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Alternative Energy Confusion
pcnetworx1 writes "New York State is starting to get crunched for electricity. While other states may just say 'pop a couple more coal/oil/natural gas/nuclear power plants down', NY has decided to take the green route. NY State wants to get more power by strategically placing windmill powerplants in upstate NY to help the grid. While getting a dedicated power plant placed on your property for FREE (and being paid $3,000 a year per tower) may sounds good to some Slashdotters, the citizens in upstate NY still need some education in the safety of alternative energy."
Where is the confusion in this article?
And, is there a limit to the numer of towers one can have (to prevent "tower-whoring")?
Purple, because ice cream has no bones.
I hope you aren't talking about birds. But then again, how would I know what you are talking about, you didn't mention it!
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
Why don't folks just use less energy? I mean, come on. Unneeded outside lighting, all the lights on inside, monitors left on all night long at work. People need to conserve energy a lot more than they need to start producing more of it.
Because you know don't you that the bird population of Upstate New York will suffer huge culls! Oh, and babies will also start speaking in tongues, and, oh, who knows, the world might end.
Stupidity knows no bounds.
More Social Welfare. Unbelievable!
I noticed this gem in the article:
"So I guess my final question is: Who do I sue if I have any health problems or my property value decreases because of this project?" asked Patricia Oakes, a Hartsville, New York, resident at a recent meeting.
Innovation and a solid legal system were some of the key ingredients that allowed America to become the most powerful nation on earth during the past half-century or so. Unfortunately, innovation is often at odds with tort law, as shown perfectly by the comment above.
With increasing competition from Europe, Japan, China, India, and other areas and nations, America will have to make a choice. They can choose to continue innovating, and perhaps maintain a lead over other nations. Otherwise, they can choose to let legalities unnecessarily interfere with progress, and they will fall behind those countries who aren't bogged down with pointless and greed-driven lawsuits.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
When the Eiffel Tower first went up, people said it was an eyesore and demanded that it be removed. Who wanted to live near a bunch of scaffolding? No doubt, they argued, it would destroy the character of the city and destroy property values. Now we can't imagine the city without it.
I think that once this farm is built, people will discover they like lower taxes and cleaner air. I suspect that the "science" mentioned in the article is mere pseudo-science anyway. I have no idea how a bunch of rotating blades could do as much damage to the human body as the fumes from coal and oil burning. (Note: I assume the human body does not actually come into contact with the blades)
What are you eating? isItVeg?.
Oh. My. Goodness. I have not read about stupidity on such a level since my 7th grade algebra teacher. I read through the issues. Sunlight reflecting? Pulling out a Godwin to compare windmills to Nazi torture tactics? Women having extra periods?
What the hell kind of stupidity is going on here? I used to think that all of the inbreeding was occuring in rural states - but this has got to be the biggest level of stupidity ever. And like my daddy used to say, I can abide a dumb person - that's just an ignorant one.
These people are stupid - which means the inability to learn.
(Sigh.) So, uh, any space up in Canada?
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Windmill safety warnings:
Do not place windmill into eye.
Never use windmill chop vegetables.
Windmill cannot be used for personal hygiene.
Tilting windmill may result in cliché.
So, all I have to do is buy some small plot of rural land in upstate NY, then lease it to the government to get 3K a year in rent? Awesome! If I can rent out 34 of these plots, I'm a millionare without any effort on my part!
to it's just plain silly to claim that our energy problems can be solved with solar and wind energy. They simply take up an enormous amount of land when compared with how much power they actually produce. Obviously coal and natural gas will run out eventually and are also contributing to global warming, so they aren't a long term solution either. Nuclear power is the only sustainable energy source over long periods of time. Many "environmentalists" will exploit the public's paranoia about anything with the words "nuclear" or "radiation" in it, and while storing nuclear waste securely is an important question, it's not one that has no answers. Energy conservation and solar/wind energy are nice, but when compared with the big picture, they really are drops in the bucket.
I'm not really defending these people; frankly, I think it would be cool to have wind turbines near my house. I'm just saying that people who are serious about solving energy problems are going to pick their battles, and this won't be one of them. Building nuclear power plants and storing nuclear waste will bring up similar "not in my backyard" protests, but at least it would accomplish something that would make a significant difference.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof of this theorem that this sig is too small to contain.
Put a market price on pollution... that's the way to do it. Fuel supply/demand determines a good price for fuel. But in the pollution market, there is no balance. Why should I care how much pollution is caused by the energy I use, just altruism?
People making green choices should be compensated for that in the pocketbook... and people will therefore do it!
it may sounds good to me too.
It would be interesting to find out more information regarding the backgrounds of the people involved with the campaign against such technology. Do they have any engineering or scientific backgrounds? Are they even aware of the pros and cons of these windmills?
From what the article presents, it would seem that they're just throwing out knee-jerk responses to a development they do not have the background to sufficiently understand.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
"[...]the citizens in upstate NY still need some education in the safety of alternative energy."
Uhhh, ok... so, I'm all for wind farming. It's cheap and competitive and safe. The NIMBYers (including those in my home state of Massachusetts) need to start considering their alternatives WRT coal, gas, and nuclear. Which would *you* prefer nearby, and how much do you want to pay for electricity? But when I read the term "education" used in this context, it just drives me up the wall. It's as if by being "educated" I would -- of course -- agree with the proposition at hand. IOW: The reframe of using the term "education" in the context of whatever agenda happens to be yours has now become cliché. *shrug*
Of course, if the government really wanted to conserve energy, we'd all be living in houses with 5.18 square metres of solar panels on them...
This is happening within my own county, and it's difficult for very conservative folks to imagine that this could possibly be a GOOD thing. There's the aesthetic argument, some griping about birds being affected, but I think maybe *part* of it is the unspoken downstate-versus-upstate struggle. The NYC metro area funnels off water from this region for its own use and is not cognizant of the fact that every spring, people die because they are reluctant to raise the floodgates and release a few million gallons that might prevent a flood or a road washout..... perhaps there are some resentments that "those people" down in in NYC are gonna get the bulk of the electricity produced here. "They" bring their city money up and purchase houses and price the locals out of the market. It's a conspiracy! It's way too easy for people to forget how all of it stimulates the local economy. Upstate New York would basically be dirt-poor-like-Vermont if it weren't for the NYC taxbase. I say bring on the wind turbines! More solar! Change it all to renewable energy. I'd much rather have a turbine spinning in my back yard than the Marcy South powerline marching over my land. :rolling eyes:
I am sure that the dislike of the NYC region bby the upstate residents plays a big part in this. Upstate NY per se has plenty of cheap hydroelectric power, much of which gets shipped to NYC making the electricity rates in upstate much higher than they otherwise would be. Rather than build an ugly tower in their back yard most upstate residents would rather NYC float out to sea then sink.
I grew up in rural upstate New York. Actually, I was just there. Talk about a depressing place to live. This could very well be the best thing to happen to the area where no one has any money...and decreasing property values? Give me a break. With NY taxes, no one's buying houses that are falling apart because no one can afford to fix them, anyway.
I'll take Hurricane Wilma anyday, thank you.
If there were 500 Eiffel towers dotting Paris, people might be less happy about them than they are about the one.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The green solution: Everyone stand on top of your building and exhale to the North!
hi mom!
I don't know about the confusion part but the windmills can be distracting. In California there are a couple places where windmills are close to major highways. It is really distracting when you are trying to focus on traffic while driving between giant spinning blades.
Windmill tortures you!
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Make McDonald's new logo a windmill. They'd make a fortune and nobody would complain if they had a big yellow windmill showing them where they can get fat. One for each McDonald's could power the entire western hemisphere.
I don't think birds are more important than people. Bring on the wind turbines!
Also, recently I read an article about a different type of wind generator that seems to be nicer to the birds. If I remember correctly it was a vertical spinning cylinder instead of a fan-type contraption.
I have to be a bit skeptical about some of these claims about wind turbines:
1. Wind turbines make the same noises as Nazi troops torturing Jews? WTF??
2. Wind turbines causing women to have multiple menstrual cycles a month?
Come on. The real issue is that these people think wind turbines will decrease their property value. They don't have to make up shit like this. Especially if you compare the health effects of what would be built instead of wind turbines...probably coal power plants, which would be far worse health wise.
That being said, wind power is definitely inconsistent. From what I've heard about Denmark, which has the most wind power per capita in the world, most Danes are so untrusting of the quality of their electricity that they wouldn't even think about powering something without a UPS, otherwise they'd fry their electronics. Can any Danes back that up?
Of COURSE the news outlets are going to interview the squeaky wheels. Sells more copies.
I imagine in any population, you can find 5% who are against something, no matter how good an idea it may be.
That 5% will get pushed aside, so that the rest of us can get on with things.
Yeah, things are winding down in WNY (western new york)...we just lost a money-sucking "fast ferry" to Toronto. Since I moved here 3 years ago I must say this is the windiest place I've ever lived in, though. I'm sitting in my house right now listening to the wind beat the siding.
While I am sure most slash-dotters are based in Urban areas, Or in other countries. Where while land prices are expensive they are not always considered as valuable. In the more Rural areas of New York, (NY is one of the larger States in the North East and most of it is NOT New York City). A lot of the people in Upstate want to live the Anti-NYC life. Where they can get up in the morning and look out the window and not see signs of Human Life, there are also many who bought this land for investment, where they can one day sell it for millions from their $50,000 investment. Things like Windmills, and other things make the land seem less pure and polluted. There was an argument about a year ago where a Cell company wanted to put a tower on top of a mountain and there ware many problems with it making it look ugly. So what the Cell company agreed to was to make it look like all the other trees, Just slightly taller. Many Upstate NYers want a life without much changes. If I had a house with like 20 achers I probably allow some windmills but I would want them away from the view from my house, and If they are in the way of my Neighbors view then Ill have some other problems.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I say paint a swirl pattern on the blades of the windmills so they look like the old hyponosis wheels. The birds will be too dizzy to fly near the windmills. If the birds are forced to walk they can't hit the blades. Better to have staggering birds with bad headaches than dead ones.
If you want a big steam turbine or several of them you have to order it years before you need it, and then it takes a long time to build all of the other infrastructure that turns it into a power station. If you go nuclear you have a choice between an expensive white elephant or becoming a pioneer with a full scale version of one of the more promising prototypes out there - so unless you have many years (more than a term of government certainly) you can forget about it.
There are several downsides of wind. With that small unit size the price per MW is high. Maintainance shedules are short (around 1 year vs 5 years for thermal plants) - but once again if you have a lot of small units you can afford to have a few down at any time. Wind isn't reliable, but paired with a thermal or hydro station that can do reasonably quick changes to load (sorry nuclear guys - this is your weak point) and control system like we've had for decades that isn't really a problem. Compare it to a solar water heater - it had a secondary heat source for those times when there isn't enough sun - so you have wind to save on oil or coal fuel costs.
Another quick fix solution is gas turbines. These are usually similar to jet engines driving generators and they aren't much cheaper than wind. Wind scales a bit (you can make big windmills and bring the price per MW down a bit) while photovoltaics don't - double the area of photovoltaics and you only get twice the power - which is why the nuclear crowd like to use it as a comparison because anything else built big enough is going to outstrip it at some point.
All of the above ignores CO2 - and if you consider it then that makes gas turbines less of an option. Nuclear in the short term would only work if someone parks a submarine nearby - everything that uses a large scale to get the efficiency up will require a lot of planning and constuction time.
Eh, why doesn't NY just suck more juice from Quebec?
It says: "'pop a couple more coal/oil/natural gas/nuclear power plants down'", implying that nuclear power is an option in the US (as it is in France, Japan, Czech Republic and so on).
That's simply not true. Since the accident at 3-mile island, nuclear power is dead in the US.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
I guess it never even occurred to them to put wind mills on the buildings in the city. Can't have that can we?
Now if Ted Kennedy lived in Upstate New York, there's be federal legislation in the works for sure.
It would be nice if all the so-called environmentalists would go ahead and put their money (and/or property values) where their mouth is and put wind farms/solar farms/alge ponds/nuclear/coal/gas powerplants, etc. in their neighborhoods.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
They could even put the dead pigeons to good use.
The average coal plant produces 600 megawatts of electricity Link. The entire output of an Ovionics Solar Cell assemply plant is enough electricity to produce 30 megawatts a year if all solar cells are used simultaneously, in sunny weather, during the day Link. That means that you have to have 20 years worth of production from that plant to get enough solar cells to equal a coal plant. Wind is a little better with the largest onshore turbines producing 2.5megawatts Link.
Or about 240 needed to reproduce a coal plant, when the wind is blowing. There are about 62 gigawatts of new generating capacity in the works, according to the CS monitor story, for the continental U.S.
But what about solar powered homes? The average home uses 10656 kw/h per year or about 1.21 kw constant load Link. The average aluminum smelting plant uses 300mw of electricity or 250,000 times as much Link. The average chemical plant uses 12mw constant load or almost 1000x as much Link. There are lots of similar industrial users. <sarcasm> Of course, who needs all those plants anyway? Doesn't produce anything usefull? All just pollution right? </sarcasm>
Sure there's plenty of little stuff we can do about the energy problems of the world but I think the problem is far far bigger than most people imagine. So basically given the above, environmentalists really have no solution to the world's energy problem except de-industrialization and I really doubt we are going to go along with that much less China, India, Russia, or Brazil. There you go, with a little math I spoiled the whole alternative energy debate. You have read the last chapter of the book on Global warming: There is no solution (except nuclear!). If you have some alternative examples show me and please make sure they include actual figures in megawatts. Not things like "wind energy potential" but instead, how long it would take to build, how much money, how much energy would be provided, etc. BTW, I'm not saying that some technological revolution isn't going to save us but please, let's get some numbers into the discussion!
How anyone can claim health problems from windmills is beyond me. People are calling them an eyesore but would they be happier with a coal burning plant next door? More of that anywhere but here BS. Tell you what. Communities that say yes to them get their power for half and your power bills are going to double. Not fair? Wait'll oil starts running out and everyone is paying 4X the current rate. I don't get the eyesore part myself. I lived in Wellington NZ where there was a massive one and it was a tourist attraction and I can't remember anyone complaining about it. Personally I love the ones between LA and Phoenix. The drive is boring and they are a lot more interesting to look at than desert scrub. The placement may not have been ideal but what birds are dying pale to what encrochment and polution cause. Not a perfect solution? Welcome to the real woirld where there are none. It's simply one of the best solutions. Third world countries are embracing the technology. It's sad that we in the oil whoring US of A are whining about asthetics.
Some time ago, people started getting paranoid about adverse health effects from high-voltage transmission lines near residential areas. Around that time I was back in school, and my Physics instructor did a very good job of debunking some of the pseudo-science.
With a few simple calculations, he demonstrated that the magnetic field strength at a point directly underneath an average high-voltage transmission line was less than that of the Earth's magnetic field.
Susprisingly, no one has launched any class-action suits against the Earth's core.
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
I recently saw a demo of a Stirling engine. It can generate energy from hot air. All they need to do is ship a few of these to the Governor's Mansion in Albany NY and that state's energy problems will be history.
Upstate New York is full of short-sighted, selfish idiots. These people will continue to be militantly stupid until something impedes their access to cable TV; once that happens, they'll be fighting tooth-and-nail to get wind turbines installed. After that, they'll cover the turbines in bright yellow "Support Our Troops" magnets and sit down in front of the TV until another opportunity to delay technological progress appears.
Move 'sig'. For great justice!
I'm in upstate NY.
Politics are on the lips of just about every person residing in upstate, as far as I can see. I couldn't go down from my office to get a coffee in Collegetown without overhearing at least 2 or 3 townies discussing politics if I wanted to.
It's also a fertile breeding ground for rather furious debate about such things. The Socialist party has a strong presence here (seriously, and they're proud to be Socialist). The town prints 2 forms of currency to be used in addition to US currency, City Bucks and Ithaca Hours.
So, to hear people talking about building wind farms in upstate is unsurprising. People have been talking about that for quite a while.
The flip side, however, is that you can always hear opponents of such actions. For instance, Cornell University does its cooling with water from the Cayuga River. We're not talking about dumping hot water into the river. Cold water from the Cayuga is pumped through campus buildings to cool them, reducing the amount of energy required by the campus. As far as sustainable, environmentally sound solutions are concenred, it's probably one of the cleanest ways to do it. It's definately pushing the curve a bit and showing that such solutions are viable.
This solution has vocal opponents as well.
To be brief, you can find just about any statement, as long as it's left-wing, that you want in upstate, and, according to people who've lived her longer than I, quite a few right wing ones too if you look hard enough. It's just the nature of upstate. People like politics.
They're a symbol of "green" energy and sanity. I couldn't give a fuck if it is blocking someone's view of some hill across yonder. I... I don't even have any coherent words to say about this. Since when is your "view" more important than the environment and public health!? I'm sucking on pollution and being irradiated due to coal plants because of these idiots! Fuck your view! Bring on the windmills!
Well I thought evolution had laid this problem to rest, but apparently the bird wars are to begin again! I for one welcome our new bird-brained overlords.
I just checked a manufacturer's site, theirs produce 1.5 to 5MW. So, even if we assume their smallest model, that would mean the household in question would have to run almost 10.000 XBox 360s, which of course is impossible since nobody could survive in such a hot environment.
I fully agree with the other half of your comment, though, and would like to add that you wouldn't be able to hear them from a few hundred meters distance anyway.
Generating tourism isn't dependent on there being 500 of them though. With wind towers, the more the merrier the people will be since they can run more stuff on the grid. After all, who likes rolling blackouts over unlimited air conditioning?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
I live in Stueben County. These people are so braindead. The city of Hornell is mostly welfair recipients and they spent 25,000 dollars on a clock for downtown becuse they thought people would want to come here to see it. ITs a stupid clock for friggin christs sake. who in there right mind is gona drive 3 to 4 hours into the middle of nowhere to see a 10 foot clock? The local goverment is corupt as all hell and the property taxes are so high that people sell houses for insanely cheep prices to get rid of the tax burden. you can buy a house here for under 20 grand but you will pay 3 grand a year in tax. I would tell you more but i might get lynched. This be redneck country
I don't think ugliness is a good enough excuse to not put them up there. If they are so worried about their property value, ask the government to compensate them for 100% of their land loss, or maybe ask to be exempt from any property taxation.
... windmill farms ... provide clean and practically free energy once they're installed.
And my house provides clean and practically free shelter once I've built and paid for it.
Ladies and gentlemen, er, we've just looked at the pictures, but, uh, what we've seen speaks for itself. New York State has been taken over - "conquered," if you will - by a master race of giant alien propellers. It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive townsfolk or merely enslave them.
One thing is for certain, there is no stopping them; the props will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new rotary overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a Slashdot poster with excellent karma, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground storage battery caves.
--
If giant alien robots invaded California, would they think the windfarms were just outdoor fitness classes?
That's precisely the idea behind the system of pollution credits in the Kyoto treaty. Companies get some number of tradable pollution credits. That way companies have an economic incentive to curb emissions so that they can sell off their credits to other companies who pay real dollars to keep on polluting. Regulating the supply of pollution credits allows one to curb the total amount of pollution going into the atmosphere.
I'm sick of everything only being news if NY or some other east-coast state does it. And if the up-staters can't figure out that free money and a free windmill in their year is a good thing, that's their problem.
Here in Colorado we've had wind power for a long time, and you can elect to get your electricity *only* from wind. You can even get beer produced entirely with wind-generated electricity: http://www.newbelgium.com/sustainability.php
Where do I sign up, I live upstate New York and I need a windmill to help power my own datacenter and my storage with pr0n and 3000$ would be a nice extra (given that some people here earn only 15000$/year.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Presently coal from places such as West Virginia is used to power New York. In West Virginia, hills are bulldozed into valleys to get at the coal, leaving a wasteland.
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New Yorkers want the benefits of the power while shouldering *none* of the costs.
Lame.
Example:
http://www.ohvec.org/galleries/mountaintop_remova
and that 5.18 square meters of solar just might run my computer and refrigerator. maybe.
To answer the prefabricated troll intended for another article - Photovoltaics are a portable power source when you need a little bit of power and don't want your device to be connected to the grid. Building up some bit SF solar park scheme without even a mirror or any use of heat is only the practice of people who want to have a crappy alternative to compared to what they are selling.
The right tool for the job is the answer - in the case of a station in Antartica where the fuel needs to be shipped in and strong winds rarely stop is the extreme case for wind power where nothing else makes any sense. In other less extreme cases you have something you can turn on when you need a bit more power on the peak (about the time when those shore winds pick up on a still day) or something you can run all the time and burn a bit less coal or oil in those thermal plants - which can all respond to load changes very rapidly (coal fired plants were doing load following while big mining draglines operated even back in the 1950s - with manual control and guys talking on telephones).
Brilliant post!
./ a few days ago that we could use Algae. In this story it was suggested that someone has come up with a novel idea. Of course - among the uninformed posts we didn't see any estimates of the maximum (much less average) photosynthetic efficiency of algae. If they had that number they could multipy by the _average_ solar incidence.
The peak amount of sunlight falling on flat land in the vicinity of the 49th parallel on a clear day when you can see forever is in the vicinity of 1GWe per square mile. If anyone has some good ideas to capture it then that may solve the energy crisis as well.
It was suggested in a story posted in
It has always been much cheaper to mine the fuel from a rich deposit rather than make it from intense agricultural sources. The problem is those who dream of these solutions can't seem to do the math.
The SOONER these hair brained ideas get built the better. Those windmills will not help the Northeastern Seaboard power problems. In the middle of the night when the wind isn't blowing one day the lights will go out (again - then again) and there should be a lot of people demanding to know why there is so little technical competance in the upper echelons of those who wish to manage... this includes the pollies.
Deal with reality or reality will deal with you!
Windmills can reduce consumption of non-renewable natural resources as can solar and to this extent they are worthwhile providing they are reasonably cost effective. However these power sources still need to be backed up by conventional generating capacity and when doing so the investors have to realise that their backup power plants cannot show a return on investment when they are idling.
This illustrates the problem with alternative "green" power. It is more than 2x as expensive as anything else. Not only does it typically operate at a 30% duty cycle or less - in addition it needs to be backed up by a plant that will idle while the alternative systems are operational.
---------------
A much better place to spend that investment capital is in retrofitting homes and bringing the R-values up into the R50 range for the walls and R70 for the ceilings. This can be combined with better glazing and perhaps automatic insulated shutters that close in the middle of the night when everyone is sleeping and it is dark outside anyways.
If someone hasn't noticed before the duty cycle of fiberglass insulation is close to 100% when it is in the walls. In addition it is a somewhat proven technology.
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So will be a lot of kids as the oil wars continue to unfold. As they said in the 70's... open up those pearly gates! I guess Iran rythmes with Veitnam...
So what are we going to be fighting for? The right to burn other people's oil because we don't want to use a proven safe alternative? (which BTW is more reliable and much cheaper and increadibly abundant)
Deal with reality ro reality will deal with you.
Amazingly enough, I'm actually working on an alternative energy project for my school's Public Affair's class. My group is actually on its way to getting a photovoltaic system for the school (With luck, but it looks good so far!). As another project for it, I'm working on a website for the class, too. It's going to contain a collection of alternative energy resources for home-owners, but isn't quite complete at this time. (Residential cable, woo!) :E
PS: NY state, too.
(\(\
(=_=) Bani!
(")")
and not Chicago?
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. - William Gibson
Yes, nuclear energy doesn't pollute like coal or gas. It pollutes in its own unique radiant style that will keep an area aglow for millennia.
Personally, I favor switching everything to biodeisel. Once our cars are competing directly for the agricultural resources needed to feed humans, we will see the population drop to a sustainable level.
Someday we might realize that there isn't a magic bullet. Each alternative engery source has draw backs and we need to be developing them all. PS, I agree nuclear will be the long term solution. This solution has to be developed slowly and more thought than other alternatives.
You haven't seen those ads? "The value of your investments can go down as well as up." Deal with it.
And if someone wants a nice view out of his window, he can fucking well buy all the land out there or shut up...
I'm not to proud to be an American normally, but the U.S. attitude has its moments.
What chornobyl residents? There arn't any. Sadly this illustrates why a containment building is needed.
But the flip side of this horrific unintentional experiment is that the death toll is about 50 (and not as the media speculated!!!), there has not been a single documented case of leukemia (yet the media speculated there would be 100's of 1000's _AND_ they have NOT corrected their lies). At one point it was speculated that there was a thyroid cancer increase but even that has now been shown to be perfectly normal.
The Chornobyl area is becoming a beautiful wildlife preserve if for no other reason than humans for the most part are staying away and leaving it alone. Perhaps this will be its future... a wildlife park.
Birds and squirrels live in the sarcophagus. So far we havn't seen too many 3 eyed squirrels or birds.
I'm not saying it's impossible people think wind turbines have something to do with Nazi Camp torture... but wackos exist everywhere. Why do these wackos get publicity?
The article gives us a clue...
Maybe the future governor wants to cozy up with the largest lobbying group in the United States? (the energy industry)
And what does the energy lobby want? Do they want citizens to get $3,000 a year and other rewards for setting up wind farms, OR do they want NY to give them millions in subsidies after they build a new coal plant?
There is a chance that people are thinking about ugly broken unmaintained windmills fifty or so years into the future. Personally, I fear the day when the windmill and solar power industry begins its conquest of the remaining wildnerness in the US.
And that's the problem. These things are big. 400 feet high, the size of a 40 story building. And that's the old 1MW model. The new 3MW units are even bigger, with a 341 foot blade diameter.
But that's only 3MW. These things need to installed in large numbers to generate enough power to drive whole cities. So thousands of these huge towers have to be built. This is happening. And, let's face it, the result looks like an industrial park. We're not talking about those little hippie windmills from the 1970s. This is serious machinery.
Upstate New York people are bitching about this, as mentioned in the original article. The Cape Cod and Nantucket people are furious. The plan there is to build a wind farm six miles offshore, with 130 turbines. This seems huge, but it will only provide about a quarter of Cape Cod's electricity. Residents are upset about how it will "ruin the ocean view". Six miles offshore.
Actually, the Cape Cod site probably should be about 10x bigger. Someday it will be.
Just build a conference center for politicians directly underneath windmills pointing down, with no roof. Unlimited energy for all! And if you're lucky, an occasional windmill propeller will break loose and make the world a happier place.
They seem completely oblivious to the fact that some people would like the looks of the windmills.
"Old Spanish guys might try to swordfight your windmill."
If you don't get the refenece, well, this is Slashdot, and it's a literary reference, so I won't be surprised.
Town board members surveyed the population and found that only 5.5 percent of townspeople are against the wind farm, while 58 percent are for it.
The remaining 36.5 percent voted for the Cowboy Neal-based solution.
I used to live in Upstate NY. I've seen several wind farms now in the Midwest --I'm just wondering if there is enough persistent wind to run power-generation windmills?
My ex-girlfriend's dad was setting up a program called "Sustainable Vienna." His goal was to make our town self-sufficient in terms of both energy and food production. I was on the board, before I moved out to Rochester for college. Just had to point out that everyone in Upstate NY doesn't fall for this crap.
If this article at Open Source Energy Network is to be believed, a new alternative form of turbine will solve a lot of problems and might get them all on the same page.
To a politician, one email equals one voter.
The Federal energy bill that was signed into law and went into effect Jan 1 has some nifty tax credits. Maybe your boss might be interested. And if you are in California it just got even more interesting. Not totally free, but some dineros to be saved there on installs. HTH
Quoth your article: 100 watts per hour
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Here in Austin, we've had the Green Choice Program available for a while. There's a huge farm of windmills out in west Texas by El Paso. I've driven past them--it's really amazing how many there are. I remember last summer getting a flier in the mail touting this program. They said that for a typical household that used 1000 kilowatt hours/month, it would cost about an additional $5 to know that all of your power came from these sustainable sources. I kept meaning to sign up but never got around to it.
After Katrina and Rita, I heard predictions that the price of natural gas (which is what most of the electricity is made with around here) was going to skyrocket. I figured that I'd better sign up for Green Choice immediately, because if the predictions were true, then Green Choice would be cheaper than regular energy. Plus, the Green Choice program locks in a 10 or 15 year contract with the energy providers, so the price doesn't go up.
I wish I had signed up, becuase come October it was too late and the program was full. Now if you look at the Green Choice site you'll see that Green Choice energy is in fact cheaper than regular energy, and they're having a drawing to sign up a relatively small number of additional customers.
I think this is fantastic--it's bound to cause expansion of wind and other sustainable energy production methods.
---
watch funny commercials.
Because They Can.
Yes, ABSTAIN, SINNER! That's always worked very well in the past. Face it, as a civilization grows, its power consumption grows as well. There's no way around it. Trimming waste is a temporary fix at best; eventually you'll just need to generate more power anyway.
(Hey, you get wheat from wheat farms and pigs from pig farms, right?)
Windmills actually *can* be quite dangerous! Where I live there was recently (A few years ago) built a state of the art windmill park. October 2002, the blades on one of them fell off. That's right, they fell off! A propellar with a diameter of 90 meters crashed to the ground. Snippet about the incident (norwegian)
Less than 42 years, seeing as to how we will be spending less money on repairing the environment and everything else associated with externalities of natural gas, coal, nuclear, etc. An important thing to note: gas and oil prices are only likely to go up, as they are a limited resource, and supply is decreasing.
The US Navy has been operating dozens, maybe hundreds of nuclear reactors for half a century without incident. While normally I'm against it, I think that private companies can't be trusted with nuclear power and that the Navy (with Marines to gaurd I believe is SOP) has known from the start that one slip-up would cancel their nuclear power program and thus have rules and procedures so tight a Nazi drill sargent would snap. At least as I understand it. Wind and solar have their place, but we need all, and power conservation.
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. - William Gibson
...let the little guy get into the energy production business. From single house size on up. It's not that far from going from producing what you need yourself to being a commercial supplier, it's as easy as having a grid tie and a backwards running meter, and you can scale up from there to serious wholesale amounts. it's a good deal for those farmers who have put them in already out in the midwest. The only people who benefit financially from nuke plants are the already-billionaires crowd. Don't they have enough money and economic and political control now? Solar and wind decentralize the input radically,they create many more installations, thereby increasing security and the robustness of the grid. You don't have to have squads of armed guards with surface to air missiles 24/7 guarding your solar panels or wind towers. Solar adds peak power exactly when peak air conditioning demand is needed. Wind towers can make use of marginal land, maybe not suitable for efficient farming, but great for capturing some energy, like hilltops. Wind picks up a lot in the winter months when more lighting electricity is needed from shorter days, so wind and solar together are a great year round hybrid system. Wind towers and solar can create many more jobs, *useful* jobs, and give employment to people in rural areas, something desperately needed in this age of blue collar outsourcing to overseas plants. If the US switched bigtime,merely as an adjunct to what we have now for grid production, maybe we could put a million dudes to work, actual productive work, wealth creating work. These alternatives create service and installation work as well as in the manufacturing. You as a small biz guy or homeowner can actually pay off and *own* your own power, eliminating the "rent the infrastructure" at no guaranteed price that a normal monthly "bill" represents. Initial installation costs are much lower, and much simpler, and much cheaper than any nuke plant. Solar or wind plants can be setup and running very quickly in areas devastated by natural disasters and provide immediate emergency power, without requiring allocation of expensive fuel resources that conventional emergency generators need and might not be available (see last years hurricanes examples).
and etc. There are a lot of advantages to going with the simpler and greener alternatives. Not as an immediate total replacement, but to add to the mix we already have. We need a balance, we ALREADY have a lot of coal and natgas and nuke plants and large scale hydro,so let's add in an equivalent balance of some greener stuff, the solar and wind, see how that works out. I would bet once true economies of scale kick in, we'd see some significant price drops and it would get pretty competetive. wind is darn close now to coal in some places as it stands. It is not a magic silver bullet, but the tech is here now and it works and just keeps getting better. The wind and sunlight are *free*, we aren't going to "run out" anytime soon, and no one can "embargo" the fuel, we aren't going to hit "peak sun" or "peak wind" soon, and there's nothing all that dangerous about it, for the most part.
Compared to all the other strange stuff joe government and joe consumers drop cash on, it just makes sense to dig in and do some of this on a really big scale now, while it's still cheap to build it.
We're talking America here, the land of city slickers driving F250's and Suburbans so the family of 4 can make it over the speed-bumps in Walmart's parking lots. And if you don't like it, why don't you just go to FRANCE? Stupid, no-good Frenchies, refusing to die so we can exercise our God-given right to drive said vehicles for a moderate price.
was invoked in TFA.
There should be no posts to this topic!
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
We need to reduce the amount of electricity our homes require. NYC simply needs to enact a curfew and mandatory bedtime. "Lights out, kids!" Or, we could just work on the age-old problem of energy efficiency a little more... Maybe some subsidies to help the poorer folk afford the new gadgetry.
There are so many parts of this I want to comment on, I don't know where to start. I guess I'll respond to the comments about Tom Golisano first:
/.ers have hit the nail on the head. The hate really starts with the NYC watershed. The city abuses upstaters around their watershed areas like it's all they have to do. They sued an upstate man who tried to mow the land next to his property, which happened to be part of the NYC wateshed and had not been mowed in years. The city claimed he would be able to claim squatters rights to the land if they didn't stop him. He just wanted his property to be next to something that didn't look like a neglected wasteland. NYC management of the watershed also causes floods that are very damaging (which they don't pay for) and puts many people at risk.
Tom Golisano is an moron. If you've ever wondered what a fallacious argument is, just listen to Golisano for 5 minutes. He is also the current World Champion of Godwinism. Give him any topic, such as medicare, poverty, privatizing schools, etc., and he can Godwin it in under 20 seconds. If he weren't a billionaire, no political party would give him the time of day.
On to NYC hate. I think a few
There are a lot of stupid upstate townies, such as the ones quoted in the article. I welcome wind towers to my county, although I'm sure there won't be any around me (very strict zoning laws in my town). I wonder why NYC isn't using the massive amount of property it owns in its watershed for wind towers. Perhaps the pulsating sunlight could damage the water.
You are WAY off with your typical rush limbaugh sourced "payback" figures. here, have a look. That 10-20 year figure is from like 30 years ago, and people still keep quoting it, never bothering to actually go and look. Believe it or not, tech keeps advancing, even when you aren't looking.
I lived for a long time with pure solar power. You can easily run a normal house with a normal amount of electricity from what can be mounted on the roof, given a good open southern exposure in some place reasonably sunny, which is 3/4ths or more of the land mass of the US. And wind power is even cheaper if your locale supports it, which, again, is a huge area of the US, probably between 1/2 and 2/3rds of the land mass. And that is at todays prices and with todays tech, who knows what kilowatt hours will be costing you 5 years from now. They might rise enough to decrease "payback" figures by a significant amount, and if you go bu past historical cost data, you can just about bet your rate will be going up from your friendly electric company. Those tables and maps for solar and wind potential you can go google up yourself, easy enough to find, I found the "solar payback" site for you with ten seconds worth of search.
I completely agree, somewhat. We need to save energy, but it isn't light bulbs or televisions or microwave ovens that are the problem, it's al these newfangled computers. We have millions of computers with their bojillan ludicrousHz processthingies sucking up 1.21 jiggawatts per second. Therefore the solution is clear, we will soon be at war with computers and will only win when an alien race helps us defeat them, then lulls us into a false sense of security and kills us all. Ironicaly the aliens will die too and everyone lived happily ever after.
I don't know what this is talking about in terms of safety (I've never heard anyone argue over the odd safety points they mentioned), but it's not something most people here want. The thing is, practically every bit of energy from the windmills is going to be routed to NYC (we have no power problems here). And having a big farm of a few dozen windmills right in the back of every small town is rather ugly and noisy in the immediate area. My friend lives about half a mile away from a farm of about 8 I think that are maybe 10 miles outside of town, and they are still audible from his house with about half of them running (I think they supply power out of state). I'm not against clean power. I don't think many people against the windmills are. It just gets old catering to and living in the shadow of NYC. If _we_ needed them, it would be a different story. But this is just another time when New York is New York City, not New York State. Some might consider that greedy, but a community belongs to the people in it. Tall mechanical objects may seem ok to people in a reasonibly sized city dotted with skyscrapers, but when you live in a rural area, they really aren't something that improves or matches the look of the community. And sure, the land owner may get $3000 a year for placement of a turbine. But if my next door neighbor puts one in and gets paid $3000/year for it, isn't it just as obtrusive to me? I won't get any money for it.......
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
It is easy: Shift taxes and the market will do the work. Bad things should be taxed, good things should not. So, you can lower VAT, income taxes etc. and get those for energy up. People will figure it out, especially in those places of the world where a coin is every reason you need to justify any behaviour.
Bert
Yes, Denmark has more windmill power per capita than anyone else. And the Danish windmill producers have half the global marketshare, chances is that the NY windmills will be of Danish origin.
No Danish electricity supply is not untrustworthy. The avarage time between a power grid failure (affecting a specific houshold) is around 10 years. Apart from one (which was a network configuration error in Sweden), the ones I have experienced have all been extreme weather related (trees blown into power lines, stuff like that). I don't know anyone with an UPS, I don't see them marketed in the stores, but sometimes they are in catalogues, so there must be some people who buy them.
Hearing about the power problems in Californaia made most Danes shake their head in disbelief. To us, it sounds like a third world situation, and we don't think of USA that way. I have even heard unstable power used as an argument to keep Turkey out of EU. If they can't even keep their power grid running, they are clearly not ready for the EU.
However, this has nothing to do with wind mills. Winds mills can save use of fossil foil, but cannot contribute to the stability of the grid. We still need enough coal based power plants to supply the nation with electricty, even when there is no wind. So it is not a question of whether you want to build a coal plant or 100 wind mills, but whether you want the coal plant alone, or the plant plus 100 wind mills.
The Danish power grid has until recently been run by regional companies, mostly owned by municipals, with a monopoly. They build the grid to have excess capacity. With deregulation coming, they even upgraded their capacity further in order to be able to export power (and increase their value for comming buyers). My guess is that the main problem with unstable grid come from deregulated markets with strong competion and low profit margins, not leaving money for any excess capacity.
The wind mills are not particular popular among the local population in Denmark either. Not because of any health issues, but because they a huge (only the largest mills are anything near cost efficient compared to coal), and not everybody think they are pretty. There are hate-organizations such as "Neighbors to Wind-mills" in Denmark as well. The trend is that ever larger mills are build out on the sea. More wind, less neighbors.
The current 20% is considered the maximum technically possible, without any means for efficiently storing the energy. The hydrogen based economy is interesting to us, as it would allow the wind-mills to store convert the energy to hydrogen to be taped later.
More important than the wind-mills are probably the local combined heat and power plants, which allows a very high utilization of the coal. They are clean and noiseless, and provide a local community with heat, while the power goes to the grid. We still need some of the large dedicated power plants to when we want power, but not heat.
Everywhere I went there were signs saying NO TO TURBINES. There have been a series of letters from some crank who writes the local paper who brags about how his education allow him to speak about the evils of scary windmill power (he has an ENGLISH degree) and how that qualifies him to say things like, "Windmills spook the local cows and they will not make milk, or they will make cancer milk!" and other alarmist and ignorant crud like that. Of course, the health of children is at risk too, etc. These are people who beg for prisons to be built in the county, complete with huge, tall, bright watchtowers and watertowers. But for some reason windmills are BAD. By the way, a year before this the signs on the same pieces of property read, "YES TO WALMART." Take that as you will.
***
Apologies if this has already been said (my computer isn't working quite right and it's a bit hard to read all the comments), but according to the article:
"Landowners who install wind farms will earn about $3000 per year per turbine, and the municipality will typically receive a percentage of the wind farm's profits based on wattage output."
Thus, that should make up for your loss in property value. Heck, it might even increase it, seeing as the property generates income.
Documentation: Instructions translated from Swedish by Japanese for English speaking persons.
How bad does it fuck up a landscape? Nobody seems to care (well besides the republicans from http://www.saveupstateny.com/), I mean, how can you be against nuclear power plants, as they hardly polute anything, and want to put the mills everywhere? Because nuclear power plants can explode? Correct me if i'm wrong, but last time it happened i wasn't born yet.
I really can't understand that windmill madness, if anyone can explain me, why does these damn hippies who are supposed to love nature want to see everywhere, and why do governments think they really must get into it, as if it was the solution of the future? Personally I really don't want a future with a countryside full of that shit, aerial power lines are already bad enough, it's yet nothing compared to that.
You just got troll'd!
I have no idea how a bunch of rotating blades could do as much damage to the human body as the fumes from coal and oil burning. (Note: I assume the human body does not actually come into contact with the blades)
I assume that you do not have any dumb-as-fuck teenagers who will try to "ride the blades" when they are drunk.
It sure looks like what I saw when driving between San Antonio and El Paso last year. At least in my opinion, I thought those lines of windmills running along the occasional ridge looked pretty cool. The three big windmills in my home state (Michigan, two at Mackinaw and one in Traverse City) also look very nice and from my perspective are not a detractor to these areas at all.
A line of six-mile distant windmills will not ruin the view. Anyone who subscribes to this theory should have one built right in their damned back yard.
Barely, in New York during winter, it must be a very small and well insulated house, if you use electric heating. But that's not the point. The problem with wind is that it doesn't blow all the time. Perhaps some places have a more or less constant wind, but I doubt that's true for New York state.
And too much wind is a problem also. Wind turbines must be stopped during very strong winds. Other than developing ultra-strong materials, there isn't much technology can do about this. Wind varies so much in intensity that, if you want your turbine to be useful in the most frequent wind conditions, it will not work in either too strong or too low winds.
Labelling. I receive my bills, which exactly tells me, how much power, of which quality I did consume. Labelling is that what I want to do with the internet.
Recently I started an initiative for the sustaineable, ecofriendly internet. The idea is to write a power-code into the header of each packet. Every router, every ip-able device should label the packet and should do the maths between each route.
In the end I receive the amount, what kind of sources supplied the technology to forward my traffic.
In practice this means, every consumer, every isp can take part in this network. A real green grid. Unfortunatly our website http://www.ecologee.net/ runs not in English so far, but this might change.
Not even that works, just look at all the hooha that is being made about Yucca Mountain . It is located in one of the most bleak and god forsaken corners of this country, and is almost 2 hours north of Las Vegas, in the middle of the Nevada Nuclear Test Range. Despite its remote location, suitability for long-term waste storage, and the billions already and yet to be spent to insure safe operation on a scale of thousands of years, it is still not good enough in the eyes of nuclear power's detractors.
I would really like to know what exactly those people think about the looks of New Orleans nowadays.
It is so very interresting, that renewable energy systems have to be 100% perfect in every single aspect while all the other energy systems are allowed to have fundamental flaws.
There is no silver bullet for our energy situation.
If I were to live in an area that is endangered by flooding from rising sea levels or in an area where coal is being dug up or if I had to choose whether I had to live near a nuclear plant or near a wind farm, I would definately opt for the wind farm.
It is also very saddening to see all those already debunked myths about wind and solar energy pop up again and again and again. "It takes more energy to produce a wind mill | solar panel than they ever produce in their lifetime."
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Check the facts. Will this ever stop?
-silence
Dyslectics of the world, untie!
FuKing generator.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Use energy with more efficiency?
When you do your meal you use food enought for 4 days just for a sandwich?
I live near the wind farms in Madison County and have ridden my bicycle up to the bases of some of the towers. It's a great thing. THere is even a song about them by Karen Savoca on her new album. Most of us around here are for the wind farms knowing that it's just what we need, that the terrain is right, and that we need to move forward in this region before everyone flees our snow fall.
Here are some links:
Aerial Photos
About Madison County
The Fenner Wind Farm
Start thinking about making your move to Central/Upstate New York now. Very little traffic, cheap housing, beautiful four seasons, apple picking, the Finger Lakes, the Adirondacks, Niagara Falls, and the Thousand Islands. My friend, a software engineer, formerly from Oakland, lives here now and telecommutes at incredible savings.
Best of all, there's Wegmans and if you've never been to Wegmans, your first visit will make it so you never want to leave.
Let me know if you need help unloading the moving van.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
I'm in Central NY and hoping that we are smarter than the folks including Romney and Kennedy on Cape Cod who, though they may talk about being green (word is, it's not easy), don't want the towers in their area. Ugh. Maybe we could set up an oil burning plant or a nice nuclear (or, as Bush would say nook-you-ler) cooling tower. Sheesh
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
Apparently Ted Kennedy is one of the people who oppose renewable energy, at least when it affects his property values or vista.
m ain560595.shtml
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/06/26/sunday/
Aluminium is produced from ore by electrolysis, i.e. by passing a current through molten aluminium ore. Quote from Wikipedia:
Aluminium electrolysis with the Hall-Héroult process consumes a lot of energy, but alternative processes were always found to be less viable economically and/or ecologically. The world-wide average specific energy consumption is approximately 15±0.5 kilowatt-hours per kilogram of aluminium produced (52 to 56 MJ/kg). The most modern smelters reach approximately 12.8 kWh/kg (46.1 MJ/kg).
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
You can trust me when I say that this is all pretty damned rural. I can get in my car right now, drive five miles in any direction, and have a decent chance of seeing a cow, or maybe a horse, trying to find some grass underneath the recent snowfall. It's a certainty when the weather's nice. Like just about everywhere else, there is a disparity between the educated and the non-educated of this region, but the educated tend to cluster in one place, and there are a lot of tiny villages and townships between here and civilization. These are the sort of places where, were you to stop for gas in the middle of the day, the toothless folk behind the counter who are selling night crawlers (every gas station in these places doubles as a bait shop/convenience store) break off their conversations with their other customer, and the both of them look at you funny; almost as if they're hoping you'll do something funny so they can say they killed the "city boy." I should mention, to these folks, a "city" tends to be defined as a town with a population of more than 5000. There are a decent number of Amish communities interspersed in the area, and it's not uncommon to pass a horse drawn carriage on the highway, but it is a disturbing commentary on the bulk of the ruralites that the Amish community is, overall, more tolerant than they are. Being uneducated and toothless is a mark of distinction with these people: they're the sort who drive around in rusty pickups with bumper stickers that say "My kid beat up your Honor Student."
My view from the college town that I happen to reside in leaves me unsurprised at the sentiments expressed in the article. The population of most of the towns in the North Country is insulated, uneducated, and xenophobic. When they hear the "wind turbine," they're probably thinking it's the devil's own handiwork; that, or something that an A-rab wears on top of their head. Either way, they don't want it in their back yard, and they're too ignorant to understand that really it is a good thing for them.
The official message of many nuke-tenants is "nuke will solve the greenhouse-gas problem". This is pure BS, as a lab shows it right now. The lab name is 'France', where approximatively 80% of the electrical (grid power) is produced by nuclear plants.
Guess what? France missed by far the Kyoto objectives of greenhouse gas (and among them CO2) reduction, and those objectives were not ambitious (Details).
Moreover we discover, in another "lab" (England), that, in addition to all the known problems (waste, disaster...), any nuke plant dismantling produces a huge amount of very 'hot' (radioactive) crap, as revealed by the corresponding costs (always rising) and planning (delay: 100 years, and counting).
But all this information is not propagated as well as the usual pro-nuke BS.
Nuclear-vendors propagate the usual "nuclear power if safe, pigs can fly" crap ("nuke is the solution for greenhouse gas reduction", "production of clean energy producers cost most energy thant they will produce", "the Chernobyl disaster killed 4000 persons"...). One can understand that. But I wonder why some theoritically neutral (are they?) people relay it!?
Electricity is not a scarce resource! All we need to do is use nuclear power, or build that giant solar array that keeps getting proposed, or some other method I don't know about and we've got all we can ever use. Sure, people tend to dislike nuclear because of the whole waste issue, but we can solve most of that problem by using breeder reactors, and significant disasters are impossible if we use modern designs.
"73% of quotes on the Internet are made up" -Ben Franklin
NYC needs a constant, predictable supply of power.
Big buildings and commercial nerve centers can't cut back on air conditioning, elevators, and subways.
The city needs LOTS of STEADY power.
Windmills provide just the opposite.
If you add windmills and want to keep the same level of service, you have to add EVEN MORE gas-fired generators to make up for time of little or no wind.
Think August.
The problem is not just flaky folks up north, it's all the people that use wishful thinking and think some greenish energy source will solve all the problems.
When you said you installed your own solar system, my first reaction was that creating an entire solar system was a pretty extreme - but doubtless effective and environmentally friendly - way of generating energy. Then I read on and things made sense :-)
The cost of the turbines seems a bit step compared to ones i've seen before, but perhaps they are much larger or use a new super efficent turbine? I live within the perspective area, and honestly i think its not such a bad idea. I do wonder about possible sound pollution, i know the light relflecting off of these can be bad as well. I think these will do well to be put in the more rural areas at first, i don't know how these compared to the ugly cell towers that have been put around, but i would imagine they would pose less health risks. Will be intersting to see what happens with this.
You're looking for this: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/press/repo rts/windforce-12-2005. The source might have their own agenda, but the science and technology reported is sound, and they provide links to further reading. Otherwise, try EWEA (ewea.org) or AWEA (awea.org).
Hurricane Application Group, Dept of Meteorology Control, Ministry of Proactive Defense
Is it a joke? Even very pro-nuke agencies think that it will kill approx 4000 persons, and this is based upon very very dubious data and methods (see below).
> Anyway, the site that you cite says that the 4000 people estimate is based on bad science.
Indeed. Official UN agencies try hard to let us think that the disaster will only kill 4000 persons, and the proposed site shows why it is not true, why the grand total is very probably way higher.
In France alone (2000 km from Chernobyl), a Nobel Prize (G. Charpak, physics, very pro-nuke) thinks that the disaster will kill approx 300 persons (French site). Many think that it will kill at least 100000 persons. Special bonus: don't neglect the teratogen and mutagen effects.
> you might want to consider other industrial disasters. When I was in college, 7
> people were killed in a collapse at a local coal fired plant
It did not irradiate an enormous area and did not release very dangerous stuff, some active during very long periods and some freely wandering around, flying with the wind. Is ther any possible comparison?
There's been talk for decades about how to get cheap power from cold fusion. Now maybe we can get cheap power from con fusion...
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
Well, you know, you know a lot more about this topic, and have a more developed opinon on it than I do. I probably can't win this argument, so, I'll let you have it.
It would have been helpful if you'd spent a few minutes with Google before posting. Wind turbines range in production capacity between 500kW and 6MW. For comparison, a 5MW wind turbine produces enough electric power for 1000 homes and that's after taking into account fluctuating wind conditions.
I suppose a 5kW wind turbine would be enough for one house. That's the eletrical production capacity of wind turbines back from 1890. That's right; wind turbines have been used to produce electricity since the late 1800s. They produced enough power back in 1890 to power a single house today.
I think the grand-parent rightfully manages to raise concern about the improvement rate of junior college curriculum..
let me look at the universe around me. trillions of megawatts of solar, wind power abound, nuclear fission, pebble bed nuclear reactors, to say nothing of an eventual fusion breakthrough. cheap energy is not a historical blip, energy production will week rising exponencialy because of technology, coupled with greater efficiancy in transmission and the decentralization of power, will yeild humanity in a age of more energy per capita than ever before. if you believe that people should live on less for some romantic attachent, than just fuckin say so. dont insert bullshit science and faulty economics to write it off as energy policy
It is also very saddening to see all those already debunked myths about wind and solar energy pop up again and again and again. "It takes more energy to produce a wind mill | solar panel than they ever produce in their lifetime."
Replace "wind and solar" with "nuclear fission" and your argument is still valid.
In any case, I happen to live in upstate New York (outside of Binghamton for those with a map) and wish I had been online last night to see this discussion. Locally there seems to be two interests that are attempting to derail these projects. A) Bird Lovers, B) NIMBY.
I don't know if there is a solution to A. Has anybody ever done a real study to see how many birds these things kill? Or for that matter how many birds cell towers kill? We used to find dozens of dead birds and bats (presumably flew into the guy wires?) when I worked for a WISP and went up to the tower we were leasing. The solution to B is equally challenging. Property owners rights must be balanced with the rights of society as a whole. This is nothing new -- you'd be facing the same opposition to a cell tower, new transmission line, new gas pipeline or a prison (literally -- there's a big argument locally now about siting a juvvie prison).
For my part, as a New Yorker, I would like to see the New York State Power Authority (the same people that run the St. Lawrence Seaway and Niagara Falls) get a mandate to build and operate nuclear power plants and sell the resulting electricity to our utility companies in the same manner that the sell the power they get from hydro projects. They sell it at cost to the utilities who are not allowed to mark it up. Anybody who lives in New York State should see a "Hydroelectric cost savings" line item on their electric bill -- this is because of the power authority. Safety concerns with nuclear power could be addressed by recruiting the talent from the US Navy -- they've operated nuclear power for five decades without a problem.
New York also has limited natural gas resources. Our leaders in Albany are currently trying to get mineral rights from the property owners so they can bring in the out of state energy companies (the Enron's of the World) to exploit these resources. This is a mistake! If I had my way I'd see these natural gas resources exploited by the power authority (or a similar state agency with a mandate to serve the public) and used to supplement the HEAP program for low income families having problems meeting their heating bills.
Of course none of this will ever happen because we have the most dysfunctional State Government in the country :) It's nice to dream though! Maybe Spitzer will clean it up when he gets elected.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
They do, in fact, harmfully alter weather patterns.
The more they are put into use, the more pronounced the effects will be.
> opinon on it than I do. I probably can't win this argument, so, I'll let you have it.
I'm not trying to win arguments but by chance got to discover that there are numerous problems (biases, distorsion, omissions, lies...) in many published "information" from both sides (pro and anti -nuke altogether). The pros have huge resources, the anti play on the "fear" string. My proposal is: let's filter information very cautiously.
No, certainly. I agree. I'm just concerned that I'll further promulgate flamewars, which I've spent the past day doing.
I really need to get back to my research.
They seem to have started a race to see who can be the most disfunctional state government. Look at the attempts to pass legislature in some form or another trying to regulate the distribution of games having content that "might harm children".
Replace "wind and solar" with "nuclear fission" and your argument is still valid.
s chutz.pdf (Sorry, German).
No. There is no nuclear fission reactor today that produces more energy than it takes to operate it. At least not one that is capable of running more than a couple of seconds. I recently read an interview with one of the leading nuclear fission scientist and he said that we should not expect to see such a reactor before 2060 (no typo, two thousand and sixty).
Has anybody ever done a real study to see how many birds these things kill?
Yes, there are such studies. One of the more recent studies showed that the amount of killed birds is neglible when compared to other causes of bird deaths. This seems to depend on where the turbine is placed. Don't put it on a bird migration highway.
Latest figure I read was 0.5 dead birds per year per turbine. http://www.wind-energie.de/uploads/media/HG_Vogel
Safety concerns with nuclear power could be addressed by recruiting the talent from the US Navy -- they've operated nuclear power for five decades without a problem.
I like your humor.
-silence
Dyslectics of the world, untie!
Regarding aesthetics, remember that there are other turbine designs that don't look like traditional windmills. For example, consider this vertical axis wind turbine. Radical designs like these will decrease the threat to birds and reduce the size of the turbine's footprint.
I challenge you on your disfunctional government, placing California's up for comparison. At least New York can come together in time of crisis. All California can do is fracture into twenty different political camps, all allies and all backstabbers.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Every card should be monitorable (electricity, heat flow) by the cpu to write an ecobilance of each component of the system. This result would be monitored by its superior organization. So you can label it down to the last fractal.
Major bird-kill problem there. That pass is a migratory bird route, and for a bird, it's like a trip through a row of blenders.
It seems you're confusing fusion and fission. If fission wasn't capable of producing a positive power output France wouldn't have electricity. Fission is what happens in nuclear powerplants right now, fusion is the thing they're trying to get ready by 2060.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
We chould concentrate the nuclear waste into small, highly radioactive containers and place them in remote caves (and other hideouts) in Afghanistan and other areas where there are terrorists. Should do one of two things - keep them from going in the caves to hide, or keep them in the caves for good.
They would counter that NY City and surroundings is full of short-sighted selfish idiots.
The rest of the country would strongly agree with both arguments.
I used to think that all of the inbreeding was occuring in rural states
Most of New York is a rural state. More than half the population lives south of Westchester County. Apart from that, there's Albany, Buffalo, and (I guess) Binghamton, and a whole lot of empty space in between, dotted with lots of little, run-down, toothless, redneck hick towns full of provincial, ultraconservative attitudes and prejudices. (No, I'm not at all bitter from growing up there.) North of Westchester, New York is by and large a "red" state.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
Also, you might want to consider other industrial disasters. When I was in college, 7 people were killed in a collapse at a local coal fired plant. That's just 5 short of Chernobyl, but nobody cites "Morgantown, WV" when slamming coal as a dangerous power source.
Well... good thing it was just an accident at a coal fired plant. Had it been a nuclear plant, Morgantown's city size would have dropped to 9, which equates to roughly 1,350,000 deaths!
Everyone stand on top of your building and exhale to the North!
Just build a conference center for politicians directly underneath windmills pointing down, with no roof. Unlimited energy for all! And if you're lucky, an occasional windmill propeller will break loose and make the world a happier place.
I'm sorry, I can only support this solution if you include lawyers. What? Most politicians are lawyers? Well that explains a lot. Carry on then.
hi mom!
I think you're getting confused between "fission" and "fusion".
Here is a list of operating plants using fission.
43rd Law of Computing:
Anything that can go wr
fortune: Segmentation violation -- Core Dumped
Yes, you're right. Sorry for that.
-silence
Dyslectics of the world, untie!
Building a house is more dangerous for birds than building a windmill. There have been a few specific instances (perhaps Pacheco is one of them) where there were problems, but they were not "major" by any rational definition. These usually can be avoided by using larger windmills and intelligent siting decisions.
Environmental considerations aside, the problem with nuclear power is that with the efficiency of reactors used by the majority of plants worldwide, and an even conservative estimation at future energy use, the world's nuclear fuel will probably only last another 50 years. Even if all nuclear reactors were converted to the most efficient type we'd get at best 75 years. Not only does the world have enough coal to last a thousand years with the least conservative estimates of future use, but the US is like the "Saudi Arabia of coal" making coal the most attractive fuel for infrastructure investment.
People won't invest in nuclear power 'cause it has very short half-life.
Get it? Ha I make myself laugh...
Yeah, we have that in America for major appliances (I'm not sure if it's mandatory or not). I think it should be mandatory for small devices as well. I'm often surprised by how much heat a wireless router can generate (though, this time of year I don't mind so much as it keeps my apartment warm).
Peak Oil. It's now.
Political problems are much larger and more intractable than technical ones. We here in the USA have just spent $500,000,000,000 -- that's a lot of zeroes, a $5000 tab for each American family -- and thousands of lives to try to solve a political problem in Iraq, and it's debatable whether we've made much progress. How many technical problems could we solve for the same money and effort?
And political problems block more than wind or nuclear power. They block conservation too. Notice how it's a political problem if I can't get my way, but it's "Thank goodness" if someone else can't get their way.
That's why I'm a geek, I can't even handle office politics. I'm long on opinions but short on the patience it takes to enact them.
I challenge you on your disfunctional government, placing California's up for comparison. At least New York can come together in time of crisis. All California can do is fracture into twenty different political camps, all allies and all backstabbers.
California has it's own problems. Unlimited ballot box governing would come to mind as the biggest of those.
We do have one thing in common though. We are both blue states that can't count on DC for an iota of help. The way California got screwed over in the energy crisis was absoletely disgusting -- and DC refused to step in. The only thing keeping New York from facing a similiar problem is the fact that our energy deregulation was handled a bit better -- and we have friends to the North with a huge excess of hydroelectric power :)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I like your humor.
I guess you don't know anything about nuclear fission. Perhaps it would surprise you to learn that the United States Navy has operated hundreds of fission reactors across a fifty year timespan without a single accident?
With that in mind could you think of a better place to get the brains you'd need to design/build/and operate reactors?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Do you really think that anybody would tell you anything when something went wrong with their reactors?
How can you be so naive?
-silence
Dyslectics of the world, untie!
Looking from this corner of the globe (Finland), half a dollar per kilowatt is a pretty stiff price for electricity. What's the pricing structure?
The power market is pretty competitive, with consumer price at about 0.10 EUR/kWh (about $1.2/kWh).
Over here, most power plant companies sell electricity to the Nord Pool (http://www.nordpool.com/). Power vendors buy it from the pool and sell it to individual customers (with markup). The vendor's duty toward the customer is basically taking meter readings and sending bills. The customer makes a supply contract with any one of a largish number of various vendors, the main differences being marketing slogans, supermarket chain bonus points, and amount of markup. The electricity, after all, is the same.[1]
The power is actually supplied by the utility company, which is responsible for their part of the supply network from the grid to the customer's location. They also charge for this, based on the kWh transferred. There's also a tax per kWh, and a monthly base charge on top of all this.
All of this works out to about 0.10 EUR/kWh. You may be able to affect the final price by up to a cent by switching vendors.
The heavy industry will have none of this. They won't buy this horribly expensive pool power (which is as of this writing 37.88 EUR/MWh = 0.03788 EUR/kWh); therefore they have founded their own power company, (http://www.tvo.fi/index_eng.shtml) which has built power plants to produce "as much power as possible, as economically and safely as possible". Only stock owners have access to their power. Of the power produced, 89 % came from nuclear plants, and 11 % from coal.
[1] Some vendors do specialize by selling power produced by environmentally friendly means. Seems that buying this might increase the production of these plants in proportion to the rest. Whether this has any real impact or not remains to be seen.
Usage: km/h for speed (kilometers per hour); kph for very slow impulses (kilopond hours).
The California legislature brought that on itself when it jumped in the pockets of the industry. I'm not happy about the electric rates here, but I do what I can do keep them down (and am looking at more things, like LED replacements for the fluorescent bulbs).
Ballot-box governing is one of the things that I like about California, though it does seem over the last few years that voters are tiring of it, since so many from both sides of the aisle have been voted down.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
It was an idiotic Carter administration decision to not recycle spent nuke rods. Their rationale at the time was that if the US didn't recycle the rods, nobody else in the world would do it. This is why I call it an idiotic decision. Other countries saw the economy of recycling the rods and therefore don't have the waste problem that we do. Bush could do the country a lot of good and get rid of that policy.
How can you be so naive?
How can you be so fearful of a perfectly valid and safe technology?
Wanna go tit for tat and compare the deaths indirectly or directly caused by nuclear technology to those caused by coal or gas? Hell, it wasn't two weeks ago that a dozen coal miners died. How about the fact that burning coal dumps more radioactivity into the environment then nuclear power? Yet we are ok with coal power plants?
What are you basing your fear of nuclear power on? Because if it's the standard "I'm afraid of anything with the word 'nuclear' in it" attitude then I'm going to be very disappointed.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The California legislature brought that on itself when it jumped in the pockets of the industry. I'm not happy about the electric rates here, but I do what I can do keep them down (and am looking at more things, like LED replacements for the fluorescent bulbs).
I don't see how the legislature brought that on itself when you had outfits like Enron shutting down power plants to create a fake shortage so they could jack up the spot prices on electricity. You can say they brought it on themselves when they brought about deregulation in the first place (I'm less then happy with the results of deregulation in New York) -- but they weren't entirely to blame. When you have the businesses in one state holding another state hostage then the Federal Government should step in and put a stop to it -- interstate commence clause, what?
Ballot-box governing is one of the things that I like about California, though it does seem over the last few years that voters are tiring of it, since so many from both sides of the aisle have been voted down.
To each their own. I thought your recall election was the mother of all embarrassments. I'm also highly skeptical about ballot-box governing. One of the reasons that we have elected representatives is so that they can look at the bigger picture/long term rather then the passion of the moment. Of course there are things broken with that system too (gerrymandering being my biggest pet peeve) but I don't think Athenian Democracy is the answer :)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The deregulation laws were extremely poorly written, filled with loopholes. One of the requirements was that the major utilities (PG&E, SCE, and SDG&E) divest themselves of most of their power plants, allegedly to avoid monopoly concerns. The real reason was to move more of them under the control of the very same companies that would later manipulate their maintenance and fueling schedules at the very peak of things. Later review of the records showed that the uptime under the utilities was far better than under these separate companies, but only when power was peaking. During off-peak times, availability was comparable.
As to the recall election, it's not an easy thing to get on the ballot. There have been at least a half-dozen attempts to set up a recall for Gov. Schwarzeneggar, but all have failed, even when his rating fell below 40%. Gray Davis simply was hated by pretty much all of California. He was despised by Republicans, hated by independents, and really not liked all that much by even enthusiastic Democrats, largely because of perceived corruption (for example, a hugely expensive Oracle contract that was derided as far too big by the state auditor) and his exceedingly poor handling of the electricity "crisis," which resulted in him signing deals with the companies in secret and signing away the rights to sue to recover damages in some cases. It's telling that even in a strongly Democratic state like California, the sitting Democrat governor was recalled 55/45 in favor of a moderate Republican.
There are a lot of things wrong with California, gerrymandering among them. Maybe in the next couple of years, we can get something passed to deal with that after the next census, since no one wanted to deal with it in the middle of the decade this time.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Do you really think that anyone could cover up a nuclear accident to the extent that you wouldn't hear about it? I hate to break it to you, but the US military, including the Navy, is staffed by actual flesh-and-blood people with families and friends, and from time to time they even talk with those families and friends. Even sensitive information such as ships' schedules is usually public knowledge, especially in the area where a ship is due to arrive. Businesses usually have welcome banners made days or weeks in advance, when the information is technically only declassified in a much smaller window.
A nuclear accident would be orders of magnitude much more difficult to cover up. Family members and friends would have to say nothing about the death or radiation poisoning of their loved ones, vast areas would require "secret" quarantine and decontamination, etc. The Navy actually has very strict guidelines for its nuclear program, practices regular internal and community-involved drills, and limits radiation exposure of personnell to levels far below that of expected normal exposure in daily life, let alone an active outdoors-type individual.
Lets look at it from a practical consideration. Up until recently, fire was the primary means of heating and lighting our homes. Throughout history, fires have destroyed entire cities, and inspired the phrase "playing with fire," yet not using fire was not a viable option; people would freeze without it, work would have been limited to daylight hours, and society would probably still be in the pre-stone age, literally, without it. Electricity turned out to be even more useful than most people probably would have imagined at the time of its discovery, and its relative safety was an added bonus. Life as most people know it today would literally cease to exist without electricity. While it's true that a nuclear disaster would have severe repercussions, the likelyhood of such a disaster pales in comparison to the idea of millions of people lighting their homes with torches and candles. Further, modern reactors are much less accident-prone than their predecessors, and it's likely that safety and reliability will continue to improve.
Just as we have throughout human history, we must use the best tools available. In the future, alternatives to nuclear energy may, and likely will, be devised, but for now it's one of the best choices we have. When you come up with something better, do the world a favor and let us know.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
There was actually an excess of power during the California "crisis" as well, if you believe the reports about Enron. Supposedly they throttled production to create an artificial shortage, thereby increasing the value of energy futures. The documentary Enron: The Smartest Men in the Room was particularly revealing if it's true in any small portion, let alone in entirety.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
With naive I meant: How can you conclude from not hearing something about problems that there are no problems?
I am not talking about a major meltdown, I am talking about 'small' and 'allmost' accidents. In Germany those have to be reported to the authorities, and they are, and it turns out, that there is an incident being reported almost every week. Nothing where nuclear material is being released into the wild, but internal hickups of the systems.
Now before you start bragging about how great your engineers and scientists are, please back down a bit from your national pride and consider that german engineers don't catch flies with their nostrils. Nuclear lobbyists over here always claim that german nuclear powerplants are among the safest in the world.
perfectly valid and safe technology
I completely disagree.
Risk is often defined as the product of damage potential and incident probability. Damage potential is high with nuclear power, thus you have to reduce incident probability. This is often achieved with multiple layers of redundancy. For a pump station for example you would not use one pump but four. Two in serial and the two groups in parallel. To reduce the risk of systematic failure, example: the pump of one type has a design flaw that makes it break under certain conditions, you would use pumps of different brands.
I know of one case in a nuclear plant, where the backup pumps have been built in in the wrong direction. On paper this subsystem was very safe, in reality we are lucky that the first set of pumps never failed until the flaw was discovered.
The point I am trying to make is that by adding more complexity to a system, you do not neccessarily make it safer. On the contrary, it becomes more difficult to manage, review and maintain.
This leads us to another point. The complexity and cost to operate a nuclear plant and the fact that it operates on material that you could build bombs from, mandates that you have large companies building and operating these plants. So the power is in the hands of big companies.
The damage potential of solar cells are near zilch. Yes, it can drop off your roof and bang you on the head. But apart from that the cells are so much inherently safe, that you can allow anyone to operate them. They don't have any moving parts, thus maintenance is very low.
This is one step into the direction of energy autonomy. And that is the fear of the big energy companies and one of the reasons why they are lobbying a lot against alternative energies, creating fear. "Alternatives are unreliable". That is their mantra they are repeating over and over again. "Nuclear is safe and reliable" is the other. Nuclear is inherently not safe. Period. Nuclear plants are the license to print money. And that money is being spent to produce an image and you're falling for it.
With solar, wind or biogas you also don't need long landlines for the transport, because the electricity is being produced very near the place where it is being consumed. This reduces transport losses.
Here in Germany a discussion started recently because our gas supply from Russia was endangered by a political struggle between Russia and Ukraina. Politians now demand that in order to reduce our dependancy from Russian gas we should prolong the runtimes of our nuclear plants. What do they think where the Uranium comes from? We don't have any. So we would replace one dependancy with the other.
I know that the USA have their own supply of Uranium, so this is no argument for your place.
I don't consider coal and gas as a smart direction that we should use, thus I am not answering you comparisons of coal and gas with nuclear. In 2005 more than 8000 workers died in chinese coal mines. 'Nuf said.
-silence
Dyslectics of the world, untie!
Please see my other post at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=174013&thresho ld=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=14495764
Just as we have throughout human history, we must use the best tools available. In the future, alternatives to nuclear energy may, and likely will, be devised, but for now it's one of the best choices we have. When you come up with something better, do the world a favor and let us know.
The alternatives are already there, we only have to use them. There is another trick that nuclear lobbyists often use to create fear. They create the unpleasant vision of turning off all the convential powerplants and then going after the alternatives which could not replace them at once and therefore would deprive us from our precious electricity. The 'back to the stone age' vision of heating with candles and fire. You're falling for this trick.
Who in hell is proposing to turn off all the other powerplants right now? Nobody. The only thing we have to do is expand the use of alternative energies and conserve -- *gasp* I used the c-word -- and then after a while we might get to a point where we can turn off the first of the conventional powerplants. We can pick the oldest and worst at first.
-silence
Dyslectics of the world, untie!
There is another trick that nuclear lobbyists often use to create fear. They create the unpleasant vision of turning off all the convential powerplants and then going after the alternatives which could not replace them at once and therefore would deprive us from our precious electricity.
You misunderstood my point, which is not that we'd be thrown back into the stone age, but that new technologies are better than old, and future technologies will be better than what we have now. In that respect, nuclear is safer than fire, and X will likely be safer than nuclear and coal, etc.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere