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First Town In US To Become 100% Wind Powered
gundar99 writes "Rock Port Missouri, population 1,300, is the first 100% wind-powered city in the US. Loess Hill Wind Farm, with four 1.25-MW wind turbines, is estimated to generate 16 gigawatt hours (16 million kilowatt hours) of electricity annually. 13 gigawatt hours of electricity have historically been consumed annually by the residents and businesses of this town."
They could be relying solely on wind power -- it's perfectly possible using pumped storage.
(They aren't though, so your point of needing other auxiliary sources of energy still stands.)
If you draw a box around a year and this town and measure the inputs and outputs, the town is a net producer of electricity, assuming their forcast of consumption holds true. Ergo, by Jedi logic, they are 100% wind powered. Your commentary on the matter elegantly illustrates the difference between erudite and pedantic for the rest of us. Thank you, not everyone could have done so as gracefully.
I knew there would be a post like this. This always comes up when people discuss wind and solar. First, if they were not on the grid they could use "peak storage". There are a number of ways to do that. In areas where water and elevation are available, you can pump water back up a hill into a holding pond and re-cycle it through a turbine--augmented hydro power. Other methods of peak storage include: flywheels, batteries, and even compressed air pumped into abandoned mines that have been properly sealed to hold in the pressure. Choice of method depends on a variety of factors of course.
Now, since they are connected to the grid, the peak storage issue isn't very important. They just feed the grid when they have excess, and draw from the grid when they don't. Therefore, they are actually *over* 100% since they are expected to feed the grid more often than they draw from it. If everybody did what they did, then peak storage would be required because it is possible for calm conditions to persist over fairly wide areas--perhaps wide enough to make transmission impractical. The only difference here is that they are using the grid as a virtual peak storage system.
When wind power is sent to "town B", they can idle one of their fossil-fuel generators. The fuel un-burned by said generator is another way to account for peak storage.
Using the grid as peak storage just makes better econonmic sense than building your own peak storage and declaring independance like some kind of cult or something.
Wind power has other issues though, mostly aesthetic.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Ow. My brain hurts after trying to read that article. Did someone randomly select quotes and comments from a bag? Here's a better written version, though still light on the information (no figures for cost per kWh) http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1568/
The article sucked. Are the turbines really powering the town, or is that going into the grid in general? The article mentions that the power won't be free, but that the mayor hopes it will cost less because of lower transmission fees. So how much does it cost? The article mentions the landowner that set the thing up. So is it privately owned, or part of the city? Does the city actually buy electricity from this guy, or does he just make money selling to the power companies? What the heck does John Deere have to do with anything?
Better known as 318230.
Those poor birds.
That's mostly a legend, remaining from the times of small, very fast rotating wind wheels.
Nowadays, this isn't an issue any more: The wheels are much higher (less birds) and slower
(birds can react to and avoid them). I've been to a couple of recent generation generators,
and have even climbed one (great view) - there wasn't a single dead bird lying around in the
vicinity. Yes, I looked for them.
New Zealand still sources 30-40% of it's energy from thermal (gas/coal). In addition, New Zealand has water storage capabilities of a few weeks to months, so it's very possible to run low, and as such requires additional thermal capabilities to compensate. Norway is closer to 100% hydro.
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
Well, not quite on the variability in the US at least. Connecting geographically spreadout wind farms yields at least one third of the power as steady and, if I recall, closer to 60% when most of the wind belt is connected. http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2007/december5/windfarm-120507.html
This lowers the cost of transmission because the largest transmission lines can be used 100% of the time at full capacity.
What now? It's been a few years since I took physics at more than an interest level, but that makes no sense whatsoever. If you're talking radial velocity, all parts of the blades take the same time to complete one revolution (obviously), hence the same radial velocity. That same phenomenon says that since all parts must take the same time for a revolution, the further you are from the axis of revolution the faster the linear velocity must be - so the tips cut through the air faster than the inner section of the blades.
Care to explain where the hell you got that piece of "information" from? Logic would say that the tips of the blades should be more dangerous than the inner sections due to the higher linear velocity, however maybe they're also easier to avoid. Whether birds can detect the blades or not isn't my field of expertise.
February 9th, 2009 8:55pm: Slashdot becomes self-aware.
Isn't Iceland almost entirely geothermal?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
And what is the average cost of wind power anyway?
According to the American Wind Energy Association's FAQ, "What are the Factors in the Cost of Electricity from Wind Turbines?", wind costs can be under 5 cents per KWH. I don't have an electric bill handy but I think I pay something like 10 cents per KWH.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I'm not a civil engineer either, but I am training to become one. I think you're worrying way too much here. Yes, you need a reasonable foundation for the thing, but then you can put soil for farming on top of that.
But even that is overthinking the issue; just look at this picture. See the space each turbine tower takes up? Now see the space between towers? Is the former significant compared to the latter? No. Are they, in fact, growing some kind of crops between the towers? Yes. If this weren't true, the picture wouldn't exist!
You don't want to put them close together anyway, because
- the turbine needs to rotate (in the X-Y plane) so that it's always facing the wind and you don't want blades of adjacent turbines to hit each other, and
- if they're too close behind each other, the wake turbulence from the turbine in front reduces the efficiency of the turbine behind.
Oh, and by the way: assuming you arrange the turbines in a square grid, they would have to fall in one of the four cardinal directions to risk creating "the world's most expensive set of dominos." If we assume that the zone where this would happen takes up 1 degree of arc for each direction, there's a (4/360) ~= 1% chance of that happening, assuming a tower fell over in the first place. I'd call that negligible risk."[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The only flaw in that cunning plan is that the best terrain for wind power is open, flat country where the wind blows constantly while the best terrain for pumped storage is rocky, mountainous areas where the earth forms natural basins.
There are few places in the world where terrain suitable for both wind and pumped storage occurs close together.
Most wind power stations will have to rely on gas-turbine backups, which is to say building a wind power station means building both a wind power station and a gas-turbine power station.
Umm...go nuclear?
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Exactly, a town (or a grid) doesn't need energy it needs power. It doesn't matter how many Gigawatt hours something produces it is how many watts it produces when they are needed. A grid needs a certain current and if it doesn't get it things go wrong. It doesn't matter how much energy you harvest over the fiscal year, what matters is if your generation is keeping up with your consumption in a moment to moment basis. It takes hours to shut down a coal furnace and months to shut down a nuclear reactor so until meteorology comes far enough, these things will have to keep running whenever there is supposed to be load lest the grid brown out whenever the wind calms down. Currently, when these things spin, all that happens is the load on a turbine in some power plant reduces and its energy is dissipated in a cooling tower instead. If you want something that can pick up the slack for these things, you'll have to go oil, gas or hydro. This requires burning something rare, expensive and environmentally nasty or flooding a valley somewhere which is far worse than what we're doing now with coal and nuclear.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem