Slashdot Mirror
Wind Could Provide 100% of World Energy Needs
Damien1972 sends in a report on a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, which finds that wind power could provide for the entire world's current and future energy needs. "To estimate the earth's capacity for wind power, the researchers first sectioned the globe into areas of approximately 3,300 square kilometers (2,050 square miles) and surveyed local wind speeds every six hours. They imagined 2.5 megawatt turbines crisscrossing the terrestrial globe, excluding 'areas classified as forested, areas occupied by permanent snow or ice, areas covered by water, and areas identified as either developed or urban,' according to the paper. They also included the possibility of 3.6 megawatt offshore wind turbines, but restricted them to 50 nautical miles off the coast and to oceans depths less than 200 meters. Using [these] criteria the researchers found that wind energy could not only supply all of the world's energy requirements, but it could provide over forty times the world's current electrical consumption and over five times the global use of total energy needs."
...would be bloody terminal.
It'd seem having massive wind turbines would slow down the movement of air, which might lead to scenarios where the current global warming scare would be merely a trifle.
Now people are whining about the noise and environmental impact.
It just couldn't simply because there isn't wind all the time and we don't have any realistic way to store energy for calm days. Wind could be useful as a part of the energy production but with current technology there is no way wind could be used as the only energy source.
Right so this is assuming we put these rather large ugly things everywhere that hasn't already been greatly disturbed by people. I know they are excluding forests. but just because you don't have to cut down a tree doesn't mean it isn't a spot worth preserving.
Personaly I think that we really ought to build more nuclear power plants. Yes there is waste but overall it is fairly clean and cheap and would do more for preserving the environment and supplying electricity than this would.
... to have a noticeable impact on the Coriolis force?
Won't someone PLEASE think of the birds!!
The thing that always seems to concern me is this: is it possible for the large amount of energy pulled from the winds to change weather patterns even slightly? I know it sounds stupid, but could even a very slight change over the planet potentially have an impact? Perhaps it is safest that we diversify our energy production. So much wind, solar, atomic etc.
sudo mount --milk --sugar
Nulcear YES Wind YES Oil YES Solar YES Coal YES Natural Gas YES Tidal YES There is no one size fits all people! You 'open minded' people need to open your minds to the real problems and solutions we already have available!
And Holland's tourism industry would crash, I mean without the windmills, why would you want to go to the Netherlands... I mean isn't that what draws all those young folks to Amsterdam these days?
ôó
I've often thought that if it's economically viable to go to the trouble of all that engineering for offshore oil exploration, extraction and processing, surely it's viable to build vast offshore wind farms where there's plenty of room, plenty of wind, and no neighbours to object.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
It just couldn't simply because there isn't wind all the time and we don't have any realistic way to store energy for calm days. Wind could be useful as a part of the energy production but with current technology there is no way wind could be used as the only energy source.
Personally I use copper wire to move electrons from place to place. My state runs partly on hydro electricity from Tasmania, 200km to the south across a substantial body of water. Apparently the submarine cable which does the job only carries electrons in one direction. The return path is through the water, which comes built in with charge carriers.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Our reserves of this are so massive that we could easily provide the total global energy needs just from solar or wind in the USA alone.
Including the loss from storing said energy for transmission and usage.
That said, all energy sources have pros and cons. Some are extreme (nuclear,coal) but even the most benign source has impacts.
The same goes for tidal and geothermal.
But only oil, coal, and nuclear fission will likely lead to the extinction of our species due to the greed of the people involved.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I mean, really, this kind of talk is nonsensical. The more we invest in such technologies the better, but how do exaggeration and fanciful claims help investors take the industry seriously?
How about start with "Less dependence on terrorist-funding nations" and go from there... Plenty compelling without the bullshit science fact afterthought.
Read it again. Forty times the electrical needs or five times the total energy needs.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
but PMG, we would stop the wind! The environment would be destroyed! And birds! Won't someone think of the birds!
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
is a cost effective wind turbine design. Sheesh.
I live in Australia and we use coal. This is not even slightly environmentally responsible. In an effort to placate the greenies the government has been looking into clean coal and co2 sequestration. The general opinion of the green movement is that "clean coal" is an oxymoron and co2 sequestration is "just burying the problem". Wind and solar are continually touted as a realistic solution. They are not. If you were to ban coal, they say, wind and solar would be the only option so it would obviously grow. So long as you maintained our current ban on nuclear of course. Oh, and ban burning oil. This is nonsense. The result would simply be that the cost of power would go through the roof and all our industry would shut down. The economy would go into the toilet and that would raise the real cost of power to even higher, and the demand would go down even more. By the end of the year we'd be all living in dirt huts.
But, ya know, reality.. never let it get in the way of an indignant cause.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Both? There are many forms of energy that aren't electrical. I assume that for the most part, though, they're talking heating and transportation.
This article doesn't mention anything about mass energy storage. Without that, if we try to increase wind's share of power generation too much, it'll destabilize the grid (I've heard figures of 20-30% for this previously, but can't find a convenient reference).
Has anything panned out on that front? (i.e. been cheap enough for wide-scale use?) Pumped-storage hydro, Sodium-sulfur batteries, etc?
Our energy use isn't quantified solely by electricity. For example, oil use counts as energy use but oil is not electricity.
um yes it COULD, RTFA
Let's fill the world with gigantic metal spinning blades suspended hundreds of feet in the air. What could possibly go wrong?
I think they mean 40x the ELECTRICAL consumption, like the electricity you use in your house to power your computer, but 5x total consumption, like the gas we use in cars and to heat our homes.
Harnessing the wind in such high quantities will have absolutely no unexpected effects on any environmental issues whatsoever.
Seriously, I'd bet that fossil fuels are probably a better (less bad?) idea, ecologically speaking.
Really? I can't wait to click on all of these links. /sarcasm
Loser.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Is it just me or isn't that very impressive? If global power consumption continues growing at 7% p/a then in just 50 years we'll the wind power that we're talking about here will be almost tapped out.
From TFA: "despite these limitations, it is clear that wind power could make a significant contribution to the demand for electricity"
I don't think they're saying that the would should be entirely wind-powered. They're pointing out that there's so much untapped wind power that we should stop thinking about wind power as only a minor source of energy and invest more toward developing the resource.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
This would be a massive danger. You are likely mistaken as that would mean a huge current traveling through that water.
This is the very reason for GFI plus on fridges so that you don't get a return current through the ground or water
The problem isn't birds. Newer turbines rotate much more slowly then the old ones (which resembled Cuisinarts). Most birds can easily avoid the larger slower blades that these new turbines.
The problem is the transmission. Right now companies like First Solar claim to be able to produce electricity for less cost than coal? The problem is, the deserts don't have power lines to get the power out.
Oh and cover the world with wind turbines? You think global warming is a problem? What do you think will happen if we lower air flow around the world by say... 30%?
While I don't believe deploying wind farms all over the damn place is the best solution, this study does demonstrate that there's a ton of energy out there waiting to be used. We need a mixture of many different sources of energy: some wind, some solar, maybe nuclear, some hamsters on wheels, etc. We have options.
The answer to this is fuel cell plants powered by hydrogen derived from electrolysis. Supplemented by nuclear baseload power if desired. There have been some good advances in cheaper electrolysis latley.
disclaimer: I didn't really read anything.
I really doubt your claim that wind could not provide 100% of all electricity by the fact that there are clam days occasionally. Yes, sure, there are calm days, but I cannot imagine a day in which there's virtually no wind anywhere where these generators are placed. From my extremely cursory knowledge of the idea, I would posit that the energy is designed to be shared by everyone, and should be transmitted to a hub for distribution. As such, it wouldn't matter if there were clam days at some locations, the rest of the locations would pick up the slack (or at least, would be able to cover for it).
Of course, I think this is infeasible for other reasons.
Scientists confirmed today that Global Slowing is real. After years of speculation, it's now been confirmed that our harnessing of wind power for our energy needs is slowing the Earth down, and within a matter of decades, the Earth will come to a complete stop. Scientists are currently unsure whether this Global Slowing can be reversed, but some have proposed using fossil fuels to create artificial wind to help the Earth keep moving.
Sure, wind could do it. So could solar, if we spot a shitload of solar cells all over the world cover a decent portion of it.
But is it practical? It seems like people are perfectly fine dismissing "clean" coal (aka carbon sequestration) as a pipe dream, technology doesn't exist, etc., and then turning around and throwing scheme's like these out there as perfectly reasonable.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Every joule of energy we get on the earth, without tapping geothermal sources, originally comes from the sun. The only question is which source is the most economically (from an energy standpoint) obtainable and environmentally sustainable.
Wind and sun to electric current seem to be the best bets, since they don't require any intermediate steps like biomass or super old biomass, also known as oil. Solar-thermal molten salt storage for overnight and cloudy weather with natural gas backups will probably be the winner for much of our electricity needs. Colder climates will rely on wind and geothermal differential generators.
The important thing is that we invest now in technologies that allow high efficiency transfers of electricity, because we're going to need to balance the load across the country. This, in combination with building efficiency improvements and abandoning the urban sprawl model, should have us well on our way to sustainability.
Most people whining about noise and environmental impact are talking about older designs, or do not realize there is a net improvement in environmental impact over the alternatives. The alternative to green power is not 'no power', but is dirty power. The NIMBY crowd would be more than happy to Luddite civilization into the stone age, and then complain about the lack of affordable power. Californians are the worst at this -- in the US, anyway.
Newer wind turbines have the blades further away from the supporting tower, which reduces the noise considerably. The bird and bat deaths can be substantially mitigated by making sure your turbines are out of known migration paths, and by making the blades rotate slower. The number of bird & bat deaths that would result from a polluted environment by non-green power is a much more serious problem. Proper wind turbine technology & placement is a FAR lesser evil here, IMO.
This report is ... interesting. Placing that many turbines in very remote areas is going to be ridiculously expensive to run transmission lines to, and deal with the effects of intermittent addition of energy to the grid. An electrical grid is a temperamental mistress at the best of times. The technology CAN be had, but it's not as simple as just hooking up a turbine to a grid without some real smarts in between. Also, having trained people available to do regular maintenance on such extremely remote sites (and getting replacement parts there) is not gonna be cheap.
Still, better that that an unlivable planet. But we need to take a serious look at MODERN nuclear power, especially with re-using the waste, gas-cooled pebble bed designs, Thorium designs, etc. Trying to make ONE solution fix the problem is completely idiotic.
I was looking for a quote about "open mouth, change feet" - completely unrelated to this topic - just a few moments ago, and ran across this post that really fits:
http://papundits.wordpress.com/2009/04/11/salazars-wind-power-first-open-mouth-then-change-feet/
The summary of the numbers in that article (replacing US coal-burning plants with offshore east coast windmills):
So, we have, just for the towers nacelles and fans:
- A workforce of 170,000 people, just to work at the plants to construct them.
- 120 huge factories to construct.
- Wind towers every 375 feet for the whole length of the Atlantic Coastline and stacked 38 rows deep.
- Construct those towers, nacelles and fans at the rate of one every 8 minutes for 40 years, in the Atlantic Ocean.
- $10.4 Trillion in today's dollars (conservatively).
It gets more ludicrous than that, when you consider continental shelf, keeping shipping lanes open, etc.
Admitted, adding on-shore windmills would be more doable, but still - it is quite pricey and impractical.
Doug
A broken wind would be a stinky situation to be caught in.
there have been numerous stories stating putting the things near where bats dwell in numbers turns it into a massacre.
Regardless where they are put someone will bitch.
Let alone, if we have nearly unlimited electricity what will we do with the heat?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Single Wire Earth Return is a standard way to distribute electrical power to remote places in my country. The current density in the return path is very low because the medium which carries it has a high cross sectional area.
Lets say the cable going one way carries 1000 Amp with a cross section of 0.1 square metres. If the return path uses 100 square metres the current density would be 1000th of that in the cable.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I see...
I guess IF other non-electrical energy sources could be converted to electricity, then this could work. Pretty close to impossible, but some people are trying.
Actually this is not uncommon. It is called Single Wire Earth Return. It is often used in rural areas to save cost due to the long cable distance.
I didn't know that it was used for HVDC submarine cables, but it seems like it is in use in Germany and Tasmania (Basslink), as the GP stated.
Building a wind turbine is proven, and cost effective. "Clean coal" or as we call it in real life, bullshit, has yet to be proven as either successful or economically viable. The faster we drive a stake through coal's heart, the better.
Pumped storage, nanotech ultracapacitors, flywheels, fuel cells even will store energy for a calm day. If you have a fairly efficient electricity grid you won't even need to store that much because the chances are it will be windy in some place within reach.
On calm days the sun usually shines so photo voltaic cells come into play. Don't like those? just use solar concentrators or stirling engine-based solar panels, wave energy, put alternators into the stationary bikes at the local gym.
Of course the amount of energy required is greatly exaggerated these days because there are a lot of poorly insulated houses and an awful lot of people using incandescent lighting and 'wall warts' (and also wall marts) powering stand-by equipment are ubiquitous. It would be great if everyone had a 12v transformer providing power to 12v sockets around the house and maybe an ultracap that would store some energy so the transformer wouldn't be going all the time.
I'd go off the grid if i could. I kind of feel people have become overly dependent on electricity - one day I was in a shopping mall in London and a girl actually started screaming the second the power went out. I have a generator and a 600w invertor here but the last time the power went I didn't even bother using them
Oblivious Poster Is Oblivious.
Perhaps the GP should have included this: [!]
The Day the Wind Stopped Blowing.
In other news, atomic energy could definitely cover our energy needs.
how will we paint the machines?
how will be mine the materials that go into these things?
how will we make the fiberglas?
without oil?
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
especially if everybody starts eating a lot of beans.
But, once they use up all the wind, how will I fly my kite?
That's an interesting position, because apparently Tasmania is a net importer of power across the Basslink cable - so you aren't actually 'partially fueled by hydro power' so much as 'distributing fossil power to a state that doesn't have the hydro resources to fuel itself'.
http://www.basslink.com.au/ cites: In its first year of operation Basslink supplied 1920GWh to Tasmania and 450GWh to the National Electricity Market.
Yeah, but we do not have an infinite coal ressource, but solar resource seems infinite (Of course it is not, but we will have worse problem to deal with at this time).
In case someone's interested, it is available free here:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/06/19/0904101106.abstract
2004 NIH study on this: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=526278
Ambiguous results. Naturally "they" confuse the results by suggesting that energy extracted offsets the energy increase caused by global warming, thus a small net change and happy bunnies everywhere.
My guess: pulling tens of terawatts of energy out of the atmosphere will effect the climate.
Call it Atmospheric Thermal Depletion, and credit me. :)
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Environmental impact? You mean like climate change?
Hint: when you change the energy in a complex system, you change the system.
People are always the problem.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Lets say the cable going one way carries 1000 Amp with a cross section of 0.1 square metres. If the return path uses 100 square metres the current density would be 1000th of that in the cable.
That would make a current density of 10 amps/meter^2. It only takes 20ma to kill you.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Lets say the cable going one way carries 1000 Amp with a cross section of 0.1 square metres. If the return path uses 100 square metres the current density would be 1000th of that in the cable.
That would make a current density of 10 amps/meter^2. It only takes 20ma to kill you.
10 A/meter^2 == 10uA/mm^2
It would come down to whether the organs which fail at 20mA provide an easy path for current. I suspect the answer is no because things which get damaged tend to have moderate resistance and high energy dissipation.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
3300 square kilometers is 1275 square miles, not 2000.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
Or if electricity could be converted to something else? It's possible to turn CO2 and water into Methane, and Methane into Diesel and other liquid fuels.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
I did forget about nuclear. It's a finite resource, though. The sun is too, but if we still haven't gotten off this rock in a few billion years, we'll have only ourselves to blame. Or an asteroid.
One of the things that wind power proponents point to is the economic activity they create. Look at all the jobs. Look at all the money staying in the local economy and not flowing to 'people who hate our freedoms'.
Were you trying to say there is some kind of problem?
Perhaps you are being intentionally obtuse. Perhaps not.
The point is that the entire earth is being used as the return path.
What's the cross section of the earth again?
They already do this quite regularly with the oldest green source of power you managed to omit: Hydroelectric. There are a great deal of dams within British Columbia and Alaska out in the middle of nowhere - and they've been relatively successful and constant power sources.
Yes, birds are important, however, I am more concerned about the energy in the wind.
If we go and build enough wind turbines to power the world (and its growing energy demands), that energy needs to come from somewhere. What happens to the global, regional, and local ecosystems if this energy is removed from wind. In other words, what happens if we reduce the winds blowing across the world?
Is it enough to alter air currents? Jet streams? What about the erosion, pollen distribution, and all the other things nature depends on the wind for that I can't think about right now.
Now, probably there is plenty of wind out there not to make an impact, but no one has even addressed this. Everyone thinks it is a magical energy source with NO negative consequences. I want to know if there are any, but no one seems to be worried. Is it an issue people are hiding to promote wind power? Or is it really insignificant?
It doesn't come down to organ damage, it comes down to interfering with the electrical signals controlling the heart. 20ma is what is necessary to send you into defibrilation. That comes out to 20 cm^2, not a lot of area and less than the cross sectional area of the heart.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Not in my backyard, they won't!
We have the following methods of storing energy from wind power, which are currently in production:
1. gravity storage of pumped water.
2. electrical storage of electricity in batteries.
3. hydrolysis cracking of the dangerous substance H20 into hydrogen and oxygen for use in fuel cells.
There are other methods, including the storage in ten ton weights, winched up from the wind turbines output, which are then dropped from a great height onto global warming deniers heads.
Admittedly, this last method, while resulting in very satisfying splats, is not the most efficient method of storage available to science. But it looks really cool on video.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
"clean" coal (aka carbon sequestration) as a pipe dream
Can someone please tell me what coal is if it is not carbon sequestration?
Oblig. Futurama quote:
Nixon: "but it damn well better work! we can't spend all of earth's money every day."
How long would this take to pay off and how much would I be paying per kWh until the debt is paid? 10 c/kWh is enough for me. I'm a fan of nuke energy, but I am biased.
You still have an inverse square relationship based on how close you are to the discharge point.
For a wire, the cross section is constant. For earth, it's friggin huge but starts out teeny, so presumably the area getting the energy pulled into it will need to be protected.
What/ I distinctly remember last summer we lost power in South Australia due to overheating in Tasmania causing Basslink to shutdown.
Sounds like power is coming from tasmania to the mainland not the opposite!
They already do this quite regularly with the oldest green source of power you managed to omit: Hydroelectric. There are a great deal of dams within British Columbia and Alaska out in the middle of nowhere - and they've been relatively successful and constant power sources.
I think you misunderstand the scale we're talking about. There are comparatively few hydrodelectric dams in North America compared to the number of wind turbines being discussed here. The difference in number is _vast_.
If you did like the study authors said and put wind turbines everywhere, you can pretty much ensure that there will be enough wind somewhere in the world at any given time to accommodate demand. That's assuming that you create a world electrical grid (or a set of grids that each cover a large enough area) to allow everyone to benefit from the averaging out of wind around the world.
They imagined 2.5 megawatt turbines crisscrossing the terrestrial globe, excluding 'areas classified as forested, areas occupied by permanent snow or ice, areas covered by water, and areas identified as either developed or urban,'
I hope the power is enough to make all the food replicators work. Otherwise I don't know what we will eat when we cover every arable field (read: the places where we grow most food now, which are not forested, with ice, water, nor urban) with wind turbines.
Clean coal is like a soft hardon..........it ain't.
:) Nice one.
My favorite NIMBY moment in the electricity game (I used to be a reporter reporting on the energy grid in the western United States) was when California decided that not only did they not want to generate electricity generated via a certain percentage of non-green power, they also didn't want to IMPORT it. Yikes. My article title was something along the lines of, "California Says: Not In Your Back Yard". (I can't remember it exactly, this was a few years ago).
It doesn't come down to organ damage, it comes down to interfering with the electrical signals controlling the heart. 20ma is what is necessary to send you into defibrilation. That comes out to 20 cm^2, not a lot of area and less than the cross sectional area of the heart.
Not sure where your 20 cm^2 comes from. If the heart is 10cm wide its cross section would be 100cm^2 and the current would be 10mA.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The molten salt thing looks promising.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-to-use-solar-energy-at-night
As do zinc air batteries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc-air_battery
Perhaps NASA will have a breakthrough with modern flywheel batteries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_battery
Or some simple solution we think isn't feasible will be once we reduce energy expectations, such as the solution they already have in Nepal for their electric vehicles.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD1gPAoJdHA
Yes, those vehicles probably aren't safe around Excursions and Escalades, but if you restricted vehicle sizes on roads we could stop killing our society with convenience.
I wonder how sea life deals with the current. Sharks, for example, are very sensitive to electric fields.
At least now we know how they're recharging their frickin' lasers.
Have gnu, will travel.
It just couldn't simply because there isn't wind all the time and we don't have any realistic way to store energy for calm days
Ah, but there is wind all the time, somewhere. In theory at least, with a capable enough grid you'd be able to move energy from wherever the wind currently is to where the energy is needed.
I agree that an efficient way to store energy for future use would be greatly beneficial, though.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Trying to make ONE solution fix the problem is completely idiotic.
Energy diversity is where it's at. Each form of power has a different set of NIMBY problems. Different people will have stakes in different forms of power generation, which will distribute the political power of those interests.
We need to have wind, tidal, solar thermal, and next-gen nuclear.
"Building a wind turbine is proven, and cost effective."
If it was cost-effective, then it wouldn't require massive government subsidies.
Coal, on the other hand, _is_ proven and cost-effective, which is why there are so many coal-fired power stations.
It bothers me when people talk about our energy "needs", as though without some particular number of number of Watts, the world ends.
Are they better considered our energy "wants at a given price point"?
When I hear "need", but don't hear a "for what" part soon after, I get suspicious. Was the term "energy needs" a rhetorical device introduced by governments or energy suppliers to distract from the fact that we can live on varying amounts of energy consumption.
"clean" coal (aka carbon sequestration) as a pipe dream
Can someone please tell me what coal is if it is not carbon sequestration?
Coal burning is carbon sequestration in reverse.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
You messed up your conversions. You're using 10mm^2=1cm^2 instead of 100mm^2=1cm^2. Area, not length.
100mm^2=100mm^2*(1cm/10mm)^2=1cm^2
20ma/(10um/mm^2)=2,000mm^2
20cm^2=20*(10mm/cm)^2=2,000mm^2
That 20cm^2 is cross sectional area, not 20cm on a side. If it were square, it would be 4.5cm on a side.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Human farts "could" provide power.
Peso-electric platforms placed under every roadway could provide power.
Harnessing gravity could provide power.
Complete BS.
"May" is another BS word used. Journalists, please use "happened" and "caused" more. Please.
You know, that statement works great in the context of nuclear power too...
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
there are clam days occasionally. Yes, sure, there are calm days, but...
*ducks*...Look out! Flying clams!
Geothermal does not have the pollution problem, does not have visual problem, the problem of messing with birds or whatever, and the latest technology allows them to drill geothermal wells in very low temperatures or dry wells by pumping water in to the earth, rather than needing to find a particular geothermal friendly area. Even if just limited to areas naturally conducive to geothermal, there is likly just as many areas in the World where geothermal can be built (if you include all the places you can not build wind turbines like the middle of a city). Best of all, it is 24 hours, always on energy using the same technology we already use for our oil based society (drills, turbines, etc). It is "shovel ready" and producing energy right now all over the World.
Can anyone give me something that beats all of that in terms of energy to cost (including environmental)?
Living in Chile
We do not need to cover a decent portion of the planet with solar cells to generate enough electricity for the whole world. Current world power generation is about 20000 TWh and projected to reach 30000 TWh in 2030. Solar energy per square meter is ca. 1kW peak (sun overhead, no occlusion). The average is about a quarter of that, so you get efficiency*250W*24h*365 per square meter of covered land. That's about efficiency*3MWh per square meter and year. 30000TWh/3MWh is 10^10, or 100km*100km times the inverse of the solar cell efficiency. Let's assume an efficiency of just 10%, then a (200 miles)^2 square would be enough area to supply the electricity for the whole world in 2030. That is "a shitload of solar cells", but not a decent portion of the planet's surface.
Besides transmission issues, what about land use? I mean, what will we eat if all our agricultural land is covered by wind turbines? It is a nice mental exercise to cover all the world's non-aquatic, non-forested, non-urban, and non-polar land with wind turbines, but do wind turbines really integrate well with all the other rural land uses (particularly agriculture) that we have?
It seems to me that researching improved transmission efficiencies and putting wind turbines in the ocean and polar regions (and solar in the deserts) would be a better solution. This is particularly the case as population expands, and previously rural areas become more developed.
Unity in Diversity
You mean like Senator Ted Kennedy (www.boston.com):
But like a lot of well-to-do Cape and Islands landowners and sailing enthusiasts, Kennedy doesn't want to share his Atlantic playground with an energy facility, no matter how clean, green, and nearly unseen. Last month he secretly arranged for a poison-pill amendment, never debated in either house of Congress, to be slipped into an unrelated Coast Guard bill. It would give the governor of Massachusetts, who just happens to be a wind farm opponent, unilateral authority to veto the Cape Wind project.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/05/07/kennedy_doesnt_play_by_the_rules/
high tension lines typically use aluminium, and the single wire earth returns usually use steel. but moving power over a thousand miles normally is wasteful even though there are a few places in the world where it is done.
That 20cm^2 is cross sectional area, not 20cm on a side. If it were square, it would be 4.5cm on a side.
Ah then you mean 20^2 cm^2.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
> Most people whining about... ...environmental impact are talking about older designs, or do not realize there is a net improvement in environmental impact over the alternatives.
You know, that statement works great in the context of nuclear power too...
Indeed. WRT nuclear power plants, I can't say I'm all _that_ impressed by 4th gen. Water cooling is a pretty horrible way to go, very expensive, plus it limits your site selection at the same time it forces your site to be dangerous to locate on - it MUST be near a significant source of water for cooling, which means in the worst-case scenario - a meltdown - you can contaminate your ground water. No thanks.
I really like the gas-cooled pebble-bed reactor design the Chinese are working on. Way safer, gas-cooled, and modular. That's a good way to go.
A high temperature gas-cooled plant could also be used to economically produce hydrogen, which can then be used in a CoGen situation to produce even more power, or to use in hydrogen-powered vehicles.
So basically birds are toast, That's OK my car will be happier. And where exactly am I going to teach my kid how to fly a kite?
I've heard of the dihydrogen monoxide, there's a cemetery in my town where every single corpse buried there was a dihydrogen monoxide drinker. obviously, that compound has a 100% lethality rate.
Can someone please tell me what coal is if it is not carbon sequestration?
Carbon desequestration. You see, people are taking the coal out of the ground, not putting coal into the ground.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Anyone have decent sources/info for the cost, footprint, maintenance requirements and total output for wind turbines at the top of the Watts/$ curve?
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
Energy is measured in Joules. This applies to everything from power utilities (3.6 MJ == 1 KW H) to cars (32 MJ per litre of 87 Octane gasoline). Any decent physics class or book should explain this - it really is just math, which makes your subject somewhat ironic.
Apparently, electrical energy accounts for 1/8 of the global energy consumption. Thus, an energy source that produces exactly as much energy as our total consumption would produce 8 times as much eneergy as our electrical consumption, and a source that produced 40 times our electrical consumption would produce 5 times our total energy consumption.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
The problem is that "dirty power" can be cleaner than "green power" overall in some circumstances. These terms mostly have to do with image and local impact. Building massive numbers of turbines isn't a CO2 free process, and they have far from a zero environmental impact. They are not ideal, no technology is. This is about weighing the pros vs. the cons, and waiting until we have a really good, well understood solution to phase out "dirty power" before moving over to a new system. After all, its not like we can change whatever energy generation system we have at will, its a long term decision, as we have already learned all too well.
... MODERN nuclear power, especially with re-using the waste, gas-cooled pebble bed designs, Thorium designs, etc. .
Nobody mines Thorium anymore. I'm not sitting in Whispering Gorge waiting for nodes to spawn, either.
Well the article talks about electrical consumption and total energy, so I would assume that part of that total energy need is currently being met in a way that is not electrical.
Cars for example mostly run on petro-chemicals right now, but if they were suddenly all electric, it would substantially add to our electrical consumption without really altering our total energy usage.
How much energy will it take to create these wind turbines?
The last ROEI, Return on Energy Invested or the length of tyme wind genies need to run to produce as much energy as the energy needed to make the genies, was something like 5 years. Given that there are still Jacobs wind turbines still running after 50 years after the last ones were made, that's a pretty good ROEI.
Ditto for the network connecting them to the people who want to use the electricity.
That's the biggest problem to suppling enough electricity everywhere, almost no matter the source of energy. MIT's "Tech Review" published the article "Lifeline for Renewable Power" going over this. Basically HVDC, High-voltage direct current, transmission lines would have to be strung up to distribute electricity from where it's produced to where it's used. It would also require a smart grid. Even without HVDC lines strung up, the power outages or blackouts in the Northeastern US/South Eastern Canada a few years ago showed the power grids need to be upgraded.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Modern windmills aren't that hazardous to birds. The ones with the single pole instead of a scaffold, and the three huge blades, where it turns out size is good both for efficiency and for birds being able to see it and avoid it. Though at the scales we're talking here -- they're basically talking about turning all open land into wind farms -- the rare death per windmill would add up big for sure. Big enough to seriously impact bird populations? Hard to say, probably some species. Which I feel could be the case with the impact on the rest of the environment.
I mean, the calculation seems pretty clearly to just be whether enough energy exists to be harvested where possible. It's just to say that there's a lot of potential for wind energy. To the extent that blanketing so much area with windmills and drawing power from the wind would have the chance to affect ecosystems, the economic factors they mention would also come into play to keep it from getting that far.
So I say build em as fast as you want. There's so much untapped potential right now, so much room for improvement, that it doesn't make sense not to. Long before we are worrying about 40x current global electricity usage all drawn from wind, the utility will peter out and so will windmill building.
The enemies of Democracy are
The problem is that "dirty power" can be cleaner than "green power" overall in some circumstances.
I've never seen that proved. The real cleanliness of dirty power hasn't been calculated yet (and likely _can't, except theoretically), since we have not been able to clean the environment of the true impact of dirty power. Until you can capture all that CO2 that nobody has been worrying about for decades, you don't even know the scope of what dirty power is really doing.
It just couldn't simply because there isn't wind all the time...
Yes there is wind all the time.
Not in one place, obviously, but by the time you've hooked up a shitload of turbines spread across thousands of miles you largely mitigate the "it's not windy here" problem.
And in Europe, on the rare occasions when whole countries are becalmed, power is sent along interconnectors from neighbouring countries. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7598212.stm
It's always windy somewhere.
You know, for kids.
> ... MODERN nuclear power, especially with re-using the waste, gas-cooled pebble bed designs, Thorium designs, etc. .
Nobody mines Thorium anymore. I'm not sitting in Whispering Gorge waiting for nodes to spawn, either.
Hey, Heinlein said Thorium is cool. That's good enough for me! :)
Now people are whining about the noise and environmental impact.
NIMBYs have been whinnying and blocking wind farms for years. Near Boston, Cape Cod is a good place for offshore wind farms however NIMBYs including Kennedy has opposed them.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Screw this shit ya' Flinstone wanna-be's. It's all under our heels.... "I drink yoooour milks shake. I drink it up!!""
Yes but can you develop a grid to connect millions of windmills and send that electricity to where it needs to be used?
The cost of connecting one dam to a power station must be different than the cost of connecting thousands of mills to a power station.
No. 20*(1cm^2). I said NOT 20cm on a side. If you want it that way, it's about 4.5^2 cm^2.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
I agree with your concerns, but thats really my point. We are deciding to change our power systems. Therefore the onus of proof is on the new system to show it is better than what we have and the alternatives. And its only when that onus of proof has been met that we should start to move to the new system.
That might be true, but alot of aluminium electro-refineries have set up in tasmania because of the cheap hydro power. As a result the state has a disproportionately high electrical consumption.
and you wonder why alternative energies aren't being taken seriously, it's because i crackpot idea's and bad maths like this article.
wind won't provide a base load, it'll be hellish expensive and it's not without environmental impact of it's own. if you want real alternative which work now and we could start deploying tomorrow at a fraction of the cost of hair brained schemes like this, look at molten salt solar, nuclear and to a lesser extent tidal.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Is it possible that will so many wind mills the earth's wind patterns could change significantly affecting global weather patterns?
That should be pacwind.net.
Time to move on to adamantite reactors! :-D
Luddite civilization into the stone age, and then complain about the lack of affordable power. Californians are the worst at this -- in the US, anyway.
No, I think the East Coast beats California in NIMBYs. While CA has wind and solar farms operating now, and have been running for years, on the East Coast NIMBYs do everything they can to stop wind farms off the coast from Cape Cod to Cape Hatteras.
Placing that many turbines in very remote areas is going to be ridiculously expensive to run transmission lines to
The Tech Review article "Rebuilding the Power Grid says "Grid-related power outages and problems with power quality reportedly cost the nation $80 billion to $188 billion per year" already so the grid needs to be rebuilt anyway.
we need to take a serious look at MODERN nuclear power, especially with re-using the waste,
I'll support reprocessing the waste we have now but I don't support building other new nuclear power plants. We have enough potential energy from geothermal, solar, and wind to power the US. The wind potential in the Rock Mountains alone is enough to power the 48 contiguous states. And other ares for wind as well as the west coast for solar and that's plenty of energy. Until energy storage is worked out natural gas fired and nuclear reprocessing plants could provide the baseload.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
there's probably enough hot air generated by the worlds politicians to power the needs of the planet for the next century or two.
Drilling is a messy proposition. Heavy equipment trashes the ground, you turn the drilling area into a giant mudpie... the stuff you drill up has to go somewhere...That's the problem with geothermal. If drilling were nice and easy, and clean the USA wouldn't be arguing about ANWR.
Still, with that said, there's a five mile wide blob of molten rock below Yellowstone park that seems to be able boil water for hundreds of miles around. I'd be willing to bet that if were willing to trash a part of our national park, we could really have a lot of essentially free energy.
This is my sig.
I hope that this study took into account the fact that the turbines themselves actually REMOVE energy from the atmosphere. You can't just assume that "the wind blows this fast all the time" if you're going to be putting a bunch of structures in the way! The law of diminishing returns has to kick in at some point if you put in enough turbines.
It just couldn't simply because there isn't wind all the time and we don't have any realistic way to store energy for calm days. Wind could be useful as a part of the energy production but with current technology there is no way wind could be used as the only energy source.
Somebody who works for an actual wind power company debunked this for us. If you build more turbines and deliberately run them at less than their maximum, then you can use the reserve capacity plus a limited amount of geographic distribution to get steady-state power output the majority of the time. This stuff about storage technology is bunk -- we haven't built out wind power infrastructure to its potential. Do that and you don't need storage. (And Solar Thermal could make up for a lot as well. It has a cheap and reliable storage technology that would work just fine on 24 hour timescales.)
Large industries operate with those kind of numbers all the time
I think the larger point is that we have gotten where we are, environmentally, from the unintended and unforseen consequences of building at that scale. Everything we have ever built at that scale has had some huge and terrible side effect that we didn't know about until we did it. Maybe its just me, but I think somewhere along the way, building 10 trillion dollars worth of windmills to suck a sizable portion of the total atmospheric energy up is going to screw something up. I think we're trading the devil that we know with an even dumber thing. Building a great wall of windmill raises some issues.
This is my sig.
They already do this quite regularly with the oldest green source of power you managed to omit: Hydroelectric.
According to a UN study I read hydroelectric dams are economically poor, cost more than the proposals said, and do not return the economic benefits they were sold are providing. I didn't find the study but I found this: "UN study advises caution over dams". And then there are problems with dams like those on the Klamath River in southern Oregon and northern California or the Three Gorges Dam in China. Indian tribes in Oregon by treaty have rights to salmon that use the Klamath, however the dams prevent salmon from making it to their spawning grounds. In China the government forcibly relocated more than 1 million people, and India is doing the same for a new dam there.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Wasn't a story posted last year that showed if you install enough wind farms on North America to power just USA it would dramatically alter the natural circulation of air around the earth? Anyone who honestly thinks a single source of renewable energy currently available is our solution honestly needs to get their head checked.
Certainly there's going to be more nuclear eventually, but it appears to have even more issues than wind, including cost (http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2008/05/12/its-the-economics-stupid-nuclear-powers-bogeyman/)
How much environmental damage would be done by manufacturing and maintaining all of these things? I suspect that a hundred nuke plants would do less damage.
.. Blub falls right in the middle of the abstractness continuum. -- Paul Graham
should be the you-must-construct-additional-pylons department...
Could you run the entire lot in reverse and create a massive hurricane or something?
How many would you need?
It's great that we have that much wind energy available, but the article does not say anything about the cost (not just monetary) of deploying a network of wind turbines that dots most of the world's land (and a good amount of the sea).
Food for thought:
1) How much money would it cost to build this many wind turbines?
2) What would be the environmental impact of deploying this many wind turbines?
3) Could this affect global wind patterns?
4) What would be the environmental impact of mining enough material to build this many wind turbines?
Personally, I think nuclear is the way to go. It's too bad it isn't considered "green". All things considered, nuclear seems to be the most "green" of them all.
Couldnt we store up energy in the wind turbines using a gravity method. Something like when there is wind some of the energy is used to pump [matter] to a higher kinetic state and then release it against a electricity generating turbine to maintain a constant rate.
Good-bye
"Like a lot of grand plans we do "in the name of science" nobody yet knows what throwing that many turbines up would do ecosystems around the world. It's a lot of energy to be robbing from systems that depend on that energy."
Most of the wind energy in the atmosphere is in the bottom 5,000m, the largest wind turbines are only 100m tall (about as tall as the largest trees which are much more effective at damping SURFACE winds), "robbing" the energy of the wind is the least of our problems. As for birds, modern prop turbines move slowly and kill fewer birds than the same number of high rise buildings with mirrored windows.
"Seriously", don't pretend you care about the environment by posting anti-science NIMBY twaddle, read some real science.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Yes, that is what we need. Lets make the world a better place by covering all the green areas and oceans with wind turbines.
Wind doesn't grow on trees, you know.
Tassie is currently experiencing a long drought (of the order of a few years). When the link was built it was sold as allowing excess hydro power to be exported to the mainland, but in reality it hasn't been used in that way.
It's effectively used as pump storage (which slashdot seems to like so much). During times of high mainland demand power flows from tassie to the mainland, draining hydro reserves in tasmania. When there's low demand on the mainland, power flows the other way and hydro reserves recover.
Looking at the numbers it's only going tas to mainland about 5% of the time, but it makes a large difference when it does since the mainland relies on slow coal so much. (Slow coal can't respond quickly to peaks so price spikes very high and a small increase in supply has a large effect)
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
Which country is that? Come on Smitty, don't be afraid to name names. 200km north of Tasmania is about as obscure as you could reasonably get - I'd almost managed to forget about that place for good before I read your post. Damn you!
Consciousness is a myth. Trust me.
What date was that? I can't see any outages during summer months since jan 2008.
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
...When you were driving your car?
to launch a satellite into space? To launch the space shuttle? To get a 767 off the ground? To power an aircraft carrier or an ocean liner? More pie-in-the-sky bullshit. Face it, libs. You can't dodge nuclear power forever...
There are tons of ways to store the energy, we just haven't started doing it yet.
Take the columbia river gorge wind turbines. They are situated along the top of the river gorge which is very deep. I could envision that elevation difference being used in conjunction with water turbines to produce electricity. When the turbine is producing more than the grid needs, pump water up the hill to tanks. When the turbines aren't producing enough, let the water flow down the hill in pipes through a water turbine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
Another thing being worked on, is a 'smart grid'. Wind is always blowing "somewhere". We just need a smarter grid that can better move the power around.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_grid
We can solve all of our energy problems with nuclear power right now. We have enough uranium fuel to last hundreds of years. If we switch to thorium there's ten thousand years of fuel just in the known reserves alone. Here's a little reading
If you ignore the externalities from Coal power, sure. However, if you properly account for polution costs it's much closer. I'm not a green nut, but 'alternative' power supplies are becoming cost effective once all real costs are taken into account.
However, I don't think subsidies are the answer, rather it makes more sense to correctly penalize fossils, and possibly nuclear, to account for market inefficiencies. That way you don't get political fads dictating research and growth areas.
Of course penalizing industries is far less popular than subsidizing others, so it's not going to happen.
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
I will buy off on this plan if there are 2 OTHER companies other than GE building these turbo fans. Otherwise 10 Trillion and years worth of work is a heavy motive for misconduct for anyone..
moving power over a thousand miles normally is wasteful even though there are a few places in the world where it is done.
Long distance isn't that wasteful if the electricity is High-voltage direct current. According to the wiki article losses are about 3% per 1,000 km.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In other news, calculations suggest that if the entire surface of the globe were converted into a massive nuclear reactor, then we could get exceed the world's energy needs by over 1 million times. Further research will discuss possible environmental impacts of eliminating all plant and animal life, as well as using nuclear waste as drinking water.
You mean like the huge government subsidies coal gets, like not having to pay for the hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon released into the atmosphere annually, the tons of mercury and uranium released into the atmosphere annually, and the enormous healthcare costs coal miners have? Noooo, no coal subsidies here. Don't believe me? Google "Coal subsidies". Just the first page is more than enough reading material. Go shill your shitty fuel somewhere else.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Break_Like_the_Wind
I was reading about this dude who was building a single wind turbine in some rural area in the Swabian Alps in Germany. There was a huge protest against it, because a windmill like that would "spoil the countryside"...it ended with him having to cancel his plans, no windmill was allowed to be built.
So yeah, I really like the idea of this article, but a lot of people are way too conservative to tolerate placing these things everywhere.
Originally a single-wire system was proposed, but as far as I can tell* this was changed to a two wire system. More information is available on the basslink site**. However given that the single wire system only got dropped when environmentalists complained it seems not unreasonable to assume that single wire is practical, at least from a power transmission standpoint. It's certainly fairly common to use single-wire earth-return systems in rural parts of Australia.
(how you get 1000A from Victoria to Tasmania without boiling Bass Strait is beyond me though)
*see http://www.tfic.com.au/domino/tfic/tficweb.nsf/vwTitle/12.04.02%20Basslink
**see http://www.basslink.com.au/home/index.php?id=6
Personaly I think that we really ought to build more nuclear power plants. Yes there is waste but overall it is fairly clean and cheap and would do more for preserving the environment and supplying electricity than this would.
BS. Mining for nuclear fuel is probably the dirtiest mining there is. Reprocessing, sure fuel can be reprocessed but as the world leader in reprocessing France found it leaves behind a lot of toxic chemicals. Not only that but if not for massive government subsidies nuclear power would not be profitable, it may actually loose money. Here's an article from a Wall Street Journal blog: "It's the Economics, Stupid: Nuclear Power's Bogeyman. The Freemarket think tank CATO reprinted this Forbes article "Hooked on Subsidies. Notice this paragraph:
"How do France (and India, China and Russia) build cost-effective nuclear power plants? They don't. Governmental officials in those countries, not private investors, decide what is built. Nuclear power appeals to state planners, not market actors."
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
You mean we could end up with some type of, shudder, "Hydrogen economy", like the slashbots have been railing against for years?
BUT WHERE WILL THE HYDROGEN COME FROM? YOU CAN'T MINE IT YOU KNOW1!!1
heh
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
elegance, to them.
I whole heartedly agree!!!
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most places that currently use natural gas for heating could use electricity instead without any major technological advancements. It's not close to impossible anyway.
Replacing oil used for transportation is much more difficult.
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
Of course penalizing industries is far less popular than subsidizing others, so it's not going to happen.
Don't be too sure about that.
http://www.nrdc.org/media/2008/080228.asp
32 Coal-Fired Power Plants in 13 States Now Up in the Air After Major Court Ruling on Mercury
But coal has been binding carbon in the ground for hundreds of millions of years. That would seem to demonstrate that sequestration can be made to work.
We need storage or natural gas firming to get to 20% of wind power penetration. Heck we even need the gas now. The demand for gas would be so high that the price would skyrocket. What we really need are parallel developments of multiple sustainable technologies and increased efficiencies at the customer and generation locations.
It's not as sexy as 100% wind, just realistic.
3300 sq.km. = 1274.13712 sq. mi
Umm, that's the OPPOSITE of a NIMBY moment. NIMBY says "that's OK to do somewhere else, just not in my backyard". California said "that's not OK to do anywhere, not even in New York."
"It seems to me we'd have to rape the earth in a way most of us would consider fairly extreme to erect giant concrete towers on every square meter of ocean and land. The ecolgical impact of billions of tonnes of raw materials being mined [to build windmills] would be astronomical."
We already mine and BURN over six billion tons of coal a year, That's one ton of coal for every man, woman and child on the planet.
Why does common sense and reason go out the window when people post on these stories? It's got to the stage where I feel like I'm arguing with young earth creationists.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Cars and other motor vehicle traffic kill more birds than wind turbines ever will,
but nobody is suggesting that we stop building cars . . .
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
They already do this quite regularly with the oldest green source of power you managed to omit: Hydroelectric. There are a great deal of dams within British Columbia and Alaska out in the middle of nowhere - and they've been relatively successful and constant power sources.
[citation-needed]
I lived in Alaska for a while. All of the power plants I knew of ran on gas or coal. I believe there's one hydro plant outside of Anchorage.
One thing's for sure -- long distance transmission lines are bloody difficult to implement on the tundra, and would be hard to justify.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Can we just hang all the politicians and get on with building our wind/solar/geothermal powered wonderland already?
I'm tired of all the starving, bombing, genocide and general stupidity.
No? Not going to happen? That whole, "So long as Advertising works, Democracy cannot" maxim?
Oh. Great.
Stupid, Stupid Monkey Creatures. You deserve every last iota of misery being dished out because you are too stupid to hang your politicians and install mandatory psychopathy testing. The last U.S. Administration wouldn't have passed. And the current one wouldn't either. Guantanamo is still open and your downloads will land you in prison one day soon.
And the oil still flows.
-FL
There may be enough wind in the world to supply our need 40 times over, but is the cost of tapping the energy source competitive with the cost of coal, gas, or nuclear power?
All of this get subsidies, as well as pass costs to others. Coal slurry spills happen all too frequently. Mountain top removal contaminates a lot of land. As does uranium mining. Without government subsidies nuclear power isn't even profitable. Though natural gas emits a lot less CO2 than coal when burned it releases a lot more methane, which is more than 20 tymes as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2. Then it needs pipelines to deliver it.
We know that there are all sorts of natural energy sources around us, but its the financial cost that keeps us from recovering it.
More like it's politics. If financial costs were that important there would be no nuclear power. As I said before even coal gets subsidies. "Chevron agrees to lobby with Sierra Club to end coal subsidies". In "My Climate Bill 'Has Huge Subsidies For Clean Coal! Huge!' Rep Edward Markey goes over some of the subsidies different energy sources get.
Should there be a Law?
So, you're against buildings, cars, and cats then? Each of these kill more birds than wind turbines do.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
The problem with this model is that it is predicated on highly distributed wind farms. This means extending the grid out to 200 miles offshore and covering the mountains and plains with it. We just don't have that much copper, as Scientific American points out. Wind sounds good, but only nuclear gives us the point-source density needed to allow distribution to population centers with our available copper constraints.
Whilst I think we should develop reactor technology all of the design's you mention have significant inherent basis design and safety issues with them. Pebble bed reactors look great on paper until you realise the design has significant problems to implement and the containment buildings no better than what the RBMK style reactors use - really bad for when the reactor ages.
I completely agree. What about Solar, tidal and geothermal power. These are area's where we can make significant advances in technology if it is funded fairly.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I'm curious, what do you think would be an appropriate penalty for nuclear power, and for what? Are you talking about waste disposal or accident insurance or what?
You realize that nuclear is already fairly heavily regulated, huge security costs are imposed, and they already pay for waste storage and insurance for the most part.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
The only pebble bed reactor design I've heard has any problems is with the South African design. The Chinese design seems pretty good. My information on this topic is sadly about 3 years out of date, so if anything new has come out since then, I'm unaware of it.
Well, this isn't quite true. Averaged over larger regions--such as a state or a country--there is wind all the time. Naturally, the larger the region, the more consistent the power will generally be for that region. There are several studies considering different regions and different technologies (i.e., current power infrastructure, or proposed HVDC lines). Below are some notable findings.
From Stanford (pdf): interconnected wind farms could provide 33-47% of baseload power in Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma.
In Europe, 20% of baseload could be from wind power with the current infrastructure (pdf), or 70% from wind (and 100% renewables) with a high voltage DC transmission network (pdf).
Other more local findings are 25% baseload in Minnesota, and 50% in the UK. The point, then, is that wind can provide much more power to the grid than previously thought, and is often reasonably economical.
How much would it cost to build all these wind-farms offshore?
And of course plastics can be and are recycled in whole or in part
Originally plastics wasn't made from petroleum oil. Do you recall Cellophane? It got it's name from plant cellulose. Kodak used to make film from cellulose as well. Plastics made from plant cellulose came to an end when DuPont received a patent for nylon in 1935. However new research is going on in bioplastics.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Nooooooo it isn't. Please don't spread this misinformation.
Industry and a bunch of ignorant environmental groups continue referring to CO2 as simply "carbon", as though they were interchangeable. They are not.
CO2 is the product of carbon combustion. Coal is carbon. CO2 is *not* carbon. "Carbon credits" are actually credits for CO2 emissions. "Carbon sequestration" is actually the sequestration of CO2.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
If we start taking huge amounts of energy out of the atmosphere in the form of wind turbines, what effect will this have on weather patterns?
If you put up a wind farm in the midwest, does it alter the wind speeds enough to change the flow of the jet stream and ultimately change where rain falls, or average temperatures?
The knee-jerk reaction of most people will be "it won't hurt anything". But we are talking about removing a huge amount of energy world-wide. Someone better study this before we start heading in that direction.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
Chinese? We invented Pebble bed Carbon Helium Nuclear Energy.
http://www.memagazine.org/backissues/membersonly/feb08/features/pebbles/pebbles.html
http://www.pbmr.co.za/
Westinghouse is working with South Africa on it.
Economically you've got it all wrong. Nuclear power wouldn't be used if not for massive subsidies but wind, which does get subsidies as well, does not get anywhere near as much. In a world without subsidies wind could survive but not nuclear power.
Far lower than building windmills and their acompanying grid infrastructure requirements to get the power from the wind centers to where it needs to go.
If anything was learned during and after the blackout in the Northeast it was that the electrical grid had to be upgraded and made smart. So the cost is there whether or not wind is used. According to the article "Rebuilding the Power Grid" in "Tech Review" "Grid-related power outages and problems with power quality reportedly cost the nation $80 billion to $188 billion per year."
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Yes I did. I've used "NIMBY" a few tymes here, I wonder why I got the spelling wrong this tyme.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
i dunno about the noise thing or the ugly thing there is a huge wind farm between clovis and lubbock and it doesn't seem to be hurting anyone. honestly i can tell you that there is a huge section of land in eastern new mexico that has very little else going for it except that the wind is ALWAYS friggin blowing.
But is it practical? It seems like people are perfectly fine dismissing "clean" coal (aka carbon sequestration) as a pipe dream, technology doesn't exist, etc., and then turning around and throwing scheme's like these out there as perfectly reasonable.
Last I read there's not one "clean coal" plant in production. But there are a number of both solar and wind farms in production. Do you recall the rolling blackouts in CA in 2000? What most people do not know is that there was an idle wind farm that could have been contributing more than 200 megawatts of electricity but wasn't.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
If it was cost-effective, then it wouldn't require massive government subsidies.
Coal, on the other hand, _is_ proven and cost-effective, which is why there are so many coal-fired power stations.
And coal gets subsidies as well. Heck here's a video about "Chevron agrees to lobby with Sierra Club to end coal subsidies". Here are some of the subsidies coal gets: "TCS: Coal has long history of government subsidies. And here's Rep Edward Markey talking about subsidies different energy sources get.
Fact is is coal gets large subsidies as well. And they are dirty.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Haven't these people heard of the base load? I mean c'mon.
I'm all for renewable energy and I have personally used 100% CFLs, LEDs and energy saving devices for many years, but it will require a tremendous amount of resources to build enough wind turbines to power the entire planet. These resources have to come from somewhere and a heck of a lot of pollution will be generated mining the required resources, producing hundreds of thousands of turbines, installing them and building a new electrical grid to support them. Besides the wind doesn't always blow when you need it to. Building an energy storage system to support the wind turbines will greatly increase their environmental footprint.
This is totally bogus. It makes no sense to go 100% wind when there are arguably more efficient ways to produce energy.
Nuclear and natural gas are much better choices for the base load until fusion comes along.
I wanna see an all of the above approach. I want nuclear and natural gas for the base load and solar, wind, hydro, tidal and other sources supplementing energy production where it makes sense.
I respect the environment within reason, but screw the birds and the fish, we need all kinds of clean energy ( solar, wind, hydro, ... ) and we need it now!
I do want a power plant in my back yard! And I want the water turned back on in California! Forget the fish, we have jobs to save and people to feed, unless the environmental nuts would rather get all their food from China, the world's number 2 polluter ( competing for the #1 spot ), along with a heavy dose of lead and lots of other toxins.
--
unix_geek_512
I believe in the death penalty for spammers and tyrants around the world and of course world peace!
Miss Congeniality
It just couldn't simply because there isn't wind all the time and we don't have any realistic way to store energy for calm days.
Remember that experiment you did in scool where you hooked a glas of water up to a current. And then had a small glass over + and one over -.??
The "result" of that experiment was that all the O's in the water would gather around one pole and all the H's around the other.
Scale up that experiment by hooking a windturbine up to something like the ocean and what do you get.?
A clean way to produce all the hydrogen you could ever want.
Granted.. Storing said hydrogen is a tad tricky right now. (but it can be done).
So what you really need is a way to switch our energy away from fossil fuel and onto hydrogen.
And there are a lot of really big companys out there that simply will not allow that to happen. (Texaco, Shell, Hydro aso). Guess who does the lobbying, guess who has A LOT of politicians on their payrool.
One of the things i do for a living is design wind farms. There is nothing wrong with having them in a remove location so long as it is near a HV line to distribute the power that has spare capacity. The turbines are divided up into groups that all come back to a small substation for each group. These substations come back to a larger switching station which then runs back to the HV line, where we build a small switchyard to cut the lines into the existing HV line. The most expensive part of the wind farm is usually the cost of building the turbine service roads (as they have to be flat and straight enough that a massive truck carrying the turbine can get up them, and turbines are normally placed in hilly areas). And the other expensive cost is laying the cable underground for connecting up the turbines (to appease the locals as it looks prettier but is very expensive). The actual turbines themselves don't seem so expensive in comparison. Only thing i will say is that since i started designing wind turbines its the first time i can describe part of my job to a girl and she will think its "cool".
Yep... with a whopping maximum efficiency of 30%.
Next time I'll want to waste more than 2 thirds of my electricity, I'll call you.
Thanks for your suggestion!
As another poster has pointed out, the planet's surface is already filled with friction-generating objects: Houses, trees, rocks and mountains will always dominate the dissipated energy between air and ground globally, so we don't have to worry about passat winds stopping because of wind farms.
On a more general note though, the interpretation presented here of this calculation strikes me as backwards: What these people are saying is that if we were to cover all the surface area of the planet except for built-up areas and forests (that is, including all arable land, all deserts, all mountain tops), we'd just about manage to fulfill our current energy needs! I don't think that's such good news.
Dihydrogen monoxide is also a major component of acid rain, can kill you if you breathe it, and oxidises/corrodes many metals. It is found in biopsies of pre-cancerous and cancerous lesions.
For a full rundown of the dangers (and - surprisingly - some benefits) of dihydrogen monoxide click here.
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!
You can store energy as sodium which is found in the sea. Drop in the water and you get hydrogen..
2Na + 2H2O = 2NaOH + H2
Goverment will ban bird porn any day now.
FRA: STFU GTFO
Since you're in the know, do you mind if I ask a few questions?
Reality is the ultimate Rorschach.
Too bad nobody seems to realise that we can our all the energy we need right out of the vacuum. The reason we don't do that is because we are being taught that that would be against the laws of thermodynamics, which isn't the case, and that has been known for over a hundred years, first of all by the mostly forgotten genious Nikola Tesla, as he wrote in 1892 (!): http://www.tfcbooks.com/tesla/1892-02-03.htm "We shall have no need to transmit power at all. Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point of the universe. This idea is not novel. Men have been led to it long ago by instinct or reason; it has been expressed in many ways, and in many places, in the history of old and new. We find it in the delightful myth of Antheus, who derives power from the earth; we find it among the subtle speculations of one of your splendid mathematicians and in many hints and statements of thinkers of the present time. Throughout space there is energy. Is this energy static or kinetic! If static our hopes are in vain; if kineticâ"and this we know it is, for certainâ"then it is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature." It turns out that the basic theory our electrical engineers work with, the Maxwell equations, have been deliberately curtailed such that they won't allow "over-unity" devices nor the so-called "scalar waves" or longitudinal waves, which can be both electrical or magnetic. The German Professor Konstantin Meyl shows some remarkable experiments, based on a.o. Tesla's "magnifying transmitter", which show that scalar waves *do* exist and are much more effective then Herzian type of electro-magnetic waves: http://www.energeticforum.com/renewable-energy/3545-konstantin-meyl-scalar-faraday-vs-maxwell.html He also explains that the currently used Maxwell equations are actually a special case of his complete theory, based on vortexes. His theory can do without postulates like "black matter" and the like and also allows over-unity devices operating with scalar waves. Very interesting videos... Furthermore, Thomas Bearden comes to the same conclusion, and he shows how and why the Maxwell equations have been deliberately curtailed in order *not* to allow over-unity devices: http://peswiki.com/index.php/Site:LRP:The_Deliberate_Curtailment_of_Nikola_Tesla's_Primary_Energy_Source "Tom Bearden and Leslie R. Pastor discuss how the present electrical engineering model (and practice) was severely curtailed to exclude overunity (COP>1.0) electrical power systems that take their excess electromagnetic energy directly from their interaction with the active medium (vacuum/spacetime). " "The purpose of this paper is to reveal the iron suppression of Tesla and his dream of giving the world free electrical energy extracted directly from the active medium (the active vacuum/spacetime itself). The electrical engineering model taught and studied in all our universities, beginning in the 1890s, was also ruthlessly curtailed to cast out all asymmetric Maxwellian systems and to also discard Heavisideâ(TM)s odd and nearly incredible giant curled EM energy flow component actually accompanying every far more feeble Poynting energy flow in every EM system or circuit. Following the decimation of Tesla around the turn of the century, similar tactics have continued against follow-on inventors who discovered overunity systems and attempted to complete them and bring them to market. The suppression continues to this day, as can be attested by several living overunity inventors and inventor groups. For more than a century there has indeed been a giant, unwritten conspiracy of some of the most powerful cartels on earth, to continue the curtail
"don't think of conspiracies, think of sharks swimming in parallel lines." - John Loftus
Myth. Obvious counterexample: Palo Verde is in the middle of the Arizona DESERT. It uses sewage water as its cold reservoir:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_Station
THTR-300 used air-cooling:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300
> But coal has been binding carbon in the ground for hundreds of millions of years. That would seem to demonstrate that sequestration can be made to work.
Over X millions of years.
And all of that sewage water is coming out of thin air? Err ... no. It comes from municipalities that each have their own water sources.
because there isn't wind all the time
I think you will find that this part of your reasoning is false.
There is wind all the time and thats why wind could power the whole earth without requiring energy storage.
Problem 1 - practical: At near-ground level, wind doesn't blow all the time. Until you've got practical storage mechanisms to smooth out any extended periods, or practical approaches to harvesting wind energy at higher altitude, wind is never going to be more than a very modest component of the overall energy equation.
Problem 2 - aesthetic/quality of life. In denser-populated parts of the world, many of the "best" locations for wind turbines are also areas of comparatively untouched country, with a recognised value resources in their own rights. Again, the reality of the technology as it currently stands comes into the equation - it can't yet deliver more than a very small fraction of what its proponents claim as its potential. And until it matures (if it ever does) and becomes genuinely capable of delivering a significant proportion of our overall needs, and we can have a sensible discussion about the whole topic, allowing those natural resources to be despoiled for the sake of dogma is something we do at our peril.
(Putting that last paragraph differently - if we could get a continuous, say, 50% of our energy from wind, and an essential part of that picture was wind turbines all over the hills of some of our most picturesque countryside, then we could at least talk about the subject. But while all we're getting is an intermittent 3-4% of our needs (the current figure here in the UK right now), there's no contest. Countryside first. Come back when the technology's mature and we'll talk again.)
Exactly. Especially seeing as how most of our so-called "energy needs" can be eliminated using existing technology. Using 3 tonnes of vehicle with the drag coefficient of a barn door to transport one person to the grocery store is not a need. Heating your non-insulated house so that you can walk around in shorts and a t-shirt in winter is not a need.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
"Ugly? Ugly? As opposed to what?"
I think you aren't grasping the number of turbines that are being proposed. Assuming G.E. could even build them (so far, they've only built 12,000 units, world-wide).
Here's the actual link to the paper:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/06/19/0904101106.full.pdf+html
Using their numbers for the US, 3,815.9TWh / 2.5Mwh turbines / 20% utility = 7.63 million turbines required.
Or about one turbine for every 40 people.
Even more amusing is that the G.E. turbines being discussed, the 2.5xl, http://www.gepower.com/prod_serv/products/wind_turbines/en/2xmw/index.htm, they cost about 3.5M U.S. each, according to this article: http://www.goodenergies.com/news/-pdfs/Good-Energies-GE-turbine-deal-release-final.pdf, and only have an operational lifetime of 20 years.
So that works out to about $26,705,000,000,000 US (yes, that's ~26.705 trillion dollars). Or slightly less than twice the U.S. GDP of $14,264,600,000,000 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal).
You could buy a lot of nuclear power plants for that kind of money. Heck, you could buy 13,352 Ohio-class submarines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_class_submarine with 1 Gigawatt pressurized water reactors, and float them to where you wanted to hook them to the grid. But of course, you'd actually only need 400 of them to produce all the power the U.S. uses: http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/nuc_reactors/reactsum.html.
-- Terry
If there's no wind anywhere on the planet at some time this means that one of two things has happened: Either Earths atmosphere has escaped into space, or it has frozen solid. In both cases we will have much, much bigger problems than wind turbines not generating any electriticy.
serious question:
Why do the propeller blades have to assembled as single pieces off site and transported intact? Is it not possible to have modular blades that can be transported on normal sized vehicles and then assembled at the final location?
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
All this yammering does nothing to disguise the simple fact that producing CO2 by burning carbon is the exact opposite of CO2 sequestration. So your parent poster was right, and you're just being needlessly pedantic.
Mart
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Hopefully the dirty coal air and filth will send these people on their way faster.
Then us younger folk can do the right thing.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
If you like thought experiments on future energy supplies, here is absolutely essential background reading:
www.withouthotair.com
No major energy source left behind! Enjoy!
What kind of environmental impact would that make? I remember hearing hydroelectric power being a green source of energy but the dams wreak havoc on the local ecology.
If you are worried about birds and bats, go kill some domestic cats. In the UK alone they kill over 300 million small birds, mammals and reptiles annually.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Problem is that a recent study of calm days across the *whole* of Europe showed that we would be having several blackouts a year if we relied on wind power.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hm, some people seem to think that filling huge parts of earth with solar thermal plants is not only practical but also an opportunity to cash in.
Can they generate the 1.21 Gigawatts needed to power the Flux Capacitor?
Think of da boids!!!
Pumped storage, nanotech ultracapacitors, flywheels, fuel cells even will store energy for a calm day.
The problems in not a few calm days. It is seasonal variations in output, and the storage technologies you mentioned cannot help with this. You cannot store energy for an entire city for 6 months. With the kind of seasonal variation in power output from solar and wind present in most parts of Europe, you'd either have to invent means of storing an obscene amount of energy (good luck making it safe as well), or massively overbuild generating capacity.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
You should check again how much solar would be needed. Hint, it is still a lot, but it would cover an irrelevant part of the world.
Rethinking email
Unfortunately a study of the weather across the whole of Europe showed that the number of calm days covering significant areas of Europe are such that we would have several blackouts a year, even taking into account storage of the electricity.
What we need is reliable renewable power, and in the UK that means tidal barrages in the Seven, the Mersey and the Conwy at least.
But...
They move and kill entire population of animals and produce mercury = BAD
Okay then this will blow your mind... We could also power the entire planet using nothing but solar power! 100%! Better still, that's only scratching the surface of whats possible with solar energy. We can fully power any number of space colonies, moonbases, spacewheel hubs etc, ALL FROM THE SUN! 100% Even more mind blowing is that we've had the tech to do this for decades and we don't care enough to do it because nobody can figure out how to make ongoing profits from it!
The solution to your problem is pumped storage. With most intermittent eco power, the simplest and currently most efficient way of storing energy is to use a large two tier reservoir and pump the water to the higher level when demand is low (say in the night). When demand picks up in the morning, you open the flood gates and use hydroelectrics to generate back most of the electricity. Nuclear is probably the easiest thing to provide back up power, but the waste is still a serious concern. We just have to wait a few more decades for fusion!
Power loss down the lines will probably be the most critically important, part of the reason - if i remember my physics right - they pump out of power stations at such a high voltage is because the voltage drops so much by the time it gets to the substations (and then they switch it down to 240V or whatever for houses).
Part of the problem is that so many houses are poorly insulated and aren't particularly eco minded. Solar panels can do most hot water for most houses, even in temperate zones - they can certainly do most if combined with a geothermal solution like a heat pump. If you made every house in the country fully insulated, with eco friendly bulbs, low flow showers, ultra low U-value windows, the LOT, we'd need a fair amount less electricity anyway.
The grid can only do so much currently. More houses need to be built to be able to self sustain most of their electricity (quite easy to do).
This is a really stupid question but what is the impact of taking energy out of the wind? Do the turbines slow the wind down?
If a change in the human emission of CO2 (which is what, a small % of 0.04% of our atmosphere) is allegedly so catastrophic that it's going to end the world, what would that level of windmill power do to our atmosphere?
I mean, aside from allowing some FUTURE has-been lefty politician to generate $100 million in windfall revenues, would it really be a danger?
-Styopa
I reckon they should instead funnel the cr@p and hot air that George Bush emits from his pie-hole into channels for processing. That'll provide more than enough energy for the world and we won't have to 'rape' the earth.
blog.idigitall.com
Um, no it isn't. And you're either spreading disinformation or seriously retarded if you think so. Did you attend government schools? The GP seriously asked what "carbon" sequestration was, and so far has just gotten a bunch of half-joking bullshit replies.
We don't dig up CO2 out of the ground. So burying it is not the "opposite" of anything. We dig up coal (carbon) out of the ground. Burning carbon and oxygen produces CO2. "Carbon" sequestration is burying that CO2 in the ground. They are not at all opposites.
CO2 is an end-product. It is an energy sink. When buried in the ground, it is a liability, not an asset like coal. The process is not reversable. This is not pedantry but basic middle-school level chemistry that shouldn't even have to be discussed on /. if not for idiots like you confusing the issue with blatant falsehoods.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
...they're all made of composites like fiberglass or carbon fiber. Even aluminum is too heavy for the size blades needed on an efficient wind turbine generator
Or can't you do maths?
I think maybe you don't understand the scale of Hydroelectric production in N. America! I think perhaps you're referring to the US.
Canada produces 61% of its energy from hydro. Hydro-Québec is the world's largest hydroelectric generating company, with a total installed capacity (2007) of 35,647 MW, including 33,305 MW of hydroelectric generation, putting the province of Québec at 94% hydro. During the big east coast power outage a few years ago, Québec exported energy to the neighbouring province (Ontario) and US states (New York, etc).
In other places, Norway is at 98.25% hydro.
With all this talk about wind being such a "clean" and environmentally friendly source of energy, the one thing I never hear considered is the possible negative impact of taking that much energy out of the atmosphere (i.e., the real potential for a negative impact on natural weather patterns, which are largely driven by wind energy). When you take a lot of energy out of a river with hydroelectric power, for example, it drastically cools the water and has a real impact on the species of fish living in that water and the "environment" of the water. Yet people seem to treat wind energy as it it were "free" energy just there for the taking. But all that wind energy in the atmosphere serves a real purpose (moving clouds, fronts, and other weather systems around), and taking it out on the kind of scale that some of these wind advocates are talking about is bound to have unpredictable (and perhaps really nasty) effects on our natural weather. I don't want to end up in a huge drought because Johnny-Wind-Lover didn't realize that it's wind energy that brings rain clouds in from the ocean (thinking we could just take it for free, with no impact).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
If we could harvest energy from hurricanes, we would could obtain lots of energy. The problem is to store such energy in a permanent medium which is easy to transport.
We already know where hurricanes are going to pass, each and every year PEMEX oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico are evacuated, and at least 1 hurricane hits the Yucatan peninsula every year.
If wind energy harvesters could be installed in such platforms and the energy stored somewhere safe until transported to the surface, a huge amount of energy could be obtained.
I know this is a lot of speculation (just count the number of "could" words in this message) but maybe using something like hydrogen generators might be the answer...
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Come on man, open your eyes and look at the facilities storing wind energy by pumping water back uphill TODAY. Another common method to store massive amounts of energy is by pressurizing underground salt domes.
Not quite good for the environment, since artificial lakes cause massive amounts of methane and co2 to be released, but we most certainly do have a realistic way to store energy for calm days.
0x or or snor perron?!
Vuojo, In any one place the wind is not always blowing. On the earth, the wind is always blowing somewhere. If you spread the turbines out as suggested in this report, you could in fact have a 100% reliable source of power.
San Francisco Photographers
Just briefly graphite covered fuel kernels, helium gas cooled, no containment building. These factors in conjunction make for a serious accident considering the reactor is running well above the combustion temperature of the graphite. The issue is when the plant ages and air starts to leak into the system, causing cracks to the silicon carbide coating of the kernels and the graphite catches fire. It's the most obvious and probable failure mode.
The basis design issues are unknown for a PBMR. Building a proper containment building around them (the one thing they did right at TMI) to mitigate that risk makes the reactor more expensive and you are back to using PWR.
There are also issues with manufacturing the fuel kernels, which introduces a new toxic industry. Bottom line is the Nuclear Industrial process (not just waste) is a NIMG (Not In My Generation) issue. I favor development of reactors capable of using Pu-239 as a fuel so we can end uranium mining and have a forum for Nuclear disarmament. The reality is we don't have the material technologies to support them for commercial power generation, yet. If we are going to use Nuclear power, it should be engineered responsibly.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
There is something that happens to wind once you start to place too may turbines/windmills close together.
Just like aerodynamics dictates, you put too may obstacles close to each other, the wind will be effectively
diminished, thereby providing much less power then first though. So the model that this scientist proposes, would be great in a perfect world, but in real life, having too many turbines close together might not be such a great idea....however!!! if we were to only put
1/4 of the amount of turbines he is talking about, we would have enough energy to supply our needs = to today's consumption...which in itself is still pretty damn good!
A bit of population control, we could maintain this level of life/consumption indefinitely...
but we all know those damn chinese love to fornicate!
Moderators, please correct the unfortunate rating of the parent post, from "interesting" to "desperately overrated at 0". The comment is not interesting, it's actually facile. The electric grid does need to be modernized to handle millions of scattered wind turbines, each generating a relatively quite small amount of power, with substantial fluctuation over time scales of seconds, minutes, and hours.
A few hundred scattered hydroelectric dams, generating enormous amounts of power, consistently over human-manageable-by-making-phone-calls-and-pulling-levers time horizons like days and weeks, is not anywhere near a sufficient analog to be considered worthy of an up-mod in this discussion.
The parent isn't even aware of the most basic information about the problem of the electric grid, which has been widely discussed in recent years in places geeks read. The path to enlightenment on this issue begins here: Electric Power Transmission.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I am a dihydrogen monoxide drinker. The only reason I am still alive is I dilute it with alcohol.
Although that's a standard oil-shill talking point I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and explain why you are wrong.
First of all, there is wind all the time. Seriously; the Earth is not a perfectly smooth billiard ball, therefore the earth's rotation causes turbulence in her atmospheric jacket all the time. The places humans prefer to live generally have intermittent winds, but even so there is wind somewhere always. Just as we currently move electricity from the generation points to the points of use on copper wires, so we can distribute wind-generated electricity on copper wires. It's a solved problem, despite what coal and oil apologists might want you to believe.
Second, large scale energy storage is also a solved problem. Large power plants already store titanic amounts of energy by running turbines backwards (pushing water uphill for later release) and in heavy flywheels. In a distributed generation system such as a global wind generator network, there would be less need for energy storage than you'd think, since the wind blows somewhere all the time and someone uses power somewhere all the time. In any case, existing hydroelectric facilities can already be used to bank energy and new facilities can be built.
So during hurricane season we can expect our utility bills to drop immensely, right?
The difference, of course, being that design or operation errors in wind power systems are highly unlikely to kill dozens of people instantly, hundreds or thousands of people over months and years, nor render thousands of square miles uninhabitable for sufficient multiples of the half-life of uranium, plutonium, or whatever other radioactive by products are released into the water or atmosphere in an industrial accident so as to avoid a legacy of genetic deformity in the affected area. See: Chernobyl Legacy: a photo essay by Paul Fusco.
I'm a proponent of nuclear energy in the abstract sense that it would be useful to help us out of the acidified ocean mess we're heading into, but there exist enormous problems which the nuclear power industry didn't fully appreciate in the 1970s (when the technologies in all currently operating reactors were designed). The industry will continue to treat waste disposal and many components of accident risk as externalized costs, left to their own devices. (Externalized costs are a natural by-product of a capitalist system. To counter balance that effect we invented the useful concept of government regulation. Note that quite similar externalities also existed in the communist systems which produced Chernobyl, which, like the capitalist systems of the west, also didn't do natural resource accounting nor assign a value to the cost of safety, accidents, pollution, nor maintenance of a thousand-square-mile "exclusion zone" for hundreds of years, in their economic models and business plans.)
Much safer designs are possible, but we need dramatically safer, accident-proof, terrorist-proof, designs. We can probably do that, too, but it will cost more, and we'll need to actually do it, before we deploy a new generation of plants. Oh, and uranium and plutonium are fossil fuels, too. Here's a discussion of Thorium, molten salt, low pressure containment, reactors.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Ironic. Kennedy just gave enough money to the Mass. Maritime Academy (Buzzard's Bay) to get them to rename the training ship to the TS Kennedy (I liked Enterprise better...). Mass Maritime Academy is one of the most green schools I've ever seen, they even have a wind turnbine. To keep from energizing downed power lines, the turbine is shut down whenever the electicity goes out for saftey reasons. When the chief of the ship wants to know if they lost shore power, or if it's a problem with the ship, he looks out the window to see if the turbine is turning or not :)
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
Ummm... there is no such things as a "calm day" in which the whole earth has still air. The problem is one of transmission and planning, not of not enough wind. We already sell energy over grids spanning multiple states, do you honestly think it isn't windy somewhere in your region all of the time?
I think maybe you don't understand the scale of Hydroelectric production in N. America! I think perhaps you're referring to the US.
I think you're thinking of the wrong numbers. I'm not talking generating capacity, which has nothing to do with what I'm talking about, but individual sites. Hydropower in North America is big generation spread across relatively few sites. Scaling up wind power to ginormous levels would involve small generation and zillions of sites, most in remote or very remote areas, often nowhere NEAR high voltage transmission lines. That makes a significant difference.
Most wind turbines (90%) cost more to maintain than what they give in return. (Read the statistics) It is impossible to maintain a power grid solely based on wind.
In a few years, people will finally realise the enormous FIASCO that wind-power is (except for those who sold them...).
Wind does not blow planet-wide on a 24hr schedule. Most of the time, the harsh reality is : absence of wind, generated power is 2% of the installed capacity.
Hence, this article is ludicrous.
i wish we'd stop looking for silver bullet/panaceas. Instead of hanging our hopes on one systems, i think we should use many sources... the more the merrier. While simultaneously reducing use and recycling.
If we're going to do wind farms, can we please look into the vertical systems that kill fewer birds? Birds shouldn't die because you can't be bothered to turn off the lights when you leave a room.
Have there been any studies as to what will happen when we slow down and disrupt the natural flow of wind? When the wind hits the blade, it loses energy. That wind was heading somewhere as part of the whole big system. If we frack with that, there might be consequences.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Just briefly graphite covered fuel kernels, helium gas cooled, no containment building. These factors in conjunction make for a serious accident considering the reactor is running well above the combustion temperature of the graphite. The issue is when the plant ages and air starts to leak into the system, causing cracks to the silicon carbide coating of the kernels and the graphite catches fire. It's the most obvious and probable failure mode.
Are these issues with the South African designs or Chinese designs? Or both?
Wow, that really came out sounding like a line from Monty Python. Eh. Not so bad, I guess.
New reactors don't produce any waste that needs guarding?
A good discussion of scale that puts things in perspective was published on CNN not long ago...
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/05/13/mackay.energy/index.html?iref=newssearch
Considering that there are several energy storage technologies that are already being used for grid power storage in different places, or are under serious consideration for that role, asserting that there is no way wind could be used as the only energy source is, shall we say, overblown? (:-))
Now if you want to argue that this is not the most economical method of meeting world energy demands in a non-polluting manner, then you would be on firmer ground. But all of the following technologies for energy storage are already in use for grid storage: pumped water, batteries and flywheels. Also under active development are hydrogen electrolysis/fuel cell systems, and compressed air and superconducting storage remain possibilities.
There is a huge difference between, "more expensive" and (by implication of "no way") impossible or even "forever impractical."
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Why must the power system be perfect? I'd gladly see a lot of turbines at the cost of homes having some kind of battery or super capacitor system to even out spikes\browns.
OR...
Power plants could put in giant flywheel systems to handle Surges/Browns
There's a lot of tech that can mitigate spikes to the grid, it's just not being widely utilized.
I just took an excellent course at the University of Calgary where my prof David Keith (a god on this subject matter, go look the man up, seriously).. Discussed all sorts of world energy systems. One thing he discussed was that he conducted a study on the notion of how massive adoption of wind power would affect the climate. He found that there would be significant climate implications of harvesting vast amounts of kinetic energy from the atmosphere. Global climate would be seriously affected. Apparently Keith and his peers were shunned rather harshly for presenting that finding, makes you wonder what people's agendas are.. Anyway, I'm not saying it'd be better or worse to invoke that change, but it would be a different climate. Is that a lesser evil than dumping more and more CO2 in to the atmosphere? I think probably yes. Though I doubt we can really predict who would be affected most. Nevertheless, we don't have remotely effective means of storing lots of wind generated power. And you all love that the light comes on right away when you flip the switch. For now the only global power generation technology we have that can function on demand, can be used safely, is well understood and doesn't inherently provoke climate change is nuclear power. People concerned about the waste products of nuclear power should understand that we have the knowledge to handle radioactive materials safely. Besides, the vast majority of the usable power is still present in the current output "spent" fuel. With sufficient motivation, we can reprocess that and get even more energy out. PS - if your fears are inspired by "Three Mile Island", you should go read what really happened. If you're concerned about Chernobyl - that was a garbage reactor design to fail in to a meltdown plus Russia tried to cover it up, which made the situation a lot worse. If one of the first gas engines had exploded, and thus the tech was dumped, we collectively would have missed out pretty harshly. Fact is, everything we do has a consequence. And I think the solution to our environmental & energy issues requires that we optimize on all fronts. We should continue to search for means to need less energy and produce it through a large range of processes. Part of that is not doing what's cool, but what works well. Solar Arrays (Photovoltaics) are awesome in space or remote places, they make sense there. However, I've been led to believe that it takes a very long time for them to collect the necessary power to make up for what it took to manufacture them... Bah, anyway, the list goes on. Keep on thinkin people, sooner or later we'll find a way to harvest infinite power from the ether... or something. Brains unite!
Not so simple. As I recall, it was NOT boaters that were the big factor it was the small businesses and fishermen who raised hell over the Cape Cod wind farm with funding from the rich pricks who don't want to see them. Kennedy was being the good representative he is by keeping his voters happy by doing what they want - a SIMILAR issue came up with the fishermen getting upset over federal fishing regulations limiting them on their overfishing. Kennedy got them what they demanded and now many are out of business because fish populations continued due to the predictable decrease from their overfishing. They got what they deserved BOTH TIMES and would have hated their representative for trying to inject any wisdom to the contrary.
I think its sad the way people shift blame to their representatives for THEIR OWN MISTAKES and wonder why the ones that tell them what they want to hear and throw a bone to the loudest groups. They get their power regardless of what they do on side issues (good or bad...) Some do good and some do bad but nearly ALL play politics where they must to get in and stay in. This is why you can't touch the corrupt farm lobbies or do much about all the welfare states (which are BTW all the 2004 "red" states.)
People SAY they don't want waste etc; but when their rep brings waste into town-- they REWARD them with re-election. Sure I want nuclear energy-- but not in my backyard...
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Will there be a law preventing you from installing and owning your own wind generator. With the thousands of generators (windmills) facing one direction, would they provide sufficient resistance to air circulation to cause a change in the earths rotation? I bet you yes, for the last statement.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
oil companies have replaced The Elders of Zion or Rothchilds
Except Rothschild is Jewish and was in oil. Rothschild Investment Trust controls Royal Dutch Shell Oil.
The margin for survival in the deserts is MUCH lower.
Which is one reason, though by far not the only one, I oppose the border fence in the Southwest.
I'm actually kind of sick of east coast people deciding that that deserts of the west are completely expendable for their own gains, but their native local habitats are not.
Yea, that really pisses me off about the environmentalists on the East Coast. Offshore from Cape Cod to Cape Hatteras there are excellent cites for wind farms, however NIMBYs there fight against them. Especially Kennedy.
The only real energy solutions is probably a mixture of "alternative" fuels that don't compete with food crops, solar/wind, tidal, nuclear, and conventional fuels, as the region demands
Agreed but I'd add one thing, "Rebuilding the Power Grid. Not only build a long distance High Voltage Direct Current infrastructure but make the grid smart.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
You're doing it wrong.
You need to dilute the alcohol with the dangerous dihydrogen monoxide.
And then sell it as vodka.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Is this a joke? I remember laughing in high school physics about the absurdity of electrolysing water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then recombining it again in an attempt to have a net gain of energy from the process. It would be a perfect solution if not for that pesky first law of thermodynamics.
What kind of resistance and losses do you get with that kind of system, though?
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Correlation is not causation! It's entirely possible that they were all buried without a single case of death by dihydrogen monoxide, and that their deaths after burial were perfectly natural.
Offshore wind turbines capable of powering 75% of a city that are so far out you can barely see them? That's really cool. My only thought would be what about resistance to damage from weather and corrosion at sea?
If we stopped subsidizing power generation tomorrow all that would happen is bills would go up (and hopefully taxes down) and we might get a chance to produce some fairly clean power for once.
I oppose almost all subsidies. As one say subsidies are meant to be temporary support until whatever is being subsidized is on it's feet. Unfortunately those receiving subsidies have become powerful and constantly demand more and more subsidies.
Now if all these old methods of electrical generation weren't subsidized they'd be more expensive and other methods could compeat.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
My real question is, what is the environmental impact going to be from removing all this energy from the weather? If a very slight increase in global temperatures can cause such catastrophic impacts, what impact will we find once we start extracting energy at a rate of 16 terawatts? After a year, that's about 500 exajoules, which has to have SOME impact upon the weather.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
There is plenty of Fuel for it and there is really no impact on the environment. Wind power on this scare may slow down the weather and may make areas drier which is bad.
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Sounds ideal to me, why not harvest it and burn it again?
I don't know, a cogeneration power plant could burn the methane and boost power. In a sense that's something that puzzles me about oil companies, drilling, and pumping. Those flares at oil pumps are burning methane, when it could be used to generate power.
The problem is is greenhouse gases would still be being pumped into the atmosphere.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
My real question is, what is the environmental impact going to be from removing all this energy from the weather?
Hard to say, but I bet it's way better on the environment, in general, than all the carbon we're putting into the atmosphere presently. Combine moving _towards_ much more green energy generation as well as CoGen and energy efficiency gains, and I think we can come up with a sustainable compromise. What we're doing now sure isn't working.
As I said, needless pedantry.
Mart
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
About a year ago I was thinking like you are today but in reality hydrogen is not a good solution to anything. For starters they only last a year and fuel cell that powers a car costs $30,000. Second you have to put a lot of energy into compressing the hydrogen resulting in a huge inefficiency then there is an inefficiency in getting the power back.
There is no reason to fear however, supercapacitors are the solution bit far off (unless eestor turns out to not be a fraud but I think it is at this point) but they will come and replace batteries and power our cars when oil runs out.
Thbe only technology we have right now that can really do the job and do it well is nuclear and as long as there is no accidents it is good for the environment.
Companies researching, building and operating combined cycle turbine generators running on syngas from coal gasification beg to differ. It might not be as clean as windmills or natural gas, but it's still cleaner than existing coal burning plus when you're not generating electricity you can create diesel, etc. from the gas. Coal is going to be around for decades to come simply because of the scale of existing capacity and the abundance of it. Coming up with tech to retrofit to existing coal using stuff that improves the efficiency of extracting energy from it is a smart thing to do, but it's not to say we can't do other things at the same time.
You should check again how much solar would be needed. Hint, it is still a lot, but it would cover an irrelevant part of the world.
You mean like, New Jersey?
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
Wind mills need fiberglass, around 200 tons per windmill, fiberglass is e-glass, e-glass requires a blast furnace that operates between 2600-3100 degrees. How about BTUs, ever consider the amount of energy needed per ton, I think its fair to state 1,200,000 BTU Ever consider what basic minerals, elements, raw materials needed other than sand. How about Propene (not propane), Propene comes from oil and only oil, propene demand is larger than the supply, the only way to make more is to refine oil at a faster rate. Windmills are making oil companies richer due to the raw materials needed, I have only touched on a couple of items, I could go on forever, oil needed for lubrication, amount of Boran used, what about carbon fiber, titanium, copper, brass, etc, etc. People who think windmills are good for the environment are IGNORANT, the news tells you its good and the sheeple believe.
gnulinuxrat
Cheap, proven, clean, unsubsidied, nuclear energy thank you.
Nuclear power is neither clear nor unsubsidized. The world's largest producer of nuclear power is France, and it dictates nuclear power plant be built and pays for them. SO does China, India, and Russia. The European Pressurized Reactor being built in Finland is "beset by long-running construction problems, schedule and cost overruns, and all-round hilarious ineptitude and controversy." And "is already running three years behind schedule due to a multitude of factors including quality control issues." It is also being built by Areva which is owned and subsidized by the government of France.
There's some uranium in the ground (which is actually poisoning our wells and room air in eastern part of Finland).
And you don't think mining more won't be worse? Fact is is without subsidies nuclear power would not be profitable.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Yes! Get the facts! DiHydrogen Monoxide is a serious problem. From the website DHMO.org:
Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO) is a colorless and odorless chemical compound, also referred to by some as Dihydrogen Oxide, Hydrogen Hydroxide, Hydronium Hydroxide, or simply Hydric acid. Its basis is the highly reactive hydroxyl radical, a species shown to mutate DNA, denature proteins, disrupt cell membranes, and chemically alter critical neurotransmitters. The atomic components of DHMO are found in a number of caustic, explosive and poisonous compounds such as Sulfuric Acid, Nitroglycerine and Ethyl Alcohol.
Read the website for many more disturbing facts!
Economical and Healthy mix for the next 40 years (current builds):
We need to get rid of coal now, and oil as best we can. The health effects are orders of magnitude worse than any other option.
Wind and Solar are rapidly becoming cost effective up to a small amount of the current supply.
Unfortunately, the adoption of electric cars could make these two options less cost effective, but is still worthwhile since it reduces greatly the pollution in our air.
Generation III nuclear can load follow to a certain degree, and so can offset wind and solar variability.
This reduces reliance on oil and gas for load-following.
Wind 10-20%
Solar 10-20% (largely residential)
Experimental new energy sources 1-5% (keep our options open)
Oil, Gas, Biofuel 1-10% (minimum needed for load-following)
Hydroelectricity 10-45% (a very good, cheap option, location dependent)
Nuclear 0-68% (remainder of the mix)
Ideal Reasonable Mix by Capacity/Cost:
Wind 15/25
Solar 10/25
Hydro 30/13
Oil, Gas, Biofuel 10/12
Nuclear 35/25
Numbers are based upon reading multiple sources of costing various energy sources for over 20 hours in the past two weeks.
They are a fiction, but are not arbitrary.
Recommended New Builds: 2 Solar, 3 Wind, 2 Hydro, 4 Nuclear
Once large scale power storage becomes feasible, wind and solar can and should make up a larger part of the mix.
Also, in cold places, district heating should be considered (geothermal, nuclear) as heat from these sources
is more efficient than heat->steam->electricity->heat.
-
Also it works well with the phrase "namby pamby", ie pansy/wuss-like.
Thanks, I hadn't thought of that. I'll try to keep in in mind.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
BS. Mining for nuclear fuel is probably the dirtiest mining there is.
Per tonne of fuel, compared to coal? Probably. Per generated watt? Not a chance. If we allowed modern reprocessing reactors, the balance would tilt even further in nuclear's favor.
Yea coal mining especially mountain top removal is very dirty. But uranium mining is too. As is reprocessing. As I've said elsewhere the leader in reprocessing, France, still has problems with it.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE55M0XT20090623
Born at the center of China's coal industry, the boy is mentally handicapped and is unable to speak. He is one of many such children in Shanxi province, where coal has brought riches to a few, jobs for many, and environmental pollution that experts say has led to a high number of babies born with birth defects.
Experts say coal mining and processing has given Shanxi a rate of birth defects six times higher than China's national average, which is already high by global standards.
That's totally the kind of proven and cost-effective power generation technology I want generating power.
There's no such thing as a calm day on a planetary level, the wind is always blowing somewhere. We would have to build a robust grid to move power to where it's needed from where it's generated, but we already do that, just a question of scale.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
4000 square miles is slightly smaller than the state of Connecticut. While it may be a fraction of a percent of the suitable land surface of the earth, I would say that is still "significant", at least in human terms.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
I've pointed this out before, but here goes again.
There are currently massive transmission lines taking power from Hoover Dam, near Las Vegas, NV into California.
There are ~170 miles along I-15 between Primm, NV (on the state line) to Victorville, CA.
If you replace one tower on the transmission lines every mile with a 2MW windmill... You get 340MW of power.
Hoover Dam generates almost 2100MW. California gets about 55% of that, or roughly 1160MW.
By using modest power-generating transmission lines, California could receive 30% more power.
Now consider this. The average household in the southwest USA uses ~9 MWh of energy every year.
A single transmission tower equipped with small 500W solar panels could generate over 2 MWh of energy every year.
A single transmission line, so equipped, from Hoover Dam to L.A. could generate electricity for almost 300 homes.
No moving parts; very low maintenance. No noise. No bird kills. No pollution.
And that's just tacking a dinky panel onto existing towers.
Very informative link.
Desert solar thermal: 30-40 years
"Clean" Coal: 20-40 years
Again - why is "clean" coal a fantasy while solar and wind are practical?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
- $10.4 Trillion in today's dollars (conservatively).
Which would go to private corporations who are building and installing the turbines--generating jobs, profits, and shareholder value, growing the broader economy.
If you just look at the price side, any large-scale industrial undertaking appears ludicrously expensive.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
As soon as one tech or another can produce energy for less $$$ than a previous tech, there will be changes.
Cost here is evaluated in the market. It includes things like the cost of bribing politicians, Environmental imPAct surveys, farmers' leases, manufacture, transportation, installation, maintenance, taxes, and on and on. The overall cost of doing business. The only reason that wind(and solar) plants are cropping up is because they are starting to be cost-competitive with existing energy sources.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
It was Jan 2008 that his occoured.
Summer before last apparently.
Doesnt time fly.
Regardless significant ammounts of power flow from Tasmania to the mainland in summer.
> My guess: pulling tens of terawatts of energy out of the atmosphere will effect the climate.
Nobody is pulling anything *out* of anything. All they are doing is *moving* it.
As the Sun heats the surface, the surface heats the air, the air moves to carry the heat to places that are cooler.
As the wind blows it heats the environment due to conduction, radiation, and friction. The energy of the Sun has been moved from warmer to cooler and finally, ultimately, it is radiated back into space.
As the turbine is powered by the wind and generates electricity, the air is cooled, the electricity is transported elsewhere and the energy is ultimately dissipated as heat. Same net result, just a different distribution of the Sun's energy across the surface of the planet. Will it make a difference in the climate? Only locally as places downwind of the wind-farms will be cooler and less windy than otherwise and the places that consume the energy will be warmer than otherwise.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Valid question though.
These are basic design issues which all PBMR share.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
"Most people whining about noise and environmental impact are talking about older designs"..
No I think they just ASSUME they'll be so noisy. Cell phone site NIMBYs think every site is a "tower" and worry about "radiation"... wind power nimbys will go on about the noise instead. I drove through a wind farm in sw kansas in 1999 or so, quite old (early 1990s vintage I think?) Parked right under one, I could hear it, but they were not particularly noisy.
But coal has been binding carbon in the ground for hundreds of millions of years. That would seem to demonstrate that sequestration can be made to work.
Yeah, okay... but we a solution that we can implement within the century. Solutions that take hundreds of millions of years don't count.
That said, if you know of some process that converts carbon dioxide gas back into a solid that can be buried, and does so without requiring lots of energy, please apply for a patent on it, it will probably make you rich! :^)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Ammonia production(Critical for the human race to keep on eating) takes energy equivilent to one fifth of total world electricity generating capacity
If you're talking about using ammonia for fertilizer, it's not needed. I and others farm or garden without artificial fertilizers. Right now in my garden I am growing asparagus, blueberries, two different types of lettuce, mustard, onions, radish, rhubarb, strawberries, tomatoes, and tomatillos. I started corn but they didn't germinate and I have carrot sprouts that are now ready to plant. And I have not used one ounce of artificial fertilizers added.
Instead I use natural fertilizers, compost and mulch. Before planting I mixed compost into top soil, then after planting I covered the ground with mulch. This fall I'll rip out the dead plants and toss them into a compost bin. Then for next year I'll again mix compost with the top soil in my garden. And I compost everything I can. I toss kitchen scraps in a bin as well as ground bones, cat litter, and the leafs and grass that is raked up. The dirt in my garden is quite healthy, I can take a hand garden trowel and take one scoop of dirt out and find a number of worms which further breaks down organic matter for plant food.
Last year I grew enough tomatoes and tomatillos to make and can a bunch of salsa, sauces, and soups. I had enough lettuce to eat a salad a day for more than a month, actually most of the lettuce in my garden this year sprouted up from the seeds the lettuce spread around last year. While I'd like more space to garden, I started late otherwise I could have gotten a garden plot at one of the community gardens in my area, Minneapolis, MN. And there are a number of them, the local group Gardening Matters has a Google map of community gardens in the great Twin Cities area. Using two or three garden plots in different community gardens I could grow enough to eat or trade with others for what I don't grow for most if not all year. And as I implied above I know how to can and preserve food. I've canned, dehydrated, and smoked food as well as made beer, cheese, and wine.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
As with all electricity markets the NEM is designed for efficiency. So what that means is that when demand is high in NSW, demand probably will not be as high in QLD and so QLD can help power NSW. The same thing occurs in Tasmania. The so-called "green" state that relies so much on hydro and wind power will at times have very low demand compared to Victoria (what generally occurs in summer). At these times it will export power to the mainland. In winter the opposite generally happens.
Tasmania has just experienced the most expensive week of electricity prices that it has *ever* seen and was importing at maximum capacity from the mainland. Droughts have a nasty habit of ruining power supplies no matter *what* type of power is used, but particularly hurts hydro generation. Before Kogan Creek was operational it was QLD that had the high prices (which effected the rest of the national market as well) because Tarong had to switch off most of its generation to preserve water.
My point: connecting Tasmania to the mainland (actually to the brown coal generators in Victoria) has increased reliability of the power supply on both sides of the strait.
The same thing basically happened during the bushfires this year. Unfortunately the NEM isn't designed for a one-in-one hundred year event. The heatwave in Victoria last year was a very exceptional circumstance. The south-east corner of Australia was running several degrees higher than average while the majority of Australia was running several degrees below average. Basslink isn't designed to operate at high temperatures because Tasmania only exceedingly rarely gets to high temperatures, let alone temperatures that will shut down operation of Basslink.
:).
Ultimately though Basslink is currently a net importer of electicity from Victoria to Tasmania. So all the Taswegians can thank the dirty Victorian brown coal generators for your lack of blackouts this year
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You're insane. Current temp (US zip 75501) is 100.8 with dew point at 73.4. This means sweating will only get you down to 99.8. You need active cooling in some areas, it's a necessity of life.
HAHA. I grew up in Florida which gets as warm and while I like air conditioning I didn't need it. Nor did I need it when I was in Panama. Then again I didn't need much heating when I spent part of winter in Alaska. And yes I was in both places, for three weeks. I was stationed at Fort Greely Alaska for Winter Warfare training and at Fort Sherman, Panama for Jungle Operations training.
Should there be a Law?
Well... the problem with plastics is that they arn't bio degradable, so they are just accumulating in the biosphere.
Plastic is biodegradable. Plastic was originally made from plants. The cellulose in plants is what the plastic cellophane was made from. Kodak [pdf warning] used to make film from it as well.
They will however be weathered down into tiny particles over time, and animals will get them into their systems with yet unknown consequences
Yea, that's one problem with petroleum based plastics. They make up a lot of the garbage in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
IFR's. There are enough fissionable materials already mined for 100 years of energy production, the waste from IFRs are only a concern for 500 years vs 10,000 for once-thru reactors
I am not opposed to reprocessing waste that has already been created by the nuclear industry. But I am opposed to government subsidies. If businesses want to build and operate plants then they should have to get Wall Street bankers finance them, get private insurance, and deal with the resulting waste themselves. Of course they won't, without government subsidies nuclear power is not profitable.
And to be sure, it's not just the nuclear industry I don't want subsidized. I don't want coal, petroleum, or other sources of energy subsidized either. Farm subsidies, as are others, are bad as well.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
If we started looking at heating homes with electricity instead of natural gas, we'd be looking at yet another huge increase.
With proper insulation little energy is needed to heat or cool homes. Those who build Off the Grid do it all the tyme.
you're talking about putting these massive obelisks over a surface area larger than Europe. Fact is, this alone would be the largest engineering project in human history, even at 1/40th of the scale. The effects of construction would be felt world-wide.
And where is your science or applied data to support this?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
What about the power from Mongolia, Siberia, the Sahara, etc. It would take quite long transmission lines to get power to where it can be used. It would have more validity if it stated within 500 miles of a population centre.
There is also a big difference between wind power and Hydro power; controllability. A hydro facility has complete control over how much energy it produces at any time. Wind power is controlled by how much wind there is; too much wind or not enough wind and no power is produces. Take a look at any graph of wind power output an you will see it varies a lot. The more these unreliable devices are added to the system the more likely there will be problems.
I have talked to a quite few people about this and am astounded that most do not realize a simple fact about the power grid; there is not storage of electricity. We must use the power that is created almost the instant it is created. Many people say that on average there is enough wind energy. the issue is what happens in a storm when the towers are locked down?
'm sure these companies are looking out for their best interests, and probably don't want alternative fuels to compete with their product. This is normal business practices.
It is business as usual but if different people get together to fight for or against something I'd say it was a conspiracy. Not that one has to be bad.
But I'm guessing there isn't some huge, organized, push to quash all such technologies across the whole globe.
Agreed.
As much as a pick on the Libertarians here, I do believe that if there was a miracle fuel out there, someone would develop it and sell it,
Except established businesses and industries get large subsidies and they can use that money for PR to scare people or what have you. Of course some environmentalist do the same, however they depend on donations not government subsidies.
Right now there are some generally good ideas for making our national power scheme better. The problem remains cost, and the fact that what we have right now works good enough for most people.
According to the article "Rebuilding the Power Grid" in MIT's Tech Review "grid-related power outages and problems with power quality reportedly cost the nation $80 billion to $188 billion per year." I's say that was costly too.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I put you in the camp of a libertarian, freedom without big government. Thanks ok, I used to be part of the L party myself.
Though a libertarian, I'm a small "l" not big "L" libertarian. I am registered as "No Party Preference". What I find weird is that politically speaking most people think Libertarians, both big and small, were Republicans first. Though I wasn't registered as one for years I voted mostly Democrat. I changed for the 1988 presidential election. At the tyme I was deputized to register voters and was curious about all of the registered political parties in the state, there were more than 40 of them. I checked into different parties and candidates when I came across Ron Paul running as the Libertarian candidate. After reading about the LP and learning of their platform I started supporting them.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
The wiki article talks about 5 to 10 ohm ground resistance.
I know a guy who worked for Telstra, which is our main telco as far as domestic wiring is concerned. In one part of Melbourne you have trains going north/south, trams going east/west and off to the south west. Phone lines in the ground all over the place. Earth currents were extremely high in that area. They had to keep replacing phone cable because of the corrosion.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The amount of power available from the wind is not the problem, it's the variability. The mechanisms used to dispatch power to the grid, balancing supply and demand, phase adjustments and other ancillary services is already a nightmare with systems that don't unpredictably stop and then restart in a matter of seconds.
Even arguments related to "it'll be windy somewhere" do not hold, as moving power across the grid is highly prone to congestion constraints on the grid (yet another complex term in the balancing equations).
The very reason wind is not used more is because it makes grids highly unstable, so this "research" is at best meaningless.
However part of the reason that subsidies are needed is the horrendous amount of red tape involved in getting an operating permit.
Nuclear power isn't profitable in China, France, India, or Russia either and they don't have the paperwork and regulations the US does. The only reason nuclear power plants are built in those countries was because the government says what will be built, not a free market.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Great link and info, thanks. Seems about what I was thinking with the system... not really something I'd want.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
We really need to look at modern nuclear power, period. Glad to see you made the distinction between *modern* and the average anti-nuclear advocate's idea of nuclear, technology that was out of date for its time 50 years ago. A few things about so called wind power - first, is that the material resources needed to construct wind farms are very large - why use that much metal and/or plastic? Second, being that the power generation rating for each wind turbine isn't quite half of what you will get at times of maximum power generation... you hover around 50% or less of what the actual rating is at *peak*, and generate far, far less all other times... which is most of the day, every day. Third, is that to generate a significant amount of power for industrial and domestic uses both, you need to use an *immense* amount of land to ensure the fans are at the optimum distance from each other. Doesn't really matter whether you put the fans in the middle of your neighborhood, a desert, or the ocean, they're *all* bad ideas. The energy, labor, and material resources put into them far exceed what you will ever get in returns. And on top of that, new jobs are not being created in the construction of wind (or solar) farms long term - politicians and major proponents of wind and solar technology have admitted that new jobs will not be created, beyond the very short term of building the farms themselves. Why waste all of that effort, when you could just build a modern nuclear power plant - it almost doesn't matter where you put them, as long as humans can acess them, they generate tons of energy for a very small investment of resources, the waste they create can be recycled and produces 10 to 10,000 times less long-lived wastes (using thorium), using thorium-based fission completely obviates concerns about meltdown/chain reaction, is *much* harder to get weapons grade fission material from the thorium reactor than plutonium from the uranium reactor... and the plant will take up all of a football field. There are other means of power generation, but as of yet, none are mature and/or inexpensive enough to manufacture to be used as primary energy sources to sustain current and future human population - excepting hydroelectric, where it applies.
It uses sewage water as its cold reservoir:
Eewwww!!! Those electrons went into my computer! I have to clean it out now.
I've heard of problem with that alcohol where if it ever happens to wear off due to lack of continuous supply there's this physical hell called reality in which one could find oneself. very scary.
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Power can be run distances just fine. The USA power grid is pathetically old fashioned. The smart grid is a PR thing by GE which adds considerable costs at all levels without much proof in terms of justification, IMHO.
A smartly DESIGNED grid would run insanely high voltage DC lines-- at lower heights (because its not AC height isn't a big issue.) To cut down on arcing situations, I've heard suggestions on pulsing the DC as well.
I couldn't care less about GE's smart grid making my fridge talk to the grid adding more cost to products no longer designed to last.... MORE IMPORTANTLY, the cost for the public to JOIN the distributed power grid should be lowered! I should sell back my power and the storage corp down the road can sell it back to me when there is no sunlight (rate pricing may have 2 change.)
"MODERN NUCLEAR POWER?" I'm highly skeptical. I've heard for decades about next gen stuff 5 years away and never happens. Nuclear is heavily welfare run and I don't think they'll ever get cost effective in my lifetime. France does ok because they are willing to take a LOSS on it (and they are honest about it - by having gov lose it instead of giving private owners false profits from the taxpayers.)
Anything can be 'profitable' if you can externalize enough costs.
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