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."

Comments

Except

[Nerdfest]

Now people are whining about the noise and environmental impact.

Re:Except

[NewbieProgrammerMan]

Helen Fraser and her husband lived just over 400 metres from a turbine. She says the sound and strobing effect caused her to develop headaches and body aches, and her caused her husband's diabetes to get worse.

Somehow I'm having a hard time imagining how diabetes is influenced by a big windmill. I suppose she could be ranting and raving about the turbine so much that her husband's stress levels affected his diabetes.

Re:Except

[joocemann]

Now people are whining about the noise and environmental impact.

People are generally ignorant, foolish, and short sighted when dealing with things outside their realm of knowledge.

Re:Except

[crmarvin42]

I'd assume that those complaining about the noise live near the towers, thus making it well within their relm of knowledge. As a result I'm having a hard time seeing how your post is relevant.

(I do agree that people are as you say, I just don't see how that's relevant in this case.)

Re:Except

[godrik]

Oh I read a nice study on the impact of high voltage lines on the health of people leaving below. The study showed a correlation between the presence of these lines and strange health diseases.... even when the lines where powered down... Nocebo effect is the worst thing to fight.

Re:Except

[cliffski]

I'd also imagine that if they lived in a less litigious society, the aches and pains would mysteriously vanish.

Re:Except

[Phreakiture]

I would be surprised about diabetes, but not so surprised about epilepsy. The rotating blades would cause a strobing effect when the sun hits them wrong, which could be a problem, maybe.

Then again, I am not a doctor.

Wind Could NOT Provide 100% of World Energy Needs

[Vuojo]

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.

Hmmm interesting but not

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Hmmm interesting but not

[BikeHelmet]

Ugly? Ugly? As opposed to what?

I happen to think skyscrapers are a bigger blight than a few wind turbines. Wind turbines have a certain... elegance, to them.

Re:Hmmm interesting but not

[fgouget]

Right so this is assuming we put these rather large ugly things everywhere that hasn't already been greatly disturbed by people.

Actually what the article is saying is that we could supply for our current electricity needs by installing wind turbines on just 2.5% (100/40) of the usable land and shores. Even if you add a 3x safety factor in case the study did not take into account the average vs. peak power production ratio (due to low wind days, average production is about 30% of the peak wind turbine capacity, so 0.75MW for a 2.5MW turbine), this still leaves 93% of the land/shores untouched. That should be more than enough leeway to preserve those areas worth preserving. Even in the US you could get by with 4% to 17% land/shore use.

Now if you want wind turbines to provide for 100% of our energy consumption, i.e. also replacing oil, nuclear, etc, then yes it's probably trickier. But the fine article does not provide numbers there. That said it would be crazy to restrict ourselves to just wind turbines anyway. That would be like getting into a fight with a hand and a leg tied in your back.

I wonder how long it would take...

[Nursie]

... to have a noticeable impact on the Coriolis force?

Re:I wonder how long it would take...

[Scott Carnahan]

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.

Re:Impact on birds...

[Anonymous Coward]

Paint them black and cover them with photovoltaic cells.
What's that? Birds going 20-30mph should know how to differentiate between a white-painted wind turbine and the nearby decidedly white-looking clouds?

Energy has to come from somewhere...

[dov_0]

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.

Re:Energy has to come from somewhere...

[liquiddark]

For "sustainable" (ie we have a long term supply that we can't imagine exhausting) non-fusion-based energy, we're pulling the energy out of the ecosystem regardless. Solar and wind have more or less the same impacts, albeit at different points in the cycle. Wind impacts are problem more friendly than solar simply because the cross-section is vertical and blocks very little sunlight, whereas solar is largely lateral and therefore can't be implemented where there's a significant amount of vegetation without massive non-energy-consuption-related impacts. If you're familiar with chaotic mathematics, you know it's almost certain that pulling increasing volumes of power out of the planet's energy will have significant impacts simply due to the fact that there are always going to be incalculable tipping points present in any complex system. We can't operate based on fear rather than knowledge. The world really is more complex than we can manage in any real sense. Doesn't mean we don't take care of the obvious things - global warming seems pretty clear-cut - but we can't cut ourselves off completely. Industry and citizen both need to become more efficient if possible, because that will mitigate the threat as effectively as switching sources, but switching sources still counts as a good option.

Re:Impact on birds...

[Anonymous Coward]

And... How much energy will it take to create these wind turbines? To erect them? Maintain them? Ditto for the network connecting them to the people who want to use the electricity. How do they expect the worlds energy demand to increase with increased access to energy? What type of environmental impact would this network have? Would it have a local/global impact on weather patterns? These results definitely sound interesting enough to warrant looking into these questions.

A more Viable option

[exabrial]

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!

tourism

[binarybum]

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?

Re:tourism

[quenda]

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?)

Offshore

[fiannaFailMan]

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.

Re:Offshore

[westlake]

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

I think the keyword here is "vast."

The permanent offshore rig is more or less a terminal.

Impressive in size - but still a single, relatively compact, structure. That is not going to be true of a wind farm.

Re:Wind Could NOT Provide 100% of World Energy Nee

[MichaelSmith]

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.

Re:Math

[gmhowell]

Read it again. Forty times the electrical needs or five times the total energy needs.

Energy storage?

[rcw-home]

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?

The usual comment...

[MWoody]

Let's fill the world with gigantic metal spinning blades suspended hundreds of feet in the air. What could possibly go wrong?

Re:The world has a surplus of solar and wind power

[DaveV1.0]

Please state your source of knowledge on nuclear power and the dangers of same.

I think we're missing the point here...

[pushing-robot]

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.

Re:Wind Could NOT Provide 100% of World Energy Nee

[FishTankX]

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.

News From Slashdot 2029

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Cost? $$ and practicality?

[R2.0]

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.

Not many choices...

[copponex]

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.

Re:Not many choices...

[chuchmo]

Every joule of energy we get on the earth, without tapping geothermal sources, originally comes from the sun.

Not true; you forgot nuclear. Uranium and other heavy elements don't come from the sun. Sure, they came from a star, just not ours.

Re:Not many choices...

[jmv]

Every joule of energy we get on the earth, without tapping geothermal sources, originally comes from the sun.

There's actually another exception: nuclear energy. It comes from supernovas that predate the solar system's formation.

Re:Not many choices...

[rcw-home]

There's actually another exception: nuclear energy. It comes from supernovas that predate the solar system's formation.

One more exception: Tidal power comes from the earth's rotation in the presence of the sun and the moon.

Re:Not many choices...

[sanosuke001]

Except it all comes from gravity. No gravity, no stars or planets. No stars or planets, no .

That's one thing I always had an issue with over geothermal. What happens when we pump out all the heat from the planet? It solidifies and our magnetic field shuts off? (unless you believe that new thing about the ocean currents) I read somewhere that we'd have ~9000 years of geothermal at current world usage levels of energy. No, it wouldn't affect anyone we might ever know and who knows if we would last long enough to hit the limit. However, what if solidification of the core is shorter than that figure? Do we have the right to screw over possible future generations?

The we-might-slow-down-all-the-wind issue is kind of the same but more short-term. The only viable source of energy is solar. It'll run out when the Earth is well beyond uninhabitable. We don't screw over anyone in the process. Well, unless you count mining for panel materials...

overstated or misunderstood wind turbine problems

[Tumbleweed]

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.

An interesting counter-article

[dougsyo]

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

Re:An interesting counter-article

[IdahoEv]

Large industries operate with those kind of numbers all the time. How many power plants have been constructed over the years, and what did it cost?

The worldwide auto industry produces roughly 50 million cars a year. That works out to ~1.6 per second. Scary statements like "OMG We have to make one every EIGHT MINUTES" are peanuts to large-scale industrial production: we make cars roughly 750 times faster than you're saying we'd need to build turbines.

Wind towers every 375 feet for the whole length of the Atlantic Coastline and stacked 38 rows deep

The aesthetic impact of that is the only part of your post that gives me any concern. The rest is perfectly doable.

Re:An interesting counter-article

[Ifni]

I don't necessarily consider this pricey or resource intensive when you realize that what is proposed in nothing short of replacing roughly 100 years of nationwide power generation infrastructure, from scratch, in 40 years. Attempting to do that, with any technology, is what is ridiculous (though nuclear might be up to the challenge, haven't seen the numbers). That and attempting to do it with energy generation limited exclusively to the east coast, introducing insurmountable (or at least unnecessarily difficult to surmount) obstacles to distribution. Oh, and essentially barricading the entire eastern seaboard. So, yeah, it's a bad idea, but not because it costs $10.4 trillion and requires 170,000 people for 40 years.

Re:What about friction?

[_ivy_ivy_]

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.

Not if you fit the turbines within the Senate's chambers...

Re:Impact on birds...

[jfdawes]

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.

Actually its nastier to bats

[Shivetya]

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?

Re:Actually its nastier to bats

[Anonymous Coward]

if we have nearly unlimited electricity what will we do with the heat?

Crank up the air-con. Uses up some of the spare electricity AND cools things down. Problem solved.

Re:Actually its nastier to bats

[Mr_Blank]

Let alone, if we have nearly unlimited electricity what will we do with the heat?

If human machines take energy from the wind, do work, and return waste heat to the atmosphere, then I think the cycle would repeat itself: The warmer air near the concentrations of machines (cities) would cause weather and wind just like the uneven heating of land and water does.

Re:Actually its nastier to bats

[Mt._Honkey]

Let alone, if we have nearly unlimited electricity what will we do with the heat?

The energy in the wind would eventually dissipate as heat anyway (friction with land, ocean waves, etc). This is why the wind doesn't keep getting strong and stronger without limit. Wind power would actually lead to less net heat emission (0) than most other forms of energy production: fossil fuels and nuclear release energy previously stored away as something other than heat, geothermal speeds the heat release from the mantle, and solar decreases the earth's albedo. Hydro is less obvious... it seems heat neutral but it may even increase the albedo by forming new lakes.

To put this all in perspective, the world power consumption is something like 15 TW. The total amount of solar power incident on the earth is about 130,000 TW.

Re:Think of the birds!

[Nerdfest]

The long term plan is to let evolution take its course. Eventually we'll be left with Ninja birds that have learned how to avoid wind turbine blades. These will then be put through further training to teach how to stop crapping on my car right after I've washed it.

Re:Wind Could NOT Provide 100% of World Energy Nee

[MichaelSmith]

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.

Re:Wind Could NOT Provide 100% of World Energy Nee

[BlaKmaJiK_]

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.

Re:Think of the birds!

[guppysap13]

I'm worrying about what they've got against birds. This will wreak absolute havoc on African Swallows migrating with their coconuts.

Re:Cost? $$ and practicality?

[TooMuchToDo]

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.

Re:Wind Could NOT Provide 100% of World Energy Nee

[ickleberry]

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

Re:What about friction?

[iCodemonkey]

Not if you fit the turbines within the Senate's chambers...

damn that's a lot of hot air right there.

But...

[Ralph Spoilsport]

What will lubricate the turbine bearings?

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

Re:But...

[Bemopolis]

You're right — it will be so much easier to build these windmills after we've used up all of the oil.

Re:But...

[Anaerin]

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.

kite

[confused one]

But, once they use up all the wind, how will I fly my kite?

Re:Wind Could NOT Provide 100% of World Energy Nee

[ogl_codemonkey]

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.

The original article

[siddesu]

In case someone's interested, it is available free here:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/06/19/0904101106.abstract

Re:The world has a surplus of solar and wind power

[fenring]

Please state your source of knowledge on nuclear power and the dangers of same.

I'm not an expert, but dont't nuclear power plants have the best output/waste ratio? Environmentaly speaking, isn't it better to have some radioactive waste than build a trilion plastic/metal/whatever wind turbines?

Answer

[TopSpin]

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. :)

Re:All we need now

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Learn the goddam metric system ffs

[Bemopolis]

3300 square kilometers is 1275 square miles, not 2000.

Mod parent up.

[copponex]

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.

Re:All we need now

[HiThere]

I *think* your opinion is based around obsolete designs. I'm not certain. Perhaps you have good reasons for your beliefs that you didn't mention. It's certain that I don't trust the messianic proponents of either wind or solar, but I do notice that the amount of investment in them has been increasing at a substantial rate over the last decade. To me that means that they must be at least close to sufficiently efficient. (I should have been cured of this belief by bio-ethanol for gasoline, but I haven't been, and consider that a statistical aberration cause by a strong political pressure group.)

If I'm wrong, could you please offer me a link to substantiate your opinions? Academic sources are preferred over either governmental or industrial.

Re:overstated or misunderstood wind turbine proble

[paazin]

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.

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.

What if we take away too much wind?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:What if we take away too much wind?

[shentino]

The amount sapped from sheer friction with the ground will make the "turbine tax" negligible.

Not to mention that wind energy is constantly refreshed by solar input.

Re:What if we take away too much wind?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well... wind energy is mostly solar energy, like hydro, and frankly, fossil fuels. Basically, none of it matters anyway. It's all just one stupid big game to control and regulate access to energy since available and exploitable energy is the single requirement for increasing standards of living. Since you can't have any rich people without poor people, do the math. Why do rich people want to regulate easy access to energy? So that poor people will cook their food, clear their house, and fight their wars.

Re:What if we take away too much wind?

[jfdawes]

You have a really valuable argument that people should spend a lot of time worrying about. It's a real shame that most people won't see it, since it's posted anonymously. Wind is essentially created by heat from the sun. Using all these wind turbines will obviously make the sun go out.

That would be a real problem.

Re:What if we take away too much wind?

[Quothz]

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?

I've been raising this point, around here especially, whenever a wind-power topic comes up. Generally, you're right: Not too many folks're interested, and a few are downright hostile to the notion. It'd be nice to see some peer-type-reviewed studies, or at least computer modeling, before we test it head-first. I suspect any such thing would, as usual, be ignored by those it opposes and embraced by those it favors, with no real political impact regardless. But at least I'd go from "vaguely worried" to either "somewhat relieved" or "a crank with citations".

Re:What if we take away too much wind?

[jfdawes]

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.

Re:What if we take away too much wind?

[Jurily]

Ocean water a few degrees warmer in select areas destroys coastal ecosystems, what will the wind averaging a few MPH less do?

For starters, there are a lot of plants that rely on the wind to distribute their reproduction material, not to mention the passats are responsible for the major oceanic currents which have a significant role in the climate of coastal areas around the world.

I don't think we can gather enough processing power in my lifetime to do a reasonable simulation on a system that complex.

Re:What if we take away too much wind?

[adf92343414]

There's problems with every method of power generation - they all remove energy from the environment.

And then they put energy (in the form of heat) back into the environment. The only exception is the energy that results in light and other electromagnetic energy, which of course can escape the earth.

Re:What if we take away too much wind?

[c6gunner]

There's problems with every method of power generation - they all remove energy from the environment.

Actually, we have this snazzy new method ... it's called nuclear power! Well some people prefer to call it atomic power, or nukeular power, but they're just silly. Anyway, I'm not sure about all the ins and outs of it, but supposedly some science geek with a really messed-up haircut managed to figure out how to turn matter into energy! Weird, I know, but they even say they might be able to make bombs out of it. Imagine that: a power generating method which not only doesn't remove energy from the environment, but adds energy into it! It's mind-boggling ...

Re:What if we take away too much wind?

[prisoner-of-enigma]

His question demands an answer.

No, you deserve to be shouted down, you heretic! How dare you bring things like logic and physics into a debate that should be ruled by emotion and general lack of understanding of how the earth's climate works! Don't you realize that thousands -- maybe hundreds of thousands -- of scientists, authors, and pundits could die or be seriously financially inconvenienced should the public ever glom onto the fact that there is no consensus amongst scientists on what's going on with our climate? And unicorns! Won't somebody think of the uuuunnniicoooorrrnnns??? You heartless bastard! You want unicorns to die, don't you?

Re:What if we take away too much wind?

[Jurily]

Oh wow, we can spot something as tiny as a hurricane!

Here's a question for you to simulate with that: if we lower the average wind speed by 3 MPH across the globe, how does that affect the reproductive capabilities of the oak tree? How about other trees, like the maples, which use the wind to get their seed as far away as possible? Other plants which don't use bees?

Simulations are fun, but don't ever think you thought of everything.

Re:What if we take away too much wind?

[Gibbs-Duhem]

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.

Re:What if we take away too much wind?

[mark-t]

Thinking that taking energy from wind would change nothing is ignorant, blind and very stupid

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.

Re:Wind Could NOT Provide 100% of World Energy Nee

[WillAffleckUW]

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.

Re:overstated or misunderstood wind turbine proble

[Tumbleweed]

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_.

Re:What about friction?

[frieko]

I can't imagine a wind farm ever approaching the drag coefficient of a forest.

Re:All we need now

[Jeremi]

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.

Re:Cost? $$ and practicality?

[0123456]

"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.

What are "needs" ?

[DoofusOfDeath]

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.

Re:What are "needs" ?

[mr exploiter]

Are the mods on crack? How is this +4? I think it's pretty clear that "need" is based on how much energy we are using today. And we may no be that flexible about the energy that we use. Transportation and heating are were most of the energy is used and they are not much elastic. Electricity use would have been to be reduced drastically to make an important difference and at that point civil unrest could start a dangerous downward spiral. In a few decades there won't be so much fossil fuels to fall back for easy energy to maintain a large population. The only way to prevent a catastrophic energy shortage is to have varied and redundant energy sources ahead of that happening.

Re:What are "needs" ?

[xtracto]

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.

You can get an idea of yours here

Re:overstated or misunderstood wind turbine proble

[Sir_Lewk]

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...

Geothermal is better

[cenc]

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)?

Re:Geothermal is better

[aXis100]

Geothermal is far friendlier than fossil fuels or nuclear, but it does have alot of downsides - Complex machinery and processes, high water usage, high maintenance on the wells. All of those have a pollution aspect to them. Plus it's still releasing extra heat to the environment.

Re:Impact on birds...

[falconwolf]

...would be bloody terminal.

Actually buildings and cats kill many more birds than wind turbines do. The wind genies that killed a lot of birds are the old ones that spun fast, spun at high rpms. Modern genies spin slow and are safer.

Falcon

Re:The world has a surplus of solar and wind power

[WillAffleckUW]

I am basing this on the university-provided scientific publications from my ScienceDirect feed of peer-reviewed papers on Energy.

These come from numerous scientific journals - published over the last two years, including ones which are not yet in print, but still in draft and review stages.

The primary advantage the French have is that they have a basic standardized fission reactor design - this is also true of the safer methods used in the Canadian fission power plants - but is not true of the US power plants, which have no truly standardized designs, and are frequently designed to have specific design byproducts of weapons and medical grade plutonium and other materials that are lacking in the Canadian designs, for example.

Current scientific papers - not those from decades ago.

(caveat - until recently we had a reactor here on the campus at the UW)

Re:Cost? $$ and practicality?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:overstated or misunderstood wind turbine proble

[mh1997]

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.

You mean like Senator Ted Kennedy (www.boston.com):

...But, it turns out, Kennedy's antipathy to furtive rules changes and backroom power plays stops at the water's edge -- specifically, the waters of Nantucket Sound, which separates Cape Cod (where the Kennedy family has an oceanfront compound in Hyannis Port) from the islands of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. A shoal in the center of Nantucket Sound is where Cape Wind Associates hopes to build the nation's first offshore wind farm -- an array of 130 wind turbines capable of generating enough electricity to meet 75 percent of the Cape and Islands' energy needs, without burning any oil or emitting any pollution. The turbines would be miles from any coastal property, barely visible on the horizon. In fact, Cape Wind says they would be farther away from the nearest home than any other electricity generation project in Massachusetts.

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/

Re:overstated or misunderstood wind turbine proble

[Tumbleweed]

> 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.

Re:Wind Could NOT Provide 100% of World Energy Nee

[iggymanz]

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.

Re:What about other uses?

[Tumbleweed]

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?

Many farmers are making a _killing_ off of leasing their land for wind turbines. Some are only able to keep their farms going _because_ of the wind turbine land leases. So yeah, it works pretty well, actually. :)

Re:All we need now

[Anonymous Coward]

Australia does not depend wholly on coal, you know. In fact, wind power generation is increasing by a large amount.

How do I know this? My brother works at the wind farm on the south coast of south-eastern South Australia (it's near a place called Millicent). He is currently working extremely long hours constructing yet another batch of turbines. This is the second batch he's worked on in only a few years, and both batches are huge (we're talking dozens of turbines, not just a handful). So, it's not some feel-good experiment, it's a full-fledged economically-viable business.

As for solar energy, Australia has so much sunlight we'd have to be crazy not to make use of it. I know there are problems with transmission if you put a big solar plant out in the middle of nowhere, but that's not what I'm talking about. Think about all of the roofs in all of the cities - not just residential, either. How much solar energy is being wasted just bouncing off of the corrugated iron roofs of warehouses and factories? Put solar collectors on them, and they'd probably generate more power than they'd use - at least during the day, and most factories shut down at night.

Solar collectors may only run during the day, and may lose efficiency during cloudy days, but consider this - when is the single biggest draw time? Summer, during the day, when all those air conditioners are running. This also happens to be when the skies are clearest and the solar radiation received at its highest - therefore when the solar collectors would be at their most efficient.

Yes, we may not be able to just ban coal - yet. But we can easily reduce the dependence on it if we look outside the box, and don't just bag alternatives out of hand.

ROEI, Return on Energy Invested

[falconwolf]

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

Re:ROEI, Return on Energy Invested

[Anonymous Coward]

So, I suppose mining billions of gallons of oil and coal isn't raping the earth? Not to mention the mining equipment, traveling/shipping equipment, pipelines, refinement factories, giant coal furnaces, etc....

Re:ROEI, Return on Energy Invested

[falconwolf]

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

Re:ROEI, Return on Energy Invested

[wisty]

Keep in mind, there is plenty of scope to reduce demand as well (better insulation, fluro bulbs, etc).

Plus, I don't think that gas and coal is going to go away too soon. New investement might be cut (something like 50% of the cost of coal power is the infrastructure, and so the risk of higher taxes makes it a poor investement), but that doesn't mean that existing generators will be shut off in the next 10 years.

It's likely that the old generators will be gradually EOLed, and the replacements will be greener (and more sustainable) than fossil.

Re:ROEI, Return on Energy Invested

[Ex-MislTech]

Peak oil has already been reached, peak gas and coal is a ways off,
but the issue will arrive someday.

The ocean is acting like a massive CO2 sink and large sections
of the sea are seeing huge die offs of coral and that is the habitat
for the fish.

http://www.supereco.com/news/2009/03/11/coral-dying-a-fifth-already-gone/

So we can start to move towards something else or the Earth is going
to make some adjustments in our food supply we might not find real
pleasant.

You remove all saltwater fish from the world and the food problem we
have now is going to look like small potatoes.

Re:ROEI, Return on Energy Invested

[falconwolf]

Keep in mind, there is plenty of scope to reduce demand as well (better insulation, fluro bulbs, etc).

Yea, I've said that before. With proper insulation a candle should be enough to heat a room, if a body isn't. And with good ventilation there shouldn't be much need for cooling. CFLs, which I have in all of my light fixtures but and that one I rarely use, only use 1/3 to 1/4 the energy incandescent lights do. However LEDs use only 10%. Unfortunately they're expensive and currently they're only good for spot lighting.

Falcon

Re:ROEI, Return on Energy Invested

[Eivind]

A single candle is a little optimistic, but sure it's realistic to heat homes in all but the most extreme of climates using nothing more than body-heat plus the waste-heat from machinery we use for other purposes (such as computers, televisions, fridges, lights and dishwashers)

A one-family detatched house (apartment-blocks need less due to less external walls) built to standard norwegian building-code, requires 100Kwh/year pro square meter, for an entire year. That works out to an average capacity of 23W if you assume that heating is only needed for half the year. But even a 15% increase in building-costs is enough to build a house that requires only about 30Kwh/year rather than 100, and that means you're down to 7W/m^2

That means a family-home with 140 square meters need aproximately 1KW to stay warm. Human body-heat is around 100W, so a family of 3-4 will provide 300-400W of body-heat. Add in the fridge, a tv and a dishwasher, and the house stays warm with more or less zero active heating.

Most such houses still have a single space-heater somewhere central, for use on the 5 coldest days in the year, and for making the house quickly comfortable after say a 2-week christmas-vacation.

Re:ROEI, Return on Energy Invested

[Kierthos]

Congratulations, you're setting a new standard for dense. Not only did you not read the article, you didn't even read the Slashdot summary.

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."

Over 40 times the electrical consumption, and over five times the global use of total energy needs. I'm repeating that part because it's important.

That alone says we'd only have to put up one-fortieth of "covering the entire globe in massive obelisks" to meet all of the current electrical consumption, and it's not even the entire globe because of the areas removed based on the criteria they set. And let's face it, even that won't happen, because of the whole "not in my backyard" syndrome.

Re:ROEI, Return on Energy Invested

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

They also ignore the unknown effects. What's being proposed is actually "destroying" 2.5% of all global wind (or 20% if oil is to be replaced too).

And what about all the animals dependant on all sorts of wind ? All the plants ? Obviously 2.5% reduction in energy reduces wind speeds by nearly a factor 1.5. That's great but it means plant seedlings will have less range. Much less range. That will mean the death of all plant life on islands that are too far offshore, and become out of range. Birds will not be able to fly as high, or as fast. What will the impact be on those birds ? What about the impact on their prey ? (One thing that has happened in the past, for example, is that rats and other virmin tunnelled below dams when their predators disappeared, who subsequently breached).

Furthermore, the waves on the ocean will drop. Wave heights on beaches will drop along with the reduction in wind power available (unlike eb and flood, the actual waves are created mostly by winds). Wave power will lose potential.

What will all the weather phenomena that are created by winds ? What, exactly, happens if El Nino stops ? The Mistral ? All of these will be affected, and only God knows how. Those phenomena are involved in massive climatic events like the pacific oscillation. If one of those even slightly falters for merely a few months, it will make Al Gore's personal fantasies of global warming impact look utterly insignificant.

Needless to say, those are only global effects. In some locations, effects will be hugely magnified due to all sorts of unforeseen and unknown dependencies that nature will turn out to have.

I personally fear it will turn out that using a significant amount of wind power will make people compare coal mining to the manna of the old testament : a gift from God. (the same goes, obviously, for solar power : if humans are using 0.000000000001% like today, great, no impact. But will the same be true if we're using 10% ? I doubt it).

Face it people : the only thing that can make cities self-sufficient is nuclear power. And, pray tell, why exactly do you think all oil-producing nations are building nuclear power plants in the middle of sun-drowned deserts, with winds that every now and then literally blow small villages away, sometimes straight into the sea ? We don't have much time to build a number of extra nuclear power plants in the US to stave off an electricity and oil shortage.

Re:ROEI, Return on Energy Invested

[JimFive]

They also ignore the unknown effects.

Yes, they do.

What's being proposed is actually "destroying" 2.5% of all global wind (or 20% if oil is to be replaced too).

No, when wind hits the windmill it doesn't stop, it slows down. So we're talking about reducing by some small amount the wind energy in 20% of the wind in a narrow band near the surface of the planet. How high do you think windmills are?

Birds will not be able to fly as high, or as fast.

What?!?!? We're not destroying the air we're reducing the wind. Altitude is limited by air density not wind speed. If a migratory bird is flying high enough to take advantage of wind speeds they are probably above the height of the windmills.

This isn't to say that there wouldn't be unforeseen effects, I suspect there would be. But, I think the extremism in your rhetoric overshadows that point with absurdity.
--
JimFive

Re:ROEI, Return on Energy Invested

[triffid_98]

So, I suppose mining billions of gallons of oil and coal isn't raping the earth? Not to mention the mining equipment, traveling/shipping equipment, pipelines, refinement factories, giant coal furnaces, etc....

No, she was clearly asking for it. I mean, she had part of her oil and coal deposits glistening out of her top. Were we supposed to just ignore that kind of signal?

Wind turbines are nice and all, but on a local scale you cannot depend on the wind, just like you cannot depend on solar, at least until you have some sort of national wind infrastructure ($$$).

Re:ROEI, Return on Energy Invested

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Turbulence sinks. You probably want a reference to this so I think it's in the FAR/AIM, or possibly in the Private Pilot's Training Manual. But it shouldn't be that hard to verify that slow moving air has a higher density than fast moving air (Bernoulli effect [wikipedia.org]) and therefore is heavier and will sink.

You know what ? We math graduates think we have it soooo good. After all every nutcase only bothers the physicists with their ideas for perpetual motion machines.

Guess I'll have to drop my illusions.

Hello ? When you take energy OUT of a system LESS remains (even less total remains, ie. putting that energy back in STILL results in less remaining energy). Not more. Not equal amounts. LESS.

Wind energy does not get magically replaced. The wind does not keep moving no matter how much energy you take out of it. It does not.

Do you seriously expect to argue on this point ? Go to the Democrat national convention, don't try to convince anyone who's ever mastered high school physics.

And yes this means that long-term there is no such thing as renewable energy.

Re:ROEI, Return on Energy Invested

[Rabbitbunny]

And with good ventilation there shouldn't be much need for cooling.

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.

Re:overstated or misunderstood wind turbine proble

[Tumbleweed]

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.

NIMBYs

[falconwolf]

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

Re:Impact on birds...

[Darinbob]

Paint them black and cover them with photovoltaic cells.

I see a red windmill and I want it painted black
No birds fly anymore I want them to turn black
I see the vanes turn round dressed in voltaic cells
I have to turn on lights until the darkness goes

Re:Impact on birds...

[blind biker]

You have a wrong website for Pacwind: try pacwind.NET

Wind Intermittancy Debunked

[StCredZero]

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.)

Re:Impact on birds...

[mrmeval]

How much would it cost in energy and materials to build the global wind farm? Compare that to nuclear.

We are talking about SURFACE wind here.

[TapeCutter]

"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.

Re:Wind Could NOT Provide 100% of World Energy Nee

[shermo]

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)

Re:What about other uses?

[falconwolf]

Besides transmission issues, what about land use? I mean, what will we eat if all our agricultural land is covered by wind turbines?

Actually wind turbines add another source of income to farmers. They don't take up much space, and depending on how it's structured, farmers get royalties on the energy produced. Here's a report on wind turbines in Minnesota corn fields, "Innovation in the fields". The royalties come to more than the loss of income from farming. There are also plenty of places to cite wind farms where there is little activity. The Rocky Mountains and the Southwest for instance. To the east offshore from Cape Cod to Cape Hatteras is good. Also in the east from the Appalachians up into the Catskills and Poconos Mountains there are good places.

Falcon

This is silly

[greg_barton]

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

Re:All we need now

[tinkerghost]

Rooftop solar collection actually has 2 benefits in the summer - first is the obvious generation of electricity to run the AC/Lights/whatever. The second and often unobserved effect is to actually reduce the solar heating of the building involved. Proper ventilation combined with solar collection can reduce thermal heating by up to 30% (roof to wall ratios are important here) - ask how many building managers wouldn't want to see their cooling bills go down by that?

Re:Cost? $$ and practicality?

[shermo]

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.

HVDC

[falconwolf]

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

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Aesthetics...

[LunarEffect]

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.

Re:Diminishing returns

[kjllmn]

Global warming means there is too much energy in the atmosphere. Removing some is not bad.

Is that supposed to be a joke?

[TapeCutter]

"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.

Re:Is that supposed to be a joke?

[mr exploiter]

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.

Because you are too naive. There are lots of people that have some interest in the status quo and they can post in slashdot too. I'd even say slashdot could be infiltrated. It's a good spot to seed false ideas as it has a kind of "collective mind" that amplifies the ideas, due to the moderation system.
And the people that I'm talking about can be from rich investors in the oil sector to average joe that works for shell as a sysadmin and is afraid he's not getting his yearly 2% raise.

Re:Is that supposed to be a joke?

[Sj0]

Let me tell you something about common sense.

Many years ago, I weighed 400lbs. I managed to very quickly get my weight down to 160lbs, and I've kept it around 200lbs for years afterwards.

The first step in the process was NOT buying a bunch of stuff with "diet" slapped next to the name. The first step in the process was figuring out what was going on in my body, figuring out how weight loss and gain happened, figuring out energy inputs and outputs, and building a plan that would get the results I wanted.

Along the way, lots of people tried to give me "common sense" that was misguided or just plain wrong. People would give me muffins, nuts, orange juice, and other high calorie foods that had no place in my plan. Before I'd even hit my safe BMI range, people would beg me to stop, saying I'd lost too much weight and I was going to kill myself (Keep in mind my final weight was exactly in my BMI range).

That's what all this renewable stuff is. It's 'diet energy'. It's almost completely meaningless without looking at the whole picture, like I did when I was dieting.

If you don't think that putting billions of wind turbines anywhere we can stick one will have a bigger ecological impact than coal mining, you're not thinking hard enough, and all the mods modding me down for saying this simple and reasonable truth need to take a long look in the mirror.

Re:Is that supposed to be a joke?

[Sj0]

Who is brainwashed here?

Here in the north, there are massive protests over hydroelectric dams.

Hydroelectric dams.

One of the single most practical and environmentally-safe forms of electricty in existence, and we're hearing protests over a few dams.

Where I live, whenever someone turns on a light, it's hydroelectricity that powers the bulb. Not coal, not oil, not natural gas. Water rushing through a turbine. There are huge protests. It's incredibly controversial.

True environmentalism isn't some simple quick fix. You can't just start sucking up diet energy and hope that'll make the problem go away. You need to realise that we live in a global ecosystem that's impossible to live in without changing it, and we need to figure out the best way to move towards a truly sustainable existence. This existence will NOT be some quick fix that'll let a few companies get rich quick. If you want to fuck the environent up beyond recognition, go ahead and buy into every single 'get green quick' scheme you can find.

Of course, I'm one of the engineers you'll need to rely on to actually get these schemes to work. Every day I work at increasing energy efficiency, so unlike the brainwashed proles on both sides of the debate, I have some idea of what's involved.

Cars Kill more birds

[wooferhound]

Cars and other motor vehicle traffic kill more birds than wind turbines ever will,
but nobody is suggesting that we stop building cars . . .

It's really about comparative cost, though.

[falconwolf]

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.

Re:It's really about comparative cost, though.

[RegularFry]

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.

Re:40 times what we currently use? So what?

[benjamindees]

It's just you. Given that we're talking renewable energy that's doable now with existing technology, that's hugely impressive. I'm not sure you realize exactly how dependent we are upon the energy from fossil fuels.

Barring cost-effective fusion, global power consumption will simply not be able to continue rising like it has. If we ever get to the point that everyone on Earth has half the energy usage of an American today, we will be lucky.

Re:Impact on birds...

[Joce640k]

Doesn't matter. You can erect five turbines and use the energy output from them to make a hundred more. With those hundred turbines you can make ten thousand. It's called a windfarm because that's where you breed new turbines.

Environment

[gerardrj]

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.

Re:penalize nuclear?

[falconwolf]

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?

I wouldn't penalize nuclear power but I would stop giving them massive subsidies. Nuclear Power is "Hooked on Subsidies". Even in China, France, India, and Russia. "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

Re:Wind Could NOT Provide 100% of World Energy Nee

[bakes]

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.

Re:penalize nuclear?

[weicco]

I wouldn't penalize nuclear power but I would stop giving them massive subsidies. Nuclear Power is "Hooked on Subsidies".

If I'm not totally in wrong here, in Finland nuclear power isn't subsidied at all. Nuclear get some investment guarantees from government but I haven't heard that money has ever changed hands.

Wind power on the other hand screaming for subsidies. Local power companies don't even build wind generators unless government guarantees them. And what's worse they are demanding guarantees that they can sell wind power totally overpriced. I'm not sure how this goes but I think that if power company sells wind power with 10 amount of money, buyer pays 4 amout of money and government (us, the taxpayers) pays 6 amount of money. And of course we pay the actual power bill also so we end up paying 6+X amount of money.

Hard to explain this in English when I don't even totally understand it in Finnish but I hope you get the point...

So what I would like... Cheap, proven, clean, unsubsidied, nuclear energy thank you. We could even open up one or two uranium mines here in Finland. There's some uranium in the ground (which is actually poisoning our wells and room air in eastern part of Finland).

+1 for Efficiency

[turing_m]

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.

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.

Re:Impact on birds...

[somersault]

Terminal* as in the end of the line (in this case, death).

*From the latin Terminae, meaning "cyborg sent from the future to destroy the leader of the resistance before he is ever born"

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Re:Wind Could NOT Provide 100% of World Energy Nee

[jabuzz]

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.

Re:Cost? $$ and practicality?

[benjamindees]

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.

Re:is nuclear power clean?

[rjstanford]

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.

Re:overstated or misunderstood wind turbine proble

[Tumbleweed]

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.

CNN article

[wfeick]

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

Re:overstated or misunderstood wind turbine proble

[bussdriver]

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...

plastics

[falconwolf]

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

energy

[falconwolf]

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