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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.
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.
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!
"[...]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*
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.
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.
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.
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!
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'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!
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.
It will practicaly never run out. The waste can be reprocessed, and newer designs can actualy run on the waste of normal reactors. And there is all sorts of fissionable stuff in the ground(thorium) and sea water(more uranium). Hell, most coal has enough trace amounts of uranium in it to produce more power in a nuclear plant than being burnt in a coal plant(and guess where it goes when it IS burnt?). Right now its just too expensive to bother getting fuel from these other sources when you can just dig it out of the ground. Though, when crunch time comes it won't be too expensive anymore.
Unless you want to cover an entire state in solar cells or wind turbines. Solar cells require alot of energy just to make. It takes 10-20-ish years of continuous operation to 'pay back' the energy required to manufacture it, and only then are you actualy making any 'new' energy. Up untill that point they are just really expensive batteries. And wind turbines are complex machines, a whole state filled with then is never going to have them all operational at the same time. How much energy will be spent even just driving around and maintaining them all?
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.
Also of note is TCO and additional expenses not included in the "oil costs $X/gallon" figure. You can't just pour oil on electric lines and expect to have electricity; even that would require paying someone to pour it on them, transportation costs, etc. The oil (or natural gas, most likely, coal) is paid for, it's shipped to the plant (which requires more oil to ship it), it's unloaded by workers, stored until ready to be used, then burned. Under current labor laws the workers must be paid, and the plant usually belongs to a company which wants to make a profit on its investment (buying the land, building the plant, running the lines, paying the workers, buying the fuel, paying its executives, cleaning up hazardous spills, appeasing the environmentalists). So, in reality, if a barrel of oil costs $62, you're probably paying at least $70 for the energy it produces, a good 30% of which is lost in transmission over the grid.
When we decided to put in our solar system it cost us around $20,000 and should pay for itself in 7 years. It should last at least 20 years without any significant maintenance costs (no batteries, still on the grid). Windmills are essentially the same way in that they're extremely reliable with only a few working parts. Maintenance may be needed occasionally, but it's not like having a team of nuclear technicians running a plant.
What really amazes me is that a good solar system costs $20,000-$30,000, and the average home price where I grew up is about $500,000 with energy prices of a good $0.50/kWh. A builder could easily increase the cost of the home to $550,000, tell the buyers they're going to be saving $400/month on electricity at CURRENT prices, and make a profit. I'm sure they could get some sort of a subsidy from the state and environmentalists to make an even bigger profit.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
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?
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.