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Offshore Windpower To Potentially Exceed US Demand
SpuriousLogic writes to mention that a new Interior Department report suggests that wind turbines off US coastlines could supply enough electricity to meet, or exceed, the nation's current demand. While a good portion of this is easily accessible through shallow water sites, the majority of strong wind resources appear to be in deep water which represents a significant technological hurdle. "Salazar told attendees at the 25x'25 Summit in Virginia, a gathering of agriculture and energy representatives exploring ways to cut carbon dioxide emissions, that "we are only beginning to tap the potential" of offshore renewable energy. The report is a step in the Obama administration's mission to chart a course for offshore energy development, an issue that gained urgency last year amid high oil prices and chants of 'Drill, baby, drill' at the Republican National Convention."
So when can I purchase my chunk of the ocean to erect my power plant?
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Blame the artist for all mistakes!
Undersea cables are a notoriously problematic thing, and a wind farm is going to be running lots of live power back to shore. Would cut cables endanger sea life? If so, to what extent? It may not sound like a big deal on a one-off basis, but if you have thousands of these things surrounding the continental shelf, this could seriously impact the viability of our coastal wildlife populations, no?
Hey, guess what you're accessories to?
So what happens if we start taking a large percentage of world energy requirements from wind power... Will we inadvertently cause a change in the weather through reduced windspeeds?
Does it seem premature to declare this the savior of our energy troubles before you have even put up a single test/prototype site? What are the technical hurdles? How do you transmit the power from the middle of the ocean to Kansas efficiently? What happens in rough seas? Land based wind power has been hamstrung by NIMBY folks blocking all attempts to build high tension transmission wires from the windmills to the population centers already, and the land there is mostly large commercial farms. I can't imagine how much worse it would be over the highly populated coastlines.
I read the internet for the articles.
It seems to me that floating platforms would be cheaper and easier to make and maintain than anything anchored to the sea floor. I wouldn't know where to begin, but I find it hard to believe engineers haven't already got it worked out.
Whale
I would love to see a future where rich libertarians build floating cities free of the governmental restraints and constraints of the pandering politicians. Live free on the water! No taxes. Everything accomplished by contract. It's like a paradise *sigh*
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
Ok, there are hundreds of huge transport ships idling off the coasts of Asian cities, right? Why not just put wind turbines all over them and park them 20 miles off the US coast?
"The biggest wind potential lies off the nation's Atlantic coast, which the Interior report estimates could produce 1,000 gigawatts of electricity ..." ...when the wind's blowing. Unfortunately being somewhat fickle it doesn't always do that and when it doesn't you need backup generators. In fact you'd need to backup ALL the wind power generators with equal rating backup systems and since these would probably coal and/or nuclear which can't be started up and shut down on a whim and so need to run 24/7 anyway it makes a mockery of the whole enviromental argument for wind.
And thats before you get into power transmission issues - windy sites generally arn't near big cities.
We can just build our wind turbines on that conveniently located plastic garbage island floating around in the middle of the pacific! I'll be auctioning off parcels next week on eBay. Be sure to bid early and bid often!
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
We've seen a number of these farms out there already elsewhere. I'm just wondering what the realistic lifespan of a windmill of this nature is and how many are normally down for any number of reasons at a time?
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
e.g.
Everyone has a car... No... TWO cars. Not only cars, but Hummers, because normal cars are just too efficient. Which is going to be "interesting" when people start choosing between NPK and fuel for their SUV.
Deleted
We can make up for the lost tax revenue by selling them toilet paper at a 1000% mark up.
it works in any depth.
Read radical news here
No so much when as where? "Certainly not in my backyard! What an eyesore..."
The only problem left to solve is all of them.
Wasn't there a physicist who did an analysis of various power sources and costs recently? He said that we could only get about 20% from wind power. And that Nuclear is the cheapest source.
That is just awful.
"better ways of doing things eventually just replace the inferior things" - Linus Torvalds 09-08-07
The United States has a 200 mile sovereign jurisdiction on our oceans. It's about time they use it for something!
Wind power has a severe problem - uncontrolled availability.
Don't get me wrong - there are lots of things "right" about wind power. It's perhaps the cheapest form of "alternative" electrical power. Windmills are easy to design, and don't require expensive, polluting labs to build. Parts are readily available, and they are the only form of electrical power that's profitable today without strong tax subsidies.
But the wind blows when it wants to, not just when you need the power. For this reason, you can't supply more than about 10-20% of a given power grid directly from wind power - it destabilizes the power grid. Wind dies down, suddenly you have a brown out. Then you get hit by a strong gust, and you're blowing fuses left and right.
But, off on the horizon, there's a new economy a-brewin' that's been talked about for years. And I'm not 100% sure it will actually take off, but I have my hopes: the hydrogn economy.
If, instead of directly providing electricity to the grid, we used wind energy to build up our hydrogen supply, then suddenly things start to make sense! Hydrogen can be burned when needed, and stored (fairly) cheaply when not. Sure, it's not as efficient as direct feed, but you're going to need *something* to power all those cars, and batteries aren't any more efficient than a hydrogen system, at significantly greater cost!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
The only energy sources environmentalists like are those that are hopelessly impractical and expensive. If this proves feasible, they'll oppose it.
Just to cut off this dead birds argument before it starts... I know a guy that runs some wind farms in Cali here (the livermore ones) and as a test they decided to shut off one half of their farm for a month and see the difference in birds killed.
They found like 4 dead birds in the field where they were off and around 8 dead birds where they were on. So each half of the farm might kill an extra 4 birds a month versus having standing towers. That's 96 birds a year for a very large windfarm.
You know what kills WAY more birds than that per year? Housecats. Example quote from some government study in the UK:
"In 1990, researchers estimated that "outdoor" house cats and feral cats were responsible for killing nearly 78 million small mammals and birds annually in the United Kingdom."
full link: http://library.fws.gov/Bird_Publications/songbrd.html
My mom's house also has a large window that kills a few birds a year, I'm sure for every house and building that adds up.
Point being, winds farms have effectively NO impact on birds! Thanks
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
For just the US: http://www.bergey.com/Maps/USA.Wind.Lg.htm For the world: http://www.bergey.com/Maps/World.Wind.Lg.htm
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
big, bloated pus-bags like Walter Cronkite, Ted "the swimmer" Kennedy and other coastal-snobs are in the mix these projects will always be blocked. After all, you're despoiling their playground.
FTL: "The floatation element will have a draft of some 100 metres below the sea surface, and will be moored to the seabed using three anchor points"
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Does it seem premature to declare this the savior of our energy troubles before you have even put up a single test/prototype site?
Did you miss the part where they said "potentially"? I haven't heard anybody proclaiming that all our energy and greenhouse gas problems are over.
The fact remains that there's a lot of free energy out there. In theory you could provide our entire energy budget a thousand times over from any one of several renewable resources: wind, tides, geothermal, solar. But in order to tap resources properly (as opposed to the puny projects we've done to date) we have to solve big problems. Did I say big? Enormous, gigantic, titanic. There isn't an adjective that really describes how difficult this is.
But that's all the more reason to play up the enormous amount of energy available this way. If big huge problems can only be solved with big expensive projects. You're not going to get anybody, public or private, to invest the enormous sums required unless there's hope of enormous return.
What, you mean like the million dollar oil rigs which get placed in all sorts of extreme situations?
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
There's more energy on this planet than we've fully realized. Think about the how much it takes to pick the entire ocean up three meters and set it back down twice a day. There are more carbon-killers here to be tapped than just solar and wind, though these are two good ones.
\\//_ Live long and prosper.
Of course this topic will inevitably turn into the standard flame war of it's intermittent, you can't store electricity, and what not. But with the other smart grid technologies that are being discussed these things become less of a concern.
Time to offend someone
The source of Wind turbine's power is neither unlimited, nor free — it is just largely untapped. Enough turbines will alter climates along the coasts (and deeper inland) will weaken the winds and thus change, for example, the rainfall amounts...
Has anybody thought of that? It will also be a hazard to navigation, but that, probably, is easier to solve...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
While the near-shore environment is reasonably suited to cables, the cost of long distance power transmission in the deep ocean environment may be problematic. This suggests that the power be stored into some transmissible fuel that can be picked up intermittently. One possibility would be Ammonia, NH3, which could be made by electrolysis of water to get the Hydrogen and nitrogen from the atmosphere. The heat of formation of NH3 is ~ 10% of the available energy in the Hydrogen (liquefying Hydrogen requires ~ 30%). Anhydrous ammonia is easily handled at moderate pressures in steel vessels, has a higher volumetric density than liquid Hydrogen, could be easily handled by tankers, and the Hydrogen can be easily released at moderate temperatures by catalytic reforming. Spills of NH3 are limited by its high solubility in water and lack of persistence - plants metabolize it rapidly.
So ... how exactly are we going to overcome the whole "International Waters" problem? Specifically, the areas with the largest amount of wind power are the same areas that the United States, China, and Russia could all conceivably lay claim to.
The point of hydrogen is just energy storage. I used to be a fan of hydrogen, but in the end it is just too hard to transport. However, there are lots of potential chemical reactions that could be used for energy storage, for example, there have been various proposals using aluminum.
The biggest problem is sheer scale: it's all well and good to say we'll store hydrogen/aluminum/whatever for when the wind isn't blowing, you then need full-capacity power plants to convert the hydrogen/aluminum/whatever back into electricity. So: you have to build two power plants, not just one, plus the transport infrastructure. Expensive!
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Why is the US map all white (no white) right in the Florida/Texas/South area?
So, CNN is really making all these Hurricanes up?
I don't see anything wrong with building enough wind infrastructure to exceed demand. My understanding is that you can turn off a turbine if you don't need it, or if conditions aren't right, or if you need to work on it. It really isn't that often that we have a foresight in the US to build something robust enough to have some redundancy available for those types of situations.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
We should use a variety of methods to derive alternative energy and in a variety of locations, otherwise, we risk disaster. Imagine if a tidal wave or surprise attack hit this infrastructure. The country would collapse before we could respond. We need to make sure we use many methods in many locations. This is not only safer, but because of the energy loss when power it sent over a distance it is more efficient to have local sources.
These things are going to be way too expensive right now. You have serious frequency and intermittency issues which make the whole gig more expensive (requiring more tolerant equipment, fast-response storage, etc). The 'potential' sure is there, but it wont be happening. Long Island Offshore Wind Power (LIOWP) was scrapped over cost issues last year. Environmentalists and NIMBY whiners will complain about the impacts on the ocean floor, fish, birds (bah), and tourism. Even with a carbon price, coal and natural gas will probably be cheaper than offshore wind for at least a few decades. The current wind VC is all going into onshore applications, because it just makes more sense.
Don't we currently prohibit big bulky energy-producing contraptions off just about every mile of coast of the US? At least 50 miles out anyway in most cases and none that I know of off California.
I'm not saying I oppose the turbines, but it seems like a bit of hypocrisy when you consider that oil rigs are not allowed.
They would just make their own government and find themselves within a few dozen years or two crisis right back where we are.
Never under estimate the people to give up their freedom if someone else offers to make it all better.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
But that's the energy of the moon orbiting the planet. If we tap into the tides, the moon will fall from the sky. :-)
Well, TFA is just about incoherent as to what percentage of whose demand when could be produced from wind turbines where. This article is a great deal clearer about its claims.
Or, you could peruse the report summary itself.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
"Offshore wind resources have substantial potential to supply a large portion of the Nation's electricity demand (Figure 1). According to estimates by the NREL, developing shallow water (typically 0-30 meters) wind resources, which are the most likely to be technically and commercially feasible at this time, could provide at least 20 percent of the electricity needs of almost all coastal States."
How did this turn into 'meet or exceed the nations current demand'?
Report url: http://www.doi.gov/ocs/ExecutiveSummary-final.pdf
... letting wind turbines take out all the excess power out of all the hurricanes haunting florida? You know, so they never reach the land.
Wouldn't that be a win-win?
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
With ALL those windmills going, taking the energy out of the wind, eventually, there won't be any more wind. See, the wind hits one set of windmills and slows down; then hits another and slows down further until eventually, no more wind! Then we'll have to set up windmills in the Middle East and we'll be right back to where we are today! It COULD happen!
Since when is double == none?
It's not. Considering the scale, however, and relating it to the total number of birds and small mammals, the net effect is essentially zero.
If I make $100/day, and you make $200/day, then sure, you make double the amount of money I do in a day.
Compare that to the GDP of the US, however, and the net effect of either or both of us losing or retaining our jobs is zero.
They already made a documentary about this. It was called Bioshock. I think I remember that it turned out well for everyone involved...
If my memory serves me correctly, the Oregon coast has amazing ONSHORE wind resources along the coast. (http://www.bergey.com/Maps/USA.Wind.Lg.htm
It kind of boggles my mind that we're worrying about deep-water offshore wind when that kind of potential lies untapped.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
The real costs of energy, when you include pollution, terrorism, wars, risks to national defense, etc is far above what is currently charged.
When the subsidies stop, the alternatives will develop.
Anchor these floating windmills to the sea floor so that they can be used for tidal generation, too. While we're at it, use solar panels for the blades. It just doesn't get greener than that.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
From the actual article:
The Slashdot headline:
I know the word 'potentially' is still in there, but when you say something is going to do something, it means it is imminent. For example just go to google news and search for "mayor to" (with the quotes), or "ibm to", or "[any entity] to". You'll get back stories of people and things who are actually going to do the task at hand. In addition, the slashdot headline makes it sound like we already have the offshore turbines in place and this year it could come close to exceeding demand, which is certainly not the case. Leaving 'could' in there indicates that if we were to have the wind turbines in place, they could potentially meed our demand.
We always knew Comcast was corrupt, here's the proof: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1909890&cid=34545432
Ok, so we can take power from the wind and the waves.
Wind (or water) pushes on turbines some way or another, and voila, we get electricity.
But... let's say we go for that plan full sail (pun more or less intended): in the extreme, if you take the (in)famous and overly quoted law of thermodynamics into account, doesn't that *slow* wind/currents down ? Wouldn't that become a problem (ex. effects on climate, decrease in power...), if done on a large scale ? (and seriously, if we could tap into such a big potential of energy, do you think anyone would care about energy consumption anymore? at least, not for a long while...)
Maybe it's just me and my brain at the end of the day on a Friday...
Kinda reminds me of Asimov's "The Last Question."
Since there are approx 1043 natural gas and oil rigs already in the U.S, could they not piggy-back off these. This may not provide enough power to supply all the demands, but maybe as a supplement. The windmills could also power some of the rig, thus reducing the amount of emissions by from the diesel-power generators mostly used on rigs.
People just love picturesque fanciful solutions to problems. They love the idea of pleasant Dutch-like windmills turning in the gentle breeze, or raising healthy green corn to make friendly ethanol, or shiny happy solar panels under a crystal blue sky. It makes them all warm and fuzzy. It's a smiley face on that frowny problem. If only it weren't for those the nasty science details: lunatic costs, minuscule power production, nasty secondary environmental consequences.
I love fantasy land but there's a reality to confront -- civilization's energy requirements grow exponentially. Hundreds of thousands of years ago we used kilowatts. A few thousand years go it was megawatts. Today we use terawatts. Energy requirements aren't going to go down, no matter what some treehuger tells you. Thirty years from now we need solutions that produce petawatts. So if you're going to solve the future energy problem, what sort of solution do you implement? Happy little windmills that produce one billionth of what you need, and do it unreliably?
There's only one solution I know to this problem, and that's Thorium reactors. It's the only solution that gives us petawatts in thirty years without miracles. It's the only solution that doesn't destroy the environment. It's the only solution that has plenty enough fuel to last us until we move to exawatts.
Something like a 1/4 of the state is ideal for wind farming... It could even co-exist with the ranches! http://www.windpowermaps.org/windmaps/images/WYwindpower50_highres.jpg
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
At first I thought about the uproar we'll get from the killings of all the seagulls....but then again, they're dirty animals and I'm sure they won't be missed. I wonder if all the dead birds will bring more sharks into the bays though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_energy#Environmental_effects
You're not breaking any laws of thermodynamics.
See Autogiro boats.
http://uk.geocities.com/fnsnclr@btinternet.com/yachts/auto/hist1.htm
Deleted
Good luck with the pirates!
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...never gonna happen. Deep waters? Might as well be outerspace. Seriously.
How are they going to get the power from the windmills to the distribution point? High voltage lines lose a percentage of the power as heat. That heat would be radiated into the ocean. Global warming fanatics ought to be up in arms about this.
Oil rigs are a weeee bit more durable than windmills.
And they cost a lot more than a million dollars.
Now, sure, you could reinforce your windmills to withstand weather extremes. But at what cost? The advantage of building them at sea is that they're more efficient, but if you have to spend 5 times more energy and materials just to make them, then is the efficiency boost really worth it?
Our current supply of thorium could generate our current demand for A THOUSAND YEARS.
Probably more.
Read all about it
So how much is it going to cost for the Navy to guard these things 24/7 ?
It would be a shame for pirates to hold our power plants hostage, or terrorists to destroy them.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Look at Saul Griffith's TED video Kites can reach higher altitudes and sweep more sky than turbines, so they can (theoretically at least) generate more power than the turbines.
Think global, act loco
For this reason, you can't supply more than about 10-20% of a given power grid directly from wind power - it destabilizes the power grid.
That's just not true. 10% of all the power used in Spain in 2007 came from wind power. On 20 March 2007 (a particularly windy day with low power usage during night, etc) we had a peak of 40% of power coming from windmills. On 22 january of this year, we had an absolute record of wind power (234.059 MWh, 22% of all the power used that day) - higher than all the power generated by the 7 nuclear power plants we have, BTW.
The grid didn't destabilized. Nobody noticed it. Sure, destabilization can happen and it's a problem, but it can be fixed. We have some sort of "coordination center" which (i think) predicts quite reliably the amount of wind we're going to have and balances everything accordinly.
Bluewater Wind has a deal to sell energy from a proposed wind farm off the Delaware cost, but it needs $800 million investment to move forward. Bluewater's project will "nameplate" at ~600 MW with average delivery of ~200 MW.
Meanwhile Delsea Energy has filed initial permit applications with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and the US Army Corps of Engineers to build a utility scale wind farm project offshore New Jersey. Delsea will nameplate at 300 to 400 MWe with average delivery of ~100 MW.
Both of these projects are looking at 3 MW to 3.6 MW turbines (~200 for Bluewater Delaware, ~100 for Delsea New Jersey) that have 300 foot towers.
It'd be a complete a total disaster, attempting to live in close proximity without governmental restraints. Total party kill within a decade.
If offshore wind turbines became America's primary source of power, then the country would be especially vulnerable to naval attacks.
I've often wondered, since we're talking about putting these things offshore anyway, why they're air turbines and not water ones.
water's denser and can thus exert more force in its flow; tides are a lot more predictable than wind patterns..
sure, directly translated it'd be a fish-grinder the same way the air ones are supposedly bird-grinders. but going back to water being denser, i bet we'd find we could make a more efficient archimedes-corkscrew kinda turbine instead of something like an airplane propeller.
Nobody in the industry takes a cavelier attitude towards bird and bat kills. The Altamont Wind Project and it's well-documented bird problems probably set this industry back 10 years. It was an example of a very poorly sited facility. From Wikipedia:
This idea that we in the industry discount bird and bat issues is false. The American Wind Energy Association, the leading trade association for wind developers, has sponsored a number of studies of the issue. This 132 page report from 2004 is just one resource discussing recent research: www.awea.org/pubs/documents/WEBBProceedings9.14.04%5BFinal%5D.pdf . This report from the American Academy of Science's presents a similarly scientific look at bird and bat fatalities: http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11935&page=1. The Bats and Wind Energy Cooperative (http://www.batsandwind.org/default.asp) has fascinating video of bats encountering turbines:http://www.bu.edu/cecb/wind/video/, and has detailed discussions of proper siting and operation of facilities.
The better operations come in two ways -- (1) shut down the turbines during local migratory and breeding seasons; and (2) shut the turbines down at night when bat activity is at a maximum and power prices are at a minimum. By combining these two operating parameters, the bird and bat kills can be reduced to an acceptable level, while revenues to the wind mills decrease only slightly. This is particularly true since electricity demand is at its lowest during the spring and fall -- when animals are most likely to come into contact with the turbines. It's common for fossil units to shut down during this period for maintenance too, because the revenues do not justify the costs.
As usual, things are rarely as simple as we would wish. Generating power is not environmentally friendly. It just isn't. It's all about minimizing the bad parts.
Everything accomplished by contract.
Nothing makes me laugh more than this weird belief that contracts can replace government. What do you do when there's a difference of opinion over how to apply a contract? Don't say "free arbitration" because there's nobody to enforce the arbitration, just as there's nobody to enforce the contract.
Contract disputes would end up being settled by force of arms. NRA types with their Daniel Boone mythology doubtless think that would be pretty cool. But wars aren't won by rugged individualists, they're won by people with a lot of resources who can deploy huge numbers of well-trained soldiers and expensive hardware. So all arguments get won by the people who have the best armies. That's a formula for creating a ruling class of professional warriors. That's called feudalism.
Now, Feudalism has its advocates. But they are ignorant fools. You may not like a government that taxes away 40% of your income, but I don't think a hereditary feudal ruling class that demands almost all your income and considers outsiders an inferior life form is much of an improvement.
The windmills take out energy by providing resistance against the wind and converting that energy into motion.
Think of how many acres of rainforest are destroyed every year (or day), and how much has been destroyed overall in the last hundred years or so. Those trees cut the wind also and transferred that energy into movement of leaves, branches, or entire trees.
I think even if we got all the world's energy from wind, it wouldn't even be close to the number of trees which have been cut.
The problem here is that the scale involved is enormous. One day of an average hurricane releases roughly the energy equivalent of an entire year of electrical consumption...for the entire planet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(energy)
...according to people who were actually at TMI. Note that they were called in to replace staff who fled when the incident occurred. Wonder why they ran off? Believe what you want, but it's an interesting read either way. Personally, I trust the nuke industry and the NRC about as much as I trusted the tobacco companies when they told us how safe cigarettes were.
To all the cranks pointing out that the system would be susceptible to terrorists with really fast submarines --with hundreds of torpedoes --and lots of time. Methinks you've been watching too much 24. Time to go hide in Cheney's undisclosed location (wish he'd go back there) and stop trolling forums on the Internet.
The reasons wind power is not a good idea for a large fraction of the baseline power supply has nothing to do with the amount of power needed, and everything to do with other economic and technical concerns that this does nothing to address. In particular:
1)Part of the reason wind power is not even more expensive is that other power plants can adjust their output according to changes in wind pattern and demand. As the fractional wind-power output increases so does the amount of backup power or energy storage schemes you need to compensate for the variations. This problem is often misunderstood by many. It is not that 100% cannot be done. Using hydroelectric pumped storage, it would be very possible to cover an entire country's energy demand from wind, the problem is that it gets expensive. Denmark, which gets a sizable fraction of its power from wind kinda manages because they exchange power with its neighbors, effectively using Swedish and German nuclear plants as backup, but this obviously won't work if everybody did it.
2)Wwind power is still multiple times the cost of coal or nuclear. Yes, in many countries nuclear is subsidized, and there's decommissioning costs of nuclear plants and waste handling costs. There have been delays, Finland's new reactor is estimated to cost twice what originally planned. EVEN SO, the cost of wind power ends up being higher for on-shore wind farms, and higher still for off-shore ones. Don't believe me ? Go check out the UK's royal academy of engineering report on the cost of electric power production. If you've ever been to England you know it can get quite windy, and they still see more than twice the costs for wind than for nuclear. I've seen many proponents of wind power claim randomly that wind would be cheaper when you remove subsidies and include life-cycle costs and decommissioning. Turns out that even if you allow for a doubling of estimated nuclear prices ( including decommissioning ) this is simply not true. There's of course also the questionable logic in basing the decision of what energy source to use on "best case" prices for wind and "worst case" prices for nuclear, but even if you do so you have to bend the numbers a bit for wind to come out in favor.
3)Much of the speculation of improved wind turbine efficiency is downright impossible due to physical constraints. Because you need an airflow through the turbine to extract energy, a wind turbine can never extract all the energy ( as that would leave the air stationary ). It turns out that the laws of fluid dynamics puts an upper limit on the conversion efficiency (which is related to how much teh airstream expands as it moves through the turbine), and as a consequence the hoped for dramatic improvements in efficiency simply cannot happen. At the very best a wind turbine that today gets 40% conversion efficiency could get 59% ( the theoretical maximum ) , meaning a 50% improvement in energy output. This is not alone enough to put it on par with nuclear and fossils. Any other improvement would have to come from either stronger off-shore winds or reduced material costs. Unfortunately the extra cost off of-shore construction and maintenance makes off-shore wind farms more expensive than land based ones, and since capital production costs is also the main cost in nuclear energy, changes in material prices are likely to benefit or hamper nuclear as well as wind, without altering the relative price between the two.
4)Many of the claimed benefits of wind power over nuclear are dubious. As with Nuclear power stations, wind farms are only "carbon-free" if you ignore the CO2 output associated with creating the steel and concrete used in their construction, yet the emissions from producing steel for nuclear plants is often used as an argument for why wind would be better than nuclear. It is true that wind power does not produce radioactive waste, but in practice even the overly-cautious deep geological repositories planned in Sweden and Finland contribute only a fraction (less than 10% ) of the cost of the
Using wikipedia and some quick web searches.
...a private home in a temperate climate generally needs around 20,000 kilowatt-hours per year (20000 kWh/year) to fulfill its energy needs
On 21 December 2007, Q7 (later renamed as Princess Amalia Wind Farm) exported first power to the Dutch grid, which was a milestone for the offshore wind industry. The 120MW offshore wind farm with a construction budget of 383 million was the first to be financed by a nonrecourse loan (project finance). The project comprises 60 Vestas V80-2MW wind turbines. Each turbine's tower rests on a monopile foundation to a depth of between 18-23 meters at a distance of about 23 km off the Dutch coast.
So let's figure each propeller generates 2MW, or around 17,500MWh in a year.
So each household uses 20MWh in a year. That would indicate that each windmill could power 17500/20, or 875. There are approx. 115,000,000 households in the United States, so we would need to build about 132,000 offshore windmills.
That's better than I thought it would be; I figured the idea was completely ludicrous. Of course, at the cost quoted above, it would take 842,600,000,000, or over 800 billion Euros. That's really high, but not impossibly high. It would need to be overbuilt some, to handle outrages and stalls, but there would be economies of scale involved as well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGSlzj99pWc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGSlzj99pWc
VERY ironically, in the past oil capital of the world, is some of the most windy parts of the US.
VAWTS are perfect for if you have extra land. I know a guy who has some acreage in western oklahoma which is extremely windy all the time, and with enough funds, he could easily start his own power company.
Except wind mills in these condition will be torn apart.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
We started using wind power for industry long before electricity was understood. Why not try that again?
On thing that I've been mulling over for a couple of months is combining a windmill with a sterling cycle engine for heating and cooling. The Stirling cycle is reversible; you can let heat flow from the hot side to the cold side and take mechanical work from it, or you can drive it mechanically and pump heat from the cold side to the hot side.
Home heating and cooling is a fairly long-hysteresis operation. If I'm living somewhere with gusty winds, a windmill driving a heat pump still might be worth doing.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It is well known that the power generated at a site greatly exceeds the amount of power that can be delivered over a distance. While there is enough wind to generate the US's power consumption needs, how much extra would we need to generate to ensure that the required amount actually reaches the US? Everybody seems to jump at opportunities to generate seemingly limitless amounts of energy, however more attention and research should go into making systems more efficient and operate with lower power. Also, with the distance factor in mind, it is clear that if I were to plant solar cells on my roof, I would reap a much higher percentage of the energy generated than if I were to use power generated from wind in the Oceans.
Yes, the million dollar oil rigs that are built with the intention of minimizing the impact of weather, unlike the million dollar turbines that are built with the intention of maximizing the impact of weather.
10% more thinking, 10% less talking
Journalists usually make the mistake of saying "so many of X could supply all of the continental US" but the only sane informed people that advocate "one true energy" are lying to sell things. For example - Tidal power in the Bay of Fundy could supply the continent but at slack water what do you do? A mixture can play to the advantages of each method.
The problem with your nuclear suggestion is that it is twenty years out of date - Superphoenix exposed a few problems that showed fast breeders are a dead end. Accelerated thorium may achieve the same end however since it has no military applications it has received very little funding so there is not yet a working prototype. Nuclear has to show they are capable just like all of the other alternative energies and deliver some prototypes that work well before anybody goes out and builds a lot of them for civilian purposes. If there is something good enough it won't even need taxpayers money to build and operate it.
The problem with putting windfarms far out at sea is that sometimes the weather there gets really rough, and global warming is making that worse. Every few years a large fraction of the windmills will be smashed by large storms.
Oil rigs survive out at sea, but they are large, heavy structures, because there only have to be a few of them. Each oil rig produces far more energy (and money) than a single windmill, so we can affort to make them massive.
Windmills have to be much cheaper, and they've got big old blades on them too, to catch wind. I wonder what happens when 100 foot waves start crashing over these? Are they floating, or anchored to the seabed and tethered? Do they fold up and submerge to 500 feet when bad storms come along, to protect themselves?
Weather seems like a huge problem, because it can be so rough at sea, and because there need to be millions of windmills, each cheap enough to make it possible to deploy millions of windmills.
electrocute the starving gay baby whales.
But I thought that 1C was the predicted temperature change after 90 more years of all of the global carbon emissions
No, "the IPCC projects a best estimate of global temperature increase of 1.8 - 4.0C with a possible range of 1.1 - 6.4C by 2100". They say the temperature has already increased 1C since the 1800s.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Why would you go all the way out into the ocean and then use wind? Why not use power buoys to create the energy right from the waves? The buoys can sit on top of the water and be attached to the sea floor. The profile is much smaller, the output is much greater, the maintenance costs are much cheaper. A company called Ocean Power Technologies already is building them and has many deployed around the world. They build a "Power Buoy" and the main one outputs at 150kW for a single buoy. Check out http://www.oceanpowertechnologies.com/ Why waste time and energy trying to capture wind when you are already out into the water?
Also weak considering the alternative is routing our energy supply through the Persian Gulf.
Though shipping oil through the Persian Gulf does affect us the US doesn't get much oil from there. Of the US's foreign oil supply 3 of the 4 largest suppliers to the US are in "our back yard". Canada is the US's biggest supplier, Mexico is the second biggest, and Venezuela is the third or fourth largest.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Switch off the mind.and let the heart decide;
There is no enemy.
Lift up the hearts of this your only tribe.
We're a continent, a continent a continent a continent a
Anyway, the last 8 years of terrorism talk seem to have you unduly paranoid. A terrorist could totally cripple the US right now by targeting pipelines.
LOL and THAT's supposed to make him feel better? We're just lucky all the terrorists (domestic and foreign) haven't really thought things through all the way.
Terrorists wouldn't have to go that far to find stuff like this. Chuck Norris's movie "Invasion U.S.A. goes along this line.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Terrorists can only target people or landmarks, by definition. Going after the infrastructure is counterproductive use of their resources, since they cannot damage a lot; the only way to have any impact is to try to terrorize the populace.
A goal of terrorism is to terrorize. Destroying the USA's infrastructure will certainly terrorize a lot of americans. Look at the effects of 911. Because of it americans allowed their rights to be abridged and allowed the president to start 2 wars. Heck hurricanes make people afraid.
The truth is, one should not be worried about the terrorists at all because the probability and the extent of any actual damages in terms of lives or goods is minimal.
When I've said this before /.ers have scuffed at me but I'll risk it again, government scares me more than any terrorists do.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Vietnam
The fake Gulf of Tonkin Incident?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
No, the Federal government owns the rights to waters offshore.
State waters extends out 3 miles.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Nuclear is (or should be), without a doubt, the biggest part of the picture.
No, solar and wind should be the biggest part of our energy supply.
In it's current form it's relatively clean and safe.
There's no waste and no mining?
We should be breaking ground on dozens of new reactors, not looking to stick windmills in the middle of the atlantic.
If private businesses want to then they can without government subsidies. However without subsidies nuclear power would not be profitable.
Solar and wind have their place, but they're simply not a viable alternative if your goal is to stop burning fossil fuels.
TFA says wind farms in the Atlantic can provide a quarter of the US's electricity, what it does not say is that the Rockies can provide all of the US's electricity. And the Wind Energy Resource Atlas of the United States lists more good places. In "A Solar Grand Plan" the writers say solar can provide 69% of the US's electricity by 2050. Solar and wind are vary viable.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
His brother was SHOT!
Two of his brothers was shot, JFK and Bobby. Another brother, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., was shot down in a plane during WWII.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Oh and the coastal transmission lines need to be larger if you are going to transmit all the way to Kansas.
Transmission lines don't need to run from the east coast to Kansas. Kansas is near the Colorado Rockies, Colorado and Kansas share a border, and the Rockies have enough potential wind power to supply all 48 continuous states. According to the Wind Energy Resource Atlas of the United States about the only place in the US that isn't good for wind is the southeast. However Florida, part of the southeast, is terrific for solar power.
Should there be a Law?
I gather that windmills are safer for birds than they were years ago (I have no firm reason to believe it)
What made wind genies dangerous to birds was that they spun fast. For years now though the blades have been made larger so they don't spin fast. Actually more birds die from flying into buildings.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
In a , all of the "free" energy sources are more expensive than coal in terms of $ per MWh.
Funny, that doesn't say anything about the subsidies coal gets. I wonder how cheap coal is if you add in those subsidies. Then there's all the external costs of coal.
the U.S. wind plant figures on page 55 look good simply because the U.S. rates wind plants with a 40 year lifespan, vs 20 years for the rest of the world
There are Jacobs Wind Turbines older than 40 years old still working. People look for Jacobs made in the 1930s and '40s to use.
About $45/MWh for wind vs. about $30/MWh for coal and nuclear.
And I bet subsidies are not included in the cost of coal and nuclear but they are for wind.
The problem with the wind and solar is that they are very sparse.
This is not true in the US. The Wind Energy Resource Atlas of the United States lists what regions are good or bad for wind, and the only region in the US that is not good for wind is the southeast. However Florida is part of the southeast and it's great for solar. Also good for solar is Texas west to California then up the coast.
Hydro, geothermal, and biofuels (which is really using plants as your solar collectors) look like much better candidates long-term.
I disagree about hydro but agree about geothermal. Biofuels might become good later but as it's done in the US today it sucks. Corn, which is what's used in the US, is a bad feedstock, sugarcane is better and switchgrass is currently the best.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
United States offshore drilling debate -
As interpreted by the federal courts, the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution gives the federal government certain regulatory power over "navigable waters" of the United States. The Submerged Lands Act of 1953 and Continental Shelf Lands Act of 1953, along with the 1960 Supreme Court decision in United States v. States of Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, divided ownership of the tidelands of the United States between state and federal governments. States own the sea and seabed out to 3.5 miles, except Texas and Florida which own out to 10.5 miles. The federal government owns the remainder of the territorial waters.
We're Americans - we will try and have God Given Right (TM) to use at least twice whatever they can supply.
The end user doesn't change to be less efficient if you change the way you produce energy. If they have inefficient electronics with wind power, they would be inefficient with nuclear or oil.
And as to your earlier question, think a little.
Just a back-of-the envelope working will show you how daft your concern is.
wind speed: 10kts ~20m/s
weight of air: 10^5kg/m^2
energy 1/2 m v^2
each meter of windfront affected affects 20m of length each second.
power per m of windfront: 10^6 x 10^5 Watts.
10^11W per meter of windfront.
1.6x10^13 W
Sorted by 1/10 mile of windmills.
Heck, if we only placed them on the meridinal, that's about 1/4000th the energy lost.
Wind speed would drop 1/8000th m/s if we got 100% of our energy from it.
They want SOMEONE ELSE'S cat indoors all the time.
The cat owner doesn't want catshit all over the place.
PS you're an urban dweller. But you CAN go to the countryside. You're STILL a city-dweller even when you're on your holiday in the catskills.
We OBVIOUSLY must stop this... in our climate and mentality of doing more with less, having less is the only correct answer! We must export this and pay other countries to take it so we can have less ourselves even if we did the work and provided the resources, and others countries don't want it! Possibly we can just use it to make sea water into hydrogen and oxygen, oh no, we might find out that increasing the amount of them as free gasses in the environment might lead to more global mediocrity , or is that warming, or is it cooling? Who cares, we are all chicken little and scared of change ... and if you are not you are the problem. ... If we have 'enough' then how are the 'haves' going to 'have more' and the 'withouts' going to 'have less'? We can't give it away... no one would make a profit...
It think that fills my sarcasm quota for the morning. ... Next?
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."
I have gone down this thread a pretty good distance and have yet to see solar mentioned. It seems as obvious as the roof over your head. The power is generated at or near the place of consumption. It does not generate nuclear waste or CO2. Cost of production per kW are falling with a pattern similar to Moore's Law for computing speed. You are also generating the power during peak demand (AC on a sunny day). It seems like the perfect next ingredient in our energy mix.
Um, is it just me, or has somebody else considered what will happen to climate (such as cooling, heat redistribution, etc) if we take so much energy out of the wind?
If another country (or terrorist) wanted to seriously hurt the US...
Well, "terrorist" aren't Marvel super vilains. They don't nuke things for fun. They're often just a little bit upset that the US government bomb their countries in order to steal their natural resources. So, if I were you, I wouldn't be afraid about these wind turbines being attacked.
Wind Power is intrusive, relies on an something that's evanescent and is therefore ultimately not a complete long term solution. The geo thermal ideas for deep wells and other "smarter" natural solutions will probably win out and as others have pointed out decentralized solutions avoid many distribution logistics and catastrophe liability issues .
Check out Vivace.
http://www.ns.umich.edu/podcast/video.php?id=499
This is brilliant.
Also, the earth is flat and birds just fly along it into them!
Why, even dark matter holds the atmosphere onto the earth!
I bet that pushes the birds down into those windmills!
OMG we just proved the earth is flat, and we need to realize this as a society to fully stop this bird massacre!
Green energy is all good and well, but giving too much incentive to go green can cause problems. Look at Sweden.
The government grants tax write offs for individuals and businesses buying solar panels and windmills for complementary / personal electricity production.
What the businesses in particular end up doing is buying far more windmills than necessary, taking the tax cuts, and then the directors and shareholders take these windmills / solar panels home, or worse, re-sell them on the black market or through various means, back into circulation through other businesses and individuals in neighboring EU countries.
If liberal Sweden can become so corrupt with Green Power initiatives, I would hate to see how the we in the USA fare.
There's plenty of good references around on power generation. You don't have to have been an engineer in the electricity generation industry to be aware of the basics. I don't have anything paticularly against nuclear power (I've worked with people from two nuclear facilities and had a student from a third), I just have a problem with the vast amount of bullshit on the issue generated by Westinghouse et al. Now you should have some idea why I said you were misled and that it is by no means a personal attack of any kind.
Americans generically, not you specifically. I am American myself and I've been complaining for years.
most of the atrocities against the Constitution would likely have happened regardless of who had power simply because the government will use any excuse it has to gain power
Agreed! Before Bush Clinton was already on that road. There was Nixon, and before him FDR. The earliest example I know of or can recall goes back to Andrew Jackson, when he said of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court "John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it." This was when the Supreme Court made a ruling against him in the 1830s.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?