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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."
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.
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
Some wind turbine designs are far more bird friendly than others. The standard "propeller" based designs tend to be pretty bad. Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (Pac Wind and Helix Wind) can be much more bird/bat friendly.
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
The basic answer is, "a really long time," because the main power source for the wind arises from the sun, rather than the rotational energy of the Earth. Tides leach much more rotational energy, and they've been at work for over 4 billion years.
"Your notation sucks!" -- Serge Lang (1927-2005)
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.
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
In what way is solar not an option in Australia? We have HUGE amounts of unused land with high solar irradiation year round. Large scale solar-thermal with molten salt energy storage plants will provide more energy that you can use 24/7 if scaled up. The technology is here, it is proven, and environmentally responsible.
I thought it was the copious amounts of marijuana that made Amsterdam a compelling destination. LOL!
You must be real fun at parties, explaining the punchline of every joke.
If that gets "insightful" moderation, I just want everybody to know that water is wet. (Or is that informative?)
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! --
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_.
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.
If you're concerned with reality, why not examine it rather than putting up a straw man?
A real solution would build out wind and solar resources over a number of decades, and wind down coal usage as the load gets shifted over.
Nobody is proposing anything remotely like forcibly converting the entire world to wind/solar within one year.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
What will lubricate the turbine bearings?
Polytetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE for short (AKA Teflon®).
how will we paint the machines?
Soy/Rapeseed(canola)/nut-based oil pigment paints
how will be mine the materials that go into these things?
Mine? Use electric power. Though you could also recycle! 10,000 drinks cans = 1 turbine nacelle (Note: Completely wild guess, but you get the idea)
how will we make the fiberglas?
Glass-Reinforced Soy-based plastics? Carbon Fibre?
without oil?
There are already solutions to all your problems.
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/
The original article was suggesting that there is so much wind around that wind power is a viable power generation method, not that this should actually be done. There's problems with every method of power generation - they all remove energy from the environment.
Maybe with all the deforestation going on there's now too much wind? Maybe we need some way of slowing it down.
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.
Not even close. In the US the Rock Mountains alone contain enough potential wind energy to power the 48 continuous states. I think that's what the Picken's Plan calls for. However the Southwest on up the Pacific Coast is also good. To the east from the Appalachians north to the Poconos and Catskill Mountains contains a lot as does offshore from Cape Hatteras to Cape Cod. Unfortunately there are a lot of NAMBYs along the coast who don't want wind farms offshore. Kennedy is one of them fighting to stop wind farms in Cape Cod.
The ecolgical impact of billions of tonnes of raw materials being mined would be astronomical.
You have that with all sources of energy. If you don't want mining then you don't get energy.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
"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.
I'm honestly totally neutral to the idea since I'm a scientist, and I don't really have any personal stake in the answer. However, I have done a lot of reading about many things like this.
People have seen a measurable local temperature increase near the ground due to lower winds -- similar to a city heat island. We are talking about a degree or two C locally, right where the windmill is, not an extended area effect.
Furthermore, the greenhouse gases we put into the atmosphere are theoretically increasing the amount of energy in the atmospheric system (increased hurricanes, etc). It seems rather unlikely on the face of it that removing energy from the atmosphere will cause a problem that more than offsets the problems from greenhouse gases, although it's certainly a valid thing to look into.
In any event, here is a back-of-the-envelope calculation for you. The solar insolation is 1366 W/m^2 at the top of the atmosphere, with ~500-1000 W/m^2 absorbed before it gets to the ground. The cross section of the earth is 127,400,000 km^2, giving a total power absorbed by the atmosphere in excess of 63700 TW. So, producing the total energy consumption of humans on earth (16TW) by energy removed from the atmosphere this way is talking about a 0.025% decrease in the atmospheric energy...
It's not impossible that this would cause problems, but this seems like a situation far less likely to lead to the extinction of mankind (or at least lots of animals that can't adapt fast enough) than global warming, and powering ourselves from wind removes a huge amount of political friction from the world, making a situation that is far less likely to lead to a nuclear holocaust... I think it's a matter of risk analysis... and unless someone did some pretty compelling modeling to demonstrate otherwise, I think I'll take my chances with too many calm summer days.
Actually, it's a very realistic view. Wind power is not a closed system, energy is _constantly_ being put into it by the sun... at a grossly faster rate than we could actually siphon it off to make a significant difference. The total world power demands are, today, somewhere between 15-20 terawatts. Notwithstanding the technological hurdles that would be required to extract it, we could utilize that amount a hundred times over and it would not even be 1% of the total energy available.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
He's probably talking about this. It does actually look really promising. It's technically simple, and flexible enough to be tuned to specific required hydrocarbons.
Unfortunately it suffers from the same problem as all biofuel proposals: an upper energy density limit of 100W/m2 of photosynthesisable sunlight, before tackling the problem of putting energy into the biomass to get your product out. You still need an absurd amount of installed capacity to even begin making a dent in any country's energy requirement with it. That being said, it looks orders of magnitude better than almost any other biofuel proposal.
Reality is the ultimate Rorschach.
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.