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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."
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
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.
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"
Not only that but couldn't you argue that because it pours that power onto the grid it might as well be any town? It seems like somebody nearby has a wind farm and therefore that city is thusly powered by wind. Couldn't my town be completely powered by wind out of the Loess Hill Wind Farm if it takes less than 16 gigawatt hours? Local windfarm produces more than local towns power consumption? It isn't like the town owns the wind farm... it's exactly like there's a windfarm near a town!
This is completely stupid. Well played Slashdot, well played.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
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.
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.
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 ghost of Nikola Tesla
You guys are all nattering nabobs of negativity :)
The town that you claim is powered by the wind can't be TOO far away, or line losses would eat up too much power... in any event, the claim isn't much of a stretch as the city does now produce more wind power than it consumes total power.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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!
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Alternatively, you can think of it as being stored in the most highly efficient storage medium yet devised by man.
Unburned fossil fuels.
As long as we have significant fossil fuel generation capacity, nobody's lights are going dark when the wind slackens. And we aren't likely to hit the point where wind power generates more power than coal, natural gas and oil any time soon. In the long run we'll need to have other ways of storing and reusing energy that don't rely on fossil fuels, but if we did this sort of thing everywhere we could, the world could conserve its limited supplies of petroleum and coal and reduce its emissions of CO2 and other pollutants.
Also, you might consider why famine is rare in developed countries. That is because our food supply is, in effect. A network with many suppliers. If beef suppliers are having mad cow problems and can't supply the market with enough beef, money flows to poultry and pork producers instead. Any individual food supplier is subject to short term shortage, the network as a whole has diverse sources of food it can draw upon.
A geographically large superconducting grid would smooth over local variations in wind, solar, tidal and other intermittent power sources.
The "use it or lose it" nature of some renewable power sources means that it's may be financially efficient to store any excess production, even if that storage medium is not very efficient itself. If your windmills are going full (err...) tilt in the dead of the night when power is cheap, why not use them to pump water upstream across a dam? Then you can sell that energy in the middle of the day when market prices are higher. Or you could sell an energy contract to an energy intensive factory that can run in the off-hours.
Suppose if your photovoltaic farm is generating power in the middle of the winter, why not put it into a reversible chemical reactor that converts it back into electricity during the summer to run people's air conditioning?
A superconducting grid itself could be a short term storage mechanism; you could pump liquid hydrogen in when demand is low, and extract it when demand is higher.
I see no real short term or long term barriers to the utility of renewable energy as a way of reducing pollution and reliance on politically unstable regimes overseas. The midterm -- well that could get economically tricky. But then, declining oil production will be even more tricky.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.