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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.
We must fight this evil invention!
... 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!
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.
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!
Imagine 3% of U.S. farmlands with windmills on them. All of the sudden, the wind is slowed down because it has to turn numerous giant windmills.
Nope.
The atmosphere is DEEP. Aircraft routinely fly at 40K feet. Depending on where you want to say space begins, the earth's atmosphere is around 100KM deep.
The tallest building in the world is only about 1400 feet high, so if all our wind turbines were as tall as the Petronas towers, their penetration into the atmosphere is still miniscule.
Now, if you want to talk about a real evironmental impact of wind power, you could discuss birds flying into turbine blades, which happens quite a bit in California, I hear.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I 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.
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.
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......
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
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.
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
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.)
1. You build wind power to reduce the use of fossil fuels, not to make the grid blackout-resistant. Widespread blackouts are caused by faulty control mechanisms, not the method of power generation. Why even bring this up?
2. Having a company in financial difficulty do *anything* can be problematic. This issue is of significant concern.
3. On what do these sources base their conclusions? Studies of bird deaths due to wind turbines show pretty minimal numbers, even with the old CA turbines that were unusually dangerous for raptors. Estimates are around two birds per year per turbine (compared to somewhere around 10/year per mile of road with average traffic). Maybe you should dig up your roads and walk everywhere instead--but that's no good, you need to get places, but electricity comes for free from nowhere! Er, wait.
4. If there's really not enough wind, then building these towers is really stupid. Building wind farms where there is no wind is a good way to bankrupt one's company once again. However, are the NWS stations on ridge-tops? You can have huge differences in wind-speed based on local terrain. You make a good case against building a wind turbine on top of the National Weather Service stations. You need to provide more information, however, to show whether the 30 year records are relevant. The company's
report claims that the ridge crest is a local wind corridor. Wind corridors are real, so your objection is only valid if they are wrong that it is a wind corridor, or if they are right but that even so there is insufficient wind. (Also keep in mind the difference in wind velocity as you go from ground-level to 80m above the ground.)
5. Ice is apparently a red herring. There simply isn't evidence that thrown ice is a danger, despite many installed wind farms in ice-prone areas. Besides, there are good physical reasons to think that ice would not be thrown a great distance (e.g. turbines are based on airfoils, and ice coatings don't preserve the airfoil shape, which is the whole problem with plane wings icing).
6. I have heard the new large 80m-ish Danish turbines. They're not that loud, and I don't personally find the noise that annoying. It's mostly sort of whooshing as the blades go past; the new designs have very little mechanical noise (unlike some of the old eggbeater designs in CA). It's hard to even hear them from a reasonable distance away (a few hundred meters). Why do you think that they are LOUD?
Anyway, it's nice that you're helping your dad out and all, and it's good for people to be involved in their community, but are you really arguing against it for the reasons you've given? Or is it instead because you don't like the look of giant windmills on the top of your ridge crest, and figure that if you can shoot it down you won't have to see a coal-fired power plant there instead?
People do this kind of thing all the time, often without realizing it. E.g. people where I used to live wanted to cut down all the trees for "fire protection", despite the fact that the shrub and annual grass that would have replaced the trees were a bigger fire hazard than the trees. Curiously, there was an extremely strong correlation between people who wanted to cut trees for "fire protection" and those whose views stood to improve the most, but only a weak correlation between people whose houses were near trees and the same desire.
Aesthetics are important. If that's the real reason you or your dad is fighting this, best to recognize it now so you can recognize when you're prone to believe something false because it provides an excuse for your position. Then if you still want to spread misinformation to the city council, or whatever, well, that's up to you. That happens all the time. At least you can be intellectually honest with yourself (and with readers here).