing that causes me to think about this is when I am driving through the midwest doing photography, I get so annoyed at the powerlines ruining the landscape. Honestly they are really kind of depressing. At least with powerlines you can usually find a way to reframe the shot to cut them out, but these windmills are really big.
of course cleaner air would be pretty too.
it's just a thought
I vote for covering 3% of the US with windmill and then suddenly running them backwards. I've always wanted to make Earth wobble off into the void of space...
That all sounds fine and dandy, but the technology to use hydrogen for this purpose still seems to be at least a decade, and probably more, away. Over that timescale, it seems to me that there are a number of other technologies which might make significant advances. If these occur, the impetus for hydrogen energy storage might just disappear, for static applications at least.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Have you, by chance, seen the latest National Geographic?
I didn't think the problem was running out of oil, I thougt the problem was not being able to get enough of it out of the ground to meet the demand.
There are three kinds of lies:
Lies
Damn Lies
Statistics
I'm probably at the karma cap. Mod up a funny troll instead, it lightens the mood
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?
Think about what you said. 1940's technology versus todays. I suggest you visit one of several coal gasification pilot plants across the country. AEP is in the process of building a fairly large coal gasification plant in Ohio.
And that shows you it is still economically viable to convert to coal to natural gas for burning due to the economics of coal production in this country.
But I'm going to apply a simple rule I've learned from switching from Windows to Linux. First, switch to applications they both share and get settled in with that, and then make the big switch. If you try to do both at once, it's too much change to deal with.
How this applies to the article is that car manufacturers should start rolling hydrogen powered cars. Once people are comfortable with hydrogen, then we can start to take advantage of energy sources like wind and (gasp!) fission and hopefully (gasp gasp) cold fusion. If you have huge amounts of electricity, then you can make hydrogen pretty cleanly from just sea water.
Wind energy is great and I would love to have my heating bill reduced, but I still have to buy gas that's on a tight supply from the Middle East.
There's no easy answer to the world's energy problem. Recent growth in China is a big reason why we're paying so much at the pump and that's not going to go away. What most people don't realize is that coal is very dirty and releases more radioactive material because trace amounts of uranium lie in coal. We could use many energy supplies to foster a hydrogen economy.
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.
Whatever you save in fossil fuel usage will be sucked up by people commuting in this.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
so how much would it cost an average joe to run one of these puppies off the grid?
lose != loose
Here in oregon we have the option of power from all all renewable resources It's just a few bucks extra ($0.008/kWh in additon to regular billing) a month for me and the power is 50% wind 25% geothermal and 25% hydro. Nice to have power companies give you options like these.
small flowers crack concrete
I doubt it. The Germans did this in the 1930's, and it was pretty expensive.
Was. Isn't.
Sorry, if we take all this 'energy' out of wind, it won't reduce global warming.
The benefit comes from reducing CO2 emissions, which reduces the heat we trap from the sun.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Cars to, I have personally seen 5 birds killed from cars I was in.
Birds are going to crash into things they do it all the time. Wouldn't it be better to kill a few birds, rather then poison the whole world?
...then what is America's obsession from staying away from this cheap source of energy?
---
IMHO, of course.
May the SOURCE be with you.
At least with powerlines you can usually find a way to reframe the shot to cut them out, but these windmills are really big.
Half the time I just photochop the power lines out. Besides, don't a lot of paintings by Dutch masters have windmills in them?
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.
The energy cost in manufacturing the turbines is greater than the energy gain you get back from them.
Incorrect.
Well, I suppose that technically it depends on how long you run it, which is true of every generator, including gas and coal-powered ones. If you just make the turbine, run it for a month, then tear it down, of course that would be wasteful. But we must assume that when you say "get from them", you mean over their multi-decade lifetime, rather than over a second.
That's why people talk about the "energy payback" time, which is the amount of time you need to run the generator (powered by whatever source) to pay back the initial investment of energy you made in its manufacture.
For wind turbines, the energy payback takes only a few months (varies depending on how much wind you get, of course), well within the life of the turbine.
This should be sort of obvious if you think about it for a second. Why would you make something to sell wholesale-priced energy if it takes more retail-priced energy to produce (not to mention the costs of raw materials and profit margins along the way)? I don't think the subsidies are *that* good.
Anyway, even if you can't think, you could at least search Google.
If you are serious about making a windmill, I highly recommend one of Hugh Piggott books "Windpower Workshop". It has everything from building generator from scrap and recycled parts to wing design. I found book fun to just read.
Lots.
The Danish Wind Industry Association says infrastructure is just under $100K per 100Kw peak production... our total peak capacity is about 1 TW. At 100% efficiency, that's $1 trillion (assuming I'm not doing slashdot math). So expect the real cost to be at least 4X that (guessing?)
Skyscrapers kill more.
A blog about stuff.
Using microcontrollers, relays, and fuel cells to control the allocation and distribution of raw electrical power has a great future.
I will become one of the fastest, if not the fastest, growing areas of electronics within 5 to 10 years.
So all you electronic technicians out there...be sure to keep up with lastest developments when you come home from your jobs at the Burger King. I realize that you're all trying to learn Spanish as fast as you can in order to advance to fry cook, but don't slack on power electronics.
Things will get better, honestly....hang in there.
The cool thing about using wind to generate electricity is it's scalability. Say we use the 3% of farmland to generage most of our electricity. What's to stop us from doing it again? And again? And...you get the idea. The price of producing electricity with gas/coal/oil is determined in part by the cost of those resources, which is determined by the market, which is, for the most part, governed by supply and demand (efficient markets...work with me). If we produce as much power as we produce now with fossil fuel and then decide to double our power production, we have to double the rate at which we extract those resouces from under the dirt. The only problem is that we can't. So...prices on those commodities go up and we are hesitant to keep using so much. We are unable to keep using so much. However, with wind, if we decide to double our capacity, we don't impact our resources as directly. We can keep building turbines in the most insane places and give those suffering from epilepsy no rest from the ceasless humming. We can make everyone in the entire world into complete headcases, as if they've been listening to trance techno at 50 000 beats/min for that last century, and still build more turbines with plenty of wind left over. With such gobs of electric power available, it would be possible to take on projects that would have seemed completely asinine before, like desalinating the ocean and other fantastic miracles of mankind. Seriously, the point is that an economy based upon fossil fuels cannot scale beyond a certain size due to finite supplies of those resources. Wind can scale virtually indefinitely because we can't currently consume all of the energy tied up in surface level pressure variations. It's indirect solar. It's beutiful. I think I'm going to become a hippy and retire to Ibiza where there will be erected a ginormous Tesla coil which will be powered by our insane electricity surplus. With regard to wind being intermittent, not if you have them spread out all over the place, especially offshore and coastal installations, where land breeze and sea breaze offer nearly uninterrupted power.
"There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them." ~ Louis Armstrong
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.
Turbine engineers don't work for free, many years have been spent feeding, educating and raising them. Without their parents, turbine engineers wouldn't exist, so you need to consider the resources their parents used and so on - which adds up to a lot. Then you consider the materials, it takes a lot of energy to build the dragline that gets the coal to make the steel etc.
If you look at things in a more sensible way the energy is returned quite rapidly.
Find a way to get an extra 1% there and you will save billions and make millions for your efforts.There are limitations of wind power without resorting to bullshit. Maintainance costs are still high, and the units still need to be brought down yearly. You don't get much of an economy of scale - the units are seperate and don't produce much each with the conventional designs. Unreliability of supply means you need decent control systems and something with a fast response like hydro to take up the slack. In the right place it works, you can easily bring just the right number of the things on when needed if there's wind at peak times but it's not a base load solution.
The front page post suffers from the "one true energy" problem the nuclear lobby pushes. You don't want a monoculture in energy - it just looks silly when people push it, paticularly with wind.
...apart from a few famous mishaps, nuclear power is cheaper, more reliable and pretty environmentally friendly (providing nothing goes boom)
Now, we just need to throw a good marketting team at it and we're set.
My apologies to the poster if this was meant as a troll (in which case it seems successful) or a joke but just in case it really is ignorance...
The idea behind global warming is that greenhouse gases such as CO2 make it more difficult to radiate heat back into space acting sort of like - well a greenhouse. The amount of heat that is produced by manmade processes is entirely negligible relative to how much the earth receives from the sun and radiates back. So by subsitituting wind energy for fossil fuel burning we reduce the CO2 produced and lessen the greenhouse effect, reducing global warming...
It's better than throwing caution to the wind...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Yeah, it's easily prevented. Just use lots of scarecrows.
Or, you call Changing World Technologies and they show you a way to make the oil.
The site you linked to is "Madison Gas and Electric", not the state of Wisconsin.
r nal/biz/6 0059.php0 2/07/News/ Planned.Power.Plant.Generates.Buzz.On.Uw.Campus-36 3425.shtml
e ch_wind. cfm?state=WI
Given that Madison Gas and Electric has been fighting for a very large new natural gas plant for several years now in a heavily enviro-friendly city (and just got a new coal-fired plant near Milwaukee), it is not surprising that they spin wind power as a clean technology, but one that is just not practical at the moment.
For more information about MGE's plants:
http://www.madison.com/wisconsinstatejou
http://www.dailycardinal.com/news/2003/
For more information about Wisconsin wind power:
http://www.eere.energy.gov/state_energy/t
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.
The price is aproximately $0.01/kwh per the article. The cost to produce and store (for calm days) the electricity is not included. In reality, every buyer of electricity in Colorado is subsidizing the manufacturers and operators of wind generators.
Taking into consideration operation costs, a turbine life span of 30 years, and the initial investment in for a commercial turbine, the estimated cost of electricity generated is seven cents per kWh each (Pimentel, 2002). Other reports found wind energy costs ranging from 3.9 cents per kW in sites with ideal wind, to over 5 cents in less ideal locations.
http://www.uwec.edu/grossmzc/elquiscl.html
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.
[reality] Wind power is NOT continuous, but demand is. What do you think will happen on a nice HOT summer day, when there's "not a breath of wind"? And, everyone wants to run their A/C? Yep, it'll be time to fire up the the old reliable coal/oil/gas/nuke plant.
n sert your own local fauna here].
And, you can't store electricity (like someone suggested pumping water up hill) because if the site was viable for this purpose, it's already in use for it. Think about it: How many folks would want to live near a body of water where the level went up and down dramatic amounts on an unpredictable basis (i.e., non-tidal)?
Oh, and someone said something about 3% surface area gets you 95% power? Right. Try telling that to the 3% of folks who currently own that land. Think they're gonna give it up just like that? Hardly.
Lastly, for every environmentalist that advocates wind power, there's another one standing there bitching because the wind turbine interferes with the mating/migratory/feeding habits of owls/eagles/geese/ducks/bats/moths/butterflies/[i
So, the bottom line is: you have to have a diversity of energy sources that includes some wind, sure, but also includes coal/oil/gas/nuke/waste/bio/geo. Then, very few people are real happy, and very few people are real pissed, and everyone gets reasonably priced electricity anytime you flip a wall switch.
[/reality]
Brilliance doesn't need a sig.
Well hopefully there will still be plenty of cheap oil left when we have shifted to alternatives such as fuel cells, windpower, fusion (I can dream can't I?), and solar power... since petroleum is the major ingredient in plastics and asphalt.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
The earth is slowing because we are pumping out all the oil! Can't you hear the squeaking? Soon, the earth will just grind to a halt.
Plus, the "modern" plants not to be found - patched 1950's technology is what you get. Those wonderful pebble bed reactors we've been hearing about for a couple of decades are not producing a single kW of power on a grid anywhere.
Ah, but there is no initial cost needed for a person to get struck by lightning.
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.
My father-in-law worked with John Rich, a man who started a company that turns culm, the unuseable rocks that come out of coal mines, into diesel and other fuels. There are huge piles of this stuff sitting in northeast PA, and it's a blight on the landscape. While the process does put out CO2, it prevents us from having to drill/import/strip mine more to fulfill our energy needs.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
It is actually way easier to make hydrogen fuel via electrolosis than it is to make an efficient and practical fuel cell.
All you need is some water with electrolyte. NaOH works the best because, unlike NaCl, it won't outgas anything except pure hydrogen and oxygen. Common salt will outgass poisonous levels of chlorine gas, so don't even try it. Then you just need a DC current of low voltage, and some inert electrodes (graphite rods work great). Hydrogen (H2) gas collects at one of the electrodes (I'll let you do the half-cell equation to figure out which.) Then just deal with some physical issues like collecting the H2 gas SAFELY.
20 Rhode Islands
or the North Island of New Zealand
I found this number in the US Census Statistical Abstract:
Land in farms 941,000,000
3% of that is about 28,230,000 acres
640 acres = 1 sq mile
44,109 sq miles.
I think my math is right...
[cluestick]
n sert your own local fauna here]."
"[reality] Wind power is NOT continuous, but demand is. What do you think will happen on a nice HOT summer day, when there's "not a breath of wind"? And, everyone wants to run their A/C? Yep, it'll be time to fire up the the old reliable coal/oil/gas/nuke plant."
So? Think of how much less would would depend on them. It would be better if we could store electricity. Which brings us to:
"And, you can't store electricity (like someone suggested pumping water up hill) because if the site was viable for this purpose, it's already in use for it. Think about it: How many folks would want to live near a body of water where the level went up and down dramatic amounts on an unpredictable basis (i.e., non-tidal)?"
Yes, if only we had some sort of means for storing electricity... something that can hold it a release it when we need it. You know, to keep the power continous.
If such a miracle device should apperas, I'd call it a battery.
"Oh, and someone said something about 3% surface area gets you 95% power? Right. Try telling that to the 3% of folks who currently own that land. Think they're gonna give it up just like that? Hardly."
Here's a thought(I know, we're on unfamiliar territory for you) How about we spread it out? or better, let the land owners get paid for using there property? Or use the MILLIONS of unused acres. I'm talking about the US here, but many other countries also have milions of acres of unsed land.
"Lastly, for every environmentalist that advocates wind power, there's another one standing there bitching because the wind turbine interferes with the mating/migratory/feeding habits of owls/eagles/geese/ducks/bats/moths/butterflies/[i
Only a problem if they are put in migratory paths. Even then it's not unsolvable.
"So, the bottom line is: you have to have a diversity of energy sources that includes some wind, sure, but also includes coal/oil/gas/nuke/waste/bio/geo. Then, very few people are real happy, and very few people are real pissed, and everyone gets reasonably priced electricity anytime you flip a wall switch.
[/reality]"
Well d'uh, but you sure are closed minded about wind power.
Keep talking, and will get our hot gas from you.
[/cluestick]
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
We just need the government to invest the money in the infrastructure and research to make this happen people.
I wonder which presidential candidate is more likely to spend money on public works and not on trying to maintain our oil interests....
1. Set up oil rigs with windmills in the path of the hurricanes coming from Africa to the Carribean.
2. Move the rigs in order to get as much wind benefit as possible, without too much!
3. Draw water from the ocean and convert the wind power into hydrogen.
4. Ship hydrogen to anyone who wants it.
5. ?? (keep costs down by coming up with good ways to not lose oil rigs in the storm?)
6. Profit!!
I'm just suggesting it so that someone with more sense can tell me why I'm wrong...
Quite a few appliances could be re-engineered for intermittent power. For example, add some thermal mass to a freezer, and it can stay cold enough even if it only gets power once a day.
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.
Not all nuclear reactors. I'm afraid China is going to be the one who shows the west how it's done. I guess we'll let China whip us for the next ten years or fifteen years, then adopt what pans out.
Well, assuming we aren't still whining about 'Intellectual Property' and draining our resources fighting 'Rouge Dictators' when they have beaten us in cloning, stem cell treatments, computer science, computer hardware, and space exploration. Energy production almost seems small by comparison.
"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." Wind power isn't a unique solution. We can use wind to take energy out of the atmosphere and mitigate global warming. We can use solar to prevent energy from going into the atmosphere and mitigate global warming. Or we can stop pumping catastrophic levels of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to mitigate global warming.
Oh my God! If your theory is correct we'd better make sure not to put too many more propellers in the ocean or it could just stop moving!! Think of the horror!!!
Electric Monkey Pants
That was random....
"when we run out of oil we will convert coal to synthetic fuel."
We won't ran out of oil, just like we didn't run out of coal. Before we could dig all coal out of the earth, a better energy source came along (oil) and today medium yield coal mines sit unexploited.
Same with oil, 100 years into the future the combination of wind, solar and nuclear energy plus ultra-efficient combustion engines and advanced fuel cells will make low yield oil uneconomical and they will sit unexploited too.
Actually, wind turbines last forever. Only coal, fission, fusion, gas and microwave powerplants must be replaced after 20 years. Of course, this is all
- 2000
technology, so things may have changed.extracting energy from of the atmosphere (wind), means extracting less energy out of the ground(petroleum and such). Thus reducing green house gasses.
So does solar power.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
WHy do we need to make coal into synthetic fuel when we can make biodiesel to use in normal diesel engines?
You are of course correct I think I did read it (js7a's comment) properly the first time but my mind automatically coerced it into something sensible...
Alright, first of all I simply don't believe the statement about less than 3% of the US farmland being required. I would very much like to see how this statistic was calculated. I would point out that very few places are appropriate for wind turbines as the power is proportional to the cube of the wind speed (meaning if your wind is half as fast you get 1/8 the energy). See wikipedia for more detail.
Now I don't know the cost of fossil fuels per kwh but one has to ask if wind power is so cheap why isn't this the primary power source being built today? It isn't like companies are evil villians who want to deystroy the enviornment and they already get tax benefits for using eco-friendly approaches. My guess is that once you factor in the price to purchase the land, errect the turbines etc.. it is considerably more expensive. Furthermore you have the very significant issue of people objecting to it as an eye sore in their backyard. Moreover, if we were serious about truly getting rid of our energy dependence and polution problems we already have a tried and tested means, nuclear power. The french already use it for most of their energy.
So if we have these options, for instance nuclear power or even wind turbines, why aren't we doing something to stop global warming. After watching the media coverage and talking to many enviornmentalists I am forced to come to the surprising conclusion that it is the *enviornmentalists* who are primarily responsible for global warming. Sure they have done us a great service in bringing these things to our attention but their uncomprimising positions guarantee we stay with the worst alternative.
Every time someone proproses a solution to the energy problem, for instance nuclear power or even wind power enviornmentalists protest. In the case of nuclear it seems primarily based on fear of radiation (despite the fact that coal power plants release tons of radiation per year directly into the air). When someone proposes wind power they protest to save the birds who might be killed (even if these are only demands for bird safety measures this means it increases costs.)
Quite simply we need power and other resources which will hurt the enviornment. This means we MUST comprimise on those power solutions which hurt the enciornment the least. However, most enviornmentalist groups refuse to take this sort of realist stance objecting to any project which hurts the enviornment in any way. If the companies and the government take flak from greenpeace both ways what incentive do they have to do the responsible thing?
---
While offtopic another good example is yuca mountain. Enviornmental groups are now sueing to stop yuca mountain because they can't guarantee it's safety beyond several thousand years. As a result instead of storing nuclear material in a place which will be very safe we store it in pools all over the country. WTF!?
A responsible citizen doesn't just protest everything he thinks is harmfull. He delibrately considers the *realistic* options and supports the best one. Returning to nature and stopping our power usage is not one of the realistic options.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
...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.
Click HERE
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.
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."
Oil is not a fossil fuel, we are not running out.
R TI CLE_ID=38645
l e= 44011&d=29&m=4&y=2004
c a/ peakoil.html
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?A
http://www.unlearning.org/editor30.htm
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=6§ion=0&artic
http://joevialls.altermedia.info/wecontrolameri
http://www.gasresources.net/
http://tinyurl.com/globalwarmingisascam
... these batteries, distribute these batteries and this wind/energy equipment - maintenace trucks and tools that consume energy for a fleet of repairmen and don't forget the environmental cost of disposing of all these batteries.
This is something, even with solar, that most environmentalists leave out of their arguments.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
In our area, they place a remote cutout inline with the A/C compressor. For that little gadget one gets a $3/mo credit on the power bill.
Most around here have either natural gas (within the city limits) or LP (for those too far for city services) to run their water heaters... both tend to be cheaper than electric for heating water.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
First, global warming means the atmosphere has more energy than before, which means the wind blows harder, which means that if you could slow down the wind, you're removing some of the energy, which means you may lessen the severity of weather patterns.
Okay, so you extract energy from the atmosphere, convert it to electricity, and then convert the vast majority of that into heat... which puts the energy right back into the atmosphere.
That was the point the parent was making. Extracting energy from the atmosphere only to put nearly all of it back in doesn't really change anything as far as that goes.
CO2: Yes, that's a possible difference maker. Pulling energy out of the wind is not.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
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.
do you realize you have the word electrode in your generation of hydrogen?
...and it should be known by now
Whats the price when we remove cronyism from the energy/government relationship? Whats the price after we subtract the handouts to the middle eastern nations, including Israel? What's the price when we subtract health costs from a polluted environment? Whats the cost when we remove subsidization of energy?
I'm all for real costs, but lets face it, if anything on the market is misrepresented its oil. Not to mention oil prices are fickle depending on middle east politics, thus future "interventions" into the region and further support of the sadistic Saudi regime and incredible funding for Israel so they act as our watchdog in the area.
The larger issue isnt really about price its about what energy indepedence can give us. The main secondary effect will probably be price. Of course we're going to be using nuclear power probably forever, but at least we can get off the oil teat. Especially in regards to the automobile industry.
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
It is not a matter of running out anyway. We are consuming faster than we can produce. The opther matter is the pollution. Even if you may or may not believe in global warming, you at least believe in lung disease? Well, children are not supposed to have lung problems in record amounts.
Hello.
Wow, I hadn't thought of that. Forget wind, then. While we're at it, forget solar, because the sun doesn't shine all the time.
I'd better go ahead and tear down my solar-power station I have setup at camp...there's obviously no way it can be working...although I do wonder what those darn heavy batteries are for....
....with evolution, YOU are a part of it, you are a part of "nature" so you are a part of natural selection. Your intervention to save the birds was just as viable a bit of chaos theory natural selection as if the cat had never discovered the birds in the first place. It's also part of being a "good steward of the land". You choose to enjoy your pets and give them a home, but also you stepped in to help out the wilder creatures around you so all could live in peace. Your cat is still fed, the birds are saved, all is well.
Yes, windpower generators kill birds. That's pretty well-established. The question is what kind, how many, and can these strikes be reduced?
However, the movement against wind power (conventional fuels, such as gas, coal, and oil) use the Migratory Waterfowl Act of 1929 to try to shut down wind power sites as they are competition. I forget the specific wording, but the net upshot is that if someone plunks down a power generator, whomever runs the local grid must buy it from them at a reasonable rate. This is what keeps people with solar panels and a grid tie happy, for example.
Of course, this would cut into the bottom line for the power companies, particularly in remote, windy areas. Fortunately, the big money is in urban distribution nets, and not in rural electrification- these smaller companies don't have the money to tie it up in courts. However, the big power generators DO have the money to tie it up in courts. Until recently (the past decade), windpower sites were pretty rare, and were nothing more than an oddity. However, larger wind farms have sprung up. Some in Texas generate megawatts of power; the Brazos windfarm does 160 megawatts from (160) 1-megawatt towers, for example. That's not an oddity- that's an industry.
These wind farms are now competing against conventional fuels, so the race is on. The big power companies see the Migratory Waterfowl Act as their best bet to constrain or even extinguish wind power. My understanding (which is probably simplified and wrong) is that killing just one bird is a violation of the treaty- and treaties with other countries (such as the MWA) take precedence over all other legislation.
I worked on the field research end, trying to figure out how many birds flew through wind corridors using radar. It was a lot of fun- really cold, but very worthwhile. I still don't think that windpower site is open; the research was done 9 years ago this fall. It's been in limbo since then, best as I know.
As a side note, we saw vast numbers of birds, flying at all hours of the night. Nobody had any idea there were that many birds out there. To this day, I have no idea how a bird flying in subzero weather at 40+ MPH kept its eyes from freezing over.
Oil and wind power don't equate. Most of the US electricity supply is produced using coal.
Another poster has hit it on the head though. As it is, oil is being consumed just about as quickly as it is being extracted. Most suppliers are extracting oik as quickly as they can as it is, with too few new discoveries to make up for drying fields. Estimates vary, but pretty much all of them agree that the extractible oil will be gone a few decades before year 2100.
As noted before, the production limits are getting thin, with demand increasing. The cost of oil will have to go up as more people want it but less of it can be produced, a problem that could come to a head in a decade or two.
Yes we need to make it more efficient and reduce pollution. No, we are cutting production to keep prices high. The peak oil lie is being used to justify war, depopulation and all kinds of other extreme measures.
Iraq is about keeping the oil from flowing.
If prices go up it is profitable to produce. The market is controlled by the gov and cartels it is not a real market.
Have you read those links? Why is Russia the biggest oil producer? Why do the saudis claim they can double production for fifty years?
Don't believe the propaganda there is plenty of oil and production capacity can be added quickly. The elites want to create artificial scarcity to keep us controlled.
http://tinyurl.com/globalwarmingisascam
The bottom line is that if we extract enough energy from the sun to power our stuff we will make changes to the envrionment.
Right now we're using up really old stored energy, but once that's over if we don't make our own sun (fusion) we'll have to build enough windmills (or whatever) to make a change to the environment. I think if you covered the bottom of the ocean with structures that remove energy you would change its flow at the surface.
[NPR-regurgitation]Actually, if the ocean stopped cycling water, we would die. The cycle of the water from the Pacific to the Northeastern Atlantic keeps western Europe at a bearable temperature. It also affects the climate in most parts of the US, and it keeps animals alive in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.[/NPR-regurgitation]
What happens when you farm enough wind power to replace all the fossil fuel burning that goes on in the world today? Does it suck enough life out of big wind current patterns to affect them in any significant way? (Which could, in theory, cause storms, sea level changes, etc...)
11*43+456^2
When oil runs out, everything will be expensive.
I find it terribly amusing that all the wealthy liberals who live on MV/CC/Nantucket think it's someone else's problem to stop global warming and the consequent rise in sea level from washing their vacation homes out to sea!
Apparently wind turbines don't kill birds dead. They only kill them to a half-way point, mainly because of the increased karma generated from a non polluting energy source.
I live in toronto, where there is a public project called "Windshare" which is investigating the viability of wind power in urban areas. They recently did a study on bird mortality caused by the turbine. Here's a link - Windshare
For those who don't want to click, during heavy migratory seasons (spring and fall) for 1 year, there were a total of 2 dead birds found in the vicinity of the turbine.
See windshare.ca for more info on the project.
1. Westfield was one of the only places in the northeast that did not lose power during the big blackout. Their power infrastructure doesn't need any help.
2. The company that is planning to build these things is promising to "rent" land from the locals to build the towers... What they aren't advertising is the fact that they've gone bankrupt a number of times. They collect huge grants for the project, and then bail out, leaving landowners with 400 foot towers that aren't being serviced, or paid for. Property values will drop like a rock.
3. Westfield is right smack in the middle of a whole pile of migratory bird paths... There are also a number of eagles that live in the area. There are a number of sources, including the nearby Roger Tory Peterson Institute that confirm these towers will kill birds in massive numbers.
4. I helped him organize the collected databases from the National Weather Service for almost 30 years worth of hourly wind readings from the two nearest stations. The wind speed needed to make these things worth building, even on the edge of Lake Erie, was rarely achieved for more than an hour or two, and only a few days a month.
5. Just like the propellers on airplanes, the blades of these turbines collect ice... LOTS OF IT. It will of course eventually fly off of the blade. I'm sure there are some people here who can calculate for us the distance that a few hundred pounds of ice can be thrown from one of these turbines. While I secretly think it would be kind of funny to see a 400 pound slab of ice smash through a trailer half a mile away, in reality it would not be cool.
6. Have you ever heard these things when they're operational? LOUD. My dad is currently collecting information about rates of depression and anxiety in people who live near the constant sound of these things... Not just the whooshing sound they make, but also the noise from the blades passing by the tower itself. It's somewhat like the air compresssion sound from the tail boom of a Huey.
What it boils down to, is that it's an intersting idea, but poorly implemented by shady cocksuckers. Pretty much everyone is in agreement that we need alternative power sources, but these turbines don't add enough to the output to cover the costs, let alone free us from fossil fuel dependency. Anyone who has further information, or would like copies of the information that my dad has collected, can contact me at my screen name at excite dot com.
Someday a real rain is gonna come...
Fossil plants generally do load-follow production and change their output levels to match demand. Nuclear plants tend to run best at constant power levels for a variety of reasons, but it ultimately comes down to a cost/benefit analysis. In many places you'll find nuclear plants alongside man-made lakes fitted with hydroelectric generators. At night the excess electricity from the nuclear station is used to pump water into the lake, converting electrical energy into potential energy. During the daytime this potential energy is converted back into electricity by the hydro plant to help even out the load and meet peak demands.
This isn't a hard and fast rule for nuclear plants, rather it depends on the market and the fuel management strategies being used by the utility. For instance many French nuclear stations do use load-follow generating strategies, the operating strategies in France are sufficiently different such that load-follow there is cost effective for the way they operate their plants.
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.
.. in other news tonight, fan blade manufacturer Oster has been bombed by the United States military. Oster, a subsidary of SunBeam, was not immediately available for comments; however, Donald Rumsfeld says that a special Halliburton deployment team will be sent to Boca Raton, FL to reconstruct the area, and get fan blade production back to peak efficiency.
I'm assuming that you're talking about last August's outage in the northeastern U.S. and Canada. If so that outage resulted from a failure in the distribution network, not from a lack of generating capacity. Your area of Michigan was not affected because it wasn't on the same grid as the areas that were affected. Parts of Manhattan were entirely dark while just across the river Jersey was fully lit. At least twenty of the powerplants in that region had to shutdown because of the outage since they had nowhere to dump their output because the grid had failed.
"A witty saying proves nothing"
-Voltaire
A blog about stuff.
1.)Energy companies have multi-billion dollar infrastructures that require million dollar maintenance
2.)Energy companies have huge lobbies and congressmen in their pockets for their various industries (oil/coal/whatever)
3.)We have big moneyed Energy companies tied right at the very top of our government, they're sitting pretty
Btw, what do tanks and jets and carriers and troop transports and every single moving object our military has have in common? That's right they all run on Oil or some deriviative not wind power
are they likely to just drop everything they have invested as long as the black gold keeps bubbling up out of someone else's backyard?
Should they care about pennies saved on the billions earned (stolen)?
Seriously doubt it; see RIAA, they will have to be clubbed to death before they will give a fuck
there has to be some ramifications to sapping the power out of the wind.
...instead of taking 3% of the farmland, we take 100% of the politician's land and leave the flipping farmers alone. I like corn and bread and stuff, but I can't recall a politician ever doing something I liked (well... other than retiring.)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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.
megnetically suspended centrifugial flywheel battery,
large flywheels on friction free magnetic bearings in a vacuum, center bound 'accelerator' drive and edge mounted 'generator' drive to input and retrieve energy.
thoughts??
doesn't cause children's brains to form outside their skulls when they break (recently seen on chernobyl baby special)
thank you for playing
build them in the ocean
everyone knows the ocean always has a breeze and its flat so is nothing to get in the way its like a liquid prairie (sp)
South Dakota
=)
If you don't have a well established grid in place a PBMR is a good choice. The concept was meant for countries like China with very little infrastructure in a lot of place and rapidly rising demands for electricity. China is also heavily pursuing the much higher output Gigawatt scale nuclear plants that are currently used throughout the Western world as well as other parts of Asia in the areas that do have an existing distribution network.
PBMRs are only cost effective to a point. You wouldn't want to power a city the size of Beijing with PBMRs, it would be far more cost effective to build two or three 1100 MWe plants instead.
What you do is you take an SUV and load it full of plants. Then throw in a chipmunk, and a bird or two. You could build a stream in the back, if you don't mind it sloshing around as you drive. Oh, and don't forget the mosquitos and deer flies.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
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.
375 million acres of cropland in america http://www.numbersusa.com/interests/farmland.html
raise your hand if you think 10M acres is small...
Robo-Blogs of the world: UNITE!
Short answer, no.
Why? Generation losses, storage losses, transportation losses.
Example, there is currently no method of welding a liquid hydrogen storage tank that does not leak. This problem also includes valves, pipe joints, and fittings.
Then there's the issue of where to find the millions of tons of rare metals to make all the fuel cells out of. We are talking palladium, gold, silver, platinum and on and on.
Ain't going to work right now.
Wow. Cars work remarkably well using that particular law.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Properly managed nuclear power is indeed very clean and affordable. There is unfortunately a lot of incorrect information available about the topic.
The Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) uses billard ball sized balls of enriched uranium with a graphite moderator matrix. These types of reactors are gas cooled and intrinsically safe - as coolant temperature increases the reaction rate slows. This type of reactor is sometime called "walk away" safe. You could walk away from them, turn out the lights and never come back and the reactor wouldn't overheat.
The CANDU reactor (CANadian Deuterium Uranium) reactor is a heavy water cooled and moderated reactor that burns natural uranium. Heavy water is required due to the low concentration of fissile U235 found in natural uranium. These reactors, like all water cooled and moderated reactors have a negative void coefficient - as the coolant temperature increases the nuclear reaction rate decreases. These aren't quite walkaway reactors, but they have an imporant safeguard built into the very mechanism that allows the nuclear reaction to occur.
The negative void coefficient safeguard is also inherent to the light water reactors that are the predominant source of nuclear power in much of the world, these include pressurized and boiling water reactors which use normal water as a coolant with slightly enriched uranium 5% U235.
The reactor that exploded at Chernobyll was of the RBMK design. The RBMK has a positive void coefficient. As the coolant increases in temperature the reaction rate rapidly increases. This is an inherent instability in the design of the reactor making huge power increases possible from an initially low power state, producing an immense feedback response. That, combined with a number of other safety shortcuts like the lack of a proper containment structure, allowed the Chernobyll disaster to happen.
Comparing the RBMK to a water moderated reactor is like comparing Vaseline to Napalm. Both are petroleum products but the similarity stops there. The reactor designs in use throughout the world are orders of magnitude safer than the RBMKs that the Soviets built, they're cheap, but definitely not inherently safe.
But Hydroelectric can change things significantly. For one, dams prevent downstream areas from flooding and replenishing the soil adjacent to the river. The farmlands near the Nile or the Colorado through the Grand Canyon are in peril for this reason.
Dams also prevent fish from moving upstream - many western salmon runs have been reduced or wiped out. Hydroprojects can even alter the weather, as Lake Nasser has done in Egypt.
Hydro does have a number of advantages but is not without costs! Also, most of the best spots for dams have already been used.
Well here we are *charged * about 5.5 cents per kw/hr. Clearly, the *cost* is less. Prices vary across the US.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Don't know if it's viable, but how about cooling water for A/C, etc purposes? This requires substantial infrastructure investment, but lots of large concerns do it to take advantage of off-peak rates.
Redundant?? Must be the same stoopid moderator as with the previous post... either that or his evil twin!
I'll comment on the nuclear issue touched upon in the post. Yes it is true that environmental groups are pointing their fingers at Yuca mountain. Alas!
The spent nuclear fuel problem is not nearly the problem people make it out to be. Let me explain.
First we need to look at the nuclear fuel cycles. There are three (3) that are very significant.
First off, natural uranium contains about 0.7% U235 and 99.3% U238. Both are fissonable but U235 is about 6x more fissionable than U238. Also U235 is more senitive to the "thermal" neutrons in a reactor hense reactors tend to burn U235 in preference to U238.
In a PWR (enriched) reactor system such as used in the USA, the fuel goes in with about 4% U235, 96% U238 and when it comes out it is about 1% U235, 93% U238 and 1% Pu 239. Thus only about 3% of the fuel is burned and this is over a three (3) year period of time when it is in the reactor. These reactors are fueled with about 75 tonnes of uranium oxide fuel and 25 tonnes are exchanged per year.
Note that the "spent" fuel with is 2% highly fissionable material (U235 and Pu239) is alomst 3x as "hot" as natural uranium. Candu reactors burn natural uranium so a Candu system clearly can burn the "spent" fuel sitting around in the swimming pools.
So why isn't this being done? The answer is that in other countries the combined Candu / Enriched reactor program is being built and used. It was the USA that decided unilaterally to ban fuel reprocessing. The only reason I can hypothesis for not using CANDU style reactors to burn the "spent fuel" from the PWR reactors is national pride.
Ok. we have 97% of the fuel that goes into a reactor comming back out unused. Now look at the ENRICHMENT phase of the operation. USEC is an example of a company involved in this... (NYSE:USU).
Here we start with 0.7% and enrich to 4% for approximately a 6 fold increase. Thus we need to discard 5/6th of the original natural uranium. This is actually not quite correct because the discarded fraction still contains anywhere from 0.2% to 0.3% U235. Thus the fraction of the fuel that is discarded is closer to 90% or more.
Note that U235 is about 6x more radioactive than U238 so what this means is that the difference in radioactivity between the discarded uranium and the reactor grade uranium is actually quite small. It is less than 12% different in fact. The discarded uranium fraction is called "DEPLETED URANIUM" and we can clearly see it really isn't all that depeleted!
To calculate the percentage of the original natural uranium that is burned we take 10% x 3% and get 0.3% so we did NOT burn 99.7%.
Note the reactor burns 3% over a 3 year time frame or 1% per year. Thus, if the reactor could burn 100% of the original uranium then a fuel load of 75 tonnes would last over 300 years.
------------------
We've had over 100 reactors running in the USA now for over 30 years. This is 10 complete fuel exchanges and at 300 years per load we clearly have 3000 years supply of fuel sitting in pools at the present moment.
So how do we burn up 100% of the uranium (U238)?
The answer is via two technologies: (1) Breader reactors and (2) scintillation technology or Intense neutron sources. France uses breader technology in the Phenix system. As for scintillation... it works like this. You use an acclerator to fire protons into a target - probably lead/bismuth. When these protons hit a nucleus in the target they smash it to shit and you get all sorts of nuclear trash flying about... including 100's of neutrons. The flux close to the target is far too dangerous to place uranium near - it would just explode!!! Chain reaction anyone!
However this high flux zone is perfect for the long lived atomic wastes (actinides) and this burns them into non-radioactive ash and we are rid of it forever! Farther away from the targ
http://www.powerpulse.net/powerpulse/archive/aa_03 1901c1.stm
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.
{bitchslap}
"So?"
Ooooh, there's a powerful, technically economical argument. I feel sooo put down. If you're so righteous, then turn yours off. Along with your screen, CPU, TV, refrigerator, water pump, lighting, sewage pumping station, and your momma's dialysis machine.
"battery"
Strike two! Priced batteries lately? How about cycle costs? Disposal? Environmental effects? Lead-acid? How about Ni-Cd? NiMH? Dont'cha just LOVE those heavy metals? Oh, darn those details.
"millions of unused acres"
Great! For that $0.01/kwh wind power turbine, let's build $10.00/kwh worth of power lines to deliver the power from those millions of unused acres. They're called unused BECAUSE NO ONE LIVES THERE, doofus. Strike three.
Bonus Round!
"Only a problem if they are put in migratory paths"
Well, d'uh. Looked at any migraotory paths, lately? Hmmm, didn't think so. Suddenly, you find that all those millions of unused acres are being used the THE ANIMALS THAT ALREADY LIVE THERE. Wow, betcha didn't think of that, eh?
Strike four.
Now, run along and play little one, let the big people take care of keeping the little blinking lights working on your happy box.
{/bitchslap}
Brilliance doesn't need a sig.
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.
1 cent per kilowatthour would kick the living crap out of what we pay here in California. Even before the government went ahead and bought long term contracts in our name at the peak of the distorted market, it was ~ 6 cents per KWH, now it's around 12 or 13 and that's just baseline usage.
somehow I doubt that they're providing wind power at retail prices of 1 cent.
As for storing energy, several mechanisms work well, one is pumping water uphill, and the other is compressing air in underground caverns or old mines. Electrolyzing water to hydrogen and later reconverting it doesn't sound particularly great. Fuel cells are efficient but not long lived.
Big old diesel engines burning hydrogen is a good idea, but I don't know how well it would work in terms of fuel injection, flame propagation, and fuel storage. Metal tanks storing hydrogen become brittle as it diffuses into the crystal lattice. Putting diesel engines in the basements of tall buildings so they can use the waste heat to make hot water and heat the building is an excellent efficient idea though.
When wind is truly 1 cent per kilowatt hour including risk cost (lightning, storms, birds, materials failures) and maintenance I'll be happy to buy a turbine and run it into lead acid batteries to provide all the backup power and uninterruptible computer power I could ever want. Not to mention net metering my utility bill.
((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) http://www.endpointcomputing.com a scientific approach to custom computing.
Ok, the good. The wind blows all the time, land is cheap, the population is ridiculously small and shrinking, small towns are dying, and some parts are getting desperate.
Now, the bad. It's really frickin' cold in the winter, the wind blows all the damn time, and it gets worse in the winter.
There isn't exactly a huge industrial base except for some mining stuff. The only people crazy enough to live there are thick-headed, terse, and incredibly stubborn, parts of my family are representative. The rural population is relatively old too. Maybe that is a plus, I'm not sure.
Most people think that all of North Dakota is flat. It isn't. The ground elevation doesn't vary greatly, but it is always going up and down enough to make installing large, even rows of of windmills annoying, but maybe that's nothing to a civil engineer.
It's also really damn cold in the winter, and boring. Long distance travel really sucks in the winter.
It might be a good place to start a large windmill farm, but I think the environmental conditions would beat the hell out of almost anything mechanical that is exposed 24/7 for years on end.
I only know a small part of N. Dakota, so I may be way off.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
You doubt that people would do this, and as an example you name some people who did??
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
Right, 1 c / kWh is impressive. But when you factor in the production price of the mill itself, how does it look ? Does this rather optimistic take on wind power include a realistic assessment of how much it would cost to convert the current coal & nuclear power structure to wind?
"The fluoride compounds used for water fluoridation are trapped by "scrubbers" in the smokestack of factories like the one pictured above"
Companies don't make a profit by manufactring and selling flouride. By giving it to the government to put into the water supply, they save the money they would have had to spend getting rid of this noxious chemical.
There is no scientific study that gives proof, or anything more than statistical evidence that flouride actually helps teeth. They say "look, where there's flouride in the water, people have better teeth." The never mention that flouride is put into the water in countries where we have and can afford toothbrushes, toothpaste and dental care.
Statistically, people who consume flouride have better teeth. But statistically, people who consume flouride probably have a much higher standard of living than those that don't.
Personally, I've consumed flouride my whole life, I look after my teeth, but I still have plenty of holes, fillings, caries, all sorts of things. I look in the mirror and there's a filling in almost every tooth! And this is the case for a lot of people I know. So it begs the question, did the flouride actually stop any holes? Possibly, but the dentist would have patched them anyway.
In this house, We obey the laws of thermodynamics.
(I think the parent might be suggesting violation of the 2nd!)
Uhhm, wrong. It blows all the time somewhere. It stops blowing at plant A, then it blows at plant X. etc...
The intermitent "problem" is on a problem in isolated installations. If you have a grid spanning hundreds and hundreds of kilemetres, then it is not likely that you will end up with no power from wind at all of the plants.
If the grid is expanded in the future with high-temperature superconductors[1], then wind becomes as reliable energy source as fosil or nuclear. A superconducting energy grid for the entire continent would allow wind can supply ALL energy needs without interruption.
[1]HT superconductions do not yet exist, at least the ones that can carry enough current to be used as part of a power grid. Conventional superconductors are used already on the grid. I think Denver installed some to carry 100kA of current from one side of the city to the other.
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.
That's keen, except most of Colorado is semi-arid, and also in the middle of a drought. Plus that would be a very lossy process I would imagine. And where would all that water go when you release it to fulful an afternoon demand for a few million air conditioners?
You put off far too lightly the problem of storing the amount of energy needed on a day to day and month to month basis.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Do you have any answers? Or just questions? Remember, no is sometimes the right answer, but it never solves a problem.
.. or buy a recently-legalized-again assault rifle.
Finally, we can once more efficiently reduce the influx of Califonians and Texans.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
People say "run out of oil" like it's going to happen all at once. But as he was saying, that's not at all true - it will become slowly more and more expensive, but not all at once. People talk about "running out of oil in 50 years" but it's probably more like a few hundred when you factor in other energy sources taking up the slack over time as oil slowly grows more expensive.
And how much is too much, anyway? A doubling of the cost of oil would make people squirm, but would it really change the way we live? I suppose it might makes sales of the H2 decline slightly. So even the cutoff point where we "run out of oil" for all intents and purposes is very, very murky as far as I'm concerned.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.)
That's the sound of the rabid environmentalist shouting about the 'damage' that wind turbines will do to their god, er, the Earth. No matter what the power generation scheme, no matter how minimal the impact, the radicals in the environmentalist movement will claim that this man-made contraption is evil and must be abandoned in order to 'save' the ecosystem.
Apart from fission, wind is just about the cleanest power-generating system we can devise (fusion not being even remotely practical yet). It's even cleaner than solar, since the process used to manufacture solar cells is quite a bit dirtier than what's required to build the wind turbines (although it's better than it was 20 years ago).
Sometimes I think the environmentalists are the most reactionary of us all: they don't just want technology to stop in it's tracks, they want to reverse it until all of us are once again living as hunter-gatherers. Well, those that survive the loss of technology, anyway, since about 5.5 billion of us would die of starvation after giving up the 'evils' of agriculture....
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
The grid itself
Heated Hot water or Chilled Cold water.
All you have to do is free yourself of the plug it in mentality.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
As to the lifetime of other types of powerplant, I'm no expert, but I do know that mechanical devices wear out eventually, and nuclear devices require a lot of maintenance because of for safety reasons you need to detect and repair potential faults before they happen.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
If these wind generators were significantly more widely distributed (and I see no reason why they can't be) the need for power goes down. Most of the power generated in the US is consumed by the delivery method. If the power is generated where it is used the whole thing becomes cheaper.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
There is no shortage of oil in this world, there is a shortage of cheap oil. That shortage is mostly artificial, oil companies have not been investing in infrastructure in the middle east for the last 15 years, and what's there is old and wearing out. That investment is not going to happen as long as there is the current level of political instability in the region. It's now been demonstrated, that invading and installing a puppet government actually decreases the stability of the region, and invites all kinds of attacks on foreign sponsored oil production infrastructure. In simple terms, the well has been poisoned.
There's lots of 'extractable' oil in this world, it just cant/wont be extracted for 25 dollars a barrel. Personally, I'd rather see us burning cheap middle east oil in the short term, and leave our own reserves in the ground for the grandchildren to enjoy, they can sell it to the usa for $100+ a barrel after the middle east has been sucked dry.
Pebble Bed is online in China
h tm l
Wired link
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china.
2) Wind turbines take a lot of energy to manufacture, and viewed in energy terms the payback period is quite long.
God didn't give us Enrico Fermi for nothing!
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Why of why is not Geothermal energy on the agenda?
Both Europe and America are within cable distance of Iceland (or hydrogen could be generated in situ), which has massive geothermal resources. And whilst investment on the scale required would be massive, compared to the gulf war and other such incidental expenses for producing oil in unstable regions it's really not that significant. True the Icelanders would get very rich, but who would we prefere to be dependent on - a stable 1000 year old democracy or the snake-pit of the middle east?
The USA even has pretty major geothermal resources within it's own borders (Yellowstone, Alaska etc) although these are more difficult to exploit being deeper than in Iceland.
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.
Here downunder we basically pay $1 for 1Kwh of power, so it is not uncommon for a person to actually rack up $100 of electricity charges per week during summer and winter!
Wow, think about the profits energy companies must be making, making 99c profits for every 1c spent!
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
It will be good to see if the execution is as good as the promise - but no, we're not there yet.
I believe, although the article isn't very clear on it, that the 1c is the added cost when compared to conventional energy sources. Electricity produced by coal or gas fired plants at the moment is around 4 to 4.5c per kWh, while wind energy in a state of the art wind farm is around 5c. This last cost is still dropping though, and is projected to be about 4.5c at the end of the decade, and perhaps even cheaper than gas or coal by 2015. The key here is that once a wind farm is up and running, only (little) maintanance is required, while coal plants for instance need hundreds of fuel trucks every day to keep running, and gas prices are fluctuating quite much.
An interesting document with some more info is http://www.awea.org/pubs/factsheets/Cost2001.PDF
1) if we could burn 100% we'd have 100 years supply at 1% per year not 300 years. Boy that is a dumb error.
2) it should read Spallation and not scintillation. Spallation is when you smash the nucleus with a proton and scintillation is when you tickle it with a gamma ray. Cleary I know the difference. I was asleep at the keyboard I guess.
The point isn't that the oil is going to "run out" in an absolute sense. There's probably hundreds of years oil out there at current rates.
However, not much of it is CHEAP oil. What is running out, and will probably be gone in the next few years is CHEAP oil.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
It depends on the size of the area in question. The correlation drops with distance, but even combining the wind power from all of Europe, the minimum production is only 1% of the installed capacity. And in the US, you would have to transport eg enough power for California through the faltering transmission lines from North Dakota or Iowa.
See the works of Michael Milligan, Brian Parsons, Bernhard Ernst, Gregor Giebel and Hannele Holttinen for details.
On the plus side, most every result shows that integrating wind power up to 20% is very possible (Western Denmark survives with 27%, Navarra with 50%, and Schleswig-Holstein with even more).
Hurricane Application Group, Dept of Meteorology Control, Ministry of Proactive Defense
doesn't even exist. It is a scam that can't even come up with names to the consensus. What? Don't believe me? Here's my proof It even comes with sources for you who like to disprove. We will face Global cooling before the infamous desert world Global Warming portrays.
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.
That the Flywheel is always forgotten?
When is a greeny going to state that the wind turbines are "Using all of our wind..." - which is damaging the environment...? You don't get energy from nothing.
"Just 3% of USA farmland"..? How many thousands of square miles is that?!
I've got wind turbines on a hill near my house - and yes, the world should use wind instead of coal/oil.. But I think nuclear power is the best solution - plentiful supply, clean. It just needs to be in the right hands - not some greedy corporation that doesn't care if 30 miles x 30 miles is obliterated in a bored scientists experiment like Chernobyl.
Check out Sellafield in the north of England - has changed it's name loads of times because of spillages and media embarassment! A few years ago the Chinese sent a cargo ship back because Sellafield had miscalculated the load of radioactive material on board!).
Nuclear power needs to be in the right hands - not a greedy corporation who would cut safety to the bone.
http://www.eere.energy.gov/state_energy/technology _overview.cfm?techid=2
Wind energy is the kinetic energy of large masses of air moving over the earth. Because the sun heats the earth's surface and atmosphere unevenly, thermal differences develop, which drive air masses around the planet. The earth's rotation also contributes to powerful air currents.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
If built the windmills along the locations of best wind we .
o gy _overview.cfm?techid=2
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.......
get the best bang for the buck
http://www.eere.energy.gov/state_energy/technol
Electricity is already sent over VERY long distances at
100's of thousands of volts over high power transmission
conductor
Utilities of different states even sell power to each other
from time to time, it was one of the scams Enron got in on
because so much money traded hands
California in the mean time got screwed on the deal because
they refused to build ANY kind of new generation plants in
their state and when demand was high, so was the price
Target ur high use markets and lay out the wind power
farms in those areas
In areas where there is a tremendous amount of water moving,
make more hydro electric dams
Most of the power in Las Vegas comes from the Dam at lake Mead
Cover Death Valley in Solar panels is another option
Install underwater water turbines at the mouth of the Bay of
Fundy could power the entire eastern seaboard, Canada's as well
Hydraulic tidal pumps would be less invasive for the ppl that
don't like the underwater turbine idea like they are using
in malaysia to generate power underwater
There are tons of ways to fix our energy needs that do not require
oil, but as long as there are ppl wanting to get rich of their
billions they already invested in oil, its not gonna go away
for a fairly long while
Maybe Bubble fusion in duerated accetone will free us from
the beast that is oil
Hopefully something will
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Some posters have pointed out the issue of lack of jobs in North Dakota, dying communities etc. See here for a Spanish example how this can be reversed.
And wind power in Europe has created over 150.000 jobs out of the blue. That's plenty more people than to run a few nuclear plants...
Hurricane Application Group, Dept of Meteorology Control, Ministry of Proactive Defense
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
Coastal wind is not good in places like florida, and a few others .
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o gy _overview.cfm?techid=2
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as well
Check this wind study map
http://www.eere.energy.gov/state_energy/technol
The best places are where you can use the terrain to compress
the wind via hills and mountains, and then funnel it thru
passes in the mountains and setup a windfarm there
Going north from the Texas panhandle into colorado is the
Raton Pass, and for the man that builds a windfarm there
money is waiting
Some other mountains here in the US see horrendous wind speeds,
and would make great places for VERY sturdy wind turbine designs
Like some posters have said, use excess off peak power for
catalytic conversion of water to hydrogen and oxygen, and use
for fuel cells later, or as other posters put it simply pump
water to highly elevated storage tanks or resevoirs, and then
use the highly elevated water to run a water turbine when the
wind is down
Storing energy in batteries is not really practical til we
get super conductivity better in hand cost/use wise
As to the cost for wind, if it gets every last US soldier
out of the middle east, then I'd say we can afford it
Making oil worth very little is prolly our best defense against
being held hostage by it
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
The origional article poster said
the amount of power being extracted from the atmosphere would be more than the increase in greenhouse gas atmospheric energy?
My point is that the "extracted energy" goes right back into the atmosphere. Electricity generation from wind does not reduce the energy in the atmosphere.
My contribution is an answer to how you can change electricity to hydrogen, store it, and reuse it:l
http://www.stuartenergy.com/main_our_products.htm
The technology exists. Read about it. Think. Then post!
Do you have any answers? Or just questions? Remember, no is sometimes the right answer, but it never solves a problem.
Answer: subsidized wind farms
Answer: subsidized rooftop solar panels
Answer: subsidized biodiesel
Answer: higher investment in fusion research
Answer: tax disincentives for using energy-inefficient products
There are a lot of things that could be done by the government to wean people off fossil fuel, but inertia is a strong factor, and oil industry lobbying doesn't help.
That may be, but ...
Erecting such massive barriers that diffuse and absorb wind energy would also have deterimental effects on weather and localized pollution not being accoutned for. Wind is one of the earth's thermal regulators. Start interfering with that and watch the specific variance begin to increase.
To get an idea, say you have a valley that at one end (the windy end) you put up a wind farm. This barrier will diffuse and absorb much of the wind energy, by design. Now, you have decreased the thermal redistribution effect of that wind on the valley (or the other end of the valley depending on location). In some cases, you'll see a higher temp as the cooling effect is decreased. In others you will see a warming trend as the wand that formerly carried warm air has lost it's punch.
This is a greater specific varience, areas with a much greater difference in thermals. Now, over time you will see these differences lead to even more dramatic effects. Thunderstorms and other forms of severe weather are possible, even likely results as the differential increases.
Further, decrease of wind currents can lead to changes in air pressure creating a variety of effects ranging from more pollution density to shifts in the jet stream (location dependent obviously).
At best we should be able to somewhat model these on the computer, but not with much accuracy. Still, I'd hope we would at least try to model them accurately prior to moving blindly into another one.
Any way you slice it, energy consumption will occur, and any time you extract energy from an ecosystem in any way, there will be negative, and often unforseen, effects -- even solar. Given enough solar cells, you change the albedo of the planet, directly affecting the amount of light-heat the earth absorbs and radiates.
Sometimes, the grasss really isn't greener on the other side. It's just a different shade of green.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
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.
Uhh yes it does. The more sites you need to have, the more control infrastucture you need. The more variance you have in your power lines from the more locations, the more control problems and conditioning problems you wil need to overcome. The more it costs, the less likely you are to get demand up enough to overcome these.
Thus, it does in fact become infeasible. Theoretically possible, perhaps, but if it costs too much, has too little return, then yes it is infeasible.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
and the environmental damage from all of those wind farms could be significant.
Environmental wind damage... RELATIVE to WHAT???
FARMERS DO NOT BLOW UP BUILDINGS.
On the other hand, rich Saudi oil sheiks do. With our money. Come to Manhattan sometime, and look at the FUCKING CRATER.
I'm sure the Fox News and the anti-American Arab crowd will team up to mod me down, but fuck them I *love* my country and people need to remember what REALLY happened!
1.) Same reason why no company has build the perfect car that last forever. Could we, absolutely? Will corporate america allow it, hell no!
ummm... Technology is constantly improving, if we built cars that lasted for ever none of us would benifit from new tech in our cars.
Suppose that 20 years ago they started to build cars that would last 100 years. How many more people would have died without ABS and air bags? How much more oil whould we have pumped out of the ground becasue we didn't have computer controlled fuel injectors. And how much dirtier would the air be without the improvments in polution control?
Even if we could build a car that would last for ever, I don't think we should...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
"when we run out of oil we will convert coal to synthetic fuel." Huh? Whaddayamean 'When'...? The Germans/Nazis developed the technology in WWII. The South Africans refined it and put it into practice: today, they extract/refine about 50% of their petrol/gas (for cars) from coal! Steadily grown since the 60's!
This all raises a question in my mind.
If we are extracting energy from the atmosphere, this means that the atmosphere has less energy stored in it.
As my poorly trained mind sees it, this can come in one of two forms. Either the ambient temperature of the earth decreases, and we see global cooling (less thermal energy), or the winds as a whole blow less hard (less kinetic energy). Most likely it would be a combination of both, for the sake of my argument I'll assume it's 50/50.
Let's say the storage of electricity for use on still days is perfected, 100% storage efficiency (Newton tells us this is not possible in his law of thermodynamics, but let's ignore that for now).
Now, wind power is both the cheapest, and the cleanest energy source. The whole world converts to wind power, fossil fuel engines are smelted down to make plows, and everyone across the world joins hands, singing in harmony.
Soon though, the effects are noticed. The far northern and far southern areas of the planet see it first. Unusually cold months all year around. Also, winds that usually carry moisture and warmth from tropical regions have drastically lessened. Summers are cool and dry, every year we see drought. Every winter is bitterly cold and dry. This effect is soon felt down in the equatorial regions.
Seas slowly rise and lakes slowly fall as the atmosphere has less specific capacity to hold moisture, and more of it ends up in the oceans. The polar ice caps enlarge. Human kind is faced with an energy crisis far greater than that currently faced. We know we can't convert to fossil fuels for primary energy means, these will soon be exhausted, and by the time society could shift to fossils again, it'd be too late.
The scenario I describe is a bit bleak, but I don't think it's all that unlikely.
The main question here is this: Does mankind consume more energy from the earth than the sun provides the earth? Within this question is encoded the need for consideration of energies used directly by man, as well as energies consumed indirectly. We breathe oxygen, this oxygen comes from plants, which use the sun's energy to produce it. We eat plants (or animals which in turn eat plants) which use the sun's energy to grow. Ambient atmospheric heat and kinetics (wind) are required for the survival of man, his food, his food's food, and his air.
To date, man's hunger for energy has been depleting natural stores of energy. Over past millenia, the earth has been dilligently storing excess energy in the form of fossil fuels. Earth receives a certain amount of energy, and gives off less energy than that to surrounding space. Of course something has to have happened to the excess energy, and that something is fossil fuels.
Now, going back to Newton's law, it's known that energy cannot be destroyed. It can only change forms, including taking the form of matter. So global cooling only makes a certain amount of sense since this energy has to remain here somewhere. Each time energy changes shape (solar radiation -> thermal energy -> kinetic energy (wind) -> wind turbines -> man's appliances) some of that energy is lost. Everybody sing Moxy Fruvous, "In other words, damn that rising entropy."
It's inevitable that some of this energy enters forms which it is not possible or not feasible to retrieve it. For example, in the formation of molecules which are very stable, and so require a lot of initial energy to retrieve a small amount of energy in return. This is evident in nearly all non-flamable materials (eg, most metals or glass). If it requires more initial energy to initiate a reaction than the reaction gives off, you can't create a chain reaction to sustain the retrieval of that energy.
So long round about story short. All energy comes from some place. In the case of fossil fuels, it was solar radiation in centuries past, in the case of wind power, it's solar radiation within the last century, and this comes at the expense
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
True, here in Belgium we use the excess electricity of our Nuclear plants (because they take about 24 hours to shut down/start up, if I remember correctly) during the night to pump water uphill. These lakes ("stuwmeer" in Dutch, I don't the English word) are used everyday to help out during the peak-hours.
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.
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.
IIRC, jet engines/turbines are far more efficient still (80%??) and should be better as the driver for the generator/alternator.
For example, a lot of the locomotives in the UK seem to be gas turbine-electrics. Presumably they use these instead of the older diesel-electrics because of efficiency
FWIW, one other way of "storing" power is to use the excess to pump water back "uphill" in hydroelectric schemes.
Did you know that "chloride" is related to the poison chlorine? Did you know that you eat "chloride" every day, and you would die if you didn't? :-)
Yes, but too much (more than 5g per day IIRC) is also a bad thing
Actually, I have talked to a number of people about it personally, and have yet to find anyone who thinks generator towers are ugly. These NIMBY-sayers we hear about seem to be mostly fictitious.
Since I live on Cape Cod, I think I am well qualified to say that your supposition is false. The NIMBY-sayers are very real and powerful, and they have the upper hand. Cape Cod is an extremely large country club / playground for the affluent with a shrinking proportion of normal working Joes. Modest bungalows with no water view have soared to a half a million dollars. Do you really think the bulk of the Cape Cod population has any sense of realism?
Are you suggesting that wind turbines should be run in reverse to store up wind power in our atmosphere???
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
This evidence is dodgy at best. For every study that shows a (nearly negligible) improvement in DMFT (decayed, missing, filled teeth) in a fluoridated area compared to a nonfluoridated one, there's an equal and opposite study that shows a lack of improvement or worsening of dental health in a fluoridated area.
2) There is NO evidence it causes any harm.
This is actually false. Fluoride is highly toxic and it accumulates in your bones over your lifetime. At very very small concentrations in bones, it makes them slightly stronger; but any more than that, and they get quite brittle, resulting in hip fractures etc. Fluoride is also linked to other health problems such as cancer and brain damage.
3) It's cheap as hell to do.
Well, it's certainly cheaper for companies that produce it as an industrial byproduct if they can sell it to municipal governments as a water additive rather than having to pay to dispose of it. It certainly isn't free for municipalities to buy it and add it - being highly toxic it requires considerable handling precautions, among other things.
So basically, why not?
For the same reason we don't routinely add other toxic chemicals like lead or arsenic to our drinking water, that's why not. Fluoride has a similar toxicity to those chemicals, and in fact in combination with them, is substantially more toxic than the individual components separately. I hope your drinking water doesn't have any lead in it that may have leached out of the pipes. Not that that would ever happen.
Either way, it isn't some vast multi-national conspiracy
This is a straw man. It doesn't have to be a vast multi-national conspiracy to be more detrimental than beneficial. My experience with my local government's fluoride conspiracy is quite interesting, actually. I called my health department representative in my city government to ask why our drinking water was being fluoridated for no good reason and at considerable taxpayer (i.e. my) expense. She said she'd get back to me, and after doing her own research, she did. She said that I was right, fluoride was toxic and not dentally beneficial, and there was no reason to be adding it to the drinking water. But she also said that her superiors had told her to drop the matter immediately. I was told never to mention her name.
Tin-foil hat? Maybe. To me it is quite clear that fluoride is more of a (yet another) political boondoggle than a carefully researched scientifically backed example of mass medication. I now drink bottled fluoride-free spring water on the (extremely unofficial) recommendation of my city government.
As someone who lives in Colorado ... I can tell you that the northern Colorado / southern Wyoming areas ... are seriously windswept. Nonstop, hard wind.
Looks like the scientific data is not impressed with the winds in your area. The Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and into Texas are significantly more windy. Right on both coasts there are also much windier areas. The real wind is found out at sea, though. Looks like all the white dots (highest wind) are over the sea and the great lakes.
Living on Cape Cod, which is basically at sea, I can tell you that during the windy season (winter) it gets pretty bad here.
So the cost dropped in June, eh? I guess those hurricaines aren't all evil then!
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
Re:2... I don't think it's a case of policymakers interfering. It seems more like once they get their money, they split.
Re:3...Good point.
Re:4...The database was over 200,000 entries from two different NWS stations. I don't recall the exact speed needed for these turbines to be worthwhile, I just remember that the end result was that there were not many days that produced enough wind.
Re:5...Again, if ice keeps it from spinning, building a wind farm in a location where ice is an issue for 6 months out of the year seems foolish.
Re:6... You're right, it's been a number of years since I've personally heard a wind farm. I've lived in Portland OR, and Yonkers NY... City noise doesn't bother me. I was refering more the the weird low frequency throbbing sound that they made.
This doesn't seem to be breaking along political lines. The big concern is that the local taxpayers are going to be stuck with a deteriorating wind farm that eventually will generate more rust than power. I personally am not involved with any of it. I literally just took 2 huge dBase files and imported them into Excel for my dad. Just thought I would share what little info I had on the topic.
Someday a real rain is gonna come...
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.
I think you miss the point. The only useful amount of storage capacity we have for that much eletricity is the latency in the power grid. You're talking about increasing the potential energy of water using electricity. While a good idea, isn't quite the same thing.
We are the 198 proof..
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.
What about using supercapacitors like the ones used in some hybrid buses?
"There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them." ~ Louis Armstrong
"Hmmmm. Source please" :-)
I guess this will depend on the bird, but certainly it'll be cranberry for turkeys.
That's the wittiest thing I've read all day.
Colorado has "lots of great wind" that could be used for wind power.
Shouldn't this be in the Politics section of /. ?
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
"Global warming is a myth. GLOBAL WARMING IS A MYTH! LA LA LA! I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"
Repeat as necessary. While this won't serve to alter reality in any significant way, it can certainly make it possible for you to resume your mundane activities and television viewing in relative peace.
Killer heat waves in Europe, missing summers in mid-western Canada, massive drought across China and shrinking glaciers around the world (among numerous other instances of sudden changes to our biosphere), mean absolutely nothing. Just blips due to better reporting systems. Stop worrying and return to your cubicle, citizen. Your government will be re-locating underground to better facilitate the spending of your tax dollars.
-FL
...Ivan I mean, we stand a good chance of losing power, so my backup solar and battery banks and fuel genny gonna come in real handy. I hope my ISP stays up and the landline phone so I can post any interesting haps. Hopefully slashdot in general will have a dedicated thread/article for Ivan. I'm not anywheres near the coast, I'm in north georgia, but last time we had an inland hurricane this stron hit, way back with hurricane opal, it caused a LOT of damage. Hurricanes this strong spawn torandoes and knock down a zillion trees, usually wiping out grid juice real quick.
Think I'll go get some dry ice tomorrow and drop it in the freezer.... I got plenty of water stored up and food and fuel. Probably mix up another batch of two stroke for the chainsaws. Drat, have to finish haying today too, hopefully be done before the rain starts. Can't bale until the afternnon when the dew is well off the cut hay.
oh well... ya, alternate energy. Glad I got me some! I can run the old laptop for quite a spell from my battery bank.
I have researched the cost for renewable energy for a while.
To get a solar system installed on your house and be tied into the main grid (utility intertie) the cost is about 10 USD/watt. A 1kW system (10-100 Watt panels, inverter, labor) would run about 10,000 USD.
To get a wind system installed runs about 5 USD/watt (utility intertie). A 1kW system would run about $5000 USD.
The sun is more predictable, but also more expensive.
The wind is cheaper but has the chance to produce more power but that is not very predictable.
Also, in the city you will never see a wind generator in somebodies back yard but solar panels are quiet and easily added to existing structures.
Energy is conserved, and neither be created, nor destroyed. These are the fundamental laws of the Universe and are, except in extreme cases, inviolate.
If you take energy from the wind, en masse, you decrease the amount of energy remaining in the wind, slowing it down in essence. Now, we haven't noticed any effects today because our wind generation is so miniscule. But what happens when there are thousands upon thousands or millions of acres of these things? What will the effect be on airflow patterns and such? Has anyone actually accurately modeled the upward end of what the green-folks consider "ideal" to see if it's actually not going to cause more harm than good?
Everyone seems to concentrate on the "it must be good, it's clean" aspect, without pondering where that energy was GOING to be used...
No. The wind turbines should pump water in a storage tank uphill when capacity exceeds demand, and when the demand exceeds the capacity, you let the water go through a hydroelectric generator.
Hydroelectric generators are incredibly efficient - 80% or greater. Pumping uphill, then downhill, therefore results in about a 20% loss or so, which is extremely minor for energy storage.
Wind, pumped hydro storage and other forms of power generation are heavily capital intensive. As much as 20% of the USA's total capital investment in tangible assets is in the electric infrastructure.
In the past couple of years, investors have been scared away from the energy sector. The 2000 fiasco in California and the Enron scandal get much of the blame. Lack of investment capital hinders all technologies and hinders regulated as well as deregulated states. Even regulated monopolies must raise capital on open financial markets. Technologies, research, public sympathy, and government policies are all irrelevant if investors are unwilling to take the risks.
If you personally want to contribute to green power, change your 401Ks and IRAs to invest directly in the projects you favor. If you don't think those projects are safe enough for your money, why would you expect others to do so? The public debate goes awry when some people want to dictate how other people should invest their savings.
As others have said, you store and transmit energy in hydrogen, but it has to be created somewhere. Manufacturing hydrogen out in the "boonies" in a wind farm is an option.
Seriously, doesn't wind power completely devestate the local bird species? Is there a solution for this, yet?
Education is the silver bullet.
250 houses for the year?? Is this realistic? If it is what the hell is everybody waiting for? This single unit would offset the demand on the grid from my entire neighbourhood. 250 houses is a LOT of houses for just one wind turbine. Like I said if the numbers are realistic, why aren't we hooking these things up with our existing grid? Can't we just set them up to supplement the existing infrastructure?
Specs from site:
Coastal wind is not good in places like florida
I dunno, it was pretty darn strong about a week ago...
Check this wind study map.
Well, waddya know, in Oklahoma the wind really does "roarin' down the plains..."
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
kiss my ass, chickenshit AC pompous asshole.
now THAT is flamebait.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
The article states that a 10 MW power plant is online.
Last time I checked, thermodynamics didn't work like that.
(See, it's all well and good to extract the energy from the atmosphere, but you're just storing the energy for later. As soon as you use it, it ends up as heat.)
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've seen this turbine driving in and out of Toronto on the QEW, and it's HUGE. I visited the website and I noticed how the website avoid showing pictures that give you a real understanding the size of a 30-story turbine.
I especially found this page misleading where they show a diagram at the bottom right of the page comparing a 2 story house with a 30 story turbine and the CN tower.
They actually distort the scale to make the turbine appear to be 8-10 stories and then cleverly place it against the base of an enourmous CN tower where your imagination is left to consider how far up it goes.
Then they have the gall to poo-poo you for being suspicious if it's really that high. I've seen it, and yes it is.
Plant trees. They suck out the carbon in the atmosphere.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Certainly not if there if there is a substantial risk of fuel cost rises for current preferred energy generation methods in a timeframe less than or on the close order of the lead time for putting a currently-nonexistant wind plant on the grid (both for construction and dealing with NIMBY locational issues that may arise).
Large supply shocks are MINDBOGGLINGLY bad for the economy especially for something as fundamental these days as the cost of electricity, and are far worse for consumers than for corporations or corporate stockholders-- especially for the corporations producing the shocked supply. You don't remember the economy of the early 1970's very well, do you? It royally sucked. "Those who do not study their history...."
It takes time to develop the engineering expertise to make wind plants economical, efficient, and integrated into a fairly regular cyclical demand grid (nontrivial given the intermittency of wind supply). Subsidies make it look at least marginally economical to build plants now. Once you have people building plants, greed will drive them to try to figure out how to improve them to make more money... which will start pushing the calendar on developing the aforementioned expertise, so that we will (hopefully) have it before the need for it is critical. Yeah, it's a "carrot for the jackass" approach, but given the number of stupid jackasses in the US, and given the traditions of this country, we really can't use a stick exclusively.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
So massive tax increases to subsidize the rich. Interesting plans.
Second, the theory says nothing about the rate at which these renewals occur. There is an energy cost of 9.81 Joules per kg oil per meter depth extracted from for pumping; when deep enough, oil may not be economical to forcibly extract as a fuel. (Raw material is a separate but less pressing question.) If the demand for oil (growing as 3rd world nations like China industrialize) exceeds the rate at which extractable reserves replenish themselves, there will be a shortfall.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
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.
So massive tax increases to subsidize the rich. Interesting plans.
Well, you can use taxes on environmentally unfriendly products to fund tax incentives on environmentally friendly products. For example, in Belgium we have an eco tax on polluting packaging. Just adding a few cents of eco tax on packaging formats that pollute more than others can add up to a lot of money useful for subsidizing wind farms and the like, with the nice side benefit of moving packaging industries towards more enviro-friendly materials (and boosting materials research).
This system can be used in a lot of situations. You could for example tax air conditioners in new buildings (it is well known how to build buildings so they don't need air conditioners in moderate climates), and then use the resulting revenue to fund fusion research, to get more energy sooner for the airco's in existing buildings to run on.
Also, in the long term, if the US managed to achieve energy independence, this would mean it would no longer need to be involved militarily in the middle east. Not only would this massively decrease terrorist activity (since the stated goal of a lot of anti-US terrorist organisations is simply to get the US out of the middle east), but it would decrease the amount of money flowing out of the US economy, and so would be a boost to domestic US investment. This would result in higher tax revenues, and lower military costs, so the US could decrease defense spending to normal levels (instead of perennially maintaining a wartime defense budget).
I'm just throwing ideas out there, I'm sure the real thinkers have come up with much better plans. Cost is often a fake reason for lack of environmentalism, since the real costs associated with pollution often exceed whatever cost is associated with cleaning up.
You're misunderstanding the cycle of energy in the atmosphere. Only some of the energy in the atmosphere is stored as heat. The rest is in the kinetic energy of convection and wind. Extracting wind energy decreases (for the most part) the kinetic portion of this energy. So the air doesn't cool down, it just moves slower.
Also, "energy forcing" means the cycling of energy through the atmosphere by rising temperatures due to global warming. The point being made was that, if we switched from petro-energy over to wind energy, the amount of energy being extracted from the atmosphere would make up for the additional energy being cycled through it ("forced") by the greenhouse effect.
Basically, the point is that the effects wrought by global warming occur mostly in the atmopshere. Thus, the logical point to counteract those changes is in the atmosphere. By switching from petro-energy to wind we are, in a way, dealing with both problems simultaneously. We get energy and counteract the effects of CO2 in the atmosphere. Of course this is all theoretical because no wind facilities of a large enough scale to test it have been constructed.
... and maintain them, which encourages fuel-inefficient car and truck transportation, which increases demand for fossil fuels, which helps keep prices up.
If individual motorists/trucking companies had to pay to maintain the roads, passenger-miles and cargo-miles would drop significantly, and oil prices would drop too.
Sean
Some of the reservoirs of the California Water Project are used for pumped storage. Water is pumped up during off-peak periods, and run out during peak periods. But they're big reservoirs, so the lake level doesn't go up and down much.
There are a few true pumped-storage plants. Recoon Mountain.
There are some very credible reasons to believe that we are at or very near peak supply rate. See this report from Petroleum Review (a respected oil industry publication) which looks at currently-known new oil discoveries and when they are expected to come on-line. The upshot is that there will be some supply growth until 2007, but after that there is almost nothing on the horizon.
This may represent the point of oil supply peak. After that, if you want to some new development (build more cars, grow more food, air condition more buildings) you will have to take oil supply away from some existing use to do it. This could happen by investing in higher efficiencies for existing uses or by dropping energy-intensive discretionary activities (like pleasure airline travel, FedEx shipping or importing food from distant lands).
It does mean, however, that it will be extremely difficult to maintain economic growth. As our entire economic system is based on constant growth (for example, a recession is where growth happens at a lower rate than desired), this should cause major dislocations if not actual economic collapse.
It gets even worse when you consider that oil supply will not stay at peak rate, but will steadly decline year after year from depletion, so these dislocations will have to occur over and over as the supply shrinks.
And for those who say the new discoveries are fading only becuase of a lack of investment, I must say that seems like wishful thinking. The oil industry has never been known for leaving potential profits sitting untapped simply because they don't feel like investing. I think they know something they are not ready to tell us...
Gas turbines are highly efficent, but not as efficient as the REALLY big diesels; the 80% quoted above is ridiculous 40's is not unreasonable though (for a ground/marine installation).
Where gas turbines kick ass is power/weight and power/volume. And about the NOx, gas turbines do that too... It is a byproduct of high temperature combustion of hydrocarbons, which is unfortunatly the only way to get efficient combustion based power (from oil).
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
I did think the 80% was a too high. I know from a friend of mine that works for Pratt that they are have done a lot of work with getting the combustion gases out of the NOx formation temp range as fast as possible. I would be interested to see the NOx rates for a modern gas turbine vs a REALLY big diesel. Those tend to have very long strokes so I would guess that there NOx production would be pretty high. I would also wonder how efficent a gas turbine would be if you used some type of heat recovery unit to boil water or even to provide hot water. I still stand by my suggestion the the multi fuel capablity is a big advantage. Also do you know if you can even use hydrogen in a diesel cycle engine?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I go from Minneapolis to Des Moines and back once or twice a year, and there's grown up this huge wind farm on plains south of the MN/IA border, about a mile west of I35. It's just majestic to look at, especially in late afternoon with the sun shining down from behind it. Crybabies worrying about their view should consider how their view would change with a billion tons of smog in the air.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
I'm not sure where your information is coming from, but a good friend of mine had the job of collecting the dead birds from around a wind farm in wisconsin. He said he was picking up about 20 birds a day. Given that they have 120 turbines, your numbers have got to be off... 1-2 seems way too low to compare with the anecdotal evidence.
I actually went out of my way to see the wind farm I heard about in Vermont. After being awed by the one out in Palm Springs I was all excited - 'till I drove over the last hill.
There are like 3-5 windmills total. They're not even half the size of the windmills near Palm Springs.
Most likely the birds spend most of their days giggling at the pathetic attempt at green power.
Bah.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
To put things in perspective, a small, old steam turbine reaching the end of its life in a provincial city produces 120MW - that's a single turbine and generator, not the entire station.
Pratt is where I worked...
Was your friend in East Hartford? If they were in aerodynamics or combustion I probably know them...
I spent time in Computational Fluid Dynamics and Turbine Aero (but I was part of a team on an augmenter too).
Anywho... I am pretty sure you can use hydrogen in a diesel, but I know that you can't use a catalytic heat source for a diesel, which you can for a gas turbine...
Also they do heat recovery for most land/marine gas turbines.
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
It is more efficient to run all turbines at a set performance. Therefore the electricity companies try and flatten out demand so it is constant across 24 hours. They do this by letting you heat your water in off-peak tanks that are timed to when demand is lowest.
The thing is in Australia some bright spark figured this out and we now pump water uphill overnight, buying the electricity cheap then let the water run downhill into a hydro-electric during the day and sell power back to them when the price is highest. Surely the same applies here, create the electricity and then store it somehow, pump water uphill, use batteries or store it in flywheels. Whatever works and is cheapest. At the very least if the windfarms are generating power then those coal fired powerstations would scale back production.
And probably your neighbors would be more interested in a regular supply of energy. What will they do when the surplus is gone? Use traditional power sources? If they have to maintain facilities of traditional power sources, then you wiil have to sell the surplus REALLY cheap for them to be interested..
Not saying that its impossible, but surely its not that easy...
Seriously. You're proposing that, because of safety costs, we should export NUCLEAR POWER GENERATION duties?
Man, I just can't wait for a big radioactive cloud to start this way over the pacific. You've just given me a view of the future that scares the shit out of me -- more than anything I've *ever* read.
It has been estimated that 1 billion birds a year are killed by.. glass! Pretty much all tall structures cause some level of bird-deaths. *Every* power option has an environmental impact - it may be something we all have to accept as a cost of cheap clean power..
(British Wind Energy Association page)
(American Wind Energy Association page)
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
The poster to whom you replied might be right about his own energy prices in Australia, and the premium he pays for "Green" provenance. But the original article, followed by its submitter, are talking about much lower, absolute prices for wind in Colorado:
"At a cost of $17, CSU students are able to purchase two semesters' worth of wind power, an equivalent of 1,600 kwh, Phelan said."
The article also is upfront about the higher price of wind:
"The cost for wind power is more expensive than other options, but the cost has recently decreased.
The price used to be 2.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, but as of June it dropped to 1 cent per kwh.".
A better title for the story might be "Coal Power Only Slightly Less Expensive than Wind Power".
--
make install -not war
Oil peaking is no lie. But I sense a misunderstanding. By "profitable" i mean a net "energy" gain, not a "monetary gain", this is the language of oil prospecting. Oil in the us,(as reflected as an median of the whole) has already "peaked" in the years 1979-1980. There are some oil fields that are still viable, but many are fallow, and are only used as adjunct to the strategic oil reserve. The pumps used in those fields derive their energy from the grid, and not from exhaust gas. Even after the peak, oil will still be a "fuel" but not an energy "source". The energy used in pumping, drilling, proscpecting, and transporting will have to be even more heavily subsidized.
You're burned in effigy yearly so you should get enough flames as it is
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Capewind is trying to use private land to make public money and raise the cost of power for people in an area that already produces a power surplus even during the peak summer months. With all the maintenence that these turbines would require their energy output would be minimal and the cost of that energy would be high. Due to state legislation power providers would be required to buy it though and people on the Cape (most of whom are not wealthy [especially those that live there year round and would have to pay higher energy bills year round]) would be forced to pay higher energy bills so this private company can destroy a natural resource. There's a nuclear plant in Plymouth. We aren't relying only on fossil fuels. Wind farms in this region might be viable some day but I work for a company that makes turbines and in the salt water environment there are still problems. This is all a money making scheme for Capewind in the guise of clean energy possibilities. Instead of just reading the Capewind spin on how great they are go look at http://www.saveoursound.org/.
The commenter didn't indicate whether he (or she) was a sport or commercial fisher. If they are a sport fisher, the pilings from the turbines should improve the fishing--and the at 1/3 to 1/2 mile apart the turbines shouldn't interfere with navigation.
The only commercial fishing in the waters of Horseshoe Shoal is draggers which do significant environmental damage.
And finally, taking fish from "public lands" is just like loggers cutting down public forests. Did you pay to take those fish out of public waters? Did you do any environmental reviews before putting the boat in the water? The fish and waters are also public goods. If you caught any fish (the waters have been severally overfished), they are likely to have been on the watch or protected lists. How much oil and gas did the boat dump into the water? CO2, NOx into the air? What was the environmental impact of the chemicals used to paint the bottom? Fishing (sport and commercial) has a huge impact on the public lands too, Perhaps we should require environmental impact reviews on sport and commercial fishing.