Slashdot Mirror
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."
Kinda makes you wonder if government intervention is really necessary.
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.
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.
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."
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.
Well it's good to see your valuable, thought-provoking, high quality comment complaining about worthless comments enhancing the signal-to-noise-ratio...
Clearly, Slashdot is a US-centric website where many articles and discussions are in the format of comparing the situation on a scientific or technological topic in the US versus the rest of the world. Nothing wrong with that, since there are many positive outcomes from that if one can raise oneself above petty nationalism.
In this particular discussion it is valuable to compare the statistics which are a bit skewed by the vast differences in size, population and population density. Nevertheless it is interesting to note that being able to power 5 million US homes by wind power is an astonishing number in itself, and brings hope for a brighter future!
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
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.
Oh, and he "read an article"? I can write lots of articles that show all kinds of things. Did the article pass any plausibility checks?
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
***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
Also make sure you factor in the energy consumption of the average American. According to Wikipedia the US uses almost twice as much energy per capita as Germany. So it stands to reason, that if they use more, they should be producing more. 7.5 x the population and 2 x the energy consumption per person means they used 15 x more energy than Germany. They should be producing a lot more power from wind.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Then why is it being subsidized?
Short answer: politics.
Here's a hint. You are being leeched to pay for "renewable energy" built by your good ole "energy companies" of yore.
They aren't stupid. They know that the public doesn't want to fund to build coal, oil, or nuclear power. They know that the public has a thing for anything termed "renewable" even if it is more expensive than other sources. So they get us to pay as much of their costs as possible. Even when "renewable energy" becomes price competitive to build on its own, they'll still try to use subsidies as far as possible on general principles.
I can't blame the "energy companies." I'm iffy on blaming the politicians in this case. They've actually been doing what voters want. The problem is when to stop subsidies. That's one of those trick questions in politics.