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A Server Farm Powered By a Wind Farm
1sockchuck writes "A Texas startup called Baryonyx plans to build data centers powered entirely by renewable energy. Its first project will be a wind-powered server farm powered by 100 wind turbines in the Texas panhandle. The company has also leased 38,000 acres in the Gulf of Mexico, where it hopes to build hundreds of 300-foot wind turbines that can each generate up to 5 megawatts of power to support additional facilities. Baryonyx plans to sell excess capacity to the local utility, which it will use as a backup when the wind dies down."
can someone explain to me why server farms and wind farms are "farms"?
Probably by analogy with "antenna farm" - an old radio term for a site with a number and usually a variety of antennas. (These were typically a radio amateur running on many bands but some commercial and military "farms" also existed.) It was a joking reference to the crowded cluster of antennas "growing up" from the plot of land like a crop of trees or other cultivated plants in a farm or garden.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Nonsense. The new French reactor, 1650 MWe, has a pricetag of $4.8 billion. Recent Japanese and Korean reactors were in the same range - $2-3/W (PPP), as surveyed by MIT CEEPR (under "update on the cost of nuclear power"). The accompanying study (2009) predicts costs for new US reactors to be $4/W. In short, the numbers are consistent. You can look up cost figures, levelized cost studies (here's a start) up and down, and you will find this is true.
Also nonsense. Just take one recent UK wind farm, which came in at £111 M for 60 MWe - $2.07/W, or extrapolating, over $3 billion for 1500 MW. You can survey costs all over the web, and this is typical. Whitelee, Europe's largest onshore farm, cost £300M ($496M) for 322 MWe, $1.54/W. Lynn and Inner Dowsing - UK's largest offshore farm - came in at £300 M ($496 M) for 194 MWe, $2.56/MW. The famous London Array is now at £3B ($4.96 billion) for 1,000 MWe: $4.96/W. (To be fair though, this represents a 200% cost overrun over the original estimates.) (Sorry about the angstrom signs: they are supposed to be British "pound" symbols)
Also, besides the fact that your bogus figures for wind are 10 times cheaper than reality (and for nuclear, 10 times more expensive than reality), your comparison is bogus in yet another away. You comparable incomparable quantities: a megawatt of baseload yields far more energy than a megawatt of wind power - because it yields power continuously, whereas the wind turbines are very frequently down, or generating at fractional capacity. This is represented by the "capacity factor", which is the fraction of the nameplate capacity actually achieved by a power plant - ratio of [average power output]/[power capacity]. And while nuclear power plants, as generally reliable baseload plants, run at 90%+ capacity factor - that is, average 0.90 MWe of generation for each 1 MWe of nameplate capacity - wind farms, becuase of the obvious intermittency of wind, average only 20-30% capacity factors, with some exceptional offshore locations yielding 40%. Those megawatts are completely incomparable: 1 MWe of nuclear yields 2-4 times more energy than 1 MWe of wind power.
A type 1 wind site will get about 40% of maximum capacity on average. So a simple multiplier still puts wind farms a long way ahead on those numbers.
Of course there are other benefits to nuclear over wind and as the proportion of wind increases, the grid quickly becomes unstable. However at the current level of wind penetration that's not an issue, so wind farms are the better choice.
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
Well, that's easy for you to say. Do you share the same opinions about the landscape of the arctic wildlife preserves?
theres a big difference between the artic wildlife preserves and the texas panhandle, BIG. obviously theclimate, but only _slightly_ less obvious is the wildlife diversity / scarcity. theres not a lot of wildlife that lives specifically in that area at all, much less endangered species. There are few Raptors that live in that area as well, furthermore the Energy Center of Wisconsin claims that Cell Phone Towers kill far more birds annually. i guess we should stop using them too, huh?
Those wind farms really scar the countryside, and the maintenance roads that link them further destroys the ecosystems you so readily condemn. Don't forget about the intra-farm transmission lines and support structures. These things destroy hundreds of square miles to produce the power of one natural gas power station. Of course, it's on somebody else's land, though, isn't it? I guess there's no price some people are not willing for someone else to pay.
In open, flat terrain, a utility-scale wind plant will require about 60 acres per megawatt of installed capacity. However, only 5% (3 acres) or less of this area is actually occupied by turbines, access roads, and other equipment--95% remains free for other compatible uses such as farming or ranching. But lets not limit our view to land use, since you mentioned the alternative of natural gas, lets look at some of the resources that requires in comparison .25 gal\kWh produced, a wind plant requires .001 gal\kWh, again i ask, have you been to Texas? its not exactly drowning in water, except for the Gulf Coast, but thats several hundred miles away, should we truck the water in or lay pipelines for a gas plant? i'm sure the impacts of that would be minimal.
according to the American Wind Energy Association [awea.org] (i know, probably a somewhat biased source, but hey, its _a_ source, all i saw in your post was youtube, which i dont consider a source for things like _facts_ and _data_) a combined cycle gas plant requires approx
And funny that coal was mentioned, because it is the most favored fuel under the new "green energy" bill passed by the US House of Representatives. It is going to be massively subsidized for decades to come, while the cleanest fuel (natural gas) is the most punished -- both in power generation and industry. But, hey, who cares if "green energy" as portrayed in the popular press works or not... it's _GREEN_, and these wind farms go to ELEVEN!
ummm... the the US house of representatives? the same US house of representatives that is considered to be the 7th most corrupt on the planet by Transparency Internationals 2009 Global Corruption Barometer? http://www.transparency.org/ you _really_ want to trust that they're looking out for _your_ interests? wait, are you an Oil Barron, or a major Pharmaceutical manufacturer, or a Multinational Conglomerate or a failing bank? if so, these just might be your guys.
i wage a holy war against the apostrophe.
My $4/W figure was the estimate for new United States reactors, according to the interdisciplinary MIT study The Future of Nuclear Power (the 2009 update).
Referring again to the MIT study, they explain in detail what goes into their cost models (the 2003 full report, appendix 5). It encompasses EVERYTHING - the entire plant (steam turbines and all), the operating costs over 40 years of operation, 40 years' worth of fuel, the decomissioning costs after those 40 years, the waste disposal cost under the current 0.1 c/kWh DoE fee, etc. The TOTAL cash flow is estimated at $4.5 billion (nominal) during the construction phase - see the supplemental paper Update on the Cost of Nuclear Power, table 6A (this doesn't include the financing costs - go down to 6C).
Of course, what's really interesting is the levelized lifetime cost, per kWh. The MIT study estimates this at 8.4 c/kWhe; I've surveyed a dozen other such levelized cost studies on my blog. Feel free to follow the links and read up on them.
By the way, the NRC fees a very tiny part of costs - currently $4.6 M/year, out of of the MIT estimate of $56 M/year of fixed O&M costs (for a 1 GW plant).
Nameplate capacities are incomparable. They represent peak power generation; but some power plants always operate at full power, and others operate intermittently, hence the energy yields (integral of power * dt) are completely different.
No, that's a fallacy. 1 MWe of wind (nameplate capacity), at 30% capacity factor, averages 300 kWe (averaged over long time periods), with an instantaneous range of 0-1000 kWe. Adding together a thousand such (identical, independent) turbines gives you an average of 300 MWe, albeit with lower statistical variance - smaller fluctuations.
You are conflating two separate issues. One, is that the average output of a windfarm is a fraction of its nameplate capacity. Two, is that the output over time has very large variations. See? They are separate problems.
The nuke will actually put out 1500MW consistently regardless of weather conditions
Theoretically - mostly yes. I don't know nothing about the environmental laws in the USA, but in Germany there are laws allowing only a specific maximum of thermal energy to be diverted into the nearby rivers - so in a hot summer the nukes can only operate at 30% or even less (like in 2006) - source)
Practically they are down quite often. They can only operate 92% of the time for maintenance reasons (same source). And even after maintenance they fail quite often. From the 17 or so nuclear plants in Germany at least one is down for security reasons at every given time. So even without a warm summer they are up at most ~85%, with a hot summer perhaps only ~75%.
So with an average uptime of about 80% and the 40% average capacity of wind farms stated by shermo nukes are still fifty times(!) more expensive than wind farms.