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."

Comments

Re:Unless they're off the grid it isn't 100%

[Marcika]

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.)

Re:Unless they're off the grid it isn't 100%

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Unless they're off the grid it isn't 100%

[istartedi]

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.

wha...?

[Takichi]

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/

Re:But think of the birds...

[the_other_chewey]

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.

Re:Unless they're off the grid it isn't 100%

[mdsolar]

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.

Re:But think of the birds...

[RockWolf]

Although the turbines these days are much larger and spin much more slowly, the turbines are in fact more dangerous to birds. This is because the speed of the turbines is measured at the tip of the blades. The blades are so huge now that they move slowly at the tip, but get to within a few feet of the centre and they blades move much faster than the older turbines.

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.

Re:Unless they're off the grid it isn't 100%

[mrchaotica]

Outside a few small mountainous countries with heaps of hydro such as New Zealand, we are all dependent on fossil fuel or nuclear at least part of the time.

Isn't Iceland almost entirely geothermal?

Re:Yay for wind, uh...not?

[mrchaotica]

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!

Even still you couldn't put them denser than the falling distance from one to another or a slight engineering snafu turns your billion dollar windfarm into the worlds most expensive set of dominos.

You don't want to put them close together anyway, because

1. 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
2. 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.