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Will Wind Power Change Earth's Climate?
lommer writes "The Globe and Mail is currently running an article on a recent wind power study. A group of Canadian and American scientists has modelled the effects of introducing massive amounts of wind farms into North America and have come up with surprising results. While still having only 1/5th the impact of fossil fuels, wind power will still adjust the earth's climate with the equatorial regions warmed while the arctic grows colder. Could this be a boon for the nuclear lobby, or is this just further evidence for a diversified power-generating system?"
Wow! so we can affect temperature by building wind farms.
Just hope they will build a lot of these north of my town so we can stop that freezing north wind.
I surely wish Bush would agree to the Kyoto Protocol
Yes, it will... maybe.
So, they are saying that we're still going to have global warming?
This means it will reverse global warming.
You think wind farms (which are, after all, designed to let most of the wind pass) are going to have more effect than cities full of blocky buildings?
I think not.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
Energy cannot be created nor destroyed. There's a finite quantity of it in this universe, and it's not changing. Of course, Planet Earth is constantly gaining energy on a daily basis thanks to the generosity of The Sun.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that any form of energy capture, no matter how you do it is going to take energy out of the environment and that as a result changes the environment. I'm pretty sure if we had massive solar panels all over the place, that'd effect the temperature by taking sunlight that would have heated the ground and diverting it. There's no free source of energy, you've gotta take it from somewhere!
The global warming issue is a problem at the poles, as it's been presented to me. If we can make the arctic colder... maybe we'll have more hurricanes in Florida, but perhaps the seas won't rise...
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
From what I understand of Global Warming, the arctic getting warmer is a problem. According to the article these non-polluting wind farms would make the arctic colder...Bonus!
Sig- http://www.dreamhost.com/rewards.cgi?ayefly
Have big windmill/fans pointing at the nuclear plants so the radioactive steam goes AROUND my house and hits Indiana.
They won't notice.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
Why is it that people are so scared of nuclear plants, i would find global climate change to be a lot worse than the ever reducing risk of a nuclear accident. I'd rather have a few square miles potentially ruined than a certain change to the global system.
-- Checking emails and kicking cheats `till the day I die.
...is fusion power plants!
Or solar cells in space!
"Could this be a boon for the nuclear lobby, or is this just further evidence for a diversified power-generating system?"
Yes and yes. Of all the alternative power sources wind is just about the least practical for large scale explotation. Use the right system in the right place.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. It would take something this large of a scale to add enough drag to the airflow to affect climate. I still feel that there are better options to natural power, like tidal flow. The Moon still contains much more potential energy in it's motion to satisfy demands than atmospheric flow.
Besides, windmills are unsightly.
Does someone out there really expect wind power to become the major supplier (more than fossil fuels and nuclear) of Earth's energy? Is anyone out there really that naive?
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
...I was amazed by:
- how big it was (huge!)
- how noisy it was (I sort of thought it'd be silent; not sure why...)
- how still the air was immediately below it, even though the windmill itself was turning at a moderate rate
Quite an amazing piece of gear; if you ever get the chance to get up close to one, take it.
- Solar Energy (Not yet feasible)
- Nuclear Power (Here and now)
- Geothermal (Barely even considered
With those options, until Solar becomes feasible, let's stick with nuclear. Mmmmmk?...that any man-made alteration of the ecosystem is necessarily bad?
Seriously. OK, so a few species will go extinct. But who's to say that some species won't flourish as a result. The ecosystem will be different, but it won't necessarily be worse. The ecosystem will adapt.
I think it's safe to say that the poisons introduced by fossil fuel burning have a net negative effect. But wind farms? I mean, solve the bird blender problem and what's the harm otherwise?
I also wonder what effect huge solar farms would have on the ecosystem. Extracting energy from sunlight that would normally heat the crust of the earth might also have an interesting impact. But again, I don't think we should automatically assume that change is bad.
Their protests that we're destroying the environment is a basis for them to derive power from so that they can demand change to our way of life.
So, seriously, no matter what happens, they're going to complain.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
I heard this story last night on All Things Considered (NPR radio show); FWIH the wind power array size necessary to alter the climate would be able to supply the world's power today, and we know that's not happening anytime soon.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
This would tend to moderate the effects of global warming, as it would warm the arctic far more than the equator.
I'd be more worried if the wind stations did the reverse. Some arctic cooling will help to keep the ice caps stable.
I know that on a cold day, when I emit a little wind, my midsection gets warmer.....
So does this mean the United States is going to start invading windy countries?
I really don't think there's a perfect energy solution, especially not on the scale that we consume it. I think there are definitely ideal sources for certain uses, too.
This just shows that people largely thought that 'green' energy solutions were harmless, but they can still have a negative effect.
I'm all for making steady progress, and trying new stuff, but people also need to sit down and think about these solutions and their ramifications before passing laws in the name of environmentalism.
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
IF IT WERE A VIABLE MEANS OF MASS PRODUCING ELECTRICITY
To generate a useful amount of power from a wind turbine, it would require massive farms of these things which would devalue property in the surrounding areas, kill the birds flying overhead, destroy the natural habitat of the area, and be completely dependent upon having WIND at a constant or controlled speed. One tornado and your beautiful windmill farm is kaput.
If you want to do something like this, you want to have a predictable source of energy. Coal, oil, and natural gas are pretty predictable. It's predicted that they will be depleted in the next xx number of years. Nuclear power is predictable. It's predicted that the underground caverns in which we toss our nuclear waste will contaminate the ground water and kill wildlife for miles around not to mention any humans who depend on the contaminated water table.
No, the only power generation system that is both clean and dependable is one based on harnessing the tides. The Moon isn't going to be hurtling off into space or crashing down to Earth any time soon, so the tides aren't going to stop either. Other ideas like Geothermal are dependent on underground flows of magma which are inherently unpredictable.
So the answer to "Will wind power change Earth's climate?" is NO. Wind power will never reach sufficient capacity to have that kind of effect.
Of course they'll have an effect! Cities full of buildings have an effect, don't they? We already know that significantly altering the wind profile of the land changes the climate.
Now, many people say that 'of course they won't have as big an affect as a big city'. Maybe not. But wind power on a scale large enough to power that same big city, it might. It'd be significant, anyway.
I'm glad there's a study saying it now, but dammit people, duh!
Be quick about it, OK? OH, and when you kill yourself, do it in a forest by yourself so that you can be converted into plant material with the minimum of impact.
We can't get all of that last fifth of the 5 fifths -- though you worthless schmuck should do your part ASAP and stop ruining the environment with each extra breath or moment that you block the wind.
Thanks!
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
would it help if they make the turbines spin the other way?
As pointed out in Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything", the Earth has gone through a number of heating/cooling periods (cycles) and the current cycle is way overdue. This got me thinking about how much of the current global warming phenomenon is actually due to the use of fossil fuels and how much is the inevitable. There's no denying that our overuse of fossil fuels and our energy inefficient lifestyle has some blame but it would put things into perspective to know just how much. Here is a fairly reasonable article but if anyone else has any others please share.
...in many areas. Locals object to the noise, and conservationists object to the occasional bird flying into them.
But either way, this 'study' doesn't prove very much. Computer models aren't very good at predicting world climate, and the global changes that they're suggesting would (0.3 degrees to 2 degrees) are so small as to be essentially unmeasurable.
so like, who cares if it fucks up the weather in violent manner - more wind is more power right? itanium here i come baby.
but like, you know it'll like, all violent and windy right? when's the last time you watch some "doomsday" flick about the end of the earth due to man's pollution, blah, blah, blah....BUT, the "terrible" effect on the earth's weather is...serene 73% world wide, all year....with gentle showers on monday? Yeah, who knows.
um, if that don't make much sense...it's cause i'm high as a fucking kite.
Nuclear power always has to be near a water source, and always raises the water temp of the body of water that it sits on, usually by a number of degrees if i recall correctly.
This is a dramatic impact on the local habitat. No power source has no environmental impact.
There are lives at stake here!
Maybe we should just hold our breath and sufficate. That would solve the whole problem...
Isnt current global warming working faster at the poles? Lets just put up a bunch of wind mills. They dont even need to be hooked up to generators. Problem solved.
I've heard numerous times that for the same power output, a nuclear reactor generates less radioactive material than, say, a coal fired plant. The problem is that the nuclear waste is in a big chunk, and must be stored somewhere. My question is, why not pulverize said nuclear waste and pump it into the atmosphere? At worst, we'd be doing slightly better than coal plants right? And we'd have solved the waste storage problem... right? I'm sure there's something I'm missing (other than the obvious: that's just insidiously stupid).
I'm a little disappointed... I mean, I can understand CNN or NBC or someone like that getting a story before /., but NPR?
How can this possibly be good news for nuclear energy? A nuclear reactor produces huge amounts of heat - hence the huge, highly visible cooling towers. This point generally gets ignored, since people are far more concerned with other side effects of nuclear power - but any unbiased study of the total global side effect of each kind of energy generation is going to show wind ranking far above nuclear.
Not buying this. Seems like if the difference grew larger the winds would grow stronger, and balance would be maintained. Just at a little different level.
Also, building enough windfarms to power the world just isn't going to happen. At least until long after this jackass administration is gone. And even then....
Or else you'd know all we have to do is plug a couple cables into Daryl McBride and, combined with an advanced form of fusion, we can have an infinite self-renewing energy source.
...
Then again, perhaps it wouldn't be such a bad idea to at least try
I recall attending an environmentally oriented summer camp while in High School (Back in the dark, dark, 1980s when we had the worst environmental US President ever. Oh, never mind).
Anyway, the Prof in charge of the camp did some calculations showing that at the rate of growth for demand for electrical power, in order to switch to Nuclear, we would have to make enough plants so that no person in the Continental US would be father than 100 miles from one (don't remember all of the constraints - perhaps it was BS).
Anyway, if we use less power ( more efficient windows, LCD displays rather than monitors - the basics), we need less power, and we can cause less environmental impact for the same level of "goodness" of power benefits. Of course, we need to make some capital investments to get the same "goodness" with less power.
("goodness" in the Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" sense).
The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
I think there's something to be said from this:
No matter what we try and harvest as an energy source, we're always going to screw up this planet in some way.
Of course, that is until the invention of Mr. Fusion!
Course, on the other hand, since we're already warming up the planet with global warming, perhaps we can use this "side effect" of Wind Energy to balance the equation!
proposed tidal energy plants that I have seen would ruin the near-shore environment and destroy the surf breaks. So, no thank you. Throwing more crap into the ocean isn't going to solve anything.
why not construct a 10 sq. mile large solar panel out in space. have it shoot a laser back to earth for 8 hours a day, that heats up a huge copper block that in turn causes water to boil and the steam then fed into turbines to generate power? Work on battery powered cars and screw all the drama over oil.
I have yet to see a 'magic bullet' in terms of generating electrical power. There just isn't one yet. Every single kind of power generation has problems involved with it.
Wind -- Mentioned in article, provides a place for raptors to perch, allowing them to expend much less energy when hunting for prey, which decimates rodent populations (bad thing? depends on who you ask...) Also has been known to kill birds in the rotors. Plus rather complex and expensive engineering problems in generating the power to begin with as well.
Hydroelectric -- Trouble with fish populations, sediment issues, changes some local ecosystems. Removes hiking areas from lobbyists, prompting them to protect their recreation in the name of environmental protection (google 'drain Lake Powell.') But it's more straightforward to generate power than wind.
Coal -- Cheap, mature technology -- becoming MUCH cleaner than it has historically been. Lots of coal. Still quite polluting.
Oil -- Mature, relatively cheap -- also becoming more efficient, but still quite polluting, oil prices skyrocketing.
Biomass -- Uses biological sources (plant matter, leaves, food scraps, paper, etc.) to generate power -- less polluting than many think, since the 'fuel' used releases the same carbon into the atmosphere anyway (often within a few weeks/months) -- it just accelerates the process. Still, it's not the most optimal of solutions, and there are always valid concerns about toxic chemicals being released from burning garbage.
Natural Gas -- Cheap, cleaner than oil or coal, can be placed near suburban areas with few complaints (My job is next door to one, and I don't even hear it). Prices going up, limited fuel.
Nuclear Fission -- Can be very cheap, very little airborne pollution. Becoming very mature. Also has nuclear waste, public paranoia, U.S. refusal to reprocess used nuclear fuel that is 98% unburned -- they just 'dispose' of it. No new power-generating reactor has been built in the US in my lifetime. Although I hate to admit it, I personally think it may be something we'll have to rely on until well after I'm dead. Hopefully it'll buy time to get Fusion to a more practical state.
Nuclear Fusion -- Still experimental/unable to generate useful power, hopefully clean. Depending on the type of fusion, can be anywhere from near zero radiation (and radioactive waste) to levels (both instantaneous, and in terms of high-level waste) that have the same problems as fission.
Solar -- Woefully inefficient, one of the most expensive methods of generating electricity, although prices are dropping.
Geothermal -- I've heard this is (or has been) a maintenance nightmare, and is only practical in certain geological locations anyway.
Cold 'Fusion' -- not really sure if it belongs here, but there are still question marks about where the 'excess energy' generated is coming from. It simply sounds too good to be true - clean, safe power? I want to believe...
There are other types -- but I still haven't heard of the magic bullet. The best thing we can do as a society is strive for the highest efficiency in electrical use -- from generation to transmission to expenditure. Turn off those lights when you're not in the room (and, even if you are in the room if they aren't necessary...)
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
What with all the news about how fast the arctic is heating up, maybe a technology that has the large scale effect cools the poles and heats the equator isn't such a bad thing. Think of the bounty! A larger coffee-growing zone, great gobs of new skin-only beaches...
And malaria further north... Err... nevermind.
Just put them in the deforested areas of the areas previously known as rain forests. The trees were there before impacting the wind - now we can replicate this with windmills!
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
Their model is obviously not right. Maybe somebody slept through the class where they said, "If your program's output doesn't match common sense, it's probably your program that's wrong."
We occupy less than a third of the Earth's surface.
Windmills are maybe 100 meters high. The Earth's atmosphere is over 1000 times that thick (though it is, of course, thinner as you go up).
A windmill doesn't keep air from flowing even at the surface, it just slows it and disturbs it a little. Kind of like a tree. Are trees bad, too?
There is just no way we could build enough windmills to affect the Earth's climate.
Even if you could affect climate that way, who knows what other factors would show up to change the result? And that's ignoring the Earth's been getting warmer lately. Or has it? I can't keep up.
Taking energy out of the air doesn't destroy the energy - it just moves it. It'll get released into the atmosphere as heat somewhere else, eventually.
sigs, as if you care.
a) Is that a wind-powered generator in your front pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
-OR-
b) You know, a big, noisy, wind-propelled generator in one's front pocket would go perfectly with the big, noisy, wind-generating repeller that everyone carries around near their back pocket.
We were already reversing it!
It seems all those old growth forests were getting in the way of that fragile air circulation. I'm so glad we deforested the entirety of North America enough to make the climate liveable.
We should cut the rest down now, just to make sure.
Seriously, though, it seems as though if we require extreme amounts of energy to power our world, we will alter the world we extract it from. There is no free lunch (lifted from the article). Perhaps the answer is in being more efficient with the power we use, thereby requiring less. But I hate those damn econo-flush toilets.
You sure called that one right.
1. Walk to Taco Bell.
2. Buy 2 bean burritos.
3. Walk home.
4. Wait 8-16 hours.
5. Energy in the form of gas.
6. Sell gas to power company.
Repeat steps 1-6.
"Energy cannot be created nor destroyed" is the First law of themodynamics and can be credited to James Prescott Joule and Hermann von Helmholtz NOT Newton. He wrote the laws of motion!
Anyway this is nothing to do with the amount of energy in the system is to do with how the energy within the system is distributed, the wind fans increase the mixing of air levels (Turbulance). This has little affect during the day (apparently) but in the night results in warming air from higher up being mixed in.
James
Renewable sources such as wind or solar energy may disturb what happens in the atmosphere one way or another (cooler here, warmer there..), but they don't upset the overall energy balance. Energy that would have gone directly into heating the atmosphere, is channeled through our widescreen TVs and electric vehicles first, where it ultimately converts to heat that is re-radiated back to the universe.
I just heard the sad news on CBC radio. Palestinean president Yaser Arafat was found dead in his hospital room this morning. Even if you never liked his work, you can appreciate what he did for 80's television. Truly an Arab icon. He will be missed :(
Show me That Smile (The Growing Pains Theme Song):
Show me that smile again.
Ooh show me that smile.
Don't waste another minute on your crying.
We're nowhere near the end.
We're nowhere near.
The best is ready to begin.
As long as we got each other
We got the world
Sitting right in our hands.
Baby rain or shine;
All the time.
We got each other
Sharing the laughter and love.
For those of you who care the research paper can be found at http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0406930101v1.pdf
I make my face look like this and concerned words come out.
It would be considerably more difficult to do this for Antarctica because of the lack of land in the vicinity. Perhaps this is how Seasteads will come to the extreme southern oceans: not for the sake of freedom, but to put enormous wind farms there to keep the ice cap from turning all our favorite coasts into coral reef habitat.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Solar panels can capture maybe 30% efficiency (thats very good), and with wind mills and sometimes water wheels, alternative energy can potentially support a household with a running refrigerator, a couple of computers, and all the other modern conviniences, and still have energy to share.
The two main problems:
1) Cost. A full set of solar panels can cost in the tens of thousands. At Berkeley recently, they invented cells that are paper thin (and consequently cheap) but they have yet to hit the market (that I know of). Wind mills aren't cheap either, and neither are the batteries to store all that juice.
2) Complexity: Setting up and maintaining an alternative energy source system is not a trivial matter. Not only does it require some electrical knowledge, but set-up also needs substantial physical labor. Most people are not willing/unable to do so.
in order for these technologies to succeed, it simply needs to get cheaper, simpler, and more importantly there needs to be businesses specifically supporting installation and maintanance.
Yesterday, Environmentalists claim that over the last 30 years, the polar ice caps have 'lost' 8% of their volume. Oh the HUMANITY!! This report is everywhere you go, and being covered by everyone. At the same time, everyone is ignoring 3 year-old report researched by a Canadian scientist (not environmentalist) debunking the wild-eyed doom-and-gloom rhetoric saying that the ice isn't melting, it is shifting, like slush would.
I remain skeptical.
---
You liberals know you are wrong...get over it
...to start the revolution. One such as myself would argue that Humanity is natures next step in evolution for the entire planet. Just as Oxygen once was the poison of the planet, it is now the life giver. And just as humanity is putting stress on this planet, all other lifeforms that can adapt...will.
Life is not for the lazy.
Our entire electric light rail C-Train mass transportation system is powered by wind generation. Obviously, it's probably small potatoes on a global scale, but it does go to show that wind generated electricity is viable in regions that have steady wind patterns (ours is generated south of Calgary, in Pincher Creek). My understanding is that most of Pincher Creek is also powered by wind generated electricity. I honestly can't see how the climate could possibly be affected - the region is dry and extemely windy. Keep in mind that the towers are not very tall. I highly doubt they affect anything other than surface winds.
For those that are saying that they are noisy (they aren't, unless you're up close to them) or unsightly, I'd encourage you to check out a field of wind turbines, if you have one nearby. I'm not sure about the bird kill issue here in Alberta, I'd have to research that, but I've never seen a dead bird near any of the turbines any time I've visited them. They are clean, quiet, amazing structures. Pure geek awe, really...
Until we learn more by doing science, we should tinker less. But unfortunately, the time for such WISDOM seems to be over. Judging by certain governments, we seem to know enough to go on right ahead as we always have.
"equatorial regions warmed while the arctic grows colder."
No matter what we do, we'll be affecting the climate somehow. Power generation _is_ energy conversion and transfer. If we have to affect the climate, that seems like a darn good direction to push it in.
The equatorial regions will get a bit toasty, but at least it'll stop the icecaps melting. It's hardly ideal, but if you have to pick between a set of bad choices, this one sounds like one of the less awful ones.
I don't think we know enough to be able to balance energy capture in the way that's desirable, aside from wanting to keep cities cooler in the summer to reduce the formation of photochemical smog.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Maybe all of us should ride our bicycles.
If too many people cycle in the same direction to work each day, then will we change the earth's climate by creating unusually thin winds vectors?
Maybe we should walk instead.
If everybody walks, will the cumulative staccato bi-ped shocks cause the worms to move lower in the ground and cause our soil to become less rich and fertile?
Ya, you can tell my take on all this stuff is just slightly sarcastic. Maybe it's just because I got home late from work and am in the mood for a fight. Ya, in fact everything looks stupid right now. I'm going to bed.
... not friction.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Put overweight people on generator exercise bikes.
Blacktop roads have a far bigger heating effect than windfarms and no one is talking about changing that. Anyone who lives in the southwest can tell you that the difference between the temperature within city limits and the countryside can be dramatic. There were a lot of news stories a few years ago about the problem then the press lost interest. This is more hype. Everything we do affects the environment. It's to what to degree it affects it and how do we limit damage.Windfarms don't actually increase the temperature. They raise the ground temperature by mixing the air. Overall it's debatable how much damage is caused. We know coal and oil burning causes damage. Wind and similar sources are pretty obviously the lesser of two evils. Besides when is the last time you heard of some one getting mercury poisioning from a windfarm? Coal burning is the primary source of mercury in the environment.
Is it global warming, due to co2, and the polar regions melting? Or is it this, and the polar regions getting colder?
Or do they cancel each otehr out to some degree?
Maybe we can use both alternative energy sources and conventional ones so that earth remains the same!
10,000 windmills made a change of 2C 'locally' with its eddies. It did that by disrupting air close to ground. Trees could do that. Mountains could do that. I'm as worried about local temp change as I'm about the change in temperature in the generator of the turbine.
The article also didnt mention how many turbines will it take to cool the arctic and warm the south. Millions?
I believe 10,000 turbines are sufficient to power all Canadian homes and businesses, and will produce far less 'local' temp difference than all Canadian nuclear power plants.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
From TFA: "...have turbines that spin at 400 kilometres an hour..."
These guys are magic. Measuring an angular velocity in linear units.
Is it just me or is there something about journalists where, in technical articles, they have to put in gratuitous meaningless figures for no reason? Maybe it's to prove that they understand the subject.
Irrelevance be damned!
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
Wind - (Without incentives) - 4.35 cents Source
Coal - 3.5-4 cents (per an anti-GW science group) Source
(same article has claim from environmental group that ultimate cost of coal is as high as 8.3 cents per Kwh when you factor in pollution related costs)
I say keep working on wind and start retiring coal. Maybe the wind swept Dakotas are the new Texas oilfields.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
Um, we'll have it even if the entire human race disappeared today. I can't be the only person out there who realizes that the surface temperature, atmospheric composition, ocean salinity, polar caps, etc. are all VERY dynamic things.
We're contributing to climate change, without a doubt, but mother earth herself has a much greater say than our race.
That said, humans are amazingly resourceful, I think we'll do fine with global warming, we'll move up and inland as the ocean rises, no big deal in the long run. We can ship food and people can move relatively freely on the planet, so I don't expect rising oceans or desertification to be nearly as bad as most imagine it.
What I worry about are the toxic chemicals we're dumping, that's something mommy nature really CAN'T deal with well. It'll suck pretty hard if the oceans are reduced to plankton and jellyfish, I sort of like vertebrates. We need to start taxing every pound of plastic produced or something, and start making our 'disposable' commodities (computers, coffee cups, cars) more biodegradeable or recycleable.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
eriously. OK, so a few species will go extinct. But who's to say that some species won't flourish as a result. The ecosystem will be different, but it won't necessarily be worse. The ecosystem will adapt.
Due to mankind's incessant meddling, giant squids are taking over the world.
That HEAT changes the environment, because it is a net addition of energy. The earth must dissipate that energy (presumably the atmosphere losing heat into space) or the environment will still be changing.
Don't get me wrong - It may be a LOT better than any other power system because it is a linear effect rather than a greenhouse effect (and of course, fusion doens't work yet), but it still has some effect. PERIOD.
Actually, the worse problem is that if they are all facing to the west, it will slow down the rotation of the earth.
NO, silly! You attach it to the handlebars of your bicycle.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
From the post: or is this just further evidence for a diversified power-generating system?
Why is it that anyone in their right mind is expecting a catch-all cure for our current energy situation? We've never had one in the past and we probably won't see one for a long time to come.
This question plainly pisses me off... perhaps this poster is well meaning but anytime the fact that no alternative fuel can produce 100% of our needs we get the cranks crawling from under their rocks and screaming "What? No 100% solution?!?! Why do we bother with this crap?"... A Bunch of asshats the lot of them.
It's akin to someone offering you 2000 dollars twords a new car and you throwing it back at them for not being able to bear the entire bill. It's a bullshit attitude and the question itself holds no validity no matter what the answer is.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Help me out here...
The issue is not the magnitude of energy coming from the sun. I'm not sure anyone would believe that doesn't dwarf all of the energy we consume. The issue is NET magnitude of energy coming from the sun MINUS that the earth naturally dissipates into space.
Unfortunately, that data is a lot harder to get, because it can't be measured as an individual component, only as part of the larger earth system.
We can tell from past (ice & rock) records that these numbers are reasonably in balance (since the earth's temperature doesn't change all that much), but do you have any data pointing to the tipping point? For example, it would be fascinating to know just how much extra heat the few hundred PPM of CO2 in the atmosphere is capturing and how that compares to our energy usage of 17x10^12 watts. Without such data, the significance of 17x10^12 watts of extra power cannot be reliably determined.
If this cools the artic doesn't that "help" fight supposed warming of the artic? Wouldn't that be a good thing..?
http://www.hawknest.com/
Well, the scientists are not exaggerating, the original article is estimating effects of generating all current power consumption in various regions (US, Europe, and China) with wind turbines. Significant effects are already present at 2 TW generation rates, and (.5 C temp changes) and The effects are largely independent of how the turbines are arranged (assuming the same power extracted from the atmosphere). Anyway, don't have time for full read right now, but treat yourself to the article on PNAS, author David Keith. The point is we use ridicules amounts of power as Americans. Local effects are already quite pronounced.
Since he has many convenient plans on lowering the earths population such as 1: raising taxes on the poor so they starve, 2: waging wars in as many countries as possible, 3: removing taxes on the rich so they can enslave the poor and shorten their lifespans, 4: profit?
There is no conceivable way for mankind to convert any form of energy into something to conveniently heat or cool our homes, power our cars or run our industries without screwing with the planet.
Even if you put massive solar power plants in orbit and beamed microwave energy to to earth so that absolutely NONE of earth's resources were being consumed, we'd STILL be dumping that amount of additional heat into the earth's atmosphere.
The very best thing we can do is cut back on the amount of power we have to convert by doing less and doing whatever has to be done with greater efficiency.
(But you've gotta admit - microwave power plants in orbit is *cool*)
www.sjbaker.org
It seems the only way to make people smarten up about nuclear power is to force them into it. This study is very good.
Stick that in your green pipe and smoke it.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Vampires are immortal.
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
The mercury evaporated into the atmersphere by burning of coal is casting hazard to most of the industrial countries. And it must stop.
From this point, wind power is better than fossil power anyway.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
We can't do any engineering with greenhouse gas emissions, because they disperse globally in a way we can't control. But maybe we can intelligently place wind farms to prevent various catastrophes that we might foresee. So, if the arctic ice is melting and about to flood Florida, we can build wind farms to intercept a warm air stream going north. That way, we get power and keep the ice frozen.
Other dire predictions about Europe say that the continent will get colder as greenhouse gasses build up. Well, the biggest wind farm I know of is off the coast of Denmark in the North Sea. It's intercepting and slowing down cold air that's blowing towards land. Won't that make Denmark warmer? And isn't that a good thing? Maybe this research will help us build models so that strategically-placed wind farms can steer rain and warmth to fertile fields, and generate power at the same time. It doesn't look like a bad thing at all.
I suppose someone will next say that solar power cools the planet down.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Of course we puny humans can't affect the weather with our insignificant activities.
--
make install -not war
Ballparked the numbers from Google; they should be reasonably accurate. Oil is a very powerful medium to transport energy.
..that is JUST to replace oil consumption ..and that's JUST for the USA alone ..and that assumes an optimistic 50% productivity ..and that assumes 100% energy transfer like oil provides - you'd probably have 50% transfer loss on top of the above - how's 12,000,000 500kW windmills sound? ..and that assumes 0 growth in USA oil production
Oil alone;
MBPD = million barrels per day
Average US consumption of oil per day: ~22MBPD
World Consumption: ~85-90MBPD
Energy in a barrel of oil: ~6.1e9 J
1kWh = 3.61e6 Joules.
Doing some numbers: 1 barrel of oil ~1700kWh
1700kWh/barrel x 22e6 barrels/day x 365day/year =
1.37e13 kWh - Yes, that's 10^13
How many windmills is that?
Let's assume medium-sized windmills for an average - 500kW units. Those are some big honking windmills, but not impractical.
How much energy will one of those provide assuming a 50% cycle (a little on the high end, but hey, let's be optimists) over the course of a year?
500kW x 24h/day x 365d x 0.5 = 2.2e6kWh
1.37e13kWh / 2.2e6 kWh = ~6,234,000 windmills. That's six MILLION windmills.
In short.. fusion, hot or cold, or someone better find out how to extract energy from the quantum vacuum (e.g. casimir effect) or we're all fu.. er, finished.
..don't panic
The argument was "solar panels are dark in colour, so more heat will be produced, adding to global warming".
"OMG!" I replied, "we'd better go out and paint all the roads white as well, since they'll be doing it too."
My response to this anti wind farm argument is trees, cities, mountains etc also affect air flow.
There are sane arguments against extensive wind power (maintaince costs, small size of units, inconstant winds etc) before going off into the realms of fantasy. If you want some energy, and you don't care when, wind is perfect, which is why it has been used for pumping for centuries and is being used to suppliment generators and save fuel now. Wind has a place - energy monocultures can make things difficult, and some other forms of energy can't break even without selling byproducts as weapons.
What about all the areas opened up from clear cut logging allowing wind to flow easier, a few wind turbines will hardly slow down wind in comparison! Besides, we're talking about wind 400 feet or below, wind thousands of feet higher is the same as it ever was, idiots!
Oh no, what will become of the global warming models books and films now if this happens. We'd like , err have to dig out the old models again. There goes my sun drenched beach holiday in the artic, and I can like totaly forget about skiing in the equtorial parts. Darn.
I've been thinking of a plan to put solar arrays on tube domes over freeways here in Southern California, one of the biggest users of electricity anywhere.
The idea is that the land is already being used so it would not impact new land, the atmosphere over freeways is already fscked so no change there or possible with additions like air scrubbers you could posivitely impact it. Additionally solar heat is already being wasted over freeways so there would be zero gain/loss there. During periods of rain the dome tubes would provide some protection from the elements improving safety and reducing maintenance costs for those covered areas..
The structures themselves would be lightweight, low cost super-structures with translucent plastic panels covering them, with the lowest cost solar collectors available, since there will be soo many of them they don't need to be super-efficient.. they just need to be abundantly available, low-cost and sturdy enought to last several years between upgrades. Of course as more efficient low-cost components become available they can be swapped in.
The system could begin with a small demo/trial project and would be very scalable and robust as it would be such a lightweight structure that construction would be quick, prefabbed and able to be placed via crane very quickly. The only permanent components would be the foundation 'tie-downs' which could also hold all of the electronics and capacitors needed to convert/monitor and transmit the collected energy.
If needed the tubes can be sem-solid grids to allow exhaust gases to escape and later in the systems maturity air scrubbers could be put in place.
Certainly some engineering would be needed to ensure earthquake safety but because they are superstructures they would allow for a lot of movement.
Keeping them clean seems like the biggest challenge, certainly more a political problem than anything else. I'm thinking organic solvents on the top outside with an insolvent transparent surface veneer to protect the collector arrays. A high pressure sprayer mounted on a vehicle could be used during non-peak hours to clean the insides of residue. Eventually it could be automated with a rail based robotic sprayer running the course on a schedule... decades down the road.
Definitely a big public works project but certainly achievable, especially in a State that really, really needs a new source of renewable energy to supplement it's growing demand.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Just take a line of those windmills, point half to the North Pole, half to the South pole, and hook them into the grid.
I bet we can keep the temperature variant steady, and still make power.
You can't take the sky from me
There is something wrong with this study.
/1000th of the total kinetic energy of the total heat exchange at most
The lower kilometer or so of the atmosphere is called the planetary boundary layer (PBL). It is not really modeled well in numerical atmospheric models, but is typically treated as a friction layer (i.e., given a single coefficient of friction). It is very hard to get these "lumped" coefficients of friction right - for example, they tend to be too low over mountain ranges.
The equator to pole temperature exchange occurs in the 20 km or so of the troposphere ABOVE the PBL. The PBL is barely involved, and is frequently ignored entirely in numerical models. Vertically averaged and spatially averaged, the pole to temperature heat exchange causes a wind of about 10 meters per second (in the 20 km of the troposphere above the PBL). To first order the PBL is decoupled to this and doesn't move at all (mean wind speeds of a few meters / second at most).
So how in the heck are even a forest of wind farms in the PBL (basically all of them except for any on mountain tops will be in the PBL) significantly slow down the heat exchange up in the troposphere when
- they hardly interact with it and
- the PBL has about 1
This doesn't pass the back of the envelope smell test; it's no wonder that they had such a hard time passing peer review.
We already knew that hydro-electric generators have this effect on water ecology. It only makes sense that wind would do something similar above ground.
... but nothing stops the production of nasty spent fuel and we've proven over and over that stuff along those lines will leech into the environment at least a little no matter what we do.
... as was pointed out today on a local NPR station when talking about Colorado's new requirement that energy sellers must produce 10% from renewable sources by 2015. They pointed out that 4% of the total must come from solar and are balking because wind and hydro are so much cheaper. Yes, cheaper for -them- but still more expensive to everything in the long-run.
But this being a push for the Nuclear lobby? No thanks. No, I'm not a conspiracy nut who refuses to acknowledge that a properly run fision plant built to modern specs can be run safely
Until Nuclear -fusion- is possible here on Earth, or unless someone figures out that solar panels will cool the Sun, I think I'll take my fusion energy from the sky.
Yes, Solar is more expensive
Of course, I will gladly watch wind and hydro generators replace "clean coal" (that damned coughing eagle!) and hold back fision lobbies, as pointed out wind is still more friendly by far than those sources. But in the end the only good solutions are going to be solar, fusion and if the Sim folks are right, Helium3.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
An important question which was not answered in the article.
Isn't theory a great place? Everything works in theory.
"Wind turbines tower over an employee at the McBride Lake Wind Farm southwest of Fort Macleod, Alta. The site is Canada's largest single-site wind farm."
Canada's largest single-site wind farm . . . there was THREE of em in that picture. Seriously, I think it would be absolutely great if we actually started using a non-carbon energy source to the extent that we had to worry about climatological effects. I live in the mid-west and I often drive past a few of them passing through Omaha. Now, I'm guessing, I'm in the minority of people who actually have them nearby and see them. We have a while to go before we really have to start worrying about this so I say hoo-rah to wind power for now.
...merely by humans insisting on living by the teeming millions in huge packed concentrated heat and pollution sink urban areas. You not only get the same effects of "wind disruption" by all the construction and thermal mass from the concrete, etc, but it's here, now, not theoretical in the mysterious future,and the effects are measurably greater. But LOOK, we are all still here!
I invite any meterologist here to confirm (or debunk if you can) this microclimate effect-which isn't all that "micro" in a lot of areas.
The real bottom line is--we are humans, we got a right to live and BE human.
Yes, our lives will cause some disturbance to "the planet". SO WHAT? The best we can do is a compromise, live as humans with our eletricity but be smart about it.
If you can get your power by a combo of big climate change + big pollution,(we burn crap now, remember greenhouse gasses and pollutants that get into the air and soil and water? And all that heat we make with the electricty produced, it gets turned into that after doing our stuff we want it to do) goes OUTSIDE eventually causing e-vile climate change or we get the electric power we want by noticeable but much less severe climate change and much less the pollution.
Hmm, lemme cogitate on that... I say it's a no brainer, I vote "get the electricity but do it smarter with less planetary FUBAR and less pollution".
Put a few million more rust belt workers back to work manufacturing. Put another million more installers and maintenance techs to work. There, gimme my props, I helped solve "outsourcing" and "job creation" to a big degree as well.
It's a win/win/win for wind
Wind gennys are not that hard, they are big electric motors with propellers on them basically. That's it. Nothing magical about it. The tech has been around a long time. We had a thriving wind electric generation business in the early 1900s in this nation. We can build these things and they work. You can make them from tiny (I own a 300 watter you can easily hold in one hand) all the way to humongous, each one able to power hundreds of average homes. Right now it's in the low single digits of total electric production in the US, but it IS there, it is roughly equivalent to "linux on the desktop" with deployment (kinda sorta). And if you look at the graphs, it's climbing outtasight.
IMO, good deal, more power!
In a system connected to the grid you shouldn't really need batteries. Whenever you have excess power from wind or sun, you sell it back to the grid. Every Watt/Hour from wind or sun is one less Watt/Hour that needs to come from other sources. This means the coal fired plant can be throttled back, or the Hydroelectric Dam can be closed, allowing the resevoir to rise for a calm, cloudy day.
Personally, I've always wondered about dams. Water vapor is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO or CO2, and dams increase the surface area of our waterways. What does this do to evaporation and how does that affect the climate?
There has also been a lot of wetland drainage for agriculture which reduces surface area.
Some Hydro dams eliminate seasonal flooding downstream which greatly reduces seasonal wetlands.
Not good for ducks, don't know about climate.
I think this article is what you get when the sort of economist that believes the compound interest formula is the answer to everything is let out without adult supervision.
If everyone used the professor's invention to watch TV or use their computer the world would be much cleaner, except for extra poo from food required to peddle all day long!
No wonder these interesting "scientific research results" keep showing up.
Sorry, but I won't buy it. With that jackass on the steering wheel, we all know damn well what the US stance will be in all this for the next four years.
1 Earth is warming, 2 It's us, 3 it's royally bad, 4 we need to take action NOW
Nuclear energy is an interesting science experiment, but a bad commercial energy source.
1. Its too expensive, the last plant to come on line in the eighties in the US, generated electricity a cost higher than solar power of the same era (the luz plant). After around $3 trillion in R&D funding, subsidies, loan guarantees, insurance no fault legislation, etc nuclear power is STILL a commercial failure only to exist out of the "goodness" of governments around the world.
2. Smart engineers know Murphy always wins. Its not IF there's going to be a serious accident (there have been many already), its WHEN. Reliability and safety only comes in nines - no such thing a 100% perfect.
3. Nuclear proliferation. The nuclear power industry is the only other major user and generator of nuclear materials other than nuclear weapons. You eliminate nuclear power and nuclear proliferation is easily controlled. Remember it only takes 5lbs of plutonium or 25lbs uranium to make a bomb. Once you've got the material, the bomb itself is literally garage science.
4. Compared to alternative energy (solar, wind, geothermal, wave, etc.), it's less commercially viable with far more risks. Nuclear power only wins on one account: energy density. And yet, outside of a nuclear submarine, this isn't an advantage! Transmitting power is twice the operation costs and ten times the capital cost compared to the generation of that power. Small decentralized power souces such a solar, photovoltaics, wind, etc is far cheaper overall.
5. Large monolithic power plants take years to build, the investment makes no sense without government subsidies if you have to wait 5 years just to begin to make some income, and 15 years to breakeven. Modular power technologies that are built on an assembly lines, such as photovoltaics generate returns within days.
I could go on here, but I think you get the point. Nuclear energy is a fun science experiment, but commercially we should cut our losses and run.
Solar power is after all fusion power already done for us, at a safe distance, and transmitted free nearly equally around the world with sufficient energy density to suit the worlds needs for millennia to come.
Interpretation for computer guys:
Nuclear power: old complex clunky mainframe, prone to bugs.
Solar power: wireless handheld with worldwide networking
I say we just shoot the waste into space. What are the chances anyone is going to know where it comes from?
Plus we might annoy some aliens they come here and either A)Tell us to stop, we do, we become friends B)We die, the enviroment is saved!
In fusion, the result is Helium, which is NOT radioactive. The only radioactivity produced is from nutron capture (generator makes lots of nutrons and they are captured by the reactor mass, like metal supports). This radioation would require that the reactor be replaced every once in a while (few decades) since steel starts to become britle.
Now, fusion is considered "clean" because all of the resulting radioactive compounds have a short halflife. You only have to store the used reactor parts for a hundred years or so before radioation goes down to acceptable levels. And there is NO radioactive waste since He is not radioactive.
I prefer forced sterilization of un-desirables. Sure we have to put up with them till they die, but it's more humane this way.
Specifically, if wind generation were expanded to the point where it produced one-10th of today's energy, the models say cooling in the Arctic and a warming across the southern parts of North America should happen. The exact mechanism for this is unclear, but the scientists believe it may have to do with the disruption of the flow of heat from the equator to the poles.
So they created a computer model, which when run indicated drastic temperature shifts across the globe. And yet they don't know by which mechanism this occurred????
Obfuscated Code contests aside, if a computer programmer can't figure out out how his program came up with the answer that it produced, then he either lied about his C.S. degree or he's trying to sell you snake oil.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
A good majority of that 22MBPD is for refinement into Gasoline, Jet Fuel, Kerosene, Plastics, Fuel Oil (for heating), etc.
It's all burned and turned into heat. If there is no oil, or the plan is to stop burning oil - a replacement for that energy is needed. Very little is turned into hard goods. My point is that the green technologies are way, way, way, way, way off from being feasible as any kind of replacement.
So, make them 1MW. I'll do one better - make them -10MW-. You still need millions, and you are assuming high utilization rates.
Everything around you is energy. Nothing else really matters a whole lot.
..don't panic
Well at least we won't have to worry about the ice caps melting since the wind power's cooling would cancel out the fossil fuel's warming
ANY move away from fossil fuel is good.
TANSTAAFL (There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Lunch).
The results of this research doesn't surprise me in the least. I agree that the actual results may be a bit different, but the general result is almost a no-brainer.
For the most part, winds are convection currents -- generated by the difference in temperature and humidity between different spots in the world -- but heat is the serious driver in this. As an overall results, physics will call for an equalization of states -- this means cooling the equator and heating the poles.
Windmills bleed off some of the kinetic energy from this process, as such, they're almost guaranteed to slow the process of pumping heat from the equator to the poles.
This is, however, probably a good thing, because other studies have concluded that the arctic will be (and has been) more affected by global warming than the temperate and tropical regions, so slowing the process would actually help to cut back some of the side effects of global warming, and possibly help to protect the polar ice caps (and thus moderate the resulting ocean level rise).
It's not a question if projects like this on a large scale would affect the weather. The answer to that is a no-brainer (yes). The question is how, and (probably more importantly) how we could most beneficially manage the resulting side-effects.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
What sort of efficiency do you want?
The average house roof area (2000 sf) generates ~8 times (188 kWh/day)the average house consumption (24 kWh/day) with 17% efficient panels (sharp, BP, sunpower).
There is enough roofspace in the US (1.76E11 sqft) to provide 2.5 TIMES the electrical consumption of the country 3.4E12 kWh/year).
Photovoltaics at 17% efficiency has 4 times the energy density per square meter of strip mined coal (9666 kWh/m^2 average thickness of 1 meter) over its 30 year guaranteed life.
And thats just average photovoltaic panels. Multijunction concentrators are getting 40% efficiency at 500 suns. Several companies are starting to produce these (Entech, sharp) projecting $1 per peak watt of capacity (1.5 cent per kWh over its 30 guaranteed life).
We still have an option to quickly rectify everything by using these peoples sneezing at the same time.
Iceland gets a 100% of their electricity from geothermal. The issue isn't maintainence it's the fact that there are few places on the globe where it is consistent and accessable. Hawaii is another place that has similar conditions and it gets power from geothermal. Everyone wants a magic bullet solution. The answer isn't one source but many different each where it applies best. In California the energy department admitted the best solution to the short term power shortages was solar. It works best at peak hours, can be installed locally so there is no line loss and areas with shortages can be directly addressed. Nothing was been done to encourage more solar. Instead they dropped the polution standards so they could reopen dirtier power plants. Few want to factor in line loss when they talk about solar. A substantial amount of the "cheap" power is lost before it ever gets to the customers. Also no one likes to factor in the secondary costs which most alternative sources lack. If power companies were forced to pay for their own clean up on "cheap" sources like nuclear they would be insanely expensive. By definaition the clean up costs are incalculable for nuclear because no one has ever perminately cleaned up a single mess. All they have done is moved the contamination and or waste to another temporary site. Imagine cleaning up all the contaminated soil and ground water? This is from a few decades of recieving a small percentage of our power from nuclear. Not to mention about thirty thousand nuclear weapons. Tens of billions of dollars have already been spent of the public's money to clean up nuclear, coal and oil messes the power companies left. If you factor in those legitimate costs alternation sources start looking attractive. This is ignoring another secondary cost, health care. What are the costs of air polution, cancer and mercury poisioning alone?
As to biomass there's a pilot plant that is nonpoluting that turns waste from a chicken processing plant into fuel oil. It does release carbon dixiode when burned but it's renewable and gets ride of a waste that was contaminating the environment and turns it into something needed. I'd even consider coal in the short term if they were forced to use scrubbers to remove polutants and a method could be found for removing the bulk of the carbon dixoide. The sad thing is most of the antipolution equipment adds only a few percent to the costs but the companies view that as profits lost so they have lobbyist attack the bills. There's really only one problem here. Every other issue is tied to it, corporate greed.
...that not all fans come attached to an AMD processor.
To do list for Windows
1. Your sig looks like people. And reminds me of the "Soylent Green" cheat in Command+Conquer Red Alert for PS1 (possibly in other versions of the game too, don't really know).
2. I might have a hard time sleeping tonight thinking of that.
You've got it backwards. Power plant energy scale has been declining exponentially for three decades because bigger is not better. What brought down any recent blackout you remember? power generation? No! distribution. Smaller local decentralized power sources are far more economical, because you can discount the cost of grid augmentation which costs TWICE that of power generation. Distributions the problem not generation. Do you research, solar is sufficiently dense. Large power plants, take too long to build and make profit, Nuclear plants are the worst.
2. France and Japan's nuclear programs are heavily government subsidized, no proof of commercial viability there.
3. Chernobyl and three mile island are two of a litany of nuclear accidents. There is no such thing as a foolproof design, any engineer who thinks this isn't true is bound for disaster. With nuclear, the risks are huge, with renewables the risks are small.
Do some research. Educate yourself about the real state of renewables. You'll find there is no reason to even consider the risks of nuclear, because renewables are cheaper, more reliable, no safety risks, more decentralized, no proliferation issues, faster breakeven point, no environmental wastes, can be localized to use, etc.
Now why do we need Nuclear power, if there is no benifit?
JUST SIGN THE CONVENTION OF KYOTO!!
+ environment
http://unfccc.int/
(Are you UN or not?)
Almost every goverment of the UN has a difficult job by following the rules of this convention, while some other countries still have to find out everybody knows...
http://www.google.nl/search?q=influence+windpower
go ahead, mod me as a troll
_ In Egypt Networks: Network Solutions with a Twist
As we find more and more energy sources, the "average joe" will find more and more ways to waste them. The problem will grow with the solution. I see it in my roommates: I replaced all the iredescent bulbs in our house with 14 watt florescent. The result? Our power bill went up 10 dollars each because everyone thought we had "extra energy." Even now, one of them is running one of those ungodly electric space heaters. Do you find a higher paying job or cut cost in living expenses? Frankly, I think we need to educate the masses to a far greater extent to live conservatively. The occasional power company radio ad just isn't cutting it.
thanks in advance
This is almost pure speculation on my part, but I think that the major factor in this result is going to turn out to be mixing of air from the boundary layer (near the Earth) up into the jet (laminar flow region). I know that my fluid mechanics-fu are no where near up to the task of solving this problem; but I can just imagine how much worse the flow over a semi-infinite flat plate problem would get if mixing were introduced.
My CPU fans create a lot of wind. By installing some wind turbines inside my computer, I could of course gain some power, but it WILL increase the temperature.
We must never forget that Winds of the Earth are also the cooling system of the Earth.
People who drive SUVs are nothing but obscene greedy gluttons polluting the world and making terrorists rich!
Right here.
I resent your implication.
I thought it said:
Will Will Power Change Earth's Climate?
Bit odd, isn't it?
Do you realize what we have been doing with nuclear waste?
I've not read the report, but from the post it would seem that the effects from wind power would be to cool the poles... and warm the central regions....
While I would generally aggree that _any_ man-made change in the environment should be considered as potentially dangerous, is this an example where we could off-set some of the otehr damage we have done?
In particular, if global warming is going to have such a disasterous affect on the poles (warming) and wind power could potenially cool the poles, then maybe wind power should be encouraged even more strongly.
Additionally, realistically, how much power could we generate using wind power? The paper reports on the affect of 10% of power from wind power, but I doubt we could reach that level within the next 25 years.
Call me a cynic, but I think this is probably yet another too-narrow focused report.... possibly playing into the pro-nuclear lobby's hands.
Too bad.
return 0; }
Not according to wind's growth rate.
The obstacles are surmountable.
than this Slashdot headline.
The bottom line is...
the results are inconclusive, and this needs to be studied more. It is quite possible that the predicted changes would be a good thing. My interpretation of this: While global warming tries melt the ice caps, this would cool them off.
The researcher also pointed out that the models were so rough, things could be quite different from what they predicted in this preliminary study.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
The exact mechanism for this is unclear, but the scientists believe it may have to do with the disruption of the flow of heat from the equator to the poles.
Now, if one performs an experiment and has unpredicted results, it's understandable. But if you run a simulation and can't explain the results, something is probably wrong. Even if usual suspicions towards such complicated simulations are put aside, it still doesn't make a lot of sense.
See a recent issue of National Geographic which shoes the methane (or whatever it is) burnoff from oil refineries - why isn't that worth capturing. Ever drive through Texas and wonder why those enormous gas flames atop the refineries there are heating up the night sky ?
The real issue as I see it is not how to generate more energy more efficiently with less environmental impact.
The issue is how to use that energy much more efficiently than we do now.
I don't think the generation of energy is anywhere near as significant an issue as the WASTE of energy that is taking place all the time !
see: http://slashdot.org/~wass
And, incidentally, I hardly think an unimpressive string of 2's counts as being "modded into oblivion", its really much more like being ignored, or perhaps a bit like getting "Two'd".
since the past 30 years of burning fossil fuels has warmed the arctic and cooled the equatorial regions.. wouldn't this effect be a good thing...
Just Limin' Mon
The authors looked at what would happen if a significant percentage of the earth's surface was covered with wind farms; most advocates of alternative energy sources propose a diverse mix of different renewable energy sources. And, yes, it would have an effect. Probably, an effect not very different from the effect of having lots of forests.
Unlike greenhouse gas emissions, the effect is immediately reversible (CO2 stays in the atmosphere for centuries, but wind farms could be stopped or removed), and it mostly counteracts the consequences of the greenhouse effect (e.g., it creates arctic cooling).
The author himself states that he thinks that this is unquestionably preferable to greenhouse gases--he called it a "no brainer", actually.
"A lot easier" doesn't mean that much: you have potentially more than 100 nations generating indestructible, highly toxic materials and you are relying on every single one of them to get the storage exactly right. Do you trust Afghanistan to do the right thing with nuclear waste? Some African nation in the middle of a civil war? Who guarantees no terrorist is going to dig up the stuff? Who is going to pay for the engineering, land, and legal costs to build 10000 year secure storage facilities? So far, not even the US has managed to do this. And the only reason nuclear energy is cost-effective at all is because the nuclear plant operators don't even have to pay those costs--the tax payer does.
Between creating indestructible, highly toxic materials and unremovable gases that change global climate and coastlines, neither is a good choice. The best choice is still to reduce consumption and increase the use of alternative energy.
God forbid anyone would consider using less energy as a solution to the world's energy crisis.
ok, now how many people died operating coal fired power plants? I bet its at least an order of magnitude larger.
- Try these:
- Telegraph | News | Four killed in Japan's worst nuclear power accident
- New Scientist: Japan's nuclear safety "dangerously weak"
- Wired News: Nuclear 'Glitches' in Japan
- Japan Economic Institute: EXPLOSIVE FIRE BLASTS JAPAN'S NUCLEAR POWER PLANS - No. 16, April 1997
- More search results
"They have wonderful, clean air, too."Ok, What about the city skyscrapers that we build? The way we change entire regions? I really dont see how wind production, though some how linked in that paper, can contribute to GW on that scale it (the paper) claims to be.
This report looks like it's glowing green, and I'm not talking about the money....
The problem is that followers of western culture simply have an ecological footprint that is much too high to be sustainable. What we need to do is become less arrogant, and realise that there are six billion people on this planet, and rising, and that the only fair way is a healthy medium that will work when we all do it. Right now, we're destroying the earth and flooding countries out of greed for things that the countries in question could never afford.
It's okay to spend what you have, but when you're taking out loans you can't pay back just to keep up your extravagant lifestyle, you need to wise up, or go see a therapist.
Of course, the one big difference with Cherobyl is that it's much more devastating than a faulty car. You can only screw up so many nuclear plants before people, animals, and land suffer immeasurably for it.
The earth core would actually cool down within a couple of million years. It stays hot because of natural radioactivity.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
The solar cells will pay back the energy used to make them in one to four years; neither slate nor asphalt shingles will yield anything.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I've often thought that a lot of the "green" solutions proposed would have major down sides when looked at on a large scale.
Some of these effects may be piffingly small, some may not be.
"Zero" emition cars. (fule cell etc): So the "only" output is water vapour. which is "safe". How much of an effect will that be when there's a million or so cars chugging round London or SF pushing out tonnes of water vapour. At the very least there will be an effect on the local climate, (and in europe probably as big an effect on the medievel buildings as polution has had) and there could possibly be an effect on the macro climate too.
As China's (and India's) standard of living rises, expect their CO2 emissions to rise as well. Given their population, their total emissions will far exceed that of the US. Not that's a global warming crisis just waiting to happen. Remember that total emissions=emission per person*population. So individual consumption rate is not the only factor of the global warming problem.
wind power will still adjust the earth's climate with the equatorial regions warmed while the arctic grows colder.
Then we'll simply increase our output of greenhouse gasses to even it out. Once again, as we learned from Jurassic Park, nature finds a way!
Disclaimer: I'm Off Grid and loosely affiliated with an Alternative Energy Resource Site (btw, we could use some help !)
Also, I have designed and constructed a 2.4 KW Windmill
MP3 Search Engine
the take home point is that by redirecting the flow of energy the human species can make changes in the climate. No matter how you "generate" the energy it ends up as heat and by products will be created. There is not excuse for living inefficiently.
Hey, I live in Alaska. I am overjoyed at the possibility that it will return us to hearty weather of my youth. (not joking) Maybe it will send some of the tourists back down their to live.
Part of the philosophy of Alaska is that we have few people. lately, people have been migrating here from places like Seatle while weve had some soft winters. Id like adverse weather so they go back home. Besides, any true Alaskan LOVES snow and cold weather. (still not joking)
We get weather men or women here from the states that are all like "SUN and heat good, SNOW clouds and ice BAD!" This is so untrue in Alaska, and Im not just refering to the fact that we are more comfy (acclimated) in colder weather. You see in the middle of winter the SUN means lower temperatures and quite often a biting wind. Clouds usually mean snow and warmer temps. Lets put it this way, when it snows a lot of people call in sick and go sking, snowmachining, ice fishing, dogsledding, etc... Snow and ice mean fun. DAMNED TOURISTS, GO BACK HOME TO THE LOWER 48! >:p
Party at O'zorgnax's Pub! Buy me a Slurmtini aye?
Let me start by disclosing that I served in the US Nuclear Navy.
I would imagine that there are areas where he is carried (warm and cold) that could do without more heat going their way.
Regardless, the amount of heat dumped into the local river from cooling that nuke plant greatly outways the the possibly increased heat in another area because the heat is now dumped there when coverted by a windy turbine(s) there.
Is Karl Rove now posting to this board? Here we are getting wrapped up in a debate about wind turbines not allowing as much heat to disappate as letting the wind flow. The real story here is that those Nuke plants, while not producing anywhere near as much short term damage, baring accident, as a coal or natural gas fired plant, dump far more heat into the atmosphere than a large scale wind farm. The article states that if 1/10th of the global electrical production was wind, it's effects would be 1/5 that of carbon dioxide it replaced.
And what about the heat output of a nuke plant. Anyone every been near one? Warm water growing seasons in rivers through the winter or warm water water dumped in a frigid river at the wrong time of the year. That has major climate effects. It can also cause major damage in the short term when power plant cooling water is withheld and the river is adjusted to the higher temperatures in winter such as when the surrounding river temperature is 35-40 f but the area at the plant and downstream for 1/2 mile ranges from 50-75 f. Shut off the warm water for a day or too and that 75 plunges to 35 faster than the animals can cope, killing them or disrupting their cycles.
I mentioned Karl Rove earlier. Legislation requiring something like this in his world would be called something like "Healthy Planet Initiative". I can foresee them (yes them) argue that wind power power is a destructive force because it heats the planet so more coal and nuke plants get built with great taxpayer subsidies.
Given the current administration in Washington, with it's pro energy industry culture, I think it will be very difficult to get alternatives adopted in any largescale way, with or without increased government incentives. Huge dollars annually are paid in subsidies to the energy companies and will as well be for any new plants the Bush administration wants. If these same dollars were spent just on incentives (rebates, buydowns, tax breaks) for small scale, grid intertied installations, the government could assist or pay for home and commercial building roof installs, sufficient to increase power generation capacity to make up the shortfall that we now experience.
Besides, a more distributed power infrastructure is inherently more secure for the country. It's also less expensive to maintain when including security costs and environmental/cleanup costs. When you further consider that if a wind farm or your neighbors solar roof gets blown up, there are no real environmental consequences other that largely litter and someone being homeless. When a nuke plant or a coal plant gets blown up, you have radiation or coal dust. And you don't need to station soldiers to guard the roof.
"You can't change the system without...changing the system." Taking energy out of the air causes unwanted things to happen, just as when putting energy into the air. Likewise massive adoption of tidal energy taps, hydroelectric dams, or use of biomass for energy production will alter the surroundings in some way, perhaps very unfortunately. We need to evaluate *any* energy system as carefully as we do the ones that are everybody's favorite targets.
If we as a species had any sense w.r.t. politicians, I'd say we should look into how we can use the side-effects constructively, to tune our global climate in response to e.g. minor changes in solar output (which we *know* happen from time to time) or atmospheric changes beyond our control (such as dust from massive volcanic eruptions). Maybe when humankind is older and (presumably) wiser.
It's obvious that a wind-generator slows down the passing air, i.e. makes the wind weaker. Afterall it has to take the energy it delivers from somewhere.
What is pretty hard to believe is that wind-generators are in any way special in this sense.
When we remove forest, and replace it with cropland, we take away a lot of wind-braking. A forest is a more efficient brake for the lower air than any conceivable windmill-density. And we have removed a *LOT* of forest the last few hundred years.
To make this plausible they would have to argue that the net sum of human activites act more to erect brakes for the wind than it does to remove them. This seems a pretty unreasonable conclusion on the face of it. And like they say, extreme claims require extreme evidence.
Yes! I was having an argument about this at the weekend with a couple of people who couldn't grasp how extracting energy from the wind would change the wind. While they wouldn't believe a word I said, they are the type of people who believe what they see in the media.
Thank You Globe and Mail
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
Yea, thats why the terrorists really took the trade centers down. they were screwwing up the climate and blocking the wind in the middle east, causing it to be a desert, (or is that dessert ;).
Really though, this is a rediculous arguement. How many turbines would you have to put up to equal the wind stopping power of one face of the Sears tower or the petronis towers? This is so dumb. It suggestes that in taking down trees, (removing friction) and putting up a wind turbine (adding friction) that we unbalance things. lol.
So colder in the arctic and warmer in the equator?
Why is this a problem? Last I heard we were concerned with the melting ice caps in the arctic. To me this would seem to be a step tword repairing that problem. Not just the projected imediate teperature change but adding to that the absence of the greenhouse gasses that were produced by the fosil fuel burning power plants that the wind mills would replace.
As for someones mention of noise in the comments, I have been near one of these farms somewhere in Minnesota and I couldn't hear anything. Perhaps this is a brand traight though.
~Petaris "The world is open. Are you?"
This is just another reason that world leaders need to stop being petty, flip a coin, and start work on the international fusion reactor! Spend those billions already!
Isn't it nice that this would mean the end of the threat of melting polar ice caps.
I am amazed that with all these geeks, no one mentioned the benefit.
Always look on the bright side of life.. whistles
Its sort of like "safer sex", the only best answer is not to do it at all. Otherwise you rank the options.
We better cut down all the trees because they block the wind!!
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
Cool. So we can balance everything out by building the right ratio of fossil fuel plants and wind turbine farms. Far out, man.
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
If you were to a process to harness good intentions for power, prove that its 100% clean,safe and 110% effecient, there would still be people screaming NOT IN MY BACKYARD.
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
Now, what would be cool is a material tough enough to pave roads with, yet transparent enough to have solar cells underneath it. That would be neat.
But I don't think we're ready for glass roads, just yet.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
Models of the environement are complex. I doubt anyone would argue that. The point this study really makes is that wind power gathering will most likly have a non-zero effect on the environment. Until some other models confirm the amount of this effect, take it with as much of a grain of salt as the models for Nuclear Winter and for the current ever changing global warming models. They all make predictions and the order of magnitude results are probably OK but arguing factors of N is probably beyond the real uncertanties in the models. So lets not go around saying which is worse. The fact is we do not know.
I'm not picking on these models specifically. Just pointing out that this is a very tough thing to model and that past work on similar projects got the effect rigth but the scale wrong due to the extreemly non-linear nature of environemental science.
Today is a gift. Save the receipt.
Lisa! Get in here! In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
Each device to produce electricty affects the climate in some way.
:-)
- Wind mills interact with the atmosphere and reduces the energy level in the air.
- Solar sails absorb light which is converted into electricty insted of heat (or reflected to space).
So both methods have an local impact. But because the energy is consumed somewhere and therefor converted back to heat. Everything is fine (more or less
Nuclear plants produce extra energy. So it results directly in heating up the system.
So the best thing is: Place consumer and producer of energy in a local context.
Also if energy is produced and consumed in almost the same place the energy density is lower. => lower risks
If it stops the polar ice caps melting, wouldn't that be a good thing? Build them, I say!
"She's gone from suck to blow!"
The earth core would actually cool down within a couple of million years. It stays hot because of natural radioactivity.
So you are saying that this iron core has a small core of its own, of probably liquid fissil materiel and that keeps it hot? While possible, given the relative rarity of that materiel on the surface, and the mixing effects of the planets rotational period, I can't quite see that its sufficient to maintain the core in a molten state in the face of 4.6 billion years of cooling from the night sky. The rocky covering we live on would seem to me to be a pretty good insulator given that there are quite a few miles of it in most places.
If a sufficient amount of the heavy radioactives have settled to the center of the core, has anyone calculated how big it would have to be, and what actual heavy element it would take to keep it hot in the face of half the surface being a black body radiator to a night sky tempurature of 2.3 degrees absolute for the last 4.6 billion years? It would, I'd think, have to be something with only a low level of radioactivity and a half life in the billions of years to keep it from going critical in a mass aggregation of the size required to get the required heat.
OTOH, at that depth and pressure, a semi-steady critical reaction might even be possible. Any "hiroshimas" would be very well contained by the surrounding molten iron, probably to within 1 to 20 feet for the maximum diameter of the fireball if an area went critical. We might hear a click now and then.
But my common sense then says that is not the case as that background noise would have rendered our navys hydrophones deaf to the noise of the ship/sub screws that we used, and use, to track underwater (and surface based stuff like an illicite test) goings on from several thousands of miles away.
Yes, I've read that, but the print media authors who make that statement have never satisfied me by defining the materiel and required quantities to achieve this on a billions of years time scale. I tend to go by the available clues, but those are forever hidden from our fragile & fleeting existance here on the surface. 7 miles into the mohole is as deep as man has ever been and came back to tell his grandchildren about it. What goes on down there, if anything, we can only surmise and play what if scenarios endlessly, based on what we can hear. And we don't hear much from the middle of the core.
Cheers, Gene
Yes, but does the warming happen from the windmills themselves or are they just considering that whatever we use the energy for will create extra heat/pollution. If it's the latter, then the whole premise is useless. We're going to use the energy anyway, better to get it from a cleaner source. One last idea... if the world is a warmer place, won't that produce more convection/jet stream/wind reducing the need for those environment-destroying windmills?
1) Concentrated power (nukes), where screw-ups kill a relatively small group of people locally
2) Current situation, emissions from thousands of power plants lead to mildly shortened life spans and persistent health problems for everybody.
Whatever!
Vote Quimby!
We can't just sit around and let the large faceless corporations with 90% of the world's cash ignore the fact we have enough oil and coal to last us around 60 years.
We need to start investing in strategically placed solar and wind arrays to power this country to prepare for our childrens' blight. We all know it's NOT going to happen unfortunately, as big business can't profit from it.
Besides, IF this study is right that the north will get colder and the equator will get hotter, wouldn't this REVERSE global warming?! Isn't this what we want?
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
The predicted largest warming globally is forecast for the arctic and antarctic regions. So, if this preliminary model is true, that might have a semi positive effect on the very fast paced arctic warming that is occuring.
Sidebar, talking about greenhouse gases, what about all the leakage of fluorine in the Uranium hexafluoride in the gaseous diffusion concentration to get 235 percentatges boosted in the fuel.
The wind has to be part of the solution. Reducing usage is another part.
Shalom,
approx 2% of the world's population but emits a quarter
Try 4.6% and 20%
Yes, even Russia agreed to the plan, with the terrible shape its economy is in, because it knows the costs of not acting will be greater.
Yes. They knew that Old Europe would foil its attempt to join the WTO if they didn't sign. Euro-coersion at its worst. Russia has been an outspoken critic of Kyoto pseudo-science since the treaty was negotiated.
But what about air quality? pollution? clean water? moderate temperatures?
Kyoto only attempts to address 'moderate temperatures', whatever that means. (We had quite an excellent growing season here in the American heartland.) Even the most strident supporters of the treaty do not claim it will have a measurable affect on climate. They look at it as a stepping stone to a more draconian pact. Good luck.
US is a global leader in research and development, it stands to gain much more from developing and marketing these technologies
What you describe is eco-make work with no real economic value. What an absurd assertion.
an ill wind that blows no good
Wait a minute, I thought I read yesterday that the Arctic ice cap was melting and going to flood Florida, Great Britain, etc. Now they're saying if we build more wind-powered generators it's going to cool DOWN the Arctic, and that's a bad thing??? Would you please make up your mind!?!
:-)
Never give any object more potential energy than you want it to have.
We need to understand that there are always consiquences for every solution. First I believe that we are not going to find a perfect solution. we need to accept that and pick a solution and move on. Wind is not the most efficent. Nuclear has draw backs. Solar is also inefficent. Fossil fuels have draw backs. Just pick one and try to mitigate the risks and move on. As a software developer I see this problem all the time. You can over engineer a solution and end up getting nothing done.
It ought to be obvious that reducing the kinetic energy of the wind by turning some of it into electricity is going to have an effect. Winds are a means of transporting energy from one place to another. A wind turbine extracts some of it, so while the source end still gets rid of the same amount of energy, it's a fair bet that at least some of the Earth's life-forms have evolved around the assumption that that energy is actually going to be delivered -- and are going to be disappointed.
Plus you've got the problems not only of what you do when the wind is not blowing, but how do you actually ensure that the turbine rotates at a steady 3000rpm (to give you 50 cycles a second, which many appliances depend on)?
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
People frequently use "geothermal" to refer to ground sink heat pumps. While these are more efficient than air heat pumps, true geothermal energy involves generating electricity from hot springs and other geological thermal sources.
Did they model the effects of large cities and skyscrapers as well because the type of impact seems to be the same - its just blocking/consuming wind.
> Yes, some people are unreasonably scared of nuclear power. Other are unreasonably enamored of it, some Gersbackian techno-fetish of Big Science to Save The World
/ india/JA DFINAL.pdf
The reason these "Gersbackian techno-fetish," as you put it, favourably choose nuclear energy is because they don't live or have to live near a uranium mine. They only think of its clean usage and not its entire cycle. Hydrogen is much cleaner by comparison.
"Radioactive contamination around Jadugoda uranium mine in India"
http://www.rri.kyoto-u.ac.jp/NSRG/genpatu
Someone isn't paying attention.
Taking power from the wind won't reduce worldwide enthalpy.
It will increase worldwide entropy, but that was going to happen anyway.
Only this way, we get something out of it by passing the enhalpy through our homes instead of letting the entropy decrease moving discarded plastic grocery bags around in alleyways.
And don't worry. As long as the sun shines, we get more every day.
Cooler arctic => icier =>
diminished glacial melt =>
oceans do not rise
*More* wind power, baby!
7. Profit!
So they created a computer model, which when run indicated drastic temperature shifts across the globe. And yet they don't know by which mechanism this occurred?
Absolutely, this is possible. It's likely that the climate models use machine learning techniques like neural networks, which is basically like function approximation. It's a gigantic generalized equation, combined with an iterative process that tunes it (or teaches it) to match a set of data, in this case, historical climate data. Once it's "taught," you turn it around and try plugging in new values and see what it predicts as a result.
Unfortunately, you can't ask a neural network why a certain result came out the way it did, because it's still just a giant equation. Human beings have to pick that equation apart to try and understand it... And believe me, this is an almost intractable problem, especially for something as huge as a global climate model.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
I didn't see many numbers in your post. Numbers please! Numbers please! Prove it! Prove it! Wanker.
How many of them used to act as major wind breaks at the low level?
AAAARGH! 79.9 (NOT!)w itz promises of plummeting
USA gas prices are hovering near a record somewhere above $2.00/Gallon, after the neoconservative/Bush/
Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice/Wolfo
fuel prices if only we would invade Iraq.
That 79.9 cents comment reflects the misleading messages given to Americans
to drum up support and justification for (supposedly preemptive) military aggression.
BTW: did Tony Blair or his party make any such insinuations to brit citizens, overtly or otherwise?
Haven't seen/heard anything like that in the media here.
From our rebellious colonial perspective, today's neoconservative/Republican view
of patriotism and traitors is somewhat bemusing, if not just sad:
British-American colonists who revolted against King George and the privileged aristocracy are our heroes.
Today's progressives who dare to question king George W. Bush's competence, intellect, and intentions
are called 'Traitors' (with a capital T) by Bush supporters.
Truely Orwellian doublespeak and newspeak.
The dumbing down of America starts at the Whitehouse.
half the surface being a black body radiator to a night sky tempurature of 2.3 degrees absolute
Thanks to the greenhouse effect (carbon dioxide, remember?) the Earth surface is not black-body radiator. The air at high altitudes, where there is not enough CO2 above to absorb its heat radiation, is much colder.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
I'm afraid it's not bs, its right. If we supply all our power needs with wind power, then we will change wind patters. There is still no free lunch.
Ah but you're missing something with the glass roads... cars on top wouldn't be letting much sunlight through...
no streetlamps, just some reflected light through skylights... you can easily focus light from above through a lens and mirror arrangement to provide plenty of sunlight... that's if the material itself used as a 'roof' wasnt' already translucent.. but those types of collector materials are too expensive as yet so it would be skylights to start with.
It can't be such a bad idea if all you can come up with is the need to light the freeway as a problem.. but of course there are other problems that wouldn't come up until you did wind sheer studies and structural integrity analysis, etc. too bad we know some damn much about stuff and you can't just build things anymore and worry about fixing it later.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Thanks to the greenhouse effect (carbon dioxide, remember?) the Earth surface is not black-body radiator. The air at high altitudes, where there is not enough CO2 above to absorb its heat radiation, is much colder.
I didn't spell that out well enough I guess, when I said 2.3 degrees absolute, I was refering to absolute zero, or about 455 degrees below on the farenheit(sp) scale we US types normally use, or about -271 in C. The upper atmosphere is much warmer than that, typically -70F or so at the altitudes our airplanes can reach.
Cheers, Gene
From the study:
"The exact mechanism for this is unclear, but the scientists believe it may have to do with the disruption of the flow of heat from the equator to the poles."
So they made a computer model and they don't know how it works and why it produces the results that it does. That sure fills me with confidence about their model.
"One unexpected finding to the study is that the hotter temperate zone/cooler Arctic effect exists in the simulations if the wind farms are concentrated in a few spots or scattered across the world."
So they have a computer model that produces the same results regardless of inputs. Yet more indication that their model is broken...
"The mechanism for local temperature changes are the vertical eddies that behemoth windmills ? these monsters can be 30 stories tall and have turbines that spin at 400 kilometres an hour ? would generate."
A turbine spins at 400 kilometers per hour? Huh? Rotation is measured in RPM, not KPH. Unless those turbines are in jet engines I seriously doubt they're moving at more than 0 kph. Anyone's guess as to what a turbine spinning at "400 kph" means.
In short, this sounds like alarmist B.S. Quite frankly it's becoming very clear that while it may have sounded silly in the beginning that it looks entirely obvious that the real agenda of "environmentalists" is economic not environmental.
"Wind power"? Causes global warming.
"Solar power"? Can cause climate change if massively deployed and can harm the local ecosystem.
"Nuclear power"? Enough said.
"Ocean current/tidal power"? Disturbs the coast's ecosystem.
There is no solution that the environmentalists like except reducing consumption of industrialized countries. Their goal is not to cure the environment. Their goal is to redistribute wealth in the world. Every potential new source of energy that they shoot down just makes that more and more clear.
Although it would be the most expensive project known to man at the time...
We could either...
A.) Build a very large Nuclear space station orbiting the moon or...
B.) Build a solar panel space station the size of texas.
And beam both back via microwave energy back to earth (using a satellite relay system that would be redundant to multiple points around the earth).
Of course the downside would be that if the station fell back into earth or the microwave beams became "misaligned" and zapped a city... Or two...
But I think someone will use them to ransom a nation or two from their underground lair first...
You don't get it. Its not about power density. Its about transmission and distribution costs. The capital cost of grid infrastructure is 10 times the cost of generation.
I parts of the world without 100 years of subsidized grid infrastructure (china, India, Africa, etc) solar is hands down the cheapest way to get electricity to end-users (unless they have good wind or hydro resources, which is cheaper still). Same with telephones. Third world countries are bypassing line-lines for cell phone towers because the grid infrastructure is too expensive! (Think string a house with Ethernet to every room outlet, or by a WiFi card)
Even once you do have a grid, distribution is 2/3's of operation costs. Power stations have been getting progressively smaller for the last 30 years for this reason, utilities can put smaller local turbines near the point of use to offset added transmission costs.
Big and monolithic is not better. Assembly lines are better, faster and cheaper. Are you using the giant room sized one-off computer that took 5 years to build, or are you using a small mass-produced commodity desktop? Energy generation works the same way.
Besides if the power density of photovoltaics on the average sized roof using current technology is 8 times the average use, why are you looking for more?
Maybe this is what they call a Weather Control Grid on Star Trek. :-) Maybe it could reduce tornadoes.
Anyway making the arctic regions cooler might help to offset global warming there. Too bad for the tropics though.
What if the windmills were built in the tropics? Wouldn't that have the effect of cooling the whole globe a little? (Due to removal of kinetic energy from the air, which is what otherwise drives the winds.)
testing out my trending skills
And to top it all off it is cloaked in "but we are not anti-wind" speak.
1 TENTH OF THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT!!!!
I am not a climatologist, but doesn't similar phenomena exist in nature, like the gulf stream, or any predictable weather system taking place on a scale many orders of magnitude larger than our combined or simulated plastic hand waving? Does this even introduce ANYTHING "new", and if it did wouldn't it be dwarfed by cow belching?
But I can say with a good deal of certainty this is one of many complete and total lies fabricated in academia. They continually feel threatened by the alternative power community undermining their facade and the lies they work so hard to uphold.
MIT's "official" position on Hydrogen cars is they are environmental hazards because they emit Nitrous Oxide, ignoring the fact a low power cooler on the exhaust would take N2O to levels matching the atmosphere, a nill effect.
SA Thigpen * KL1FE * http://sthigpen.freeshell.org
USA gas prices are hovering near a record somewhere above $2.00/Gallon
You're young, aren't you? If you were a little older, a little more mature, and a little wiser, you'd remember that gasoline was $2.99/gallon back in the 80's (adjusted for today's dollars). Now, go back to kindergarten and learn some math.
My, my, how hatred can blind one to facts.
The increased hot and cold differential would actually make wind power *more* efficient.
Antisource - antivirus, antispam, antispyware
WThat's great that you've made a giant windmill. But the transmission lines still have the same large losses from resistance. I would like to see each home have its own mini-mill. No transmission losses. If terrorists or an earthquake or a tornado tear down your tower, people lose electricity. Whereas each home having its own personal size supply would not be affected by your target er tower biting the dust. Sorry. The day of Americans being ashamed of where their power comes from is about over. Ride the wave while you can. If your monstrosity had been in Florida, it wouldn't be in Florida. Unless.. of course, I guess you could build it where it would fold down into a briefcase during a storm.
Nanosolar SolarPly is one of these products. The manufacturer claims a cost as little as $30 per square meter (cheaper than some fancy non-solar roofing materials) and less than $2 per peak watt by 2006.
The efficiency isn't great (they aren't going to make self-powered electric cars), but this doesn't matter. When we've already covered an area equivalent to Ohio with impervious surfaces, we've got plenty of area we could re-cover with PV. If 1/4 of the 112,610 square km of impervious area was covered with 8% efficient PV, it would have a peak power potential of approximately 2.25 terawatts (more than double current US nameplate generating capacity). I think that would hold us for a while.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Everyone is going further and further up the chain in terms of the effect on the environment or health etc of Nuclear, Wind, Solar etc etc. So I thought I would throw in another missing number from the number of deaths in the industry dept.
:
Three points I would like to make (keeping in mind that I am generally pro nuclear over coal):
How many people are aware of the number of deaths each year just in Coal Mines alone.
Quoted from China D-News:
"The figure for China is around 7,000 (Official figures indicate more than 7,000 workers die each year in China's coal mines, mainly from poor control of gas density, flooding and lack of safety awareness. However, Hong Kong-based human rights group China Labor Bulletin puts the number of industry deaths at around 20,000."
Secondly, I suspect that a lot of the hysteria and paranoia around nuclear fired power stations is because people relate fission power stations with Nuclear weapons. How many average Joes could tell you the difference between the two? I was shocked recently when I asked quite a few family and friends as to what sort of explosion occured in Chernobyl. Almost without exception they all replied matter-of-factly that it was a nuclear explosion (not hydrogen). Mind you who cares how the rasdioactive material ends up in the atmosphere, its the fact that its there that counts. However there is no blinding flash of radiation, or nuclear winds...etc etc that people associate with Nuclear weapons.
Thirdly, there seems to be a bit of a misconception that Nuclear is both cheaper and cleaner. I wont weigh into the cleaner debate, I have already chosen my horse on that one, but as for cheaper... I live in Australia which has some of the worlds largest uranium deposits however Coal is still a (shit load) cheaper than uranium here. Add that to the comparison between plant build costs and dont expect nuclear to give you a power bill reduction any time soon. - The Nuclear Tourist lists the costs as slightly dearer for Nuclear than coal fired, however this would differ from country to country.
I know I only said three points...but some final things for consideration. In my mind (and I will state here once again that I am generally pro-nuclear) the real safet issues around Nuclear generation are those of politics not engineering or technology (those have for the most part been solved already). The real issue comes about when once responsible governments are replaced by irresponsible governments or economics change etc etc. Suddnely you have the issues of
reduced capital expenditure on equipment leading to aged plants
reduced focus on safety and controls as costs are cut
the possibility of enriched uranium being sold on black markets to help fund poorly managed economies
the possibility of uranium reactors and their resultant technology being used to research enrichment and possible weapons grade material
inability or unwillingess to deal with waste due to political or financial factors.
Like most things the biggest problem with technology is the people who use or abuse it.
I think there is far too much extremism in this debate (always has been). Until you can define problems both on your side of the fence and your enemies, you will never be able to actually work towards trying to solve them.
It is well known that planets do radiate their own energy,s ome of it left over from the formation of the planets. I've often wondered what would happen to Earth if Geothermal energy were deployed on massive scales. If you think of the earth's crust as an insulating blanket, then every whole punched into it is letting the heat out where it can radiate into space. Natural volcanos are one thing, but I wonder what effect massive geothermal deployment would have. Would tha mantle cool down and become less molten or even solid, slowing down plate tectonics?
I design wind farms. Has no-one flagged that this simulation is about the unlikely scenario of building a single wind farm to cover 10% of the world's landmass, and generating more than three times (unless my sums are wrong) the world's energy needs?
Does this mean can control the climate to some degree by turning off and on the windmills?
> You don't get it. Its not about power density. Its
> about transmission and distribution costs. The
> capital cost of grid infrastructure is 10 times
> the cost of generation.
I don't understand. What makes you think that its not possible to have standalone, passive, small breeder reactors?
yes, in the cases where you can get away with generation at the source, you get away with generation at the source. But even if we cover all the houses in the US with solar cells, that is about 3% of the electricity usage that we use. What about base load, and commercial districts?
And then of course what about energy carriers, like oil and hydrogen? Once you start talking about replacing these by solar power, you start talking about covering entire countries with photovoltaics..
Yes, solar and wind should be used in some places. But when you are talking about solar, the power generation *is* the infrastructure, and is very expensive.
I suggest you read 'Energy at the Crossroads' by Smil - its very instructive.
As I said: The average house (2000 sqft) produces ~8 times the average household consumption (24 kWh/day) using typical 17% efficient panels in an average insolation location (1800 kWh/m^2/year). Solar has phenomenal energy capacity. If you cover all the US roof space (2.43E11 sqft) the US produces 250% our national electricity needs. With 40% efficient multijunction concentrators we produce 500% our need, no extra land space required.
Where do you get 3%?. Please go to the references for these numbers I've already posted, get out your calculator and prove it to yourself. And better yet read more about renewables and get your facts straight.
Small breeder reactors allover the place? Now there's a safe, low risk idea! Just like North Korea, you too can make plutonium in your back yard with your very own breeder reactor! Trucking, shipping, securing fuel/waste to thousands of minireactors without loss/theft/accidents? MTBF multiplied by a million parts per reactor multiplied thousands of power plants? Hmm.
Solar still makes energy even on cloudy days. Solar energy is remarkably constant throughout most of the world/US.
For a flat panel, the deviation from the best southern Nevada site to the worst northern Washington state site is only 2-to-1! The rest of the country is surprisingly small deviation within this range. See rredc.nrel.gov/solar/ [nrel.gov]
Wisconsin gets an average daily insolation of 4-5 kWh/m^2 verses 6.5 kWh/m^2 for best locale in Arizona for a fixed panel. So Wisconsin is still 70% of the best solar location. not too much difference.
> Small breeder reactors allover the place? Now
.1% of our total energy usage.
> there's a safe, low risk idea! Just like North
> Korea, you too can make plutonium in your back
> yard with your very own breeder reactor! Trucking,
> shipping, securing fuel/waste to thousands of
> minireactors without loss/theft/accidents? MTBF
> multiplied by a million parts per reactor
> multiplied thousands of power plants? Hmm.
I shouldn't respond, but this is just FUD. The idea behind the nuclear battery in the 10-100MW range is that you install the reactor with all the fuel it needs for 30-70 years. They are passively safe, and produce plutonium from U-238 in minimum quantities for fueling, and then burn that plutonium. They produce plutonium in three separate isotopes (239,240, and 242) which make them useless for the production of nuclear bombs.
You bury the reactor (they are about 15m by 3m ) and they are totally automated. They do all of their own reprocessing of waste, and you end up with 95-99% of the truly harmful isotopes transmuted. Slashdot talked about these briefly:
sstars
Economies of scale come into question, and new materials make the EROEI for this approach more than 1000.
I think that you are correct - that the current nuclear paradigm is not scalable and too expensive, but I am not talking about the current nuclear paradigm. You are hitting a straw man here.
Anyways, I really wish that solar in large scale like you suggest was economically feasible. Maybe in a hundred or so years. Where did you get your numbers?
Solar energy comes into the atmosphere at approx 1,350 W/m^2, and averages 170 W/m^2 when it reaches the ground.
At 17% efficient panels, this becomes approx 30 W/m^2, which you can expect to use intermittently depending on weather and time of year.
Now, the average use of energy in a household is from 20-100 W/m^2. The average use in supermarkets and office buildings is 200-400 W/m^2, and industrial places like steel mills and refineries about 300-900 W/m^2. High rise buildings go for about 3 kW/m^2.
So - where is your excess? Even without considering costs of *converting* solar power or *storing* it for base usage, or even the energy cost of converting it, or even the inefficiency of the spacing of panels on roofs (ie: you'll never get 100% of the roof covered) and the inefficiency of incorrect angles in capturing the energy (most solar panels need a correct angle to the sun in order to get the 17% you are talking about), there is no excess to send to the high-rises, let alone the steel mills.
And of course that doesn't even count the energy cost in creating and maintaining the solar cells.
It isn't for lack of trying - people have been working on photovoltaics since *1830*. And yet they only generate 20 times *less* energy than wind and only
As to your numbers -
I don't know where you got your 'roof space' figure (2.43e11) but it seems high - that's about a 2000 square foot home for each three people in this country - but lets go for it.
Then, assuming that we get real solar power for about 8 hours a day -
170 W/m^2 * 2.43 * 10^11 ft^2 * 1 year * 8/24 in kilowatt hours
= 1.12 * 10^13 kwH
Google reference:
here
From the CIA factbook we use 3.602 * 10^13 kwH.
Reference here
So - even without counting the 17% efficiency rate, OR storage costs, maintenance costs, spacing inefficiencies, etc. this is only about 30% of our national electricity needs. Multiply 30% * 17%, and you get about 4.5%.
In other words, you did your math wrong.
My hat is off to you if the 'adjusted for inflation' price of gas several decades ago was near $3.00/gallon.
The original post had nothing to do with math.
It reflected the Bush administration's willful misleading of congress, the USA, and the world,
about their lack of justification for their preemptive invasion of Iraq and its consequences.
Besides, it takes no math to prove their falsehoods.
The 9-11 investigations, internal memos, and public statements by high administration officials
have repeatedly shown how politically motivated the Iraq war was.
But you made a sincere effort to divert the spotlight away from the Bush administration's failures
by shifting focus to a supposed mathmatical error.
Once again: no math involved, I failed to adjust for inflation.
Bush has yet to admit to his own failures.
Full steam ahead, headed downstream, toward the falls.
BTW, I remember filling our '56 Studebaker at 39.9 cents.
Back in the days when Republican meant respectable.
do you agree with me about the infeasibility of solar power, or do you find fault with my argument?
horos
Yikes! Here the first problem with your calculations! Solar insolation is 1300 W/m^2 outside the atmosphere, 1000 W/m^2 on the ground in peak sun conditions. NOT 170! (look it up yourself you'll find tens of thousands of refs on Google)
insolation FOR A FIXED panel at an angle equal to latitude provides an average of 6 hours of peak sun per day in the average US location. (of course the solar insolation is changing based on time of day. However this is how it is specified in the industry: pre-integrated to an equal number of peak hours). That equals 2190 kWh/m^2/year. Some locations a little more, some a little less. With trackers this goes up 25-50%. See the National Renewable energy laboratory insolation database and mapservers for more data.
Already considered see above numbers are already based on tilted fixed panels. Trackers of course improve the angle and thus the energy, but I'm giving a simple case, not best case.
Spacing is accounted for, 17% is total edge to edge module efficiency not cell efficiency. Maintenance costs, essentially are none (solid state revolution man) no moving parts, no dusting, no snow removal required (the benefits of dusting/cleaning has been proven to be of small benefit. less than 4%). Storage is an issue. There are many storage technologies and they do cost money (some solar technologies, not PV, are self storing such as Solar 2's phase change salt storage). However, energy profile on the grid tracks the solar cycle closely. 40%-60% of our energy could be replaced without substantial storage added to the system. (another 20-30% could come from wind, as the Dutch have shown, and the base load could be largely provided with geothermal, biomass, and wave. Thought I do think storage is an important piece of the puzzle.)
From the 2000 census data for households and the DOE for commercial buildings
The number you show is ENERGY consumption NOT ELECTRICITY consumption, and its a little too high (I guess the are spooks not energy experts). From the Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration total energy consumption is 2.88E13 kWh. The total US ELECRICITY consumption is 3.4E12 kWh - which is what we are talking about.
Today is your lucky day. The numbers are very much right (as you can now see). And we didn't have to even invoke any extra land consumption OR higher efficiency cells OR Dye-sensitized solar cells which can be used as windows on high rise buildings, etc. PV is amazing stuff with incredible potential, 40% annual market growth, prices are nearing $1/peak watt (33
Please learn about the subject before you respond. Energy is my area of expertise, am I'm always appalled by how engineers and geeks can tell you the latest in computer technology to the day, but are 30 years out of date (or just completely misinformed) when it comes to renewable energy.
.1% of the total. Sheesh. At even a 40% COMPOUND growth rate, it would take a good 30 years to get to half the electricity we generate.
averages 170 W/m^2 when it reaches the ground.
The numbers I quote are from Smil. You are right, it reaches the ground at 1000 W/m^2 *max* but the *average usable power* is approx 170W/m^2. From a random source on the web nature and availability of solar radiation.:
Solar radiation arrives on the surface of the earth at a maximum power density of approximately 1 kilowatt per meter squared (kW/m^2). The actual *usable* radiation component varies depending on geographical location, cloud cover, hours of sunlight each day, etc. In reality, the solar flux density (same as power density) varies between 250 and 2500 kilowatt hours per meter squared per year (kWh/m^2/year).
Now, take 250 kWh/m^2/year and change it into W/m^2, and you get
250 kilowatt hours/ 1 year
or 29 W/m^2
2500 kilowatt hours/ 1 year translates into 290W/m^2.
Which is within the range of what I - and Vaclav Smil, and the EIA quotes.
> The number you show is ENERGY consumption NOT
> ELECTRICITY consumption, and its a little too
> high (I guess the are spooks not energy
> experts). From the Department of Energy, Energy
> Information Administration total energy
> consumption is 2.88E13 kWh. The total US
> ELECRICITY consumption is 3.4E12 kWh - which is
> what we are talking about.
Ok, lets say that you are right, and its 3.4x10^12. Even then, the figure of 4.5% becomes 45% BEFORE any transmission, maintenance, cleaning, and other costs associated with solar power, which are likely to cut that figure in more than half. You see any decent storage technologies on the horizon, do you? Even with your numbers, your math is incorrect.
And of course, that doesn't even touch the fact that the major problem that we are facing is not going to be electricity shortage, but energy carrier shortage. For energy carriers, we burn about 3 TW or an order of magnitude greater than what we are talking about here. Are we going to take 20 times as much land as our buildings and highways occupy in photovoltaics just to make up for this demand?
I'm sorry my friend but you sound like you have a SERIOUS agenda. (silicon with solar having a greater energy production per pound than nuclear fuel? Yeah right.) And an 'annual growth of 40%' is easy in a market which is less than
Tell you what - would you agree to having the government both subsidize the development of solar technologies AND next generation nuclear ones, and see which one wins?
If he means by this average usable power per day including darkness, then hes not far off. (1000 W/m^2 X 6 hours of peak sun)/24 hours per day = 250W/m^2 per 24 hours. BUT this is misleading, watts are peak POWER measurements not ENERGY. The energy stays the same in either case: 1000 W/m^2 X 6 hours = 6000Wh OR 250W/m^2 X 24 hours = 6000Wh. See?
These numbers are right on, similar to what I've been showing you (1000 W/m^2 x 6hour peak/day x 365 day =2190 Wh/m^2/day). Except 250 is way too low(even Barrow, AK 375 miles north of the arctic circle gets 912 Wh/m^2/year, and 1314 with a tracker). Here a selection numbers right from the 30 year average weather history statistics for flat plate solar panels taking into consideration incident of insolation (first number is a fixed panel at an angle equal to degrees latitude of the city, second number is a panel on a tracker - numbers in Wh/m^2/year):
Tucson = 2372 (3285)
San Francisco = 1971 (2591)
Kansas City = 1788 (2409)
Seattle = 1350 (1788)
Denver = 1825 (2701)
Columbus = 1533 (1971)
Boston = 1679 (2153)
Buffalo = 1496 (1934)
Anchorage = 1095 (1460)
To get the annual energy produced per m^2 multiply by the PV panel efficiency. For example, at 17% efficiency in Denver 310 kWh/m^2/year on a fixed panel, 459 kWh/m^2/year on a tracking panel. Multiply this by the number of square meters of roof in the US, and you get 6.99E12 kWh/year for Denver fixed panels, and 1E13 kWh/year for Denver tracker (not all places are the same as Denver, but they aren't all that different either - its an example ;). See? Here we get 200%-300% more power than needed, like I said.
The quote (which is true, Lovins is very accurate with his numbers) is not meant to be more than it is: an interesting comparison between solar and the current and real state of nuclear power in the US (light water reactors are capable of using only a fraction of their fuel before they are spent). Of course breeders or other designs could produce 100-1000 times as much energy per pound, but they have their tradeoffs too (which is why we chose not to use them).
Exactly. Solar power is available everywhere (did you notice the deviation between the alaska and arizona is only 2-1?). Solar IS the ultamate distributed power source. If most of the power is generated locally, they carrier requirement of transmission is HUGELY reduced, and overall costs come way down.
The problem is
> Exactly. Solar power is available everywhere (did
.4 * .91 = 74%.
> you notice the deviation between the alaska and
> arizona is only 2-1?). Solar IS the ultamate
> distributed power source. If most of the power is
> generated locally, they carrier requirement of
> transmission is HUGELY reduced, and overall costs
> come way down.
Ok, fair enough, lets go with your numbers -
200% current electricity use if solar panels covered every square meter of roof.
Now, lets talk about transmission and storage costs.
There are 116 million customers in the United States. Each uses on average about 907 kwH:
source:
eia energy usage
This means that out of the 3.8 * 10 ^ 12 kwH of electricity, about 1.05 * 10 ^ 11, or 3 % of the electricity is residential. And 97% is industrial.
Yet the number of commercial customers and hence the amount of square footage is reversed by a large margin. Only 15 million customers are commercial but they use 97% of the energy. Hence, a large portion of that energy generated by solar is going to need to be stored/transmitted for peak usages, and you will need to take a large cut out of that 200%.
Say that cut is 60% (generous for battery technology), minus 9% for transmission costs. Then:
200% *
Now, I went to your references - and I can see how you came up with 2.43 * 10^11 sq ft. You multiplied the number of domiciles by the average square footage. However, its not that simple - the numbers quoted there are for square footage *inside the house* not outside it. Hence, it is optimistic by about a factor of 1.5 considering houses that have more than one level or a basement:
74% / 1.5 = 49%
So, we are back to about 50% *even if* we consider your numbers, and we are back with the need to have a large infrastructure to transmit that power. And this is for putting photovoltaics on EVERY BLOODY ROOF in america along with the infrastructure to actually use these photovoltaics. And of course this doesn't even consider the necessity for large peak wattage for industrial customers, which renewables aren't even addressing.
And then again, we come to the biggie - whether or not we can use solar to take the place of oil and coal.
This would require 20 times the area of buildings and houses just to produce current energy demand - the equivalent to COVERING TEXAS WITH SOLAR CELLS. Take the costs for changing the solar energy into energy carriers like hydrogen and gasoline, and the collection and concentration of that energy, and you are up to covering ALASKA.
Now, you bemoan the current infrastructure costs for energy - but this hypothetical infrastructure is far greater than what we have today, by orders of magnitude. Right now, the *worlds* total energy structure (transmission, pipelines, refineries, coal mines, water reservoirs, etc) covers about 290,000 km^2.
Yet you are proposing an infrastructure which is about six times larger, JUST to cover the current energy costs of north america, and JUST for capturing that energy (and not storing it, etc). About 1.2 million km^2 (very generous) which is about the size of arable land we use for FARMING in the united states.
Wind isn't going to help to reduce this burden - since its power density is about 10 W/m^2, worse than solar, and worse than hydroelectric.
Hence, I highly doubt that solar is really going to save our skins. It'll reach a stable point, where the costs of its growing will exceed the benefits. Its a decent energy source, but it will reach limits, and those limits will be far lower than what we need.
Space based power is a different matter altogether, though. No real estate issues, no gravity and the ability to make *huge* power stations for focusing energy. Its the way of the future, but that future is at best a century or two off.
As
ps - I made two mistakes in my calculations:
.1-.5%....
1) residential use is 3% per month, meaning 36% annual.
2) the mistake that you made in overestimating square footage is far more endemic than I think you realize. For the *apartments* are also counted double (or triple, or quadruple) by just taking the average and multiplying it by the number of units.
So I really don't know what square footage is available for solar cells, and of course apartments will need transmission lines to supply them.
Hence, I probably overestimated the amount of transmission needed (which leans towards your POV) but you probably overestimated the total amount of square footage available for solar cells (which leans towards mine).
And of course, I forgot about the intermittancy factor - a large part of the residential solar power is going to need to be stored in batteries due to intermittency, which would subject it to a 60+% efficiency penalty for storage.
Anyways, I'm going to call all of this a wash, since I'm not up for calculating it again, but to be perfectly honest, I think that overall these points will hinder rather than help the adaption of solar power. Even the EIA doesn't see solar power rising any time soon - out to 2025, solar is
Of course they are not too sanguine about nuclear either, but then again I think that they are massively overestimating how much oil is left in the ground..
horos
FACTS:
* Residential electricity consumption is 35% of the total (not 3% as you state)
* Roofspace is not as you stated. From the census data and DOE data: The average housing unit size is 2066 sq ft. There are 107 million units. 50% of houses are 1 story (roof=sq footage). The other 50% are 2 story or more (Census), which I estimated roof space is half of living space (this averages in the added garage roof space of some with the loss of roof space to 3 or more levels). The result was increased by 6% for the added area of the average roof slope. Commercial was 67 billion sqft. If you want to do a more detailed analysis, It would be great, send it to me. The average single family unit is 2527 sqft which I didn't use in these calcs, and are 88% of total housing units, so these numbers are likely underestimating roof space by around 15% or so. However the outcome will not likely be more than +/-10%.
* Of course not all roofs will be usable. The point is to get perspective on the land area needed. Even if 1/3 of roofs are usable, then problem solved. If you don't use roofs, the land area required is still VERY small. THE LAND AREA IS NOT THE SIZE OF TEXAS! With 17% panels on trackers the land area is a 46 mile square - 22% smaller than Dugway Proving grounds OR 0.8% THE SIZE OF TEXAS. With multijuction concentrators, its less than half of that. The problem here is you've been programmed to believe it should take a huge amount of space, BUT IT JUST DOESN'T. Clear yet?
*OK Say you want to replace ALL the US energy with solar(oil, coal, Natural Gas, wood, etc). How much land would it take? The US uses 98.3 Quads a year, or 2.88E13 kWh. Using 40% efficient multijunction concentrators ($1/Wp!) on trackers in average location (Kansas City) you get 964 kWh/m^2/year. LAND REQUIRED: a 100 mile square. OR 4% the size of Texas! VERY SMALL! 1/10th the 290,000 km^2 number you cite (Reference for this number please).
*Obviously once you see the real numbers - infrastructure isn't a problem. In fact a distributed PV system, some on roofs, some in local grids, some in large arrays would reduce distribution and transmission infrastructure substantially
As noted
Good thinking, but not the case. Apartment buildings above 2 stories (5 or more units) only make up 6.5% of total units. My numbers if anything underestimate the sqft, because I didn't factor the larger single family housing sqft which averages 2527 sqft and make up 88% of units. So just considering single family units we have 94.2 million units with 75% floor sqft to roof (50% single story, 25% double story w/single story garage). With 6% slope addition = 1.9E11 or 8% MORE while ignoring all apartment buildings.Adding the apartment buildings back in: 2-4 unit buildings (6% of total units) we'll say they are all 2 story (1393 sqft * 6.4E6 units *
True enough. The EIA tracks very accurate numbers for what is, and what has been, but they bad with the future. Which works OK for consumption models (sort of, they have been horribly wrong on that to - in the 70s they assumed exponential growth, when in fact efficiency made up for it), but they do not consider technological changes, cost reductions, geopolitics, etc (for instance a decade ago their wind power forecasts were FAR too low). They are primarily a current energy information outlet for congress.
so..
.2 * .4 * .8 * .91 = 13 W / m^2 usable energy = 90 kwH usable/m^2/year
.5 up to approximately 3. This both hampers the production and slows the development of solar cells without *major* subsidy..
you are saying with '40% efficient multijunction concentrators' that you are
a) turning 40% of available solar flux
into electricity, and covering 100% of the
available ground in doing so.
b) avoiding the storage, transmission, and
conversion costs. (to either put said
electricity into a battery or into coal,
oil or hydrogen)
c) providing 10 MW to 10 GW base load power
capability.
Sorry if I don't believe you. First, 964kWh/m^2/year means that you are extracting 110 W/m^2, when in Kansas the total amount there is about 140 W/m^2 - which means you are getting 80% efficiency. Reference please.
Secondly, even if you could get that for one solar cell, perhaps you can tell me of the technology which allows you to saturate 100% of the area with these cells, and the storage technology that has been developed which allows you to assume that the 954kwH that you cite goes into 100% efficient use.
You seem to think that users will somehow instantly use the energy as it is collected rather than needing to store it.
If you really are 'in the field' so to say, you know that people's usage of energy at home is very sporadic, with low needs at some points and high needs at others, and that the times solar collection is done hardly coincide with the times people use the energy.
My arguments with your numbers are that you seem to assume that conversion, transmission, and storage costs will simply 'go away' when we use solar power, because it is 'distributed'.
You will grant, won't you, that solar power is not strong enough to say, run a TV, computer, stove, and heat at the same time in a given domicile, won't you? And that it is not strong enough to run a high-rise building?
If so, then your 954kwH (which I think is wildly optimistic) will rapidly go down. And that 65% of the solar energy will need to be transmitted to where it is needed, as well as stored, given that 65% of the electricity usage is non-residential?
So, taking this into account -
Say there is a 60% penalty in converting energy into something storable, and collecting that energy (natural gas, etc), and a 60% penalty in storing the energy for usage someplace else. Say that there is a 9% penalty for transmission. And say there is a 20% penalty for maintaining the infrastructure. And say that even though you are using 40% efficient cells, you are really getting 20% efficiency (because you cannot saturate the ground with solar cells, but can only use them in about half the area). Then, in an average (170 W/m^2) power density solar area:
170 W / m^2 *
3 * 10 ^ 13 kilowatt hours / 90 kwH / m^2 =
3.3 * 10 ^11 m^2 in km^2 =
330,000 km^2
So, ok, not the size of alaska, but the size of italy. And about 60% the size of texas, which is fairly close to my other estimate. And still greater than the whole world's current energy infrastructure (reference; energy at the crossroads, page 340) (reference for kansas power density: earth radiation budget satellite erbs)
I think you should realistically consider the losses from solar energy rather than assume 'oh yeah, we're getting x kwH from solar, hence we're going to be using x kwH because its distributed!' Its exceedingly naive to think that you can get 100% a conversion rate for anything, and of course the larger the collection fields, the larger the maintenance costs.
And of course we haven't even touched the manufacturing costs and/or EROEI of these solar cells. I've seen everything from
Like I said, every time I think about your numbers, I see
Before we can move on the rest of your argument, you need to use REAL numbers for insolation. I've given you the links to the definitive government resources, but you keep on using the same bogus numbers. Come on, you are a smart guy!
So here it is:
Kansas City = 6.6 kWh/m^2/day average for a 2-axis tracker.
x 365 days/year
= 2409 kWh/m^2/year
x 40% concentrator module efficiency @ 500 suns (NREL, Entech, Sharp)
= 963 kWh/m^2/year. GOT IT?
US Energy consumption = 2.88E13 kWh/year
/ 963 kWh/m^2/year
= 3E10 m^2 OR 11544 mi^2 (a 107 mile square)
/ Texas 267,277 square miles .043 OR 4.3%
of the Texas land area.
---------
=
Which part of this isn't clear?
Even if it were a third that efficiency, the land area is minuscule.
1) your first link doesn't work (its broken) In fact, I couldn't even reach medc.nrel.gov.
2) second, the number I gave (140 W/m^2) is from the Earth Radiation balance satellite. I'm not sure what's going on here, but I'd hardly expect that group to lie.
3) the storage, transmission, and maintenance costs (especially from EROEI) makes it *much* more inefficent than just a 'third'.
Here's another example of efficiency loss - the sun is highly variable in the year, you hardly capture any power at all during the winter months. Hence, the need to store the electricity captured from the summer for months on end. Hence, high inefficiency.
You want to prove that solar is a decent replacement to me, address the efficiency concerns AFTER you have collected the solar energy, and the EROEI that you get from making solar cells.
All it takes is an overall efficiency of 10% (which is not at all hard given the cost of storage, maintenance, and manufacturing, battery and or energy carrier construction, and solar cell replacement ) and you are back to an infrastructure the size of texas.
And that is even with your numbers, which I think are *highly* optimistic.
Elsewise you really are looking at the world through rose-tinted glasses.
Anyways, I'll look for a third party that can corroborate your numbers, since I can't check them for myself. I did look at the NREL and sharp links, but they didn't go into *any* of these issues. They seem stuck on the 'look at us catching 40% of the sun's energy, isn't that cool!!!' or 'huge potential market opening up!!!' stage of things. You have to consider the entire energy life cycle, or your analysis is meaningless.
horos
pps -
I think I see where things are off, and where our numbers differ. They do in fact reconcile. You CANNOT USE A TRACKING MECHANISM TO DETERMINE SOLAR POWER DENSITY.
For if you do, you are basically double-dipping your calculations.
Figure: If a plate is tracking the sun, it is swinging out an area greater than the plate's area itself (for as it tracks, it gathers energy that would otherwise miss). In the process IT BLOCKS OTHER PLATES THAT WOULD HAVE OTHERWISE GOTTEN THE SAME ENERGY.
If you take, say the numbers for Birmingham, AL over the last 30 years,
your reference from rredc.nrel.gov
You'll notice that the flat collectors get an average of 3.5 kwH/m^2/day, which turns into about 165 W/m^2.
Its the dual tracking collectors that get the large amounts that you are talking about. However, the tracking collectors can't be placed directly next to each other, because they cast a SHADOW on each other.
My guess is that if you take this shadow into account, the benefits you get from tracking are greatly reduced (not eliminated because of better conversion efficiency) and the total that you CAN get is approx, on average 170W/m^2 (which goes along with the satellite data)
This is the only explanation that makes sense. My satellite numbers aren't lying, neither are your numbers - they are just double dipping when you make the assumption that they can be applied to large areas in 100% coverage.
Hence, the 100*100 sq mile solar concentration is way too small, by an order of magnitude or so, and we are still talking about an infrastructure the size of texas.
horos
You've realized that my numbers are in fact right, yes?
-Double dipping-
These are quick numbers to show you the ballpark of land-consumption, we assumed a 2-D array, we didn't count shadowing NOR did we count that the panels are angled around 39 degrees thus taking only 77% of the land space we counted.
1. Even if you used fixed panels in one giant array at an angle equal to latitude, ~ 39 deg angle the land used becomes only 28% greater than the panel area. For an average insolation location like Kansas City having 1800 kWh/m^2/day x 40% efficiency = 720 kWh/m^2/year. 2.88E13 kWh Total US energy/720 = 15444 mi^2 panel area x 128% to account for shadowing = 19768 mi^2 OR a 140 mile square. Now we are up to a WHOPPING 7% OF THE TEXAS LAND MASS with fixed no moving parts panels. WooHoo. Trackers would of course do much better.
2. This is a visualization exercise. In fact, all the US power would not be generated in one place. Shadowing is only a problem in 2D arrays, however we can arrange them however we want. 2D arrays on buildings do not have shadowing due to the slope of the roof. 1D arrays don't have this problem. Though not possible everywhere, they are in some places such as the 1500 mi^2 of idle land sitting below large electric transmission lines, or highway midians, etc. You see the great thing about solar is we literally can use almost any under utilized space for power production (roofs, parking lots, superfund sites, etc).
-An Example- Near my house there is a typical suburban shopping plaza. Contains 5 big box stores (homedepot, target, walmart, etc) all 150-200,000 ft^2 plus a dozen 50,000 ft^2 stores. That's 1.6 million ft^2. With 40% efficient fixed panels at an average of 2000 kWh/m^2/year insolation that's enough energy for 30,000 homes! Put panels over the parking lot (as is being done in California - dual purpose shade and energy) which is 150% as big, and together we have enough energy to power 72,000 homes FROM ONE SHOPPING PLAZA with no extra land used and no trackers.
-Alabama-
First use the REAL 30 year average numbers not a cherry picked number (how did you come up with that? Your number is far less than the worst year out of 30 years for a panel FLAT on the ground: 1553 kWh/m^2/year). The average annual insolation on a flat panel in Birmingham is 1606 kWh/m^2/year at 0 degrees (flat on the ground), 1788 for a panel at latitude (this case 33 degrees), 2263 kWh/m^2/year at latitude with 1 axis tracker, and 2336 kWh/m^2/year for a 2-axis tracker.
I'm still interested in answering your other questions, but I want to make sure you really understand that land use for solar is small (at most any efficiency 10-40% with or without trackers), smaller than many other energy resources currently in use (e.g. coal), AND in fact we don't need to use new land at all (which is pretty much unique to solar. And perhaps arguably wind, wave, and geothermal). If you understand that point now, and are done nitpicking technical details of infinitesimal returns, I'm happy to move on.
Since nulcear proponents are keen of saying "but nuclear stuff would be great if only we used this as yet uncommericalized techonology, that we could build the infrastructure in ONLY 5-15 YEARS...", I thought it would be fair to use PV technology that will be on the market in 3 MONTHS!
Now the cells used in these concentrators are nothing new, they've been used in space applications for alomost 2 decades and are well tested. They have become a bit more efficient in recent years. With concentrators (@500 suns) they are even more efficient, 39% real-world efficiency for PRODUCTION cells as of 2001 (TECSTAR and Spectrolab). 42% Eff are on in the works (ie. it hasn't been maxed out yet). But they are expensive, much more so than other PV technologies. So arrives the concentrator idea. Use cheap tubes of plastic fesnel lenses to focus onto a line of PV cells. At 500 suns, 500 times less cell area. Voila, very efficient super cheap panels!
Sharp will begin selling similar product in 2005 (three months), with a total panel efficiency of 36.5% at a production cost of less than $1/Wp. Entech also has a similar technology that will retail for around $2/Wp next year. I talked with a VC recently, who owns a large share in an energy company that has contracted Entech's complete production capacity for building for-profit solar electric plants in the western states.
Even still, its just one competitor in the market. As the land calcs have shown, land is not the issue, price is. It is widely held in the industry that anything above 8-10% efficient is land efficient enough to be market viable. So if I can produce solar cells for $0.50/Wpeak @ 10% I've got a winner. This is the stratigy of thin-film PV manufacturers (aSi, ribbon-Si, CIS, dye-TiO, CdTe, organic cells, etc). For instance UniSolar makes a amorphous Si solar panel that looks/works just like a roll of 3-tab asphalt shingles that you nail down just like normal (stuff is literally bulletproof, nail right through it). Only 10% efficient, but who cares? A roof-full would still produce 3-4 times the homes electricity needs, and you don't have to pay for a separate roofing, lowering your overhead! Konarka is making flexable polymer solar cells at 8% efficiency but a simple dirt cheap polymer manufacturing process. They are in early production, but the technology has a 30% efficiency theorectical limit, looking at the history of Si cells, they'll likely acheive 15-20% in the next 5-10 years. Other technologies are more mature: Chalcogenide (18%), CIS (13% efficient), Ribbon Si (12-14%), cast Si (12-14%), Si microsphere (12%), etc.
So 40% concentrators are looking really competitive, but there are market niches for every technology. Any references I've already given, else google them.
*sigh*
,and multiplied by 365.
I got the number from your source, over a thirty year period, at:
text rredc
I avoided anything that was tracking, took all the fixed rates, added them up together, averaged them
Unlike you, however, I'm trying to take into account the various inefficiencies and penalties that you get from using solar power - from penalties for storage, penalties for conversion into other energy carriers, penalties for the infrastructure involved in this conversion, penalties for transmission, and penalties for handling peak load.
And of course penalties for all the energy used to build and maintain the solar cells and the architecture behind them in the first place. I've seen EROEI's from anywhere less of one to about 3, taking the whole infrastructure of solar cells into account.
So yes, we disagree pretty much from the get go. Trackers are a red herring - there is only *so* much power available to gather from any given spot, and trackers just save on material costs.
I could calculate again, but we are essentially calculating different things. Your experiment is quaint at best, and misleading and false at worse. Money is a problem, yes, but so is transmission, storage, inefficiencies in capture, inefficiencies in maintenance, etc. etc. etc.
*That's* where I get an infrastructure the size of texas. By your naive calculations you are already up to 7% - double that, and that's more realistic IMO.
For example, the solar concentrators which you talk about have to have moving parts to get that 40% efficiency because they need to track the light source to concentrate the energy. These parts, whilst efficient, take an energy penalty of their own, and due to the need to directly track the sun point source in the sky, require a larger amount of area per device than you imply.
Average this out, and you're back to getting about 20-60 W/m^2 of energy for solar - which is the reference figure that I've seen everywhere except for you.
This of course is *before* any of the efficiency penalties that I've talked about.
You also are naively using 3 * 10 ^ 13 kW as our total energy source that would need to be replaced - the difference is that 90+% of that energy is in a form that we can directly use - natural gas for heating and gasoline for burning, coal for making steel, etc. You therefore take a penalty if you want to convert the solar into these forms of energy.
Lets take a different tack - overall, the earth intercepts at its surface about 87 PW of energy average. We use 12 TW (source: 'energies' by smil). That means that we use 1/7200 of the total solar flux of the planet. At 100% efficiency, therefore we would need 1/7200 of the earth's surface covered in solar cells - and since over 70% of the earth's surface is covered by water, approximately 1/2200 of the continents.
Since most of the solar needs to be converted to usable forms, I've been using a 60% penalty, which means that about 1/1360 th of the earth's continents would be needed to be covered by solar cells if everything was 100% efficient.
This equals 225,000 km^2. At 40% efficiency, this equals 562,000 km^2.
Since the current infrastructure is approx 290,000 km^2 - and of that, around 2% of that is energy production - the costs for the infrastructure in just collecting the solar power are bound to be more expensive than the current costs.
Just collecting is - even at your rather optimistic calcs - over 100 times more costly in terms of real estate than our current scheme!
And that is not even considering the *other* infrastructure involved, or the inefficiencies that I've talked about (and you haven't responded to). Or the low EROEI.
Anyways, look, I have NO problem with solar power. I hope that it goes gang-busters, I really do. You have yet to convince me. You just happen to be in solar technology before scalability issues become a factor.
But go ahead, lets stop with this area issue. You said that you'd like to respond to the other issues, so please do.
horos
As did I, only i used NRELs annual statistics not your uninformed calculations of their raw data (no offence). Since we seem to go over this again and again I will spell it out for you. Though at this point I think you are just being obstinate. From the rredec database:
"City: ","KANSAS CITY ", "Sep","Oct","Nov","Dec","Year"
"SOLAR RADIATION FOR FLAT-PLATE COLLECTORS FACING SOUTH AT A FIXED-TILT (kWh/m2/day)
"Tilt(deg)"," ","Jan","Feb","Mar","Apr","May","Jun","Jul","Aug"
"Lat ","Average", 3.8, 4.3, 4.8, 5.4, 5.6, 5.8, 6.0, 5.9, 5.4, 5.0, 3.8, 3.3, 4.9
" ","Minimum", 2.7, 3.3, 3.5, 4.2, 4.6, 4.9, 5.2, 4.8, 3.5, 3.8, 2.7, 2.5, 4.5
" ","Maximum", 4.8, 5.4, 5.7, 6.4, 6.4, 6.6, 6.8, 6.6, 6.8, 6.6, 4.9, 4.3, 5.5
Now look at that last column, "Year". Look at the row "Lat Average". 4.9kWh/m^2/day. Got it? If not, want to see a map of the same data? I don't know what you want, whack you over the head with a dozen sources? Here, here, here
So 7% of texas land mass to produce ALL of our energy use, only 0.8% for our electricity need. Using fixed panels (not even adjusting the angle seasonally), including shading. I didn't use the best location, but an average location. This doesn't translate by any stretch of the imagination into all of Texas. More importantly I showed we don't to use any new space at all.
WRONG! JUST THE OPPOSITE. We've compared solar for PRODUCTION EFFICIENCY OUTPUT to US GROSS ENERGY CONSUMPTION (my mistake really). So if you want to do a REAL comparison, we need to calculate a conversion efficiency of current energy sources based on end-use (for oil, coal, Gas).Transportation = 25.65 Quads @ 20% ave conv efficiency
Heat = 23.09 Quads @ 90% ave conv efficiency
Electricity = 35.30 Quads @ 33% ave conv efficiency
Nuclear+Renewable Electricity = 13.99 Quads @ "100%" efficiency (numbers ARE net)
-----------
50.3 Quads Net energy produced. NOW WE ARE AT ONLY 3.5% OF TEXAS.
Ready to discuss storage, transmission, grids, seasonality, etc Yet? I think you've lost this part of the argument.
Transportation = 35.30 Quads
Electricity = 25.65 Quads
Though the total was posted right 50.3 Quads. It is true that trackers are a wash. You get more energy, but you shadow more ground (however, only in flat 2D arrays). Of course, I didn't use them in my calcs so it doesn't play in this discussion. Not really. Passive trackers use no extra electricity at all, while active trackers use only 3/100th of a % of the power. FYI these are power numbers not energy WRONG. The US uses 24% of the worlds energy (97.7 Quads US, 404 Quads World). So if the US uses 3.5% of Texas, the world would uses 14.6% of Texas (100,800 km^2) or LESS THAN HALF the current infrastructure. Not that it matters since we've shown it can be done with no new space utilization. Everywhere? Not NREL, not DOE, not NASA, not the EU PV program, not PV manufacturers. Where, Smil? I think at this point his credibility is crumbling. I've given you many primary source material references. Read them! Learn how to use the data sets. Make sure you know what you are using before calculating. Is it ground plane, flat plate at angle, concentrator, tracking, plane normal radiation, diffuse radiation, gobal radiation, average, worst case, monthly, or amortized?
The only way 20-60W/m^2 makes any sense is if it is amortizing the light hours over the 24 hour day and multipled by 50% efficiency. If that is the case you can't multiply by 40% efficiency agian and then multiply by only 6 hours of insolation per day! AGAIN look at the data sets, read the instructions, and see for yourself. Or check out a PV design handbook.
Yes I know we haven't addressed use, efficiency, storage, and seasonality implications in our land use numbers, and they will rise some. Ready?
> Hmmm. I take that post as agreement. Obviously
> Smil is massaging the truth (and you are starting
> to look silly defending this guy, who in 7 posts
> is proved wrong again and again - time to read a
> broader group of authors?). I'm looking forward to
> getting past your FUD, and discussing your other
> questions, but first we must get pass the
> nonsense.
Why don't you read the guy instead of denigrating him? Using one of your data sources and an off-the-cuff calc, I get 170 W/m^2 - the one you just gave, I get 200. I looked back at the ERBS and it gives me about the same. Its not a show-stopping difference.
What a lot of people don't like (and don't understand) about Smil is that he *doesn't* spin the facts, and hence steps on a lot of people's toes (including probably yours).
He also looks at the big picture, rather than the upfront figures like you are doing. Which is why I like him, because it gives me context when judging an energy source.
First of all - YES I'm aware that W/m^2 is a power measurement per unit area. If we amortized usage of all energy sources across the world, and averaged them out, it would come out to about 12 TW continuous usage.
And 87 PW is the amount of continuous power that the sun outputs that we can use. I like using it better because its simpler and you can get a good generalistic feel about an energy source using it - kwH tends to lend itself towards electricity itself.
Now - what I mind is that you are still double dipping. More than I at first realized. You mention 40% efficient solar collectors, but they are *multijunction* collectors, '500 sun' collectors, that are getting the energy. These are 40% efficient because solar collection is inherently more efficient at greater concentrations of energy.
These both are concentrators, *and* have to swing out a larger surface area to do so at the same time.
Lets use your document to see how much area they need to swing out:
"SOLAR RADIATION FOR FLAT-PLATE COLLECTORS FACING
SOUTH AT A FIXED-TILT (kWh/m2/day) Average: 4.3.
"SOLAR RADIATION FOR 2-AXIS TRACKING FLAT-PLATE
COLLECTORS (kWh/m2/day) Average: 6.6.
Now, there is only so much radiation per m^2, so it takes approximately 150% as much area to do tracking collectors. So the average *real* efficiency for these things is going to be 40% * 4.3 / 6.6 = 26%. At least before we consider the next part.
For I look later on in the doc and get:
DIRECT BEAM SOLAR RADIATION FOR CONCENTRATING COLLECTORS (kWh/m2/day) Average: 3.4
Notice how the average, 3.4, is less than 4.3? That's the efficiency penalty for the concentration - and for going through the lenses (second law of thermodynamics gets its share). It doesn't tell me whether or not the concentrating collectors were tracking or not (my guess is they were because you need to follow the sun in order to concentrate the light effectively) but we'll assume that it is not (and hence they aren't halving the energy available) So in the best case that's a further penalty. 26% * 3.4 / 4.3 == 20%.
So we are back at 20% efficiency overall. Even if your numbers are correct, 200 W/ m^2 (although that's still questionable) and 200 W/m^2 * 20% = 40 W/m^2.
And this doesn't address moving parts storage, etc, which of course are further drains on the efficiency.
So as I said, you are optimistic by at least a factor of two, most likely more than 2.5 here.
Ok, now as to your second point. You have a point about electricity (storage, transmission, and EROEI issues excluded), but transportation and heating is a different matter.
Given the infrastructure costs that we have invested in the ICE, its not very likely that these are going to go away any time soon (40+ yrs). So we are going to need to produce either natural gas or oil in large amounts to feed the current fleet of cars and various industries (including the photovoltaics industry which would need the plast
The land consumption is not a factor. First, its small, and second we can synergistically utilize other surfaces with no or little other space needed. Even at 17% efficiency panels, the US could generate near all its ENERGY (triple its electricity) with the US rooftop space as we've shown. Since not all of that has solar access, we'll throw in some parking-lots. Heck, we could generate 1/7th of our electricity needs with just the land from the Hanford nuclear superfund site (570 mi^2).
Indeed, I took the cell numbers as functionally equivalent to module efficiency (ie mirrors can be 98+% efficient). But reading the literature, It's clear that cheap is the goal (cheap focusing elements). In fact, the production price for multijunction concentrators being discussed is 12-50 cents/Wp. WOW! $0.12/Wp for 30 years is $0.0015/kWh! (of course this doesn't include BOS, but even with, its amazing)
Commercial Efficiencies:
Entech - 30% net concentrator efficiency, 33% cells (2001)
Sharp - 28% net concentrator efficiency (FYI-uses non imaging optics)
Sharp - 17.4% MODULE efficiency (not cell)
Sunpower - 16.5% MODULE efficiency (21.5% cells)
Now take into consideration that the spectrapower cells Entech is using are now up to 37.3% (2004) efficiency, which will increase module efficiency to 33.5% from their 2001 announcement (which is in line with a claims of the VC I spoke with).
So at 30% efficiency (using published value) we need to increase our land base values by 33%. So All US ENERGY Needs from 13,491 Mi^2 or 5% of TEXAS (including shading at an average of 1800 kwh/m^2/year).
Thanks for calling that one, I'll update my database of facts. I haven't been reading the solar journals very closely over the last 4-5 years as the company I am working for is developing storage technologies, so I put most my time that technology and market trends therein (which we will get to).
Alsema is a leading expert on this field on study (you'll see his name on many in-depth studies) and shows the energy pay back period to be:
Multicrystal Si: 0.8 years (EROEI 37.5 @30y, 62.5 @yr)
CIS: 0.4 years (EROEI 75 @30y, 125 @50y)
CdTe: 0.6 years (EROEI 50 @ 30y, 83 @ 50y)
Crystal Si: 3.3 years (EROEI 9 @30y, 15 @50y)
I should note that these studies are again becoming 5-10 years old again and don't reflect the improvements in efficiency. CIS for example in this study was modeled at 12% efficiency, but the best efficiency (2003) is now 19.2%. Same with crystal Si, efficiency have edged up about 3-4%. I wasn't able to find info on concentrators, but because of low materials-to-power ratio I expect they will be at least as good.
I calculated the numbers for both 30 years and 50 years. Comparisons are usually done on a 30 year basis since this is the build life of other power plants and is a typical load period. However it is a bogus, made up number for easy comparison. Many PV manufacturers are guarantying their panels for 25 years, with no or little power degradation from the specs. No reason to artificially cut their life short.
The numbers I used were the base case, not best. Of course its possible to package them with material having more embodied energy (as in the case of the silicon numbers which has a significant amount of aluminum in the frame). Now these don't include infrastructural embodied energy such as inverters, mounting systems etc, which would decrease the EROEI to about 30 @ 30 years with current techniques. But neither do the EROEIs for traditional fuels contain the externalities of generation plant embodied energy. Other energy sources are:
Coal: 9 EROEI
Oil (middle east): 10-30 EROEI
Oil (US): 3 EROEI
Light water Nuclear: 4 EROEI current (12 with improvements)
Ethanol: Likely zero EROEI, maybe negative
Now you might quibble with some of the numbers, however I think it shows that PV is at worst good, and at best really good.
That gives it a EROEI of 60 over 30 years.
Very good
I've shown you a detailed peer-reviewed government comissioned paper showing 15-30+ MINIMUM EROEI(30 year). A EROEI of 15 (25 @ 50 years) assumes ground mounted with steel structure and concrete footings (but recycled Al or polymer composite mounts would bring it to 30). Building mounts using frameless roof integration take you up to 50+ @ 30 years (83 @ 50 years).
If you really want to understand this issue, read the journal article thoroughly, read his references, read his other studies, read "Energy pay-back time and life-cycle CO2 emission of residential PV power system with silicon PV module", Progress in Photovoltaics v6 1998 by K. Kato. And "Energy pay-back time and CO2 emissions of PV systems" Progress in Photovoltaics v8 2000 by K. Alsema.
Alsema (Professor in the Dept. of science technology and society at Utrecht University, Naterlands) has 13 peer reviewed papers published on PV all relating in some way to EROEI or environmental impact. In his most recent publication (2004) in Refocus he says:
Read Alsemas numbers, he does too. He breaks it down for you though. Thin films have a EPBP of ~.5 (~60 EROEI @30 years) for frameless panels such as these roof shingles. With poles, mounts, concrete, yada, yada the EPBP is 1-2 years (or a 15-30 year EROEI)."Recent studies give the impression of photovoltaics having considerable environmental impact. Looking closer at the data however, it is clear that these studies are based on photovoltaic systems of the late eighties, with only minor recalculations. Since the photovoltaic market has increased rapidly, a lot of progress has been made regarding the environmental profile of photovoltaics." He goes on to show, for example how current production ribbon silicon panels have a payback period of 1.2 years (and that is silicon, not even thin flims like CIS).
If you don't like Alsema cause he blows your outdated arguement read Kato. Kato (prof. Japan agriculture university) has 25 publication all dealing with photovoltaics. He has several publications dealing with EROEI.
Or read this (note this is dated and the 2 and 1 modules are already on the market).
You can squint your eyes, stomp your feet, and don that helmet believing whatever you want, but reality is waiting when you want to join us.
Cutler Cleveland (Director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Boston University) appears to be one of the leading energy analysts these days, his work is quite broad. In "Net Energy from the extraction of oil and gas in the united states", Int. Journal of Energy 30 (2005), he shows that US Oil production has a EROI of 11 for energy in/thermal energy out. And gasoline is 30-50% of this value (ie 3.3-4.5 EROI). Now that doesn't include conversion efficiency in a car or power turbine, nor does it include the embodied energy of the extraction equipment or ICE/power plant to burn it.
If you make calculations just for conversion efficiency (33% ave) of US oil converted to electricity/mechanical power has EROI of 3.6, and gasoline in a car is less than 1 (meaning that the energy to do mechanical work in a car is being subsidized by by electricity (coal) to run the extraction equipment). And still we haven't considered the embodied energy in the extraction equipment or the ICE. (now of course middle eastern oil is 3 times better than this) That is very poor EROI! And coal isn't looking much better. Both of these resources EROIs have dropped by at least a order of magnitude over the last 100 years as extraction becomes more difficult. The future of fossil fuels by EROI analysis looks bad.
As for Alsema, he does review the added embodied energy of infrastructural components in section 4.5 of the paper. For complete balance of systems analysis (inc. frames, structures, concrete, maintenance, etc) the best technologies (thin films and ribbon Si) have EPBP of 1.2-2 (15-25 EROI @ 30y, 25-41 EROI @ 50y). scSi is around 3.3 years (9 EROI @ 30y, 15 EROI @ 50y). Analysis shows that PV energy is manufacture side heavy, with little continuing energy inputs as would be expected from a solid state, fixed, and essentially maintenance free device (how often do you maintain your current roof shingles?). However, even his latest numbers are out of date as he notes getting information from manufacturers is difficult because EROI calcs involve knowing trade and financial secretes so it takes a long time to get agreements in place. Also his calcs don't use the best efficiency panels on the market, which underestimates EROI, if that was the criteria on which we made purchases. Also multijunction concentrators, should be significantly better since 1) they use less material per peak watt and 2) they have a higher efficiency. References: Here,Here, Here, Here
What's the end result? EROI calculations beyond first or second order become quite tricky and controversial. But we can show that solar in a detailed "second order" or more EROI estimate looks very favorable compared to even a "first order" estimate of oil, NG, or coal.
Cutler Cleveland is his review of Net Energy Analysis Methods (A very good overview) says this:
"It is important to differentiate between two aspects of Odum's contribution. The first is his development of a biophysically-based, systems-oriented model of the relationship between society and the environment. Here Odum's (1971; Odum and Odum, 1976) early contributions helped lay the foundation for the biophysical analysis of energy and material flows, an area of research that forms part of the intellectual backbone of ecological economics...
The second aspect of Odum's work, which we are concerned with here, is a specific empirical issue: the identification, measurement, and aggregation of energy inputs to the economy. Emergy (with an "m") analysis is a pure cost-of-production approach that measures the quality of a particular type of energy by its transformity. Transformity is the amount of one type of energy required to produce a heat equivalent of another type of energy. To account for the difference in quality of thermal equivalents among different energies, all energy costs are measured in solar emjoules (SEJ), the quantity of solar energy used to produce another type of energy. Fuels with higher transformities require larger amounts of sunlight for their production and therefore are more economically useful (Odum, 1988)...
This approach raises a fundamental question about the appropriateness of transformities to reflect energy quality: Is the usefulness of a fuel as an input to production related to its transformity? Probably not...Thus, while Odum's method provides a useful framework for highlighting he important role the environment plays in generating energy and material resources, it is of dubious value in comparing and aggregating energy flows in economic applications...
In addition to this conceptual issue, there are computational problems with emergy analysis that make transformities incomplete indicators of energy quality. The calculation and application of transformities are time, location, and technology specific, yet Odum and his colleagues mix the temporal, spatial, and technical scales of their analysis in ways that are poorly defined. First, Odum presents the transformities as constants, but based on the method used to calculate them (Odum and Odum, 1983), the transformities are clearly dynamic because they are based on the first law efficiency of technologies such as power plants, coal liquefaction, and oil refineries. The efficiency of those technologies have changed dramatically over time. Second, the emergy calculations also contain an ad hoc mixture of spatial scales. The basis for the calculation of the transformities is the thermal efficiency of a wood-fired power plant in Brazil, but the efficiency of power plants vary throughout the world (Smil,1991) as do all the other energy conversion technologies used in the emergy calculations. Similarly, energy/output data from the New Zealand economy are mixed with the Brazil power plant data to calculate the transformities, which are then applied to many other economies throughout the world (Odum and Odum, 1983; Odum et al., 1987; Odum and Arding, 1990; Huang and Odum, 1991). Third, the values of the transformities are highly sensitive to technological assumptions made by Odum and Odum (1983). They calculate the relative quality of oil, gas, and coal based in part on the fact that the first law thermal efficiency of converting natural gas in boilers is 20 percent more efficient than the conversion of coal. However, the relative thermal ef
The big difference is PV is distributed . This means a far more efficient, redundant, and secure grid. But it also mean less grid stress, because more power is generated locally. For example, normally my power comes from my roof (distance 20 ft). Sometimes some of my power comes from my neighbor (dis. 500 ft). Occasionally some my power comes from the shopping mall (distance 3 miles). When the insolation is low some of my power is imported from 2 states away (600 miles). Say the weighted average distance my power travels is 1 mile (down the same wires it would have before). Now compare that to the centralized infrastructure we currently use which 90% of the time its traveling 600 miles! Transmission efficiency is improved and grid utilization is reduced.
It is, in fact, more efficient as a two way street. This is very foundation of concept of distributed generation which has been successful at reducing grid stress and $ for a couple decades already (mostly NG turbines), and which PV is a good example of. Centralized power is everything that is wrong with the grid today. If you want to learn about DG read: here, here, here, here, or here. Huh? Just because you want it to? So you can support your argument? Not only is there no evidence for this, but it defies all the fundamental tenets of mass production and the benefits of scaled industries. If anything EROEI will rise. (because of improvements in technology, manufacturing process, installation efficiency, density of systems will reduce maintenance costs, etc, etc).We've already shown it to have a better EROEI than fossil fuels, even when favoring the fossil fuels with less stringent EROEI calculations (i.e. not counting embodied energy of equipment). If PV has a EROEI of 15 (minimum), and since the fuel/sun is a free resource, its energy output can replicate itself by x^15. Hardly a problem
PV is no different in this regard from any other power source.
Like I said this is being done all the time, there are over a 200,000 small residential systems (ave. 10kW peak) grid tied in the world right now, and working fine. (40,000 new grid tied systems in just 2003). The growth in the grid tied market is 60% per year, meaning another 64,000 systems went up in 2004.
Here are some links on how the grid and customer transformers work.
You can use your existing power transformer so long as you don't exceed its power rating. Here is one utilities regulations.
All grid-tie inverters on the market autosense the power lines going down or short-circuit to pass the NEC. This is called anti-islanding. Nonsense, nothing new required. Hook PV panels on one side of a standard meter, and it spins backwards feeding power onto the grid. PV owners do this all the time even without the utilities co's knowledge. The whole point of distributed generation is a highly redundant system of local power sources produces a more reliable power grid. Old news, not theory.Look. I'm not interested in a argument for its sake. Every time you pull some new reason out of the air that solar can't work I've proved you wrong and uninformed. If you want to learn more, or have informed opinions you want to share, then fine - but I am starting to feel this is going nowhere. (have you learned anything about solar in this process?)