Slashdot Mirror
Wind Could Provide 100% of World Energy Needs
Damien1972 sends in a report on a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, which finds that wind power could provide for the entire world's current and future energy needs. "To estimate the earth's capacity for wind power, the researchers first sectioned the globe into areas of approximately 3,300 square kilometers (2,050 square miles) and surveyed local wind speeds every six hours. They imagined 2.5 megawatt turbines crisscrossing the terrestrial globe, excluding 'areas classified as forested, areas occupied by permanent snow or ice, areas covered by water, and areas identified as either developed or urban,' according to the paper. They also included the possibility of 3.6 megawatt offshore wind turbines, but restricted them to 50 nautical miles off the coast and to oceans depths less than 200 meters. Using [these] criteria the researchers found that wind energy could not only supply all of the world's energy requirements, but it could provide over forty times the world's current electrical consumption and over five times the global use of total energy needs."
Now people are whining about the noise and environmental impact.
It just couldn't simply because there isn't wind all the time and we don't have any realistic way to store energy for calm days. Wind could be useful as a part of the energy production but with current technology there is no way wind could be used as the only energy source.
Right so this is assuming we put these rather large ugly things everywhere that hasn't already been greatly disturbed by people. I know they are excluding forests. but just because you don't have to cut down a tree doesn't mean it isn't a spot worth preserving.
Personaly I think that we really ought to build more nuclear power plants. Yes there is waste but overall it is fairly clean and cheap and would do more for preserving the environment and supplying electricity than this would.
... to have a noticeable impact on the Coriolis force?
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?
The thing that always seems to concern me is this: is it possible for the large amount of energy pulled from the winds to change weather patterns even slightly? I know it sounds stupid, but could even a very slight change over the planet potentially have an impact? Perhaps it is safest that we diversify our energy production. So much wind, solar, atomic etc.
sudo mount --milk --sugar
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.
Nulcear YES Wind YES Oil YES Solar YES Coal YES Natural Gas YES Tidal YES There is no one size fits all people! You 'open minded' people need to open your minds to the real problems and solutions we already have available!
And Holland's tourism industry would crash, I mean without the windmills, why would you want to go to the Netherlands... I mean isn't that what draws all those young folks to Amsterdam these days?
ôó
I've often thought that if it's economically viable to go to the trouble of all that engineering for offshore oil exploration, extraction and processing, surely it's viable to build vast offshore wind farms where there's plenty of room, plenty of wind, and no neighbours to object.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
It just couldn't simply because there isn't wind all the time and we don't have any realistic way to store energy for calm days. Wind could be useful as a part of the energy production but with current technology there is no way wind could be used as the only energy source.
Personally I use copper wire to move electrons from place to place. My state runs partly on hydro electricity from Tasmania, 200km to the south across a substantial body of water. Apparently the submarine cable which does the job only carries electrons in one direction. The return path is through the water, which comes built in with charge carriers.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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?
Let's fill the world with gigantic metal spinning blades suspended hundreds of feet in the air. What could possibly go wrong?
From TFA: "despite these limitations, it is clear that wind power could make a significant contribution to the demand for electricity"
I don't think they're saying that the would should be entirely wind-powered. They're pointing out that there's so much untapped wind power that we should stop thinking about wind power as only a minor source of energy and invest more toward developing the resource.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
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.
Scientists confirmed today that Global Slowing is real. After years of speculation, it's now been confirmed that our harnessing of wind power for our energy needs is slowing the Earth down, and within a matter of decades, the Earth will come to a complete stop. Scientists are currently unsure whether this Global Slowing can be reversed, but some have proposed using fossil fuels to create artificial wind to help the Earth keep moving.
Sure, wind could do it. So could solar, if we spot a shitload of solar cells all over the world cover a decent portion of it.
But is it practical? It seems like people are perfectly fine dismissing "clean" coal (aka carbon sequestration) as a pipe dream, technology doesn't exist, etc., and then turning around and throwing scheme's like these out there as perfectly reasonable.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Every joule of energy we get on the earth, without tapping geothermal sources, originally comes from the sun. The only question is which source is the most economically (from an energy standpoint) obtainable and environmentally sustainable.
Wind and sun to electric current seem to be the best bets, since they don't require any intermediate steps like biomass or super old biomass, also known as oil. Solar-thermal molten salt storage for overnight and cloudy weather with natural gas backups will probably be the winner for much of our electricity needs. Colder climates will rely on wind and geothermal differential generators.
The important thing is that we invest now in technologies that allow high efficiency transfers of electricity, because we're going to need to balance the load across the country. This, in combination with building efficiency improvements and abandoning the urban sprawl model, should have us well on our way to sustainability.
Most people whining about noise and environmental impact are talking about older designs, or do not realize there is a net improvement in environmental impact over the alternatives. The alternative to green power is not 'no power', but is dirty power. The NIMBY crowd would be more than happy to Luddite civilization into the stone age, and then complain about the lack of affordable power. Californians are the worst at this -- in the US, anyway.
Newer wind turbines have the blades further away from the supporting tower, which reduces the noise considerably. The bird and bat deaths can be substantially mitigated by making sure your turbines are out of known migration paths, and by making the blades rotate slower. The number of bird & bat deaths that would result from a polluted environment by non-green power is a much more serious problem. Proper wind turbine technology & placement is a FAR lesser evil here, IMO.
This report is ... interesting. Placing that many turbines in very remote areas is going to be ridiculously expensive to run transmission lines to, and deal with the effects of intermittent addition of energy to the grid. An electrical grid is a temperamental mistress at the best of times. The technology CAN be had, but it's not as simple as just hooking up a turbine to a grid without some real smarts in between. Also, having trained people available to do regular maintenance on such extremely remote sites (and getting replacement parts there) is not gonna be cheap.
Still, better that that an unlivable planet. But we need to take a serious look at MODERN nuclear power, especially with re-using the waste, gas-cooled pebble bed designs, Thorium designs, etc. Trying to make ONE solution fix the problem is completely idiotic.
I was looking for a quote about "open mouth, change feet" - completely unrelated to this topic - just a few moments ago, and ran across this post that really fits:
http://papundits.wordpress.com/2009/04/11/salazars-wind-power-first-open-mouth-then-change-feet/
The summary of the numbers in that article (replacing US coal-burning plants with offshore east coast windmills):
So, we have, just for the towers nacelles and fans:
- A workforce of 170,000 people, just to work at the plants to construct them.
- 120 huge factories to construct.
- Wind towers every 375 feet for the whole length of the Atlantic Coastline and stacked 38 rows deep.
- Construct those towers, nacelles and fans at the rate of one every 8 minutes for 40 years, in the Atlantic Ocean.
- $10.4 Trillion in today's dollars (conservatively).
It gets more ludicrous than that, when you consider continental shelf, keeping shipping lanes open, etc.
Admitted, adding on-shore windmills would be more doable, but still - it is quite pricey and impractical.
Doug
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...
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.
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.
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
Building a wind turbine is proven, and cost effective. "Clean coal" or as we call it in real life, bullshit, has yet to be proven as either successful or economically viable. The faster we drive a stake through coal's heart, the better.
Pumped storage, nanotech ultracapacitors, flywheels, fuel cells even will store energy for a calm day. If you have a fairly efficient electricity grid you won't even need to store that much because the chances are it will be windy in some place within reach.
On calm days the sun usually shines so photo voltaic cells come into play. Don't like those? just use solar concentrators or stirling engine-based solar panels, wave energy, put alternators into the stationary bikes at the local gym.
Of course the amount of energy required is greatly exaggerated these days because there are a lot of poorly insulated houses and an awful lot of people using incandescent lighting and 'wall warts' (and also wall marts) powering stand-by equipment are ubiquitous. It would be great if everyone had a 12v transformer providing power to 12v sockets around the house and maybe an ultracap that would store some energy so the transformer wouldn't be going all the time.
I'd go off the grid if i could. I kind of feel people have become overly dependent on electricity - one day I was in a shopping mall in London and a girl actually started screaming the second the power went out. I have a generator and a 600w invertor here but the last time the power went I didn't even bother using them
Not if you fit the turbines within the Senate's chambers...
damn that's a lot of hot air right there.
Deja Moo: The feeling you've heard this bullsh*t before.
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.
3300 square kilometers is 1275 square miles, not 2000.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
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.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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.
You're right — it will be so much easier to build these windmills after we've used up all of the oil.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
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?
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_.
I can't imagine a wind farm ever approaching the drag coefficient of a forest.
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.
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 know, that statement works great in the context of nuclear power too...
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Geothermal does not have the pollution problem, does not have visual problem, the problem of messing with birds or whatever, and the latest technology allows them to drill geothermal wells in very low temperatures or dry wells by pumping water in to the earth, rather than needing to find a particular geothermal friendly area. Even if just limited to areas naturally conducive to geothermal, there is likly just as many areas in the World where geothermal can be built (if you include all the places you can not build wind turbines like the middle of a city). Best of all, it is 24 hours, always on energy using the same technology we already use for our oil based society (drills, turbines, etc). It is "shovel ready" and producing energy right now all over the World.
Can anyone give me something that beats all of that in terms of energy to cost (including environmental)?
Living in Chile
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/
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.
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. :)
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.
How much energy will it take to create these wind turbines?
The last ROEI, Return on Energy Invested or the length of tyme wind genies need to run to produce as much energy as the energy needed to make the genies, was something like 5 years. Given that there are still Jacobs wind turbines still running after 50 years after the last ones were made, that's a pretty good ROEI.
Ditto for the network connecting them to the people who want to use the electricity.
That's the biggest problem to suppling enough electricity everywhere, almost no matter the source of energy. MIT's "Tech Review" published the article "Lifeline for Renewable Power" going over this. Basically HVDC, High-voltage direct current, transmission lines would have to be strung up to distribute electricity from where it's produced to where it's used. It would also require a smart grid. Even without HVDC lines strung up, the power outages or blackouts in the Northeastern US/South Eastern Canada a few years ago showed the power grids need to be upgraded.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
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
"Like a lot of grand plans we do "in the name of science" nobody yet knows what throwing that many turbines up would do ecosystems around the world. It's a lot of energy to be robbing from systems that depend on that energy."
Most of the wind energy in the atmosphere is in the bottom 5,000m, the largest wind turbines are only 100m tall (about as tall as the largest trees which are much more effective at damping SURFACE winds), "robbing" the energy of the wind is the least of our problems. As for birds, modern prop turbines move slowly and kill fewer birds than the same number of high rise buildings with mirrored windows.
"Seriously", don't pretend you care about the environment by posting anti-science NIMBY twaddle, read some real science.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"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.
There may be enough wind in the world to supply our need 40 times over, but is the cost of tapping the energy source competitive with the cost of coal, gas, or nuclear power?
All of this get subsidies, as well as pass costs to others. Coal slurry spills happen all too frequently. Mountain top removal contaminates a lot of land. As does uranium mining. Without government subsidies nuclear power isn't even profitable. Though natural gas emits a lot less CO2 than coal when burned it releases a lot more methane, which is more than 20 tymes as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2. Then it needs pipelines to deliver it.
We know that there are all sorts of natural energy sources around us, but its the financial cost that keeps us from recovering it.
More like it's politics. If financial costs were that important there would be no nuclear power. As I said before even coal gets subsidies. "Chevron agrees to lobby with Sierra Club to end coal subsidies". In "My Climate Bill 'Has Huge Subsidies For Clean Coal! Huge!' Rep Edward Markey goes over some of the subsidies different energy sources get.
Should there be a Law?
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.
No sig today...
Exactly. Especially seeing as how most of our so-called "energy needs" can be eliminated using existing technology. Using 3 tonnes of vehicle with the drag coefficient of a barn door to transport one person to the grocery store is not a need. Heating your non-insulated house so that you can walk around in shorts and a t-shirt in winter is not a need.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
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"
which is totally what she said
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.
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.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
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...
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