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

Moving Air

[corsec67]

Would the wind turbines be more efficient if they brought a bunch of politicians into the town?

Re:Moving Air

[Anonymous Coward]

Would the wind turbines be more efficient if they brought a bunch of politicians into the town?

Unfortunately, no. All they're blowing is hot air, so it would rise too quickly to be of any use.

Re:Moving Air

[deek]

If they blow and suck at the same time, then you're probably right.

But, if they blow then suck, you get electricity.

Man, this post could sure be taken out of context.

Re:Moving Air

[C_L_Lk]

12 million watt-hours per year is not THAT much electricity per person per year when you consider that includes all the electricity the town uses - for service industry, workplaces, and homes. That 12 million watt hours is 12,000 kilowatt hours per year - approximately 1000 kilowatt hours per month - around 33 kilowatt hours per day - approximately 1.5kilowatt hours per hour - or a "ongoing continuous consumption" of around 1500 watts per person. If you have an electric water heater, electric refrigerator, one computer, some CFL and LED lighting, a TV that's on a few hours a day, an electric stove, and an electric clothes dryer in your house, as well as a computer and lighting at your work place, add in some street lights, parking lot lighting, etc. that seems to be a very reasonable number.

In this case it's preferable to move your house to an "all electric" footprint as well - as any electricity you use has 0 carbon footprint. There's no benefit to using propane or natural gas for any of your household needs - heating should be 100% electric as well - any sort of furnace will have a CO2 footprint - where electric will not. Now, the 1500 watts of continuous consumption per person seems very reasonable. Get all these people to drive plug-in hybrid cars for their daily commute and their demand may go up a bit more again - but the carbon footprint of the town would virtually disappear. Very good progress in my opinion.

Technically 2nd

[nick_davison]

Washington has been run on pure hot air for decades.

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.)

Perhaps you should have read the article

[hellfire]

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.

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.

You want a heat converter

[spun]

Would the wind turbines be more efficient if they brought a bunch of politicians into the town? It's hot air, but it's not moving very fast and there's a hell of a lot turbulence. I'm thinking politician fueled Stirling engine.

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.

Wind can't do it.

[NotBornYesterday]

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.

Yay for wind, uh...not?

[joshamania]

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.

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.

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.

Re:SECOND TOWN!

[Anonymous Coward]

DC was first! Damnit, zombie Edison, you lost. Get over it!

--The ghost of Nikola Tesla

Re:big catch

[RiotingPacifist]

Indeed, domestic applications are pretty unforgiving of random fluctuations too - sorry kids, we can't have dinner tonight, the wind isn't blowing. That's why you need energy stores, like hydro plants. When there's not enough energy going in you open the valve, and when there's an excess you pump stuff up to the top again, they already do this with conventional power sources why would wind be any different.

And what is the average cost of wind power anyway? Probably a lot higher than coal even with large carbon taxes. How? coal power stations have all the initial costs of wind farms and then a fuel cost, a waste cost and an environmental cost.