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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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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?
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*
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The obvious problem would be how do you keep it from floating away? I know. We could put an engine on it to counter the push of the wind. The beauty of it is that this engine could be POWERED by the wind.
No, I have never heard of the laws of thermodynamics? Why do you ask?
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We can make up for the lost tax revenue by selling them toilet paper at a 1000% mark up.
No.
A decent weather system churns terawatts around.
We'll only tap surface winds and they're a very small fraction of total wind energy.
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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.
We don't need to send power from the coast to Kansas. Coastal areas are heavily populated and so the power will not need to travel very far to be used effectively. Kansas is a windy place, they will have their own land-based turbines.
These wind farms would not be in international waters. They would be on the continental shelf which are by definition national waters. We already patrol and scan these areas for evil dooers.
Electrical cables for wind farms would be more distributed and harder to disrupt than the current system of power plants.
We have the best government that money can buy.
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.
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.
The congressional budget office studied exactly this (distributed generation) in 2003 after the blackout, and determined that there would be significant economic and infrastructural benefits from such a system - it would, however, require a significant overhaul of our existing grid to control all the variable power being added. In the end, it's been largely ignored, Heaven knows why. There are a lot of merits to a system like this, among them energy independence, as well as infrastructure security. If each city block or even city for that matter is generating its own power, how can you attack that infrastructure on a national scale?
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Then you get hit by a strong gust, and you're blowing fuses left and right.
Wait, really?
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!
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?
A company called SWAY has all of the details worked out, they just need funding for a prototype.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I bet ~80% of the US population lives within 100 miles of a coastline with significant wind power potential, the east, west, gulf, and north coasts account for almost every urban area.
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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
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I don't consider this a bad thing...
What about when it slows down the earth to the point of being tidally locked with the sun, and you're stuck on the day side?
Then we use solar power on the sunny side to turn the windmills into fans.
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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.
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