Slashdot Mirror
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."
Would the wind turbines be more efficient if they brought a bunch of politicians into the town?
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Wind can't supply base load so even if the wind turbines are generating more power than the city consumes over a year, that power is being consumed partially by other cities.
They might be a net generator of power, but they are ultimately using other power sources some of the time.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
That's 1.21 Gigawatts, but nice try.
Washington has been run on pure hot air for decades.
That yellow think in the sky that makes your skin warm is supplying the energy.
There's one big catch to this: the town isn't 100% wind powered. Instead, it produces more energy from wind power than it uses each year. Wind speed changes, and people use different amounts of electricity at different times, so a significant part of the town's electricity will still come from conventional generation through the grid.
Wind power is nice, but the rule of thumb for wind power is that it doesn't actually replace any conventional generating capacity, it merely reduces the utilization at times. Since there are times when the wind power doesn't do any good, you can't actually get rid of any of your conventional capacity.
To actually replace anything with wind, you'd need a tremendous overcapacity that was sufficiently distributed geographically to ensure that enough of it got wind all the time to meet your total power needs.
It's a short article, FP isn't all it's cracked up to be:
"What we're celebrating is that the wind farm in Rock Port can produce more energy each year than what this community uses, and that has never been done before," Chamberlain said.
And that's why everyone showed up. From the celebration and speeches downtown to the city's power plant, the guy who made it all happen explained what it is all about.
"What we're showing here is the city is producing 2 megawatts more than they need, so in essence, this meter is running backwards," Chamberlain said.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Now, is there any place where a large number of our founding father's are buried? Because we could double our efficiency by putting the politicians over their graves and harnessing the founding father's spinning motion.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I'm sorry. But the only power source capable of generating 1.21 gigawatts of electricity is a bolt of lightning. And unfortunately, we never know when or where they are going to strike.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Whoosh!
I'm not sure what the metric is exactly, but it has to do with something like, megawatt-hours-produced-per-acre. This measurement is used when discussing power production by some engineering geeks somewhere...sorry, just trying to point the discussion down a path quickly here and not really set it up too much. :-)
In short, as cool as we all would like wind power generation to be, it just falls way too short in the aforemention critical statistic. If you've seen the wind farm outside of San Fran, you know how big they can get. The nuke plant between SD & LA (iirc) is but a postage stamp compared to that windfarm and it probably has about twice the power output.
Wind is not population density friendly. At some point, land costs wipe out any efficiencies.
Rock Port was certainly not the first town in the United States.
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.
Good to see that even though the country may be fumbling and lagging behind where it should be from an environmental point of view, individuals and sections of the community are taking up the slack and forging ahead.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
--The ghost of Nikola Tesla
Because at the time, 'gigawatt' was more commonly pronounced with a soft 'g', which is still the official NIST pronunciation. It's only since then, with the rise of computers in everyday life, that the hard 'g' pronunciation has become ubiquitous.
But seriously, you have an active Slashdot account! How could you possibly not know basic Back to the Future trivia like this?
At $0.11 on average per kWh, the savings is $1.7m annually, plus another $300k from the energy they sell to the power company. That's 45 years to recoup the investment ($90m), not including maintaining the turbines for 45 years (more info here)
Still, I think this should be the new standard for sustainable living and development.
And to put 16 gigawatt hours into perspective... the average household in America uses around 11,000 kWh annually. See Official Government Website
Rock Port, MO needs to add their watts saved to the total. It's like they switched out 64,000,000 incandescent bulbs for CFCs!
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.
I disagree, Talked to a nuclear plant engineer working at a plant with a gas turbine auxiliary plant. They are thrilled when the turbine powers up, because they get paid more for that energy because their willing to fill peak demand. If that plant was put into constant production they would get paid the same rate as the nuclear plant, so reduced joy overall.
A really quick Google search turned up this article which will hopefully put things into a bit of perspective. $2 billion to build a coal plant; while I grant you it'll generate more than 16MWh/year, is still a damn hefty pricetag. How many year (nee: decades) will it take to pay one of those off?
Also, FYI; 40 year mortgage amortizations are becoming very commonplace while some companies are looking towards the prospect of 50 year ams.
As for maintainence costs; how much does it cost to maintain a coal fired plant? How much does it cost to maintain a nuclear plant? How much does it cost to handle the waste product from same? How much ongoing environmental impact is there?
I'm no tree hugger by any stretch, but the fact that a town was able to generate an annual surplus of natural energy with no environmental by-products is a pretty decent little achievement. A small step towards reducing our reliance on fossil fuels.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
They are connected to the power grid, just like every other city. When the wind turbines fall below local needs, they consume power from the grid. When the turbines generate more power than the town needs, they pump power into the grid for others to use.
They appear to be a net producer, which seems to be a good thing.
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say. Of course, cats (also bad rubbish, btw) kill over a billion birds and small animals in this country each year, so the few killed by turbines (see sibling post) are pretty insignificant.
We have enough birds.
Plus, if they can't figure out that flying into the spinning blady thing is a bad idea, the species is better off without those individuals.
sic transit gloria mundi
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.
Way, way overpriced. Four 1.25MW turbines for $90 million, or $18/watt? That's far too high. Compare the Cedar Ridge project, with 41 turbines of 1.65MW capacity each for $180 million, or $2.6/watt. That's a real not-to-exceed number. The American Wind Energy Association likes to talk about $1/watt, but that's seldom achieved.
$18/watt is either wrong or a rip-off.
Ok, US average according to wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption is about 12,000 kWHr per person per year. But this average would include industry and government consumption averaged over the whole population. Would Rock Port, Missouri have significant industry to make it's consumption only slightly less than average (about the same as AU average)? 10,000 kWHr per day per person seems far too much. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Port,_Missouri Wiki says that there are about 650 households, so each consumes 55kWHr/day - Csn this be right?
Which, assuming high winds, will provide about 1/3 the power output of one of the Diablo Canyon reactors. Their own estimates are closer to 1/6 that load on average. That works out to being able to supply power for about 180,000 people (Diablo Canyon's two reactors supply for about 2.2 million homes).
To put this in perspective, all the wind power generating capacity currently deployed in California is about 3/4 of one reactor at Diablo Canyon, and that's assuming the wind is blowing constantly at the average, or about 2.5 times what Cape Wind plans on deploying, if it can get regulatory approval, and prove negligible environment impact from the construction and deployment both.
That isn't a small amount of generating capacity, but the fact that this is going to take building 130 generating stations to achieve, and a huge area (as you pointed out: not chump change, with regard to ocean acreage). It's also going to only end up supplying about 75% of the overall usage of Cape Cod, and the two islands of Martha's Vinyard and Nantucket - not a lot of people.
To put that figure in perspective, that's 4.5 x 5.4 nautical miles square, or about 30 square non-nautical miles, to supply 135,000 people.
-- Terry
Diablo Canyo powers 2.2 million people with two reactors, so you are talking 17 more installations of a comparable size to power California.
I'm pro-nuclear, and I can't see that happening in California, even if the price of natural gas goes up at the California/Nevada border again, as it did under Enron. California is all about NIMBY. Now build them in some other state and run wires, and California would likely love the idea.
-- Terry
So if we wanted to power say, California, which as of 2006 has 36,457,549 [census.gov] people we would need something around (36,457,549/4=28044 so 28044*4=) 112,177 wind turbines. That is stupid ridiculous!
Yea it's stupid to decentralize power generation when you can concentrate all that power into a few hands instead. Fact is is a farmer can have wind turbines on the farm while still growing food, and they will supplement farmers' income. Wind farms can also be located offshore. Then there's solar and geothermal. Tidal power can even be used.
Wind power 'feels good' but when you start running the numbers it gets dumb real quick.
In what way? If wind were given the same subsidies as nuclear power the math would change. As it is now nuclear power is a form of corporate welfare.
FalconShould there be a Law?
There's a reason it always comes up, and namely because it actually matters.
Yes, they _could_ use peak storage, but they don't. They're on the grid. It does matter.
So they produce 5 MW all the time (wind non-stop). If yearly production is barely above their yearly usage, let's say they use, say, 8 MW peak and buggerall at night. So someone else has to build the extra capacity to produce the extra 3 MW for them.
But wait, they may have a calm day, or a _storm_. During storms you don't make more power, you align the blades so the turbine doesn't spin. So someone else has to have the capacity to produce an extra 8 MW for them, for those cases.
The point is that someone still has to be able to cover the peak power, so just as many power plants have to be built as before. Only now you have to keep some of them idle at peak time, so you don't recoup your investment as quickly.
The total power produced maths are also a bit mis-leading. They use more power at peak, they give some power back when noone needs it. The problem isn't producing enough energy at 1 AM, the problem is producing enough energy at peak times. That's when those brownouts some years ago happened. The rush to build more power plants, and dealing with NIMBY syndrome, is to be able to supply the whole use at peak hours, not at night.
Because wind can and will occasionally fail you, someone has to build the same capacity again as some other kind of power. Only, again, keep it idle a bunch of the time so they won't get their money back as fast.
Essentially, they just passed someone else the cost of building the peak storage for them. They get their peak storage (and more importantly: backup power) all right, only now "Town B" from your example is the one who gets the bill for it.
Now I'm not saying it should be a hanging offense or anything, but it _is_ a problem worth mentioning. If you want to willy-wave about being all green, then actually be all green on your own money.
Otherwise it's a bit like Liechtenstein not having an army or military budget, because their big neighbours get to deal with defending it. Or about how they do great with a lean government and low taxes... by being a tax heaven for guys who made their riches in other countries' economies. It's just passing the bill to someone else, not being the perfect example of a smart conservative government.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
While alternative energy is expensive, I have to wonder what happens to conventional energy costs when you start factoring in trillion dollar wars to keep the fuel sources available. Imagine how many solar panels, hydro plants and wind turbines could have been purchased with one iraq?
Pumped storage is not without problems--environmental, that is.
Many resevoirs are designed to operate at a constant level ("head" for us, the difference in height between the surface and the exit of the turbine). Of course a drought could push you out of wack if this is your regulation goal, but, in general, you're going to be sticking to pretty much the same level, and, as a consequence, coast.
With resevoirs which vary according to demand, there can be large head changes over the year and with different demand patterns (and rainfall)--which translate into DRAMATIC changes in the coastline of the resevoir. As you know, the vegetation and soil developement is most at the coast line. When all of this living matter is suddenly put under four meters of water, it dies and is replaced with anerobic systems. This decay produces hydrogen sulphide (generally nasty) and methane (a greenhouse gas IIRC 400x stronger than CO2). This is the origin of concerns about how much greenhouse gas production that hydropower offsets.
Then, when the water level dives down, you kill the anaerobic systems, leaving a barren coastline (both just above and just below the waterline at the coast) which is less hospitable to fish and terrestrial animals whose life is based around this environment.
Up in Sweden, where we have considerable such resevoir regulation, which results in lakes banked by bleached stone for many km in each direction. It has also completely changed the distribution of fishlife in these valleys.
Not to be a troll, but if you're seriously concerned get yourself an eeePC, draws 13 watts most times. Now if you hook up an external keyboard/mouse/ monitor you've got a darn decent setup for web/email/light compiling for probably around 35 watts (if you get a low power monitor). I love my little eeePC, I'm always surprised by how decent it is for my tasks.