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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."
talk about single point of failure. If another country (or terrorist) wanted to seriously hurt the US, they'd just have to target a broad swath of these offshore windmills. A pretty easy target I'd think?
Much like computer systems...I'd like to see a heterogeneous solution....windmills, nukes...and perhaps some legacy fossil fuel plants and a backup.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
And here, the parent illustrates why this will never happen.
Years and years in environmental impact studies, many more years of court battles, then the legislatures and Congress stepping in to support the NIMBY positions of their constituents.
To make this happen, Barry will have to wield near dictatorial powers and sweep aside most of the legal avenues people have to fight against something like this if they disagree.
Hmmm...Barry? Dictatorial powers?
Maybe we will have wind farms after all.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
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?
You're going to have a choice of what to put in your collective backyards: ... go round and round.
Nuclear power stations, which cause cancer when they go wrong.
Coal power stations, which cause cancer.
Or wind turbines which
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Years and years in environmental impact studies, many more years of court battles, then the legislatures and Congress stepping in to support the NIMBY positions of their constituents.
No, you just need a powerful Senator:
Kennedy doesn't play by the rules
Short version: a proposed wind farm off Cape Cod was torpedoed by Kennedy with a poison-pill amendment to a bill. It wasn't just his constituent's backyard: it was his backyard.
If another country (or terrorist) wanted to seriously hurt the US, they'd just have to target a broad swath of these offshore windmills. A pretty easy target I'd think?
This is a pretty weak argument when you consider that we have the Coast Guard, the largest Navy in the world, and the most advanced monitoring of our coasts. Not to mention the sheer size of the United States and the fact that these windmills could be deployed on two different oceans. We are not talking 100 Windmills here. Also, I am sure the military will find a way to make these Windmills useful to our national defense. I doubt missiles, but those poor whales are probably gonna have more sonar pollution.
Terrorist FUD. Google up maps of oil, gasoline, and NG pipelines. Small bombs, big boom, no energy, no economy, no transportation, no food once the supermarkets run dry.
With Windmills, terrorism would be harder to perform and easier to fix. Either you have to attack thousands of windmills over hundreds of square miles, or the trunk lines transporting power. I suspect it is much easier to put out the fires associated with blowing up an electrical line than it is for pipelines, and much easier to lay cable than pipe. Plus, with electricity, the "pipe" fills immediately -- with liquids and gasses, even once repaired, flow is much slower. Oh, and undersea cables are much harder to get to than pipes running on or close to the surface of the ground, i.e., no fancy submersible required -- a 4wd Subaru Wagon would be about all you need to get bomb materials to pipelines. And some shovels perhaps.
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.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
You mean like how we've seen all those terrorist attacks on our outshore oil drilling platforms? Oh wait...
Exactly, these windmills will be far apart and designed to withstand hurricanes and swells in the deep ocean. It would take a lot of work and sizable force to disable a significant number without being noticed.
Of course, these offshore windmills mustn't be within eyesight of any rich people's homes...
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny-liwind1221,0,5450016.story
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Thanks for the thoughtful answer. I wouldn't expect a huge problem either, except that extra cheap energy could lead to massive heat pollution from inefficient electronics, toasters, and manufacturing plants.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
It's certainly a possibility. The question is: what will the effects actually be?
Winds are driven largely by energy from the sun, and the (gravitational pull of the) moon, and the rotation of the earth. Those are three sources of almost unimaginable power.
It's certain that windmills will pull some energy out of the system, but it's unlikely that they'll pull enough to cause anything more than a small local disruption.
Now, with hydropower, we have the same troubles, but the system is much more limited. Single rivers, single dams, etc. The big problems we have there are all things dealing with suspended particulates: silt drops out of the system, makes the rivers shallower. I don't see a real comparison, barring a big "Dust Bowl" type situation.
CO2 is a bit different because it's (according to the prevailing wisdom) screwing with one of the inputs, to wit, it's increasing the retention of heat energy from the sun. That's got the potential to cause more long range problems than something that moves around energy in the existing system.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Also, even if there is enough wind out there to meet our energy needs in the most technical sense (something like the same kWhs in wind per year as the US uses in a year), it doesn't account for daytime peak and seasonal usage changes.
We need a mix of power plant types in order to function. Nuclear and coal take a long time to come online (if you try to cold start one to meet short term demand, that demand will be gone before the plant is at full power). Wind and hydro are not particularily controllable--hydro can be smoothed over time but ultimately you can't make more power than flows into the resovoir over a long period of time. Things like natural gas and pumped hydro give you the fast control you need to meet fluctuations and peak load...a gas turbine can go from cold to full power in seconds and pumped hydro can be stopped/started/modulted as fast as you can open a valve. They don't make sense for meeting stable base load though because natural gas is expensive and can be inefficient and pumped hydro requires input power to fill the resovoir (and there are very few "great" locations to install pumped hydro plants).
The only way wind could power everything is if we had enough energy storage capacity to provide for the country when the wind isn't blowing (many sites die down at night) and to suck up excess when the wind is blowing hard and nobody is using power.
Bottles.
1970 called, they want there Nuclear complaints back.
"he waste precipitates are extremely toxic with no safe disposal options"
Actually the plants like LFR produce little waste and the wast they do ahve has a half life of about 90 years. Meaning in 200 years it is at background radiation level.
Yes, it is toxic, but then so is coal. And we can manage something like 200 years.
"there is virtually unrivaled and potential for large scale disaster to occur, "
You mean besides a coal fire?
"power output per plant is so massive that trying claim it will decentralize energy production is laughable, "
I don't even know what you are saying there.
"and every dollar we sink into it is another dollar we won't be putting into more long-term solutions with lower associated risks."
and that makes no sense. No one is saying Nuclear is the only way to go, but right now it is a very good way t go. It gives us breathing room while we continue to roll out things like Industrial SOlar Thermal.
That is a long term solution. BUt it will take a complete rewiring of the grid to get that power to soome places in the US.
"I'm also wondering how a large number of autonomously operating off-shore wind farms can possibly be considered an "easy target" for terrorist attack... do you have any idea just how much coastline the US has?"
they don't do well in hurricanes, tornadoes, and typhoons. Plus there will need to be a lot of underwater cabling..a whole lot. Which have it's own toxic disadvantages.
Do you realize the cost to maintain those thing? the cost to bring out new blades? Off shore wind is not practical on a large scale.
Wind power for alrge scale will be freaking expensive.
Solar Thermal is the long term solution. Seriously cost effective, easy to maintain, and the cost goes down.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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