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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?"
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!
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.
"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.
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'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).
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.
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.
And another thing... I can't speak for any militant environmentalists you might be thinking of, but the reason I'm an environmentalist is to maintain our way of life.
I like having electricity to run my computer, a car I can drive across the country in, a hospital with fancy chemicals and plastics. However I believe it is utterly foolish to continue using the sources for these things that we are at the rate that we are and expect that we can maintain our way of life forever. Refusing to change our way of life at all is a sure way to ensure that we lose it entirely.
The enemies of Democracy are
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.
The problem is that there are far too many people who claim to be environmentalists, but in fact are entirely ignorant of the facts. It's a mob mentality where they attain power by spewing their opinions in a large group, believing that repitition can make something true.
It isn't a problem with environmentalists -- not real ones, anyway. It's a problem with people use the environment to push their own personal agenda -- like promoting their personal choice in recreation (hiking is a good example), by 'preserving' public land using a definition that only allows human use in the form of hiking, with no other way to access the area, or recreate in it (even horseback riding is verboten). This, of course, doesn't go well with the rest of the voting public that prefers to recreate in other ways, and often paints a negative image of environmentalism in general.
Real environmentalists look at the facts and are willing to say that it's better to go with a less damaging source of power, than it is to stonewall for decades demanding a perfect source of power, forcing us to use the current/old massively polluting methods. (The damage there is already done, goes the mantra of the stonewall crowd.)
Honestly, the faux environmentalists seem more like religious fanatacists: The similarities are striking - they use their cause (environment or diety/dogma) to support their (frequently narrow) worldview, often in disagreement with non-fanatics of the same group. This allows the fanatics to strike down any kind of disagreement (even facts) with impunity, and en masse. The result is the same to those of us who at least attempt to reason: It gives the group (either environmentalism or religion) an undeserved and unfair black eye.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Global warming is a global problem, so everyone needs to help fight the problem, espcially the country that contains approx 2% of the world's population but emits a quarter of the word's CO2 emissions...
The US is by far the highest emissions per capita, and its worse in that the US doesn't even do much of its own manufacturing....(imports far exceed exports)
Global warming will affect everyone, and the costs of not acting will be far greater than the cost of implimenting the protocol- that's why every other country is still going ahead with the plan, even without US participation. 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.
And the fact that the economy will be hurt is BS- the underlying assumption in economics is that our living standards are proportional to number of goods/services we produce- But what about air quality? pollution? clean water? moderate temperatures? None of those are accounted for in our economic models, so a naive economist would say destroying those for greater manufacturing output would improve our living standards, when in reality it would do the exact oposite.
And considering that cutting greenhouse gasses will require substantial investments in technology by companies all around the world, and the fact that the US is a global leader in research and development, it stands to gain much more from developing and marketing these technologies than it stands to lose from job cuts at the oil companies and SUV manufacturers.
I want to like blimps, but the Hindenburg shows just how bad an accident could get.
I want to like space travel, but the Columbia shuttle incident shows just how bad an accident could get.
I want to like sex, but AIDS shows just how bad an accident could get.
I mean, seriously, are you honestly trying to make this sort of argument? In the development of any technology or process, mistakes are made, and they are learned from. Are you under the impression that there's never been a fatal accident at a coal-based power plant, in the history of their development? Are you under the impression that there have never been accidents with dams? With the development of air travel? Space travel?
Here's a news flash for you: production of energy, at its most basic level, involves the harnessing of an exothermic -- or at least exergonic -- reaction, either chemical or nuclear, at some level or another. This essentially means that if you are dealing with large amounts of energy all concentrated in one place, there always remains the distinct possibility that it could all blow up in your face.
This is true of every single energy production method that actually generates large amounts of energy in a small space. Wind and solar aren't dangerous because the amount of energy generated per square foot is very small; and this is exactly what makes them (at this point in time) unworkable solutions for large scale energy production.
For everything else, you're dealing with potentially explosive, volatile (but hopefully controlled) chemical or nuclear reactions. That's how you get the energy out of them. (Fusion may be an exception).
However, despite the fact that your car runs by constantly harnessing the energy produced by an exploding gasoline/air mixture, it itself doesn't explode. Why is this? Engineering. See, despite the fact that gasoline is volatile (less so now than fuels used in the past, when combustion engines were first being developed) we have figured out how to stabilize engines running on them. They don't blow up in your face. But I'm willing to bet you that when people were first messing around with driving pistons by explosive force, someone got hurt. It was inevitable. It's part of the process.
Look, no one likes accidents, but the Chernobyl thing is silly to bring up. In terms of design, it's like comparing modern cars to Pintos, and concluding that every car will behave that way in an accident -- but Chernobyl, like the Pinto, was flawed from an engineering perspective, not from a technology perspective. When the Pinto was recalled, people didn't say, "Man, this automobile technology is bunk, let's never use it again, and use pogosticks for transportation from now on", they said, "Damn, Ford sure fucked up the design of that car. Let's never design cars like that again."
Throw in the word nuclear, and suddenly, everyone is saying, "Yeah, Chernobyl was poorly designed, and to boot, the operators were running it in a deliberately unsafe manner, and there was an accident; so let's stop the development of nuclear energy completely, and just use our radioactive reserves to build weapons of mass destruction instead." I mean, WHAT?
If someone had suggested that same idea wrt to automobile technology right after the Pinto incident, people would have rightly thought he was looney. But if it's nu-cu-lar, well, darn! I guess that logic makes perfect sense!
Nevermind that current reactor designs are completely different from Chernobyl's, and that the same accident would not be possible again, even if they tried.
Yeah, let's just kill the most promising means of producing renewable, clean energy because, during early development of the engineering principles needed to control such a powerful reaction, an accident occured. Let's wax lyrical about wind, solar, hydro and geothermal power solutions solving all our problems when a) they don't scale b) are prohibitively expensive and c) have problems
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
Good Post. Energy problems are not technological problems. Technology is a McGuffin:
The real debate is not about the technology. It is about who will be the rider and who will be the horse. Who will have the whip in his hand and who will bear the lash patiently.
My favorite debaters are the environmental advocates (many related to an assassinated President) who feel very strongly that the United States needs renewable energy sources but not where the machines can be seen from their summer homes. Then there are who insist that all of our energy problems can be solved by conservation. Few of them maintain the lifestyles of Bengali Peasants, and some of them own their own airplanes and multiple mansions.
There is no hope of progress until such time, if ever, as there is a recognition that there are problems that need to be solved, that the solutions to these problems will impose costs and create benefits, that the costs must be shared across society on an equitable basis and in proportion to the benefits received (no free riders) and that the benefits must be shared on an equitable basis and in proportion to the costs paid (capitalism is the only economic system).
There can be no sacred cows or caribou or snail darters. The residents of New York will have to bear the (very slim) risk of an adverse event at Indian Point and probably 2 or 3 other nuclear plants as well, the Kennedys will have to look at a bunch of wind machines and the folks in Nevada will have to deal with Yucca Mountain and die in the knowledge that 10,000 years from now it may leak (the Pyramids are only 4500 years old). These are all costs that we will have to bear and there will be more of them and others. Taxes will go up. Energy prices will go up. Prices of appliances, buildings and automobiles will go up.
Technology will not make the cost problem go away. It cannot. There is no such thing as a free lunch, that is a law of both physics and economics. If we want to have energy we will have to incur and allocate costs for it. That is a political and economic, not a technological, problem.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
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.
There is no "one true energy" - people that say so are usually selling something. Everything has advantages and disadvantages.
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
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.
Well, actually, breaking wind does indeed have an effect on the climate - at least when it is sheep and cattle that do it ;-)
Sorry, I just had to say it. Apart from that, I find it a bit funny to see that on one side a lot of people reject the thought that burning fossil fuel is a major factor in the global heating, because 'it isn't sufficiently proved', but the all jump at this one, which is not in the least as well founded, scientifically.
This is not to say that I don't think the result is valid; but if one accepts this result, there is no good reason to reject that our pollution with CO2 etc is causing the global heating; and that if we want to improve our outlook, we must take steps now by drastically reducing our burning of fossil fuel.
Especially since there's an outside chance that the atmosphereic CO2 levels could get worse a lot faster than anticipated. Climatologists are just now getting hip to the fact that the Earth's oceans are acting as giant carbon dioxide sinks by the exact same mechanism we remove CO2 from our blood streams.
This mechanism is an equilibrium between CO2 (gaseus) and carbonic acid (liquid). A shift in the pH of the oceans may indicate that the ability of them to soak up 'excess' carbon dioxide is nearly exceeded. Which would cause CO2 to just build up in the atmosphere. This would cause a dramatic increase in atmospheric CO2 almost regardless of policy decisions made by us (short of not emmitting any more CO2 at all!). Not to mention the marine life that would be deleteriously effected by a shift in pH long before.
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.
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.
The ecosystem will adapt, it always has, some species will be losers, some will be winners. The question is: which will homo sapiens be, a winner or a loser? The losers tend to be those at the top of the pile when it was kicked over (i.e. us), the winners tend to be little things living at the bottom of the food chain. The Permian-Triassic extinction event wiped out 70% of all land species and 95% of all marine ones. For some time after the dominant form of life was fungus. I don't know about you, but I'm happy reading about that in a book, I don't particularly feel the urge to experience an "adjusting" ecosystem at first hand.
-- Nick "Hallo this is Beel Gates, und I pronounce weendows as
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.
n /articles/A464 16-2004May21.html
Let's get our facts straight here. They agreed to it once they got the nod from the EU that if they did support it, then they'd get entry into the WTO. So it really is all about the money for them. Oh, and just for your reference (no registration required)...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy
Just another day in Paradise
Nonsense. Its widely accepted that externalities (any economic activity which affects someone other than the buyers/sellers involved - such as all of the things you list) make economies work less efficiently and produce less good outcomes. This is a fundamental part of welfare economics - even part of something called the 'First Theorem of Welfare Economics' - and is something any economist should have learnt about.
It's politicians, the media and the general non-economist public who thing of GDP and output as being the one true measure of economic success. In fact, one of the first things many who study any economics at all will learn is just how bad GDP is as a measure of economic welfare. It's not even a particularly great measure of how many goods and services we each get to consume. Just how many people here do you think even know what it measures?
If anything there's a great deal of economic theory to support things like tradeable emissions quotas and taxes on energy and petroleum. And not just because of global climate changes either - there are plenty of more local reason like health problems and the degradation of the urban environments that many live in.