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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/
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
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!
Only if we still HAVE an environment at that time :P
... 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.
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?)
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.
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.
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?
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?)
"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.
Or you could put it just off the coastline, like these folks .
Bush Lies On the Record.
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.
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!
I put an anemometer up for a summer at my house that got a pretty constant light breeze, and captured data for a summer. I figure a wind generator (at maybe 80 feet up) would have given me on average 3% of its rated power.
Have a look at (United States) this map before you put up a generator.
It appears as if the claim is that by drawing energy from the wind, you will actively cool the planet. That's not a valid argument, as the vast majority of the electricity consumed in the world ultimately dissipates as heat, so you'd be putting that energy right back somewhere else. If your computer draws 70 Watts, it is a 100.0% efficient 70 Watt heater, which happens to do some pretty things along the way. To cool the planet this way, you'd have to take the electricity and beam it out into space as laser or microwave energy.
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?)
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
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?)
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.
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?
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.
Washington, DC.
Not economically feasible. That's the Most Expensive hot air known on Earth.
Tag lost or not installed.
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.
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?)
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
the amount of power being extracted from the atmosphere would be more than the increase in greenhouse gas atmospheric energy forcing since 1600
You are saying that reducing CO2 production lessens the greenhouse effect, which no one is arguing. But js7a wrote, that extracting energy from the atmosphere would reduce global warming. That is the point that deglr6328 is disagreeing with, and I'm guessing you disagree with the point as well.
FYI, for those who think wind power has zero-to-very-low ecologial impact:
There have been some serious changes to migratory bird populations in California since the wind-turbine farms started springing up along the mountain ridges. Lots of birds die by hitting the towers or the turbines themselves (note: I don't think they get "sliced", the blades aren't so fast), and many others just plain adjust their flying patters around the ridges. This also has an effect on INSECT populations in the California heartland, which can be bad for AGRICULTURE, which has farmers fairly concerned...
There's no free lunch, gang.
"Plus, 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.
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.WHy do we need to make coal into synthetic fuel when we can make biodiesel to use in normal diesel engines?
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."
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.
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
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....
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.
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.
...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.
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.
Scientists have already experimented with them; They mount a high-strength centrifuge onto a superconductor for levitation, and place it into a vaccuum. Right now, I think there are a few test units in place. Link. I think that Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage is more interesting; They store energy by building an enormously powerful magnetic field around a superconducting toroid. The neat thing is that, minus losses from cooling, the energy is stored for basically ever.
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.
I go to Colorado State University (Computer Science of course) and I live in the dorms (well... a single dorm room I guess). Anyways, back to topic - they offered for everybody to buy wind power at $17/year. They buy enough wind power to power an average dorm room (I should have bought 40 bucks worth because I have more than 1 car in here) and dump it into the general power the university buys. I did it, and it gives me a little bit of warm fuzzyness.
People like to talk about how clean and safe nuclear power is. However, in many ways it is amazing that a functioning nuclear reactor has not yet been targeted as an act of war. In my opinion it will happen eventually, especially if/when nuclear power spreads is the less stable parts of the world.
Bombing a functioning nuclear reactor makes sense from a war standpoint - when the USA invades a sovereign country it makes sure to bomb the power plants first. Of course the radiation risks from this can be high (possibly depending on reactor design) - and if we power civilization with nuclear energy it almost becomes certain it will happen. This is a very significant long-term risk to consider, in my opinion.
One method of energy storage I haven't seen anyone mention yet is flywheels. Basically it consists of a big cylinder made of a carbon-fiber composite that is suspended inside a vacuum chamber on magnetic bearings, so that it can spin with very, very low friction.
To store more energy, electricity is applied to a motor which causes the flywheel to spin up. To get energy out, the motor is reversed as a generator and the electricity is sent off to do whatever. Flywheels can provide more energy storage per unit volume than batteries, although I don't know about hydrogen fuel cells -- but flywheels are pretty simple technology and tend to be very low in nasty chemicals (compared to, say, lead-acid batteries, or even the catalytic components found in fuel cells).
The carbon-fiber itself, even if spinning at several thousand RPM, will basically explode into sand if it happens to rupture or exceed its design limitations. There would be no chance of a high-velocity flywheel careening out of its containment chamber and killing everything in its path (as cool as that would be).
It's not a highly developed technology yet, but mostly because we have little need for large-scale energy storage (because we have enough power plants that can provide peak production when it's usually needed), but flywheels combine well with intermittent generation technologies like wind and solar.
Of course, any good energy solution should be comprised of a reasonable mix of different generation, distribution, and storage methods, to avoid a monoculture; having enough wind turbines to meet (at most) 50% of our peak generation means that we're using that much less coal, oil, and other nonrenewable resources. I personally am in favor of safe nuclear reactors (like pebble beds), but nuclear is so much harder of a sell in the U.S. these days that we might find wind, despite its costs, more feasible as an alternative to fossil fuels.
Just some ruminations on the subject, anyway.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
If we continue to eschew Nuclear Power in the US, the Mexican government will start building several nuclear power plants (using "safe" technologies) near the US border.
They will export both electricity to the grid, and generate huge quantites of hydrogen (which will become the new "portable" fuel). that will be transmitted to the US.
This will result in a tremendous rennisance of Latin America, and result in a generally graceful transition from fossil fuels to an electric and hydrogen economy. This will "solve" the energy problem for the US. It will move money that is currently going to small groups of people in the Middle East, to our hemisphere, and create prosperity here at home.
China will be doing the same, as well as India and Pakistan and probably South Africa and Japan.
The oil economy will come to an end, and the nuclear economy will prevail.
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.)
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?)
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.
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.
Well I'm the counter example to your example. I took multi vitamins that had flouride and additonal flouride suppliments since my mom believed it helped and we had well water so no flouride.... Except our well DID have flouride in it (I forget the reason).
My teeth have some discolouration that the dentist believes is a result of that (there are areas that are quite bright white whereas most of the rest is more subdued) but they are also invincible. No cavities ever and I don't take very good care of them.
However, neither of these are valid empirically speaking, personal anicdotes don't mean anything.
The real point is:
1) There seems to be evidence that flouride helps.
2) There is NO evidence it causes any harm.
3) It's cheap as hell to do.
So basically, why not?
Either way, it isn't some vast multi-national conspiracy. There is evidence to indicate (htough not prove) that it helps and it costs next to nothing. It's not added to make some company billions of dollars.
I'm not saying it is a 100% empirically sound reason to add it, just that AFDB boy is wrong.
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
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.
Now we can look forward to a day when our arrogant dependence on wind for our power leads to a catastrophic global cooling. Children coming home from school and reminding their parents to burn some coal for the environment.
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...
..that so much of the already developed tech is forgotten? I honestly don't know, near as I can see, various alternative energy has been here and working for quite awhile now. The GM EV1 electric car was a success, yet GM pulled the leases and smashes them, even though the bulk of the owners wanted to keep them. Even concepts as simple as solar water heating aren't near as common as they could be. Even adequate insulation in homes isn't as common as it could be. How about those compressed air cars? Those look like they work very well and the concept sure is simple-yet not much action. Say back to the electric cars, fast enough, people said that the range wasn't enough for the occasional trip. There's always been an easy solution to that, to make pure electrics good for trips, it's called a generator/cargo trailer you hook up before a trip. Turns a pure electric into a hybrid with big range.
I dunno, I think occams razor applies sometimes, people are just waiting for other people to break the ice on new technology. Remember when computers weren't common? 20 years ago I bet way less than one house in a thousand had a home computer in it, now it's well over 50% or higher probably.
Anyway, I think it's every geeks duty to get some alternate energy and become at least a small time producer as well as just a consumer. It's up to us to be the neighborhood new technology ice breakers. whether it's a hybrid car or solar panels or whatever, just *something* and do a little evangelizing about it.
You just don't get it :-) To most "Greens," people are the problem. Paul Erlich typifies that attitude when he says something like, "I don't know that the planet can support two billion people, especially if they live like Americans." What an evil person. So many "Greens" want almost all people to live on the farm, till their 40 acres with hand plows and MAYBE oxen, eat only what they personally grow or breed, and kill half their children through disease and starvation. Just so long as the "Greens" can continue to live in their marble towers and dictate to the "rest of us" what is acceptable and what is not. After all, that's the "natural" state of humans (c.f. Africa). Lousy POS.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
And what happens when we run out of wind...
Set up the equipment in Washington, D.C. They'll never run out of wind there...
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
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 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 we're all selfish hyprocrites. That doesn't change the fact that the "greens" are right that overpopulation is the reason for environmental problems. The planet can not sustain infinite population growth. Plenty of species have died off when their numbers grew too big for their environment. Technology can only go so far to delay that.