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US Becomes Top Wind Producer; Solar Next
SpuriousLogic sends along a SciAm piece that begins, "The United States overtook Germany as the biggest producer of wind power last year, new figures showed, and will likely take the lead in solar power this year, analysts said on Monday. Even before an expected 'Obama bounce' from a new President who has vowed to boost clean energy, US wind power capacity surged 50 percent last year to 25 gigwatts — enough to power more than five million homes."
and always will be.
Oh, you mean that kind of wind?
Kinda makes you wonder if government intervention is really necessary.
McDonalds giving a free burger to every American, to commemorate the massive fart winds generated.
hardly surprising when you see just how many turbines some places have installed
So that comes down to 300W of solar power per capita in Germany, 83.3W of solar power in the US and 20.2W of solar power per capita worldwide. Just about enough to drive a netbook. ;)
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Americans have always been famous for producing wind.
US wind power capacity surged 50 percent last year to 25 gigwatts
Given enough beans, I can see how the US can produce a great deal of wind, however, from where I sit on the other side of the pond, I can't really envision seeing more light from somewhere where the sun doesn't shine. ;-P
Look, we already know that Americans are the biggest windbags in the world...
You guys must be pretty desperate to attempt this kind of spin. The comparison is obviously flawed.
Is it the theoretical maximum you could get from the installed generators (i.e. when the wind blows optimally, you get 25 GW)? Or is it the average power? The minimum power continuously produced under normal conditions (i.e. under non-exceptional circumstances, you won't expect the power generation fall beyond that value)? Or what?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I thought Congress already held the record for wind production.
US wind power capacity surged 50 percent last year to 25 gigwatts
I wasn't aware that live music had its own unit of energy consumption! Perhaps someone could tell me how to scale it to something SI, like gigawatts? I can't find the unit in Google calculator.
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
20 Delorian Time Machines - with enough left over for a few thousand decent cups of tea
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
It doesn't surprise me that the US is the top wind producer... what with all the large people you have over there. OH, I see. Top wind power producer. Sorry, my bad.
Unfortunately, the US is infamous for using vast quantities of energy and using pretty inefficient devices (as a whole, not saying it applies to everyone). So some pretty serious energy efficiency measures are also called for.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
A friend of mine who is a mathematician told me he rad an article that showed that the total amount of energy required to create a windmill would never be recovered by the device. So a couple of questions. First, does anyone know of where he speaks? Second, should we have a label on devices that audit how much power was used to create the device, not just how much it takes to use it? Third WTF happened to gyromills?
The Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean are at different levels (that is why locks are needed in the Panama canal).
The idea is to have a hydro-electric plant between the two oceans, all you need is few miles of huge pipes and a turbine. Bingo! unlimited power, who needs wind?
Congratulations Slashdotters, you've outdone yourselves this time! Never in my life have I seen so much redundancy with so little benefit. I think it's safe to say that we could replace 95% of the comments in this thread with:
"America is teh ghay!"
without losing a shred of information.
And people call Vista bloated ....
US wind power capacity surged 50 percent last year to 25 gigwatts - enough to power more than five million homes.
Or...
Hmm.. 25 / 2.21 = 11.31
About enough energy to travel through time 11 times, right?
I would like to thank the mods for not upmodding the MANY bean- and politics-related "wind" puns that appear to be dominating the posts so far.
Stand fast, men. I fear it is only going to get worse.
Don't put advice in your sig.
US citizens are 5% of world population and consumes 23% of the energy.
Nothing more to say.
http://worldpopulationbalance.org/pop/energy/
With last year's US wind power capacity, Marty McFly was able to drive back and forth to 1955 a total of 20.661 times, but since this capacity wasn't available in 1985 yet, you'll have to wait until 2013 to find out what really happened when Part IV will get filmed.
Wow, a country with over 300 million people, 9,629,091 square kilometers and sea on the east and west side
managed to produce more wind power
than a country with 80 million people, 57,022 square kilometers and sea on the (mostly useless) north side.
Call me when they reach 90 GW...
"I was in love with a beautiful blonde once, dear. She drove me to drink. It's the one thing I am indebted to her for."
The original article can be found here. It has more figures, including some on China, and an interesting remark that Europe in total generates 66GW, which is another way to the per capita computation to moderate this first rank of US...
For example, there was a bunch of excited speculation about when China's GDP would surpass the U.S.'s, despite the fact that that would still leave China nowhere near the U.S. on a per-capita GDP basis.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Your friend is an idiot. Do you really think people who have used windmills for hundred of years did so purely for the fun of it?
"Lets spend months building a windmill", they thought, "to saw lumber or grind corn. Who cares if it costs more energy to build it then it ever delivers and we could easily saw all that wood ourselves with the same energy".
Your friends argument is similar to those who claim we don't have global warming because it is freezing cold outside. It seems superficially true but comes from such a poor understanding of the issue you can't even begin to correct.
However, presuming you ain't as big a moron as your friend, here is the reason this myth has come into being.
It costs X amount of energy to build a generator. This is far higher then you probably think because if it uses for instance aluminum. Simply put, if all energy was equal, a generator that costs X energy from the grid to produce should pump X+ energy into the grid over its lifetime.
Now comes the killer. What is its lifetime? Economic lifetime? Period it is written off in? Or shortened lifetime because it was demolished before it was obsolete/rundown?
It is very easy to claim a generator should produce its energy in say 1 year claiming that is its lifespan for whatever reason. In that case, the cost of producing it must be recovered in a year. Thanks to the way goverments work there have been projects where windmills were put up and torn down in a matter of months. Of course these never recouped their energy. The headline went into the newspaper, idiots didn't read the full article and myth is born.
This however also applies to nuclear reactors that are dismantled before they are ever brought online and countless other big projects.
A normal windmill produces far more power over its operational life then it has cost to produce. If it didn't it wouldn't make economic sense and countless windmills have come up for no other reason than that the owner wants to make money from them.
They have been doing this ever since the first windmill was invented hundreds of years ago.
Yes, pat your selves on the back. America (9,161,923 SQ KM) has over taken Germany (357,021 SQ KM). Good work.
Right on. And the US has 2.8 times the population as well. And we don't even start speaking of totel power consuption.
The U.S. is coming closer to pulling its weight on new capacity: in 2008, it installed 8.3 GW, while Germany installed 1.7 GW, or about a 5x factor. Not quite the 30x factor of land area, but hey, 1.7 million of those sq km are in Alaska, which is kind of inconvenient for electric transmission (same reason Canada's wind power is fairly low, despite massive land area).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Of you are lager by sqare kilometers, population and power consumtion then is is just easy to have the larger wind farms as well. Comparing absolute figures between countries is just plain unfair.
Divide by any of the three and the US won't be the winner any longer. But then Germany probably won't win either any more...
Surely it's better to measure the amount of electricity generated by a particular method per head of population or total consumption of electricity or similar?
The US is a bigger country with a bigger population than Germany, it is therefore surely not that spectacular if it has overtaken a vastly smaller country in wind power generation. What matters is when it overtakes it in proportion to some other relevant statistic.
With the vast amounts of open land the US has it's more of a surprise it can't generate more wind, and particularly with states like Arizona, New Mexico etc. more solar than most other countries already.
"a friend of mine" isn't that what al gore says throughout his masterpiece? I guess if you are important you must have important friends and no one will question you.
66GW / 500M inhabitants gives about 130W/capita. US has 25GW / 300M inhabitants, which is about 80W/capita. According to this list the US consumes 1460W/capita and the EU 700.
EU 18,5%, the US 5,4%.
Which is completely wrong because "The wind power capacity installed by end 2008 will, in a normal wind year, produce 142 TWh of electricity, equal to about 4.2% of the EU's electricity demand". Sigh. What did I get wrong here?
That's enough to power the province of Ontario at peak times in the summer...can we please have your energy?
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
I'd argue that wind power per inhabitant is also wrong, since it doesn't take into account that the average American uses 1,460W while the average German uses only 753W. As a fraction of consumption, Germany has about eight times more wind power. Link
I though MSI, were the top Wind producer, and they're based in Taiwan??...er.....
I KNEW I shouldn't have eaten at Chipotle last night...
With a certain Mr Bush as outgoing president I don't think it will surprise the world that the US produces the most wind!
Those stupid Nimbys, where do they think they get their coal powered electricity from. Stupid pricks.
Either give em free pot, or send em to jail for 'working' for the oil companies, because im sure there are 4 levels of indirect funding of their legal actions against sound power generation by oil corps.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
And oil. Gas. Biodiesel.
That's enough to power *20* deLoreans!
Sorry, doesn't look like /. supports the LaTeX plugin.
Meanwhile, technology evolves quite rapidly. Economies of scale and build cost of wind are changing rapidly. Solar cell technology is changing rapidly - I'm currently testing a set of non-silicon cells and already I've decided to wait rather than buy silicon - so there will be inevitable swings. Left to itself, the market will do what I do - wait for a winner to emerge. And without investment, there will be no winner.
You've already given away your political leaning by copy and paste from the Economist - which by the way was one of the cheerleaders that led to the present financial crisis - but it's fair to mention one other thing. Britain in the 50s and 60s was poor because the US delayed intervention in WW2, hoping that this would result in the collapse of the British Empire, to the gain of the US. The US was never bombed, and Pearl Harbor did less damage to the US than a single air raid of London. As a result, Britain emerged almost bankrupt with much of its productive capacity destroyed, and only rescued itself by having a strongly dirigiste economy focussed on exports, while people at home went cold and hungry. During the late 40s and early 50s, we got shot of the Empire (to our financial benefit). During the Thatcherite "reforms", the UK slipped back economically relative to its European neighbours.
Yours, and the Economist's view of history is dangerously simplistic. Personally, like most Europeans, I believe that the answer lies in a mixed economy. But I don't expect to learn that from a comic that sells mainly to non-tax paying expats and their accountants.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
***Bring on the nukes!***
I've always been mildly pro-nuclear. It's non-polluting compared to coal, and has much higher availability than a wind-farm or solar array with a similar sticker output in MW or GW.
But there are only a limited number of sites with cooling water, satisfactory geology, and where evacuation of the neighborhood in the event of trouble is realistically possible.
The US could, I am quite sure, treble our current nuclear output. We might even be able to increase it by an order of magnitude to 1000 plants although we'd have to scrounge up some fuel that probably exists, but isn't currently in proven reserves. But every time I work the numbers, I get the same answer. US energy needs are so great that we need more like 5000 nuclear power plants just to replace oil.
And we need to remember that there are 5.7billion folks on the planet who are not Americans and they are going to want to use energy on much the same scale that we do.
So -- unless we believe that the world has unlimited hydrocarbons and there is no limit to the amount of CO2 the human race can vent into the atmosphere without consequence, it isn't wind OR solar OR nuclear. It's wind AND solar AND nuclear AND conservation AND any other non-carbon emitting technology we can come up with.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
I know that wind-powered energy generation is growing in the U.S. because I see it every day (in season; see below). I don't know if they're manufactured near here or just shipping in via our port, but those gi-normous wind turbine blades are a common sight on the freeways of Houston, traveling up I-45 headed for who knows where. There's a small cottage industry in escort vehicles. I've seen every manner of tiny, broken-down car, truck, and minivan festooned with flags and feeler poles, in packs, leading and following each individual blade as it makes its way through town. You don't realize it until you're driving right next to one, but those blades are *HUGE*; I'd estimate as long as 4 or 5 tractor-trailer rigs. I'm sure someone will pop up with an accurate number. Whatever the correct size, it's just amazing to watch something that long and odd-looking moving through midday traffic, dwarfing everything around it. Up until a few months ago (I assume winter brings a slowdown to construction), I'd see at least one every day. Sometimes I'd see three at a time. I expect for the freeways to be lousy with 'em again as soon as the weather gets warm.
...how likely is it that the US will overtake the EU?
Yes, pat your selves on the back. America (9,161,923 SQ KM) has over taken Germany (357,021 SQ KM).
Way to argue against yourself. The power has to be transmitted and good turbine locations are often not especially close to population centers. This can add dramatically to the cost. Germany's higher population density makes transmission costs notably lower since they don't have to build and maintain the infrastructure.
One can recover the financial cost of the initial investment without recovering the energy cost of the initial construction.
[It just means the initial construction used methods which require large amounts of (cheaper) energy.]
Example: Selling bottled water (in the Americas) imported from Fiji brings financial profit but energy inefficiency. [Water could be obtained locally with less energy wasted on transportation]. However, the Fiji water may be financially more profitable [perhaps it has a larger profit margin]. A Fiji water business could reclaim its initial financial investment while consuming more energy than a local-water business.
[This is actually a fundamental flaw of capitalism. One might hastily assume that since energy cost money, market forces would promote energy conservation. Such conservation happens only to a limited extent.]
However offtopic it may be... Thanks for showing me that!
I can't believe no one pointed out that 25 GW is enough electricity to power 20 time traveling Deloreans with a few MW left over.
Where are the time traveling electric cars we were promised?
That's enough electricity to power 20.661157024793388429752066115702 time machines!
I mean with all the damn wind coming out of Washington, we should be able to power the world. But then, it's all hot air, so that may contribute to global warming. What a horrible catch-22.
Pax Vobiscum
Nuclear power accounts for 19% of our electricity right now.
Trebling our capacity will push it to ~60% of our electrical requirements. 1000 plants should make it 200% of our electrical capacity.
Somehow, I doubt seriously we'd need 1000% of our current electrical generation capacity to replace oil alone....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
This is actually a fundamental flaw of capitalism. One might hastily assume that since energy cost money, market forces would promote energy conservation. Such conservation happens only to a limited extent
No, capitalism is perfectly OK in your example. The market has declared water is not a commodity, although you might disagree your individual opinion doesn't matter much vs the entire rest of the market. Fiji-an water is much better than the polluted Lake Michigan water in Milwaukee. Numerous (hundreds of) people have died in recent years in Milwaukee from contaminated city water, admittedly its not as bad as india or other 3rd world areas but I certainly will not drink Milwaukee city water (only filtered or bottled for me when I'm there, note that I live in a somewhat more civilized area to the west of Milwaukee where it's all ultra-deep wells, so it is safe to drink the city water at home). They are not interchangeable products so it is pointless to compare their costs.
Water could be obtained locally with less energy wasted on transportation
How do you propose to get fiji-an water to Milwaukee with less transportation costs, a really deep directionally bored well?
Also its not "wasted energy", if transportation was the entire point of the product, as opposed to a byproduct to be minimized. Kind of like French wine would be a lot cheaper in the USA if only you could sell Californian wine as French wine. Of course knowing the overall corruption level of the average American business, that probably does happen.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Yes, we sure do produce a lot of wind. Just look at all our politicians, although the dumbercrats (Obama and company) are worse with all of their lies. Time to clean house... and senate... and white house.
At this time in wind's growth curve, the most interesting question is: who is producing the turbines? They are likely to hold market share into the future. My impression is that Europe and the US are doing pretty well with China beginning to ramp up production. This means that the money invested in wind will often stay within a country. This makes some sense because the equipment is bulky and may pose difficulties with long supply chains.
The situation is different with solar panels. China is becoming the largest producer this year while the US is becoming the largest consumer. Solar panels can be shipped at a weight advantage of 200 times over coal or oil and fit well in containers. The US is leading in production in the small market segment of thin film solar however.
The eventual size of the solar market may be five times that of wind given cost projections so the bulk of the money to be made in renewable energy will be in solar. The present market shares for solar production look to disadvantage the US.
Adam Smith lived in a world of no big corporations (where in fact the biggest corporation was a Government department, the Royal Navy)and never envisaged how things would turn out. Karl Marx wrote in the 19th century, and actually envisaged rather more accurately how things would turn out. In the 20th century, Nobel prize winning economists demonstrated the flaw in the free market concept - the accumulation of secret asymmetric information - and were promptly proved right in the early 21st Century. Now, the US Government is trying to adopt a mixed economy without actually using the "socialism" word. It looks like your own Government has decided that the worldview of the Economist hasn't panned out too well.
I'm not a Marxist, I'm not a Smithite - but if somebody tells me on page 1 that he is prejudiced, I like to check the statistics, and get a second view from someone else. Economics is not a science like, say, QED, it makes few really testable predictions and its root beliefs are constantly being called into question. The world viewpoint of the Economist is more of a religion than a science, and I'm entitled to call it into question.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Lots of people are poo-pooing this because we are far from #1 per capita.
Well, we're also a company that has some very serious, entrenched problems with coming to terms with our energy problems. There are many milestones ahead that we will have to pass to survive, but this is a nice one. Let's give some credit where it is due for getting us past the first milestone.
For my part: Thanks, and congratulations, to those who are helping to drive us down the path to a more secure future - keep up the good fight.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
When are we to stop comparing the US with EU states? If we were going to compare EU states to the US, then we should do it to individual US states.
I actually don't care if we are "behind" EU in general or "ahead" since no one apparently considers the EU a practical entity for comparison purposes.
Do you realize the fastest growing energy sector in the US? It's pretty much wind. Why? Because it's a pain in for the big boys to get oil, coal, gas, or nuclear approved and funded. Getting funding for wind power now is easy. The other thing is that wind power can be bought in very small slices. So if I as a big boy energy company had only a few million to spend on new production this quarter, well I can build a few wind power plants somewhere.
Heck the Perkins Plan was basically that the big energy boys have long since woken up and realized that the time is ripe to really leech the US to fund our grand energy change over. I haven't seen any real details of the Perkins Plan, but that it's been introduced by "the right players." Means that it'll reappear in certain lobby groups and the given states involved could in theory fund it themselves. (They'd want federal money, but sure 5-10 states could do it themselves.) Wind has issues just like everything else, but they are just as solvable as anything else.
I'm actually not that surprised to hear how much wind power we are building. Every few day or so it seems like I'm behind either a house on a semi or giant parts of a wind mill on a trailer. Wind will happen despite the government not because of it.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
Thanks to the wind bag that Al Gore is, we have a power source to turn the turbines!
I wonder if putting up with Al Gore is worth it. I'm totally serial guys. Man-bear-pig is out to get us!
Anyone who looks into the global warming science in depth sees that TEMPERATURE LEADS CO2, not t he other way around. Al Gore had this to say about that in an Inconvenient Truth - "the relationship is complicated". That's all he explained about the science of global warming. The entire rest of the movie is about the consequences. Go watch the movie again. See if he actually explains how it works.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
That's because dakrats and other carrion eaters drag them away ;)
I've heard is that some efficiency improvements dramatically decreased the bird kills - the older, smaller, faster, and louder turbines killed far more birds than the bigger slower(quieter) turbines of today - though those edges still end up moving pretty quick, birds evolved to at least try to dodge falcons and such are plenty fast enough to avoid them. A lot easier than they avoid our nice clear windows, at least...
The latest though, is that they kill more Bats than birds - Personally, while I don't want bats too close to me due to the whole rabies problem, I do love the little mosquitoe eaters a little further away.
Still, put the turbines up high enough and you should avoid the bats - I don't imagine that skeeters fly that high, after all, there's no prey at that altitude, and why would bats be up there if their food isn't?
I don't read AC A human right
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.... have never been centrally planned economies, specially the UK.
Choose your examples wisely, what you are trying to say may be true but your examples are lousy to say the least.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Denmark generates 19% of _ALL_ its electrical energy requirements using wind.
Spain and Portugal 9%, Germany 6%.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power)
The US has a total installed capacity of 695 GW ( http://www.allcountries.org/uscensus/965_electric_energy_net_generation_and_installed.html )
25 GW wind / 695 GW installed = 3.5%
Incidentally 56% of the US's generating capacity is coal powered (can you say CO2 green house gases).
So the US produces 3.5% of its energy needs by wind, still behind Denmark 19%, Spain and Portugal 9%, ... and oh ya and Germany 6%.
If you want meaningful numbers you should look at energy consumption per person:
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption)
You'll see the US consumes almost TWICE as much energy per person as Germany.
For environmental issues (like CO2 emissions) efficient energy use is at least as important as how you generate it.
The news here is not that the US is the biggest installed capacity, but the rapid growth of wind power. In Environmental terms both Germany and the US still only generate a small amount of their electricity by wind power (less than 10%).
So there's still a lot of work to be done to lessen the dependency on non renewable energy sources like coal etc...
Just my 2 cents.
----- "Profanity is the one language that all programmers understand."
I read an article a while back on Pebble Bed reactors (though, for the life of me I can't remember where, so I'll link the wiki article instead). They seem to be a lot more stable and less prone to the dangers cited by the anti-nuclear crowd (like meltdowns, etc), and the fuel is not as concentrated. I'm not a nuclear physicist, so I can't speak to their efficiency, but IMHO would be a viable avenue to pursue as well.
just an analog boy living in a digital age.
Or one of Al Gore's.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Somehow, I doubt seriously we'd need 1000% of our current electrical generation capacity to replace oil alone....
We use oil for some stuff like lubrication that, assuming we insist on using nuclear power to provide it, wouldn't be too efficient. ;)
I haven't seen an estimate either on how many kwh a year it'd take if we went to 100% EVs. Don't feel like building one at the moment either - though .3kwh a mile is one figure I've seen. You'd have to get trucks and trains as well.
http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/2004/html/table_01_32.html
3 Trillion highway miles a year - 900 Billion kwh required - a Gigawatt plant can be expected to produce ~7.8 Billion kwh a year.
We have just over a hundred reactors now, to supply 20% of our power. Call it 500 to supply all of our electricity, and another 100-200 to provide the power for vehicles. 700 reactors in total, for relatively carbon-free transportation and electricity. Utilize cogeneration and we'd be able to eliminate a lot of heating bills as well. Reactors by the ocean could use the ocean for cooling and desalinate water while they're at it.
We'd burn through our uranium reserves pretty quickly doing it that way with traditional reactors, but using breeders and such we'd be good for thousands of years before we'd need to start filtering the stuff from ocean water or switching to Thorium. Still, I'd definitely use wind/solar where it makes sense.
It's also suspected that with increased use of nuclear fuel and the depletion of fuel coming from weapons stockpiles that a price spike would result in more exploration ala oil and find lots more of the stuff.
I don't read AC A human right
especially after a burrito.
You attended the 1910 Conservation Conference? Damn, you're pretty tech savvy for a centenarian!
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
Drill Baby Drill!!!
Oh, and burn a whole lotta coal. Because if it's environmentally friendly, our God hates it, and so do we!
It is interesting to see that my comment not only is not only hidden, it just doesn't exist.
It excoriated dumbercrates (democrates) but Obama. I see this site is not a political bullcrap machine. Good riddance.
With all the sausage and sauerkraut the Germans eat, you'd think they'd be hard to beat at producing wind.
Must have been the recent presidential campaign.
I see a lot of posts desperately denigrating the accomplishment by changing the terms of the comparison to per-capita or per km2.
Really? Because then if we don't want to be hypocrites, then we need to use per-capita, per-GNP$, or per-km2 output of pollution when demonizing the US as well, shouldn't we?
US pop 303 million
DE pop 82 million
Non US world: 6403 million
US vs Germany and Rest of World
Annual CO2 Emissions in 000's of tons:
US: 19t per capita
Germany: 10t
NonUS: 3t
GNP per capita ...so, while we can see that Germany is much more admirable individually than the US in terms of CO2 output per capita (around 50%), this 'efficiency' starts to disappear when you realize they're only producing about 75% of what each American produced. Still more efficient (and that's a good thing!) but not quite so cut and dried.
US $45,000
Germany: $34,000
NonUS: $6000
And then, when you see that compared to the rest of the world, the US is producing 7.5x the wealth per person, while only producing 6x the CO2 emissions, one might conclude that perhaps there are other states more worthy of demonization than the US.
(By the way, China per capita CO2 and GNP are 3t and $2444...about 5% of the productivity (of the US) at 16% of the CO2.)
-Styopa
Rush Limbaugh? Is that you?
Is that like a jiggawatt?
See, size does matter.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Kittery, Maine wind turbine pays dividends?
Seacoast Online Newspapers
http://tinyurl.com/cmxkew
Umm..... this thing cost $150,000 and it only produces $171 in electricity each month?
If my math is correct, the 1.5 months its produced 1,715 kwh ($171). As the article stated, lets estimate cost is .10 kwh (although its probably closer to .13 to .15kwh). Lets multiply that times 12 months and you get 20,580 kwh ($2,058) per year which is on the generous side.
That's still a far cry from 80,000 kwh year producing $8,000 in electricity. I like windmills, but the financials are just not adding up. $171 worth of electricity per month? That will take 73 years to pay off the $150,000 investment. LOL.
Noise is energy wasted.
Also, the quieter you make them, the more bats and birds will fly through them.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I think that total production don't means nothing special. Try production per habitant to see anything.
Yes indeed, and this is probably where the future lies. (I'm doing comparative testing right now.) At this early stage, the current biggest manufacturers may turn out to have sunk costs in the wrong technology. Thin film has the possibility of being significantly better for volume manufacture and for low environmental cost. Silicon may turn out to be a bit of a blind alley.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The retail price is as good a proxy as any. It can't have taken any more energy than you could get from that money by buying it on the open market, because they couldn't sell the windmills for below cost for very long.
Subsidies do muddy the issue a bit, but if can find out what they are, you can adjust the estimated retail price by it.
so, if it has a good money-pay-back-per-time, it probably has a good energy-pay-back, too.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
...we reached this global green milestone under the Bush administration? That's unpossible (as George would probably say)
Kill off the slow bats and we are left with bats that can dodge turbine blades...
A problem with pebble beds is that the pebbles, by definition, create more waste and waste that's hard to reprocess, although it is certainly safer than some other forms. Also, in the most prominent test plant, there was a radiation release. It'll never go critical, I think, but it is possible for the pebble manipulation hardware to jam and thus cause problems.
Some of the CANDU designs seem particularly nice from a safety standpoint, the only concern being that as I understand it, weapons-grade material can be made from them. Not an issue with the U.S., of course, but then you have the Iranians, etc. making CANDU reactors for civilian purposes but it also helping them develop weapons.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
no.. it's not 5000 nuclear power plants simply because when you compare electricity to fossil fuels you are comparing apples to oranges.
Right now, 104 nuclear reactors do 20% of our electricity. Hence, 500 nuclear reactors could supply it all.
As for transportation,40% of our energy supply is oil, mainly for use in transportation, which is at best 20% efficient. electric vehicles can approach 90% efficiency at point of the motor. Hence, the amount of true work to replace it is 40% / 4.5 or about 8% of our energy supply.
Anyways, you get the idea. When you see a 'million barrels of oil equivalent' chart it really is misleading, because they count million barrels of oil thermal in the case of coal, natural gas, etc. and million barrels of oil *electric* with nuclear, and hydro.
So all in all, less than 1000 nuclear plants could do it with a wide margin - the main trick of course is getting everything electrical which is no small trick..
The New York Times ran a story, Dark Days for Green Energy, that takes a more bearish look at the situation.
if you'll allow me to make an arse out of you and me
Sorry, but honestly, I have no clue what happens when you arseume.
Lately democracy seems to be based on the skybox, the Happy Meal box, the X-box, and the idiot box.
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Anybody who supports any technology made by any company is obviously a paid shill for $COMPANY or $TECHNOLOGY. Likewise, anybody who argues against $TECHNOLOGY or $COMPANY is a paid shill by those in $OLD_INDUSTRY.
In other words all arguments for and against anything are done by paid shills. Won't somebody think of the children!?
It'll never go critical, I think, but it is possible for the pebble manipulation hardware to jam and thus cause problems.
In terms used in nuclear reactions, "critical" refers to a self-sustaining fission process. You want a nuclear reactor to go critical. Thus, "sub-critical" is a reaction that is slowing down, and "super-critical" is a reaction that is speeding up. Still, you probably don't mean to say super-critical, as this could describe the beginning stages of a reaction that will become stable and critical without causing damage to its surroundings. It's safer to just say "The reactor probably won't explode" :).
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