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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.
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!
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
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 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.
...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???
So does this mean the United States is going to start invading windy countries?
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?
Maybe we should just hold our breath and sufficate. That would solve the whole problem...
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Nah... the air as a mass may be measured in terms of viscosity, but it's the individual air molecules hitting the building (and each other) that burns off energy.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
Actually there have been. In at least one instance the truck overturned and slid off the road due to ice. There was no release from the casks. There have been 72 incidents (mostly involving cask sweating from loading) and 11 accidents with transports since the 50's.
My biggest beef about nukes is that we have the highest damn electrical rates in the country because ComEd overbuilt the damn things in Illinois and manage them poorly.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
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.
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
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.
I'm not going to argue the details of the Kyoto protocol; it's like arguing over the implementation of a class. What is important about Kyoto is its goal. If Kyoto is ineffective and costs the US jobs, why doesn't someone (whose voice will be heard) propose a better approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions? We need to do something about global warming instead of arguing indefinitely over details. Ignoring the problem will not make it go away.
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
France and Japan are both largely nuclear. When's the last time you heard about an accident in those countries. Oh, right, never.
Well, I hate to intrude on a good rant, particularly one that I am in general agreement with, but you are way off base when it comes to Japan. In the past five years they have had at least two nuclear power accidents that killed people. The first was in September 1999 when some guys at a fuel processing plant decided to start mixing things in a goddamn BUCKET and managed to kill themselves and the second was a steam leak in August 2004 that killed four. (no radiation leak, but the problem would have been found if they ever did ultrasound checks of the pipes...and in 28 years of operation at this plant they had done 0 checks...makes me feel real good about the primary loop on this particular PWR plant...)
The first accident was due to people obviously too stupid to be allowed to continue living getting access to enriched isotopes and the second was due to poor maintenance practices, but let's not go around claiming that countries with a lot of experience in this area are doiing everything right...
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.
"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!
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!
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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"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." Wrong. Kyoto consumption credits are based on 1990 national energy use. Given that the Russian economy is 2/3 the size it was in 1990, it will have credits to spare, which it plans on selling on the world market and make $$$. Believe me, Russia is doing it in only their own best interest. Kyoto would totally screw the US economy. Requiring it to meet 1990 emission standards or pay $$$ on the open market to buy additional credits. Bush was right to reject it as a flawed plan. It doesn't even include India & China which stand to be the biggest contributers to global warming in the not to distant future.
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.
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.
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.