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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.
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
We must fight this evil invention!
Only if we still HAVE an environment at that time :P
Well the theory is that with global warming, weather becomes more severe. That is, with more energy being dumped into the atmosphere, more water evaporates from the ocean at a faster rate which results in more circulation, etc etc. Wind power will *slightly* decrease the severity of the weather, just like the hairs on your arm keep a strong wind from making you too cold.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
... 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!
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.
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.
There are actually reasonable solutions to this. First, you can store the energy. There are already wind turbines in California that split water at night into hydrogen and oxygen and then convert that back to energy (using a fuel cell) during the day. Expensive as all get-out (in terms of capital cost, not variable cost); but it works.
Since one of the best regions for sustained winds is in the Dakotas (North Central USA, for those Americans who don't know their geography), it could be converted to hydrogen and then piped somewhere (most likely Chicago) for conversion to power. The challenge with this method is that Hydrogen (being such a small molecule) donsn't like to stay in pipelines. It may be better to steam reform carbon dioxide into Methane and then put the methane into our existing pipeline infrastructure.
In other words, stability isn't a problem, as you can use other methods. While it does decrease efficiency (going back and forth between electricity and chemical storage of energy is wasteful!) it STILL has less of an environmental impact than oil.
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?
You're suggesting that we should take caution before using wind power because it can change the local climate as opposed to fossil fuels?
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
Why not? The whole point of hydrogen is to facilitate the storage and transmission of energy. Hydrogen is not a power source per se, but rather a replacement for power lines. In fact, the biggest advantage of hydrogen over electricity is that currently, our storage capacity for electricity is zero.
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.
Good Laugh. Think of an ocean that is more than 100000 feet deep (~30000M deep). Do you think that structures that are less than 100 ' (30 M) (less than .1% of the depth) on the Ocean floor stand, could stop (or even slow down) the water that is moving. Our atmosphere is simply an ocean of air.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Imagine 3% of U.S. farmlands with windmills on them. All of the sudden, the wind is slowed down because it has to turn numerous giant windmills.
Nope.
The atmosphere is DEEP. Aircraft routinely fly at 40K feet. Depending on where you want to say space begins, the earth's atmosphere is around 100KM deep.
The tallest building in the world is only about 1400 feet high, so if all our wind turbines were as tall as the Petronas towers, their penetration into the atmosphere is still miniscule.
Now, if you want to talk about a real evironmental impact of wind power, you could discuss birds flying into turbine blades, which happens quite a bit in California, I hear.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
What WILL happen is that eventually oil because more expensive to pull out of the ground as the reserves get lower. At that point, other sources of energy get more economical, and we inevitably switch over.
That is what they mean when they say "run out of ouil". Oil that is too expensive to obtain might as well not exist. As for "switching over", look around you and notice how many of the goods you own are made out of plastic. When oil becomes very expensive, you will have to either pay a lot of money for those items, or find a way to make them out of some other material. Given that there is no obvious substitute for oil as a manufacturing ingredient, it would be best if we stopped burning it for electricity and saved it for uses where there is no substitute.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Fuel cells have the problem that they wear out and are expensive to produce. If you want to store energy using hydrogen you're better off disassociating water to produce hydrogen gas, then burning that later in a generator. This is of course all best done at some central location, as opposed to on-site, unless on-site is all there is. If you have sun, water, and wind, you have quite a bit of energy available to you for not much cost. The hydrogen will be a little "dirty" unless you're distilling water and separating it, but since all you're doing is burning it, that won't really affect much.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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.
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.
While you are technically correct, it's sort of a moot point.
Perhaps environmentalists should instead say "when oil becomes extremely scare", but that doesn't have quite the same emotional effect.
In either case we need to start thinking about ways to deal with the inevitable loss of cheap oil before it actually comes to pass. Otherwise we will be stuck in the position of having increasingly expensive oil and yet haven't put the time/money/research into alternative energy infrastructure. It is better for the economy to attempt a smooth transition over a long period of time.
-Spyky
I always thought of wind power this way: If you have a month with good output from the wind farm, then you burn less coal. If you are supplementing fossil fuels with wind then you are indirectly banking any excess within unburned fuel.
IMHO, Oil is also heavily subsidised by the govt.
Oil has hidden costs that is never taken into consideration, because it's borne by the govt & not the oil company.
I am talking about the cost of fighting wars for
oil.
The issue is about how to convert that hydrogen back into electricity. Fuel cells are one method which essentially work like a battery directly converting the chemical energy into electrical energy. The suggestion is that we would be better off just burning the hydrogen in a conventional generator (i.e. using the heat from burned hydrogen to create steam and drive turbines..or just directly using hydrogen in the turbine like a jet engine).
If we are really thinking of doing this on a large scale I don't think the expense of the fuel cell will be as important as the *potential* increase in efficency. However, whether we can really get the higher efficency is another matter.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Fuel cells need to be larger to produce more, and making them larger means using more materials, and those materials are usually expensive things like platinum. The larger the scale, the larger the cost - I don't think fuel cells are ever going to be all that scalable. They'll be most desirable in smaller applications.
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. For example, you could use the heat to distill water or something. Thermoelectric generation of electricity is even less cost-effective than fuel cells from what I can tell so that wouldn't be much help.
I do believe that fuel cells will eventually reach a higher level of efficiency, but what we really need is a way to make them last orders of magnitude longer.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This still does not solve our problem with major dependence on black gold.
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 don't know how much oil there is, but we know that it cannot be an infite quantity.
Even from the view of the ecomomist, oil has run out before during wartime (demand a lot more than supply). Even if we have some infinite reserve there will come a point at which we can't get enough out of the ground.
Hmm.
Personally, I'd love a few more nuclear fission powerplants. I live in PA, near one (Limerick). Those suckers are great. Scares the tourists (always worth a chuckle), but its redeeming value is that those clouds hovering over the powerplant are white, not black.
I am John Hurt.
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."
Bird windwill deaths are real, but extremely overrated. The bird deaths in california were landing and resting on support wires for a certain type of windmill (which is obsolete anyway, most don't use support wires in the airframe).
The windfarm in question was in a migration path of a particular species, and only affected local predater hawks because they were preying on the resting, tired,fat, birds. Until the obsolete windmills were replaced. a simple sollution was worked out, in which the windfarm was shutdown during a few weeks in the fall for migration of the food. Oddly enough, the few hawk deaths were worth it for the hawks, who found the resting birds to be plentiful and Yummy.
Still, windmill caused bird deaths are a fraction of a fraction of the bird deaths caused by 1.) big clear glass windows, 2) Pollution, 3) Automobiles, 4) Powerlines and transformers, 6) air pollution (yes tweety gets lung illness too) 6) invasive species, and 7) Cheney and Scalia on duck huntin' trips. And 8) 8? I forgot what 8 is for......
currently, our storage capacity for electricity is zero
:-)
God damn it man -- we can store electricity. All we need are a goodly number of these devices
And why not resurect the dinosaurs using reminents of their DNA (just like jurasic park) -- then oil would become a renewable resource!
----
When your an idiot, anything is possible!
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.
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.
Arguable. Hydrogen fuel cells are better than 75% efficient at turning chemical energy to electricity, whereas burning it to create steam to turn a turbine to turn a generator, you're lucky to get 30%.
Yes, that has to be traded off against the lifetime of fuel cells vs turbomachinery and generators, although the former have essentially no moving parts and hydrogen (vs natural gas or other fuels) doesn't poison a fuel cell catalyst or electrodes very quickly.
-- Alastair
I 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.
conventional combined cycle plants (gas turbine + steam turbine) have thermal efficiencies above 54%. The latest generation with steam cooled gas turbine parts can achieve a thermal efficiency of 60%. See the following pdf files at gepower.com
u rb ines_cc/en/downloads/gasturbine_cc_products.pdf
http://www.gepower.com/prod_serv/products/gas_t
...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.
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.
I go to Colorado State University (Computer Science of course) and I live in the dorms (well... a single dorm room I guess). Anyways, back to topic - they offered for everybody to buy wind power at $17/year. They buy enough wind power to power an average dorm room (I should have bought 40 bucks worth because I have more than 1 car in here) and dump it into the general power the university buys. I did it, and it gives me a little bit of warm fuzzyness.
One method of energy storage I haven't seen anyone mention yet is flywheels. Basically it consists of a big cylinder made of a carbon-fiber composite that is suspended inside a vacuum chamber on magnetic bearings, so that it can spin with very, very low friction.
To store more energy, electricity is applied to a motor which causes the flywheel to spin up. To get energy out, the motor is reversed as a generator and the electricity is sent off to do whatever. Flywheels can provide more energy storage per unit volume than batteries, although I don't know about hydrogen fuel cells -- but flywheels are pretty simple technology and tend to be very low in nasty chemicals (compared to, say, lead-acid batteries, or even the catalytic components found in fuel cells).
The carbon-fiber itself, even if spinning at several thousand RPM, will basically explode into sand if it happens to rupture or exceed its design limitations. There would be no chance of a high-velocity flywheel careening out of its containment chamber and killing everything in its path (as cool as that would be).
It's not a highly developed technology yet, but mostly because we have little need for large-scale energy storage (because we have enough power plants that can provide peak production when it's usually needed), but flywheels combine well with intermittent generation technologies like wind and solar.
Of course, any good energy solution should be comprised of a reasonable mix of different generation, distribution, and storage methods, to avoid a monoculture; having enough wind turbines to meet (at most) 50% of our peak generation means that we're using that much less coal, oil, and other nonrenewable resources. I personally am in favor of safe nuclear reactors (like pebble beds), but nuclear is so much harder of a sell in the U.S. these days that we might find wind, despite its costs, more feasible as an alternative to fossil fuels.
Just some ruminations on the subject, anyway.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
If we continue to eschew Nuclear Power in the US, the Mexican government will start building several nuclear power plants (using "safe" technologies) near the US border.
They will export both electricity to the grid, and generate huge quantites of hydrogen (which will become the new "portable" fuel). that will be transmitted to the US.
This will result in a tremendous rennisance of Latin America, and result in a generally graceful transition from fossil fuels to an electric and hydrogen economy. This will "solve" the energy problem for the US. It will move money that is currently going to small groups of people in the Middle East, to our hemisphere, and create prosperity here at home.
China will be doing the same, as well as India and Pakistan and probably South Africa and Japan.
The oil economy will come to an end, and the nuclear economy will prevail.
Yeah, my lab experience with hydrogen has been that it's not a big deal to contain. We used to use a very small lecture bottle of hydrogen as the supply for exchange gas in cooling down helium systems. The bottle probably hadn't been filled in the 10 years before I got there, and probably not in the 13 or so years since. Most of the loss has probably been from accidentally putting too much gas into the front side of the regulator before dumping it into the experiment.
I've done a fair bit of plumbing for hydrogen systems (for measuring properties of metal hydrides) and have been able to make quite tight systems for high pressure, high temperature H2. We were actually very carefully accounting for the H2, since we needed to know how much went into and out of the hydrides. The system was full of valves, fittings, and welds. You have to be aware of what hydrogen can do to materials, but if you pick the right materials it's fine.
Dewars for storage of any liquid cryogen generally have vents (and burst disks in case the vacuum goes bad). This isn't because the stuff is hard to contain, but because they aren't made to hold high pressure, and there is always some heat leaking in that evaporates the liquid (increasing the pressure in the dewar if it's not vented). If you were doing power production you would probably plan a way to use this H2 rather than blowing it off.
Hydrogen can also be stored in metal hydrides (quite effectively), which can be less of a pain to deal with than dewars full of liquid.
(As an aside, you can even make containers to seal superfluid helium, which is *way* harder to contain than hydrogen. Helium is a pain in gaseous form, but the superfluid state is an extra big pain.)
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.
Fluoride might not be perfectly safe, but confusing elemental fluorine with fluoride ions just makes you look like a retard. Learn some basic chemistry.
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
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.
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.
Same reason why no company has build the perfect car that last forever. Could we, absolutely? Will corporate america allow it, hell no!
Well, I think this is a common misconception about how capital operates.
The idea here is that Foo Motor Corporation might consider creating the Omega car, but the loss of their future profits in making replacement cars automatically stops them. While it is true FMC is going to consider the loss of future revenues in its decisions, these future revenes are discounted, based on how long they take to come in and how risky they are.
It's the financial version of the bird in the hand theory. Suppose I can, with a reasonably safe investment, take a dollar and turn it into two dollars in ten years. In a sense, this means that one dollar in the hand today is worth two in the bush ten years from now, and perhaps four in the bush twenty years from now. Suppose FMC makes two billion dollars in a year then goes out of business producing the Omega, but the status quo is two billion dollars in ten years. That's a no brainer -- two billion dollars in ten years is, financially speaking, only one billion dollars in the short term. Even if they could make only half a billion in short term profits before they go out of business, they still might decide to do it, because if the Omega car is possible, one of their competitors might make one and drive them out of business with no short or long term profit.
So, what keeps the Omega car off the streets is not planned obsolescence, it's the fact that this car could not be manufactured and sold at a price that justifies the effort. If it did, then FMC would create the Omega, then take the proceeds and get into a different business. Planned obsolescence does happen -- engineers do have to have some kind of timeframe for how long something is supposed to last. However style is a bigger form of planned obsolescence than operation. Capital has no problem at all destroying long term productive assets if the short term gain is high enough; the mobility and fungibility of capital assures that it will simply seek the next source of returns. That's its greatest strength and its greatest weakness.
The problem comes when you look at assets that have value aside from pure finance (if you even believe such a thing exists). Suppose a course of action destroys a community. So what? Capital simply moves to another community. Suppose a course of action ruins an entire country? Well, capital can move to a different country. Suppose a course of action destroys most of the planet? Well, capital can buy the nicest plots of what is left. I'm not anti-capital, I'm just pointing out that if you assume that things have value aside from their measurable financial productivity, it leads you to different conclusions than if you assume that everything has a clear price.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Up in VT they had a similar issue. All the environmentalists were up in arms because they wanted to put up more wind farms to reduce the load on nuclear because imagine what the environment nuts would do about a second nuclear reactor. However they didn't like the wind solution because of the possibility of bird deaths. The real problem comes from the first windmills put up had nice little perches for the birds to sit on. 20 years ago in CA a windfarm was set up with this problem. Bird deaths per yer? 1-2. OMG! one or two birds died... it's horrible, you can't use that!
Really they just don't want to spoil their view. Vermonters don't really care about the environment, they care about the view that they have.
I think the savings we get both monetarily and environmentally outweigh one or two birds a year. besides, the new windmills don't have nice places for birds to sit so the risk to birds is probably even less. Most "green's" are a bunch of crotchety wackos that make people that want to actually do something about the environment embarrased.
Limitless renewability of hydrocarbon stores would
just mean that the planet ends up with a climate
like Venus that much sooner.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-