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Wind Could Provide 100% of World Energy Needs
Damien1972 sends in a report on a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, which finds that wind power could provide for the entire world's current and future energy needs. "To estimate the earth's capacity for wind power, the researchers first sectioned the globe into areas of approximately 3,300 square kilometers (2,050 square miles) and surveyed local wind speeds every six hours. They imagined 2.5 megawatt turbines crisscrossing the terrestrial globe, excluding 'areas classified as forested, areas occupied by permanent snow or ice, areas covered by water, and areas identified as either developed or urban,' according to the paper. They also included the possibility of 3.6 megawatt offshore wind turbines, but restricted them to 50 nautical miles off the coast and to oceans depths less than 200 meters. Using [these] criteria the researchers found that wind energy could not only supply all of the world's energy requirements, but it could provide over forty times the world's current electrical consumption and over five times the global use of total energy needs."
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?
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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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
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.
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?)
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.
I can't imagine a wind farm ever approaching the drag coefficient of a forest.
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.
What will lubricate the turbine bearings?
Polytetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE for short (AKA Teflon®).
how will we paint the machines?
Soy/Rapeseed(canola)/nut-based oil pigment paints
how will be mine the materials that go into these things?
Mine? Use electric power. Though you could also recycle! 10,000 drinks cans = 1 turbine nacelle (Note: Completely wild guess, but you get the idea)
how will we make the fiberglas?
Glass-Reinforced Soy-based plastics? Carbon Fibre?
without oil?
There are already solutions to all your problems.
You 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.
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
"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.