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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."
Assuming the grid can accept that excess power, which is not a sure thing. Often peak power usage times doesn't correspond with times of optimal wind speed. There have reportedly been instances in which some grids in Europe have experienced severe problems due to large excess and/or rapidly fluctuating loads coming from wind farms.
Ron
Nuclear power plants in the 1500 Megawatt range cost 30-40 Billion dollars just to build.
Wind Farms in the 1500 Megawatt range cost 300-400 million dollars to build.
Put in the zeros:
40,000,000,000 vs 400,000,000....
For the price of one 1500 Megawatt nuclear plant, we can build 100 1500 megawatt wind farms.... 1500 MW Care to revise your argument?
~Sticky
A nuclear power plant, in particular, those containing multiple reactor units, can easily produce well in excess of 1500 MW on a much smaller foot print than 59 square miles, and more consistently.
Why is land area the primary criterion? Why talk about wind farm land 'foot print' as though it were a big parking lot you plop down, as if it occupies land in the same way a nuclear plant does. One of the nice things about wind farms is that at ground level they consist of mostly empty space which can be used for farming, animal grazing, and so on. If it even matters. Nobody cares about squeezing multiple uses out of every square mile in west Texas, for example. Unless it's to put wind mills where you already have oil wells, which I've seen. There's plenty of land besides that isn't being used for anything else.
In my view, wind power is a fad. I'd wager in 20 years there will be a booming business in wind turbine demolition as it becomes painfully clear, even to many wind power advocates, that their efficiency is lousy and the ongoing maintenance, especially as the turbines age, far larger than inticipated
If they're tearing it down in twenty years, then they'll only be doing it to put up a new one, because they would have long since made a profit on the windmill. The farms that were built ten years ago have already turned nice ROIs. Even without a lot of incentives, it's profitable to run them. Unexpected maintenance issues late in life aren't going to change that. Forget some Oil-and-would-be-water Baron in the panhandle; there's a reason they're throwing up all those wind farms in west Texas.
Now I could see development slowing down if they start to run out of economical places to put them. But why would they tear down farms in places that have already proven to be profitable?
many will be glad to see the eyesores turn down.
Ah. Wishful thinking. Sorry you feel that way. I think a wind farm looks beautiful, personally. Some older models aren't very good looking, sure. But all the new ones they're building look elegant to me, a modern take on an old pastoral theme, and seen a hundred of them all carving out big circles at slightly different speeds is mesmerizing.
Solar, especially home and business installations on roofs, which basically unused space now, shows much promise - won't eliminate the need for the grid, but will reduce demand somewhat while saving people money.
Yeah, that's nice too. Economies of scale help here though just like with everything else, so it's not always as clear for a homeowner that it's a good ROI, but in the right conditions it does very well. My house used to have solar panels on it, but they were removed due to maintenance issues and a bad installation that affected the roof. It's possible I'll new ones up at some point. Commercial rooftops, though, sound like a fantastic place for solar.
The enemies of Democracy are
Jeez. Where do I even start....
1. Don't reference Other Countries nuclear programs. This is the United States, where the costs of regulation, permitting, licensing, buying land, paying off neighbors, etc outweigh the material cost of a reactor. Don't compare France. Japan, Korea, or all those others, to the US, it's apples and oranges when it comes to nuclear acceptance. The issue was a wind farm in the US, not France. A nuke in America costs 30-40 billion dollars, stem to stern, full cost. That's the cost of a FULL COMPLETE nuke plant(including water treatment, balance of plant, turbines, etc), but I'll forgive your ignorance on that. People who read wikipedia and don't know power generation often make that mistake.
2. You got your numbers wrong: Financing referenced in that wikipedia article is only for construction phase, which is the CHEAPEST part of building a nuke. Permitting isn't there, startup (which is WAY expensive) isn't there, commissioning (which is RIDICULOUS expensive) isn't there, NRC approval and licensing (which is THE most expensive piece) isn't there. If you worked for a utility or in the nuclear industry (like me) you'd know this.
3. If you want to reference a source, use one with some TEETH. Something like http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/analysis/nuclearpower.html, or http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/82975.pdf. Some dipshit's blog doesn't count, especially when he admits a full bias and doesn't disclose his credentials. BTW: I'm a computer engineer with 5 years of experience in control systems, power generation, and the economics of electric power.
4. Seriously? OFFSHORE wind farm budget numbers up against LAND BASED wind farms? Lets' see, we'll put a wind technology that is designed, constructed, and operated in one of the most harsh environments on the planet, which you have to helicopter maintenance personnel into, against a wind technology that is built on solid ground, with standard materials, and can be maintained with guys in trucks. Gee, that's a real valid comparison. My wind numbers are accurate, I know because I work in the industry.
5. Fine. Assume that they produce 1500 MW 10% of the time instead of 90%. Still a break even with my ACCURATE numbers.
6. Definitely not an engineer. Megawatts are always comparable, they are absolute quantities. A MW produced by a wind farm is the same MW produced by a nuke. Yes, while wind provides a smaller percentage of it's capacity factor when compared to nuclear, that can be (supposedly) be defeated with large numbers of geographically dispersed wind farms.
Nukes cost a lot of money. That is the operational reality. Get over it. Until someone decides that nukes are a good investment for their cost, we will not see a nuke plant. Other countries can do what they like, they are 20 years ahead of us. The NRC rules all, and nobody wants to finance something we can't figure out how to get rid of the waste for. And that's sad, because nuclear power is the future of baseload generation and will help end our dependence on fossil fuels.
~Sticky
Yes, pretty and colourful powerpoint stuff to make the guys that drank through their MBAs eyes glaze over, but do you have any figures linked to a real plant that can actually be named so that people know you are not pulling a fast one? That IMHO is the big problem in the nuclear debate at them moment, nobody is prepared to name the costs of the single plant anywhere. We just get some incredibly unlikely adjusted value which pretends to be an average but ignores the not paticularly well performing dead end designs still running. It would be far more credible to name a successful plant and give details about that since nobody is going to build any of the poor designs anyway. Your wide comparisons of very different things do not fit together.
Every other energy generation method can do it - name a plant, tell us how much it cost and what capacity it is. It's only by clearing the ground and allowing truth to creep into the nuclear debate that anything is going to get built. Nobody is going to fall for Chenobyl era crap from Westinghouse painted green anymore - if anything gets built it will be most likely from some US company subcontracting or buying out to get superior technology that might actually work as advertised.