Slashdot Mirror
Tech Allows Stable Integration of Wind In the Power Grid
diegocgteleline.es writes "One of the most frequently raised arguments against renewable power sources is that they can only supply a low percentage of the total power because their unpredictability can destabilize the grid. Spain seems to have disproved this assertion. In the last three days, the wind power generation records with respect to the total demand were beaten twice (in special conditions: a very windy weekend, at night): 45% on November 5 and almost 54% last night (Google translation; Spanish original). There was no instability. These milestones were accomplished with the help of a control center that processes meteorologic data from the whole country and predicts, with high certainty, the wind and solar power that will be generated, allowing a stable integration of all the renewable power. You can see a graphic of the record here."
...and will be fought back by european giants like E.ON etc., who even fight private home owners wanting to put wind mills on their own property by simple denial of request.
So, Spain has almost made the advance of electrical power to where GE got it over 100 years ago.
This is my sig.
Wind generally changes slowly enough that it doesn't cause massive instability providing you have sufficient backup. However, there are other problems.
Getting the percentage that high occasionally isn't amazing, especially during a time of low demand such as night. The hard part is generating an average of 50% wind overall (e.g. over a year).
Say the baseload demand is 20 GW, then you can have 20 GW of wind power installed without worrying about what to do if too much is produced. So you could even get nearly 100% wind power occasionally. The problem is for the rest of the time when demand is higher or it isn't windy. The capacity factor of wind is about 30%, and baseload is typically about 50% of average load, so that means on average you're only generating 15% of your total electricity by wind power.
Best of all, our thirst for coal and oil are also a good excuse to destroy Arab civillizations.
Who needs the motherfuckers? Buncha goddamn savages sitting on our sweet, sweet fuel. Once we get the ragheads out of the way we can build a utopia where people do nice, simple things up against evangelical Christians and other fifth-columnists.
We want an America where gas is 10 cents a gallon and everybody drives Chevy Silverados with 2-foot lifts and Flowmaster exhaust systems. An America which revolves around the NFL and the music of Hank Williams Sr. and Jr (but not III). An America with good, wholesome family values like mandatory 10-year sentences for marijuana possession and abstinance until marriage and purity balls instead of debaucherous prom nights!
Fuck, man. I'm getting hard just thinkin' about it! GIMME GIMME GIMME!!!!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Nothing is ever a complete solution, for anything.
But every single Joule helps.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Where's your god now?
45% and 54% for Spain. If you can upgrade the scale, you can bring those 2 numbers very close together.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Whatever happened once in Spain does not change the basic facts.
Sometimes the wind does not blow at all, so you need to keep 100% generating capacity that can be brought on line within 20 minutes.
Now your basic coal plant tends to be large and slow (takes many hours) to warm up. So you need a whopping amount of gas turbine generating plants,
which not only cost a lot but are going to be idle a good part of the time, just sitting around just in case the wind stops. And it will.
So you're going to pay up front for the generating capacity, then again paying for expensive and scarce oil and gas when the wind stops.
Not an attractive financial proposition.
renewable power sources ... can only supply a low percentage of the total power because their unpredictability can destabilize the grid.
As much as I'd like to see more renewable energy, this counter-example probably doesn't help. Spain has a somewhat modern and well maintained power grid. In this year's "Infrastructure Report Card", The American Society of Civil Engineers rated the USA's power grid "D+". (Unfortunately their website is down; here's google's cache. Talk about failing infrastructure...)
Once you add in coal and oil subsidies and the negative externalities of their use, they are no longer quite so cheap.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Disclaimer: I'm a Spanish citizen, living in Spain.
First of all, I want to remark the great work of the REE company ("Red Eléctrica Española" stands for "Spanish Electric Power Network", the monopoly for electric power distribution), they not only do a great work routing and adapting the production to the user energy demand, but also provide a lot of useful information about power consumption, production/consumption balance, etc.
The dark side of the problem is that although there is a huge amount of "green energy" being generated in Spain (wind and solar), that is, paradoxically, a problem. The problem is because current "green electricity production" is above 20% of total energy production, which sounds great, yes, the problem comes from nuclear power being dismantled from past 20 years, so the electric bill goes up because of the more expensive production (the solar energy production is specially expensive, which has been subsidized ad nauseam). Now the country faces near 19% unemployment rates (almost twice the U.S. figures), paying a huge price for energy, with the country in the middle of its worse recession since the post-war era (40's).
Coal and oil are plentiful, cheap, and easy to use.
Coal and oil are plentiful, but you know whats more plentiful? The solar radiation and wind, both are unlimited.
Coal and oil are cheap and easy to use because we have spent massive amount of money improving them over the last 100 years. Given enough research it is entirely possible that solar and wind will be as cheap as oil (coal would be tough to beat though). Solar power however will likely end up being easier to use, no fuel, no exhaust, and no moving parts.
... and hurt the eyeline of the cities they are installed in.
Ever heard of smog? I would much rather see a bunch of solar panels and windmills, than a giant brown haze of asthma attack and carcinogens.
And people wonder why environmentalists are considered stupid.
They are called stupid because what they are promoting is bad for business. Switching to these technologies is not efficient yet, but as this article proves they are getting closer. Big businesses and their propaganda machines (eg. Fox News) want to cast these technologies in negative light to avoid having to switch to them, which would cut into profit margins.
Oh and did I mention that these technologies could one day remove the USA's dependence on foreign oil, reduce medical problems, protect the environment, decentralize the electrical system, reduce power lost during transmission (local power generation), and be better suited to installation in 3rd world countries?
Or of course, we could just keep using the current system until our resources run out and then start looking for the solution.
You still need a source of generation that can react quickly enough to stabilise voltage. Currently this is accomplished with fossil fuels (gas turbines, fired boilers / steam turbines, etc). Wind and solar can only supplement other base load sources of generation.
My understanding is that the destabilization talk isn't about overloading a circuit breaker on one day, it's about massive fluxuation in available power over the entire generation time.
Just think of this. You've now made something like 80% of your grid powered by wind. (They all have problems, but let's just look at wind.) You have a doldrum for a day or two, now you've gone for that time period with only 20% of your normal power, that's destabilizing.
What if your windfarms are spead out over vast distances so they tend to have different local conditions. (Something like if you have them all over the USA.) In some ways that will help since no location is expected to be the same as the other, so there is an averaging effect going on. However, that averaging effect is limited by long distance power transmission issues. The grid isn't just a pull & dump system. It uses power to send power, and it needs to maintain what you could think of as electrical pressure, (V.W.A. formulas.) which is why you have all those transformers and sub-stations all over the place, they are one part of that system. So even in the distributed scenario, what if you get a situation like high-wind on the east coast, and calm conditions mid-continent, and dead west coast. Funny thing, the need for power didn't decrease anywhere, but only the east coast is generating enough for their area, some of the mid will be ok, others in brown-outs or black-outs, and the west coast would be mostly black-out conditions, except near the few remaining alternate power sources, assuming the grid demand didn't leach it out completely and blow the circuits. (The entire east coast USA was blacked out by a cascade grid failure, and it might happen again.)
Of course having multiple sources of power helps offset this kind of issue. For instance, solar. But that would only help during the hours of light, and again, it needs to be within a reasonable distance of it's market/users.
All this stuff is why intelligent power managers advocate a number of different generation schemes distributed over the area with clustering (when possible) near high draw locations (like big cities). And no power manager can rationally turn a blind eye to those methods that run 24 hours on demand.
I agree that we need to expand our renewable resources type power generation, as well as move away from fossil fuels, but it's a tricky balancing act with huge penalties for dropping the ball, so don't trivialize it.
The solar radiation and wind
Is wind power really unlimited though? The thing about wind power that I don't really understand is what the long term effects of taking massive amounts of energy from the wind and pumping it into the power grid will have. The ecosystem has evolved over millions of years with the wind essentially being unimpeded by manmade objects, so what will the long term effects of generating wind power be? How will it effect the weather? You can certainly make the argument that global warming has a much larger adverse effect on the environment, but I am curious to see if anyone really has studied how sucking energy out of wind will affect the environment.
Monstar L
wind is a form of temporary energy storage. sun --> heat --> wind --> erosion.
total input energy (sun) will stay the same. output simply changes a bit. (a tiny bit less energy will be converted into erosion).
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Butterfly effect could rule too much/few windy/sunny days, and software bugs could put the grid on risk. Maybe that we base our civilization on that energy source is a crockroaches plan to make sure that only them survive.
irony_on .. they are interfering with the Coriolis effect."
"Chop of the woods, bomb the mountains
irony_off
Solar is also volatile depending on the weather situation.
Have you ever watched a power curve from a PV-Panel over a longer time, you have spikes - here a cloud, there a diode less, which means the way you switch the panels together is important too.
If bad situation one panel in the black out means
the panel groups output is low
And solar panels are black, even converting ~30% of the light in energy they do heat up .. so they interfere with the atmosphere.
All in all, a mix is a good solution, because
wind and solar power have their weaknesses
btw. the wind forecasts are +90% acurate,
that's not what you can say about a checkered sky.
Consider this. Harnessing renewable energy is getting cheaper and cheaper as technology matures. With coal, you have to pay for the fuel. With renewables, you do not.
Any questions?
Regarding the grid.... Getting energy from there to here seems a problem. Isn't the problem with hydrogen fuel cells the fact that you have to have hydrogen in the first place (which takes energy?) I don't know the efficiencies lost via conversion (which would include the economics of transportation), but if solar or wind power was used to generate hydrogen, couldn't the hydrogen then be delivered to where it is needed, for use when wanted?
I love the argument of "hurting the eyelines of the cities". Yeah, now that you can see the mountains right next to your city, instead of just hazy smog, you actually have something to complain about. Me? I think those wind turbines are sexy as hell and show progress in this day and age. Progress is power. Well done gapagos, well done.
Technically speaking, the most likely thing to happen in that scenario is for the direction of the currents to change. Wind is driven by differentials in pressure throughout the area. It's just about impossible to ever perfectly even the pressure across the entirety of the globe and keep it at a consistent pressure permanently.
At bare minimum you'll always have the ocean cooling and warming at a different rate from the land. Then there's the bits caused by ocean currents. In short, that's a really low probability event.
I hope I'm not the only one who thinks giant windmill farms are visually interesting and slightly artistic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
Ten years ago wasn't there talk about using renewable power to pump water up to higher ground and then release the water to generate electricity at a known rate with a known duration, etc. Turns unreliable power into highly reliable power with a little waste added into the process....
Not if the earth begins to spin slower because we are taking energy out of wind.
how long until everyones favorite superpower starts invading windy countries?
I think this comment points reveals a consistent flaw with Slashdot - the score from mod points stops at five. :/
Solarpanels being black only changes the heat if they are replacing previously reflective things. Cities already generate strange weather patterns because of the difference in heating/cooling versus the surrounding area, and you could put solar panels on every roof top in my neighborhood and not change heat signatures because they are already black.
What mountains? The coal mine removed them.
One of the problems with environmentalism is common in any charged topic. You're all or nothing. In this case, your options are:
You don't believe that man-made global warming hasn't been adequately proven: so you're a greedy, goose stepping, capitalistic pig who doesn't care about the environment one bit.
or..
You believe that mankind should take responsibility for its actions on the environment: so pot smoking, brainless, mindless hippy that hates humanity.
Any people wonder why there's so much strife in today's world... Oh, and you can thank the media (sensationalism & controversy sales) and politicians (polarize to make them yours). Of which special interest groups are the bastard stepchild.
You don't sound like a Jew to me. It seems more likely that you are one of the Jews' useful idiots. A true Republican or "conservative" or whatever the evil empire is calling itself these days.
Ignore the problems that Jews like Joe Lieberman, the MPAA, RIAA, and Israel bring on the world if you want to. I don't plan on ignoring it anymore.
Of course already know that Republicans are evil so it's no surprise that you side with the Jews every single time.
idiot. If no energy is taken out of the wind: It would start to blow faster and faster. Furthermore, if it is not taken out by windmills, it will certainly be taken out by houses, trees, mountains.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
The way the information is presented clearly shows the lack of understanding by the author. The data actually proves the instability inherent in wind power.
The figures quoted are once off lasting for hours or days but not months. The next day will be a low wind day and instead of providing 40% of the energy required you only provide 10% or less (Spain has had over 100 days this year with no wind power generation, nada none). That is the instability, over a week, month, year not days.
One other point when wind was "providing" 40% of the electricity during the low load it actually was NOT. What was actually happening was Spain was producing a lot more wind power on top of typical output from conventional plants. We cannot effectively use and store excess power so the excess was wasted. Therefore the installation of wind has lead to wasteage.
This is why Denmark the leader in wind relies on interconnections to other countries, when excess is generated it is sold abroad. However for some reason Denmark has by far the highest prices in Europe for electricity even with the ability to sell excess. Also because Denmark has to export so much wind energy its installed capacity is nameplated to deliver 20% but only delivers approx 10%.
Without a viable and cost effective way of storing energy wind will remain too variable to provide cost effective energy that is carbon neutral. As wind has to be backed up in equal capacity (reason for Denmarks high prices) by conventional systems it cannot be said to be carbon neutral.
As Danish Oil and Natural Gas (DONG) utilities clearly figured out - put a REALLY big (distributed) battery on the grid to soak up the power when it's available and re-feed it into the grid when it's scarce. Not only can they produce more of the baseline power generation from renewable sources, they don't have to PAY the Germans to TAKE their excess power at night when they can't consume it. They can store it instead, use it at peak hour when kilowatt price is insane and drastically flatten the curve. Problem. Solution.
As an OT side-benefit, we get electric cars wrapped around said batteries. For what we already got used to paying for car's fuel, there's enough margin in the operator's plan to subsidize new cars for consumers (think free iPhone on a three-year-plan), we'll get a parallel 1-minute-battery-swap-station infrastructure to petrol stations to enable real (non-golfcart) electric cars to go as far as the stations reach (range limitation is station reach, not battery capacity/petrol tank) without hour-long-charges along the way, remove an entire country's addiction to oil, fix the environment by running every single car in the fleet off renewable, and actually allow everyone in town to plug their car in at 8AM without having the lights in office buildings go down (The 'Everyone owns a Chevy Volt' scenario), while not having to spend tens to hundreds of billions on new power plants to cater to the spike. (But hey, that's just a side benefit ;))
-
This isn't really flamebait, just an interesting parody.
Most gas turbine plants are already peak plants, so they don't run most of the time. Take Texas for example the summer load is typically twice the winter spring fall load due to air conditioning. so there are already a lot of plants sitting idle. Texas has hit 20% wind on its grid a couple of times in the last few weeks since a line was energized to circumvent the bottlenecks in the ERCOT grid. Most places have large demand swings with time of day and time of year so there are a lot of idle plants a good bit of the time. Combined cycle gas turbine plants must be economical when run as peak plants or there would not be so many of them. Since a turbine plant can start in 10 mins or so its a good backup. Also the turbine plant is almost 1/4 the emission of CO2 per kwh of a coal plant. (1/2 is because new plants run at about 60% efficiency , and 1/2 because methane produces 1/2 as much co2 per unit of heat).
All it takes is to fix the nimby attitude of folks. (In Texas the most recent big wind farm was build because the land owners wanted the free money from the turbines, which leave most of their land free to farm or graze cattle on).
Are you referring to Mountaintop removal mining?, it's funny how the article show's them finishing by regrading and revegetating, as if there's some economic incentive to do so.
Nope, because the system has feed back, when you break the system is when there are problems. Producing a little CO2 is not a problem, producing more than the planet can handle w/o changing the pH of the ocean is.
Just like wind, the world isn't covered in windmills, but, if you had enough wind turbines to produce 100% of the earth's energy, then we'd have a problem.
Clearly energy is already being taken out of wind, I'm arguing against pushing wind as a primary power source, not for clear cutting the planet because I 3 wind.
Even just in terms of the effects air pollution is having on the human population right now it's very expensive, apparently more people die from air pollution than automobile accidents.
Coal and oil are plentiful, cheap, and easy to use. Compare this to idiotic technologies like wind and solar that are hugely expensive, unreliable, and hurt the eyeline of the cities they are installed in. And people wonder why environmentalists are considered stupid.
Excuse me, but caring about our planet does not make somebody stupid.
Caring only about your pocketbook, however, does make you a greedy asshole.
And thinking that eveyone must have the same order of priorities as you does make you stupid.
Also, most wind turbines aren't built in or even near cities, they're usually off-shore or on hilltops somewhere out in the countryside.
There is one experimental wind turbine in Sydney, which I could see from my University. I used to love staring out the window at it, I found the slow steady movement to be relaxing.
Not everyone thinks they 'ruin' a view.
Hello,
Wind is unpredictable, and cannot supply base load. Item 14 at the following link shows how unpredictable wind is and how it can be essentially zero for many days in a row:
http://www.transmission.bpa.gov/business/operations/Wind/default.aspx
This site gives information about the wind resources in the Northwest US.
If coupled with pumped storage, wind works great. The problem is the environmental community fights pumped storage, making precious few projects in the US viable.
The thing you are missing is how tiny a fraction of the wind energy we are capable of removing. Wind energy is caused by the different temperatures in the world equalising in the easiest way possible (by moving the air between the regions). The temperature differences are caused by solar heating, which contributes around 500W per square metre (averaged over a 24-hour period). Wind contains a phenomenal amount of energy and a wind farm only removes a tiny bit of it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Another way of putting that is that if four retards agree you're insightful, you get a 5.
Captcha: tiresome
Consider this. Harnessing renewable energy is getting cheaper and cheaper as technology matures. With coal, you have to pay for the fuel. With renewables, you do not.
Any questions?
Yes, does any solar panel or wind turbine exist that, if installed on a normal house (ie. at at least 40 degrees north) has an EROI > 0 ? Actually I live at 60 degrees, and my calculations tell me that even with the tax breaks solar panels are still net-negative money generators, and seriously net-negative power generators. I'm talking about the standard stuff (not following the sun).
Since I believe a power engineer told me that the absolute minimum EROI (energy wise) for a power generator to be useful is 10 on a yearly basis (meaning it's got to create 10 times more power than it costs to build/install it in the first year of operation), and renewable energy is at, well, -1.2 or so at 20 years perfect operation (at least standard solar panels are). Meaning it actually costs about double the amount of oil to power a house using solar panels than it would cost to just power it directly on oil. Actually solar panels are defeated by that oldest of joke of a power generator : we have more efficient research fusion generators than solar panels (EROI 0.0 average, 1.01 peak performance vs -1.0).
And this is being generous : those panels are not exactly produced locally, and I don't even count transporting, connecting, installing and servicing them, none of which are free.
By my calculations, btw, solar panel will never be able to deliver enough power to heat a normal house, even if the entire lot were covered in solar panels. Meaning a 100% efficient panel that was dropped by God himself from heaven (ie. free) would not be able to heat a normal house. What, exactly, is your suggestion we do to heat about 20-story appartment buildings ? Please don't say "isolate them well", please keep into account that existing buildings need to be heated too.
Right now we don't use any significant amount of either solar irradiation or wind. I wonder, if we were to use, say 1% of solar power, that would obviously mean the biosphere would not be able to use that same energy. What will be the ramifications of stealing energy from nature ? If we do what needs to be done to power america with solar power, covering 2 "average" states entirely in solar panels, can anything grow in those 2 states ? Or will that be 4% of the united states that contains less life than the surface of the moon ?
Right now we're using so very, very little it obviously doesn't matter. The same goes for wind. Right now we barely use wind power at all, but a lot of natural processes (e.g. moisture collection in dry climates, just to name something) depend on wind. Obviously they will fail to work if we use a significant percentage of wind power in an area. What will be the environmental impact ?
Yes I have doubts about renewable power, and it's supposed "zero" environmental impact. But you could answer these questions in a reasonable manner (something that never seems to be done in any of the publications I read) ... perhaps it would help.
Yeah, the skyscraper, the forest cutting, and all these man-made stuff like cities, tower, etc are not altering wind a bit, and some gigantic propeller are going to take massive amount of energy from the wind ?
So, what you're saying is that using solar/wind will massively change the climate by changing the absorption characteristics ...
What, pray tell, were we trying to prevent again ?
(just wondering)
Subsidies aren't the solution to other subsidies. A more environmentally friendly solution would be to remove the subsides on the oil and coal. Let the most efficient technology stand on it's own feet.
We should also work on getting pricing signals into the market place in regards to external costs such as pollution and CO2 emissions. Most economists seemt to think that pollution and carbon taxes are the most efficient ways of doing that, but of course politically, anything called a "tax" is a hard sell.
Not if the earth begins to spin slower because we are taking energy out of wind.
Conservation of angular momentum is quite an important principle in physics, I don't think a few windmills will pose a threat to it.
Ahh, math time excuse!
The Earth's rotation already slows by 0.022 milliseconds every year from tidal friction. A simple way to get a handle on the energies involved is estimating from the increase in the radius of the moon's orbit, about 3.84cm/year, which comprises the majority of tidal effects on Earth.
Throw that into the gravitational potential energy of the Earth/Moon system, and you end up with a net energy loss in the neighborhood of 7.59x10^18 joules/year-- about 241GW. (Wikipedia says 2.4TW, but I think the paper they cited slipped a digit.
So, a direct energy drain at around either twice or twenty times the installed wind capacity is making the earth's rotation slow by... less than 2.2 seconds per 100,000 years.
Planets are big. Arguing that a chunk of rock 12500km in diameter is going to be noticeably moved by our technology in the foreseeable future isn't very plausible.
In related news, most of the energy input for wind is solar, not tidal, and net solar energy input into the system is still net solar energy input into the system, regardless of where it goes.
There are plenty of actual obstacles to worry about in implementing alternative energy, there's no need to make up imaginary ones.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
reduced erosion does not sound like a bad thing.
Scapegoat much?
Jeez man, you sound like Hitler.
NOTE:
All politicians are evil, not just the republicans.
All religions are questionable, and their motives are that of any major power: control the people.
Blaming the "jews" for the problems of the world just makes you a small-minded bigot. I blame the problems of the world on you. It's your fault - (this statement makes as much sense as yours does).
My hate knows no limitations.
I am an equal opportunity hater.
All powers are evil, don't fool yourself.
In Soviet Russia, road forks you!
When it's really windy, use the energy to lift huge quantities of weight to the top of a deep shaft. Then when electricity is needed, allow the weights to fall down the shaft, with the cables they are suspended from driving generators on the way down. Won't wear out like a chemical battery, plus it's not toxic and can be made out of almost anything.
Solar and wind are limited by the amount of solar influx, the pressure differentials ...) + perhaps a little latent
and ultimately the output of the sun(fusion reactor 93 million miles away). The
sun will run out of fuel eventually. Coal and oil are "stored" solar power from
prior bio-capture methods(plants, animals,
kinetic energy from the GBS system we reside in.
Nuclear fission reactors use stored energy from previous stars!
Look up the total energy usage by humans and then look at the
amount of solar influx reflecting off the earth each day. You will
realize we don't have a lot to worry about! Also consider the
average temp of the oceans are 4 degree's C. We are basking in
a warm spell on the earth!!! Enjoy it.
George MacDonald
Don't feed the trolls. Please. If everyone here just ignored the trolls, then we could spend our time actually having meaningful discussion instead of wading through a huge trough of crap. So don't feed the trolls.
There was a paper published a couple years ago by dutch researchers that proposed to give discounts for refrigerated warehouses. They would lower their thermostats a couple degrees, but would be given a signal to stop their refrigeration units when the load gets too high. The couple degrees would be enough of a buffer to last a few hours. They calculated it would be enough to handle wind up to 30% of the total power generation.
This kind of thing is already done, by the way, but on a limited scale. Large industrial consumers of electricity are already given discounts if they agree to cut their use on demand. The new thing here is to displace electricity use in time even more.
... then it's only hardly ever dirty. Especially if you only use it once a decade.
Hypothetical question...
Wind is caused by changes in air pressure, air pressure changes are caused by temperature differentiation.
Let's say we have a solar power farm, one of those big collections of mirrors that just points at the sun all day kinds of deals.
The idea of these farms is to take as much heat energy out of the sunlight as possible, but efficiency is low so much of the light (and heat) is reflected into the air.
So the question is
Could a solar farm of sufficient size cause enough of a temperature differential to essentially become a wind generator?
Coal and oil is not cheap. The problem is that the largest portion of the cost of coal and oil, the damage to the environment, is not paid for my the people profiting for coal and oil but by everyone. We need to charge the coal and oil industry a useage fee for using our environment as a dumping ground for their toxic poison.
Kinda like how spammers reap enormous profits in spite of the resources they waste for free.
If you have seen or can build wind mills that would slow the Earths rotation in the tiniest fraction of a fraction of a fraction we certainly would like to see them. Otherwise please take your retarded trolling elsewhere.
note that decentralized power does not mean that the U.S. east coast can really use power generated in Idaho, at best power can be transmitted hundreds of miles, not thousands.
Those wind turbines better be build fairly close.
"The thing about wind power that I don't really understand is what the long term effects of taking massive amounts of energy from the wind and pumping it into the power grid will have."
The wind occurs in the bottom ~5km of the atmosphere. The largest windmill is ~100 meters tall, covering the entire planets surface with windmills would have about the same effect on wind as covering it with large trees, ie: virtually nil.
People rarely appreciate just how much power the wind has, on the day of the Aussie bushfire disaster last Febuary, I was sitting at home sweltering in 47degC heat fed by a 100km hour wind coming off the desert, native bats and birds were literally falling out of trees dead from dehydration, my punny fan on a stand did nothing to aleviate the discomfort unless I got out of a cold shower and stood in front of it still dripping. Ironically these winds and the blast furnace conditions they bring are created by cold fronts moving in from the Antartic, when the front passed over Melbourne that day, the temprature dropped by 15deg in 15 minutes.
Now to put windmills cumulative effects on the wind into perspective think about running them in reverse and how many you would need to to drag that amount of cold air from Antartica to Australia.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Yeah no kidding. I was only given 5 mod points and already wasted them modding down some hippies earlier today. :(
---
Wind Power Feed @ Feed Distiller
That fact that you even put it that way shows you don't understand what the laws of conservation say. Wind turbines by definition work by slowing down the wind.
Also, I agree, clearly a few windmills don't pose a thread. But:
Annual Energy use in the World is something like 20 Trillion kWH. We would have to cover 1/7 of ALL land in the world to get this.
I'll look at your numbers later (which I do appreciate). But the effects of wind turbines on global weather are not imaginary.
"The thing you are missing is how tiny a fraction of the fossil fuel energy we are capable of removing...."
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
sure it won't be a common occurance that the wind slows down in multuple locations... but thats HOW disasters happen, all the unlikely scenarios line up and you get that perfect storm. and when your talking about the power grid it's an unacceptable risk.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
There's no mechanism for carrying angular momentum away from the earth that involves the wind. Air has a habit of staying on Earth, after all. Therefore, wind turbines cannot affect it.
The only thing that could would be tidal forces, which have nothing to do with the wind.
net energy loss in the neighborhood of 7.59x10^18 joules/year-- about 241GW
This is a power not an energy, but I do get the point.
World Energy Usage: 20 TrillionKWH .6 ms a year. .022
Maximum Windmill->E efficiency is about 30% so tripple that and get 60 Trillion KWH of energy taken out of the system per year.
Relating that to your example system would correspond to a slowing of about
Ok, while certainly non-zero, that isn't that much of a problem. Prove to me that it won't effect the weather and I'll be much happier.
60*10^12/(241 * 10^9 *365*24/1000) *
You, my new friend, need to contrast your belief in the conservation of angular momentum with your blatant disregard for the conservation of energy. If I store energy (in the form of electricity) made from wind energy (kinetic), I have taken that energy out of the system, because energy cannot be created, nor destroyed (at least on this level).
Flywheels.
I'm not disregarding energy at all, it's just not relevant to my point. Yes, you've taken energy out of *something* but not out of the earth's rotation. It would have been dissipated as heat eventually anyway - there's no law of conservation of kinetic energy.
Wind power slowing down the earth's rotation is not consistent with conservation of angular momentum. Unlike kinetic energy, angular momentum is always conserved in the absence of external forces (well, torques), which is why it's a much more useful quantity to work with when considering this problem.
Please try not to be patronising. I do know a bit about physics, what with having a degree and PhD in it and all.
Solar energy is stealing energy from nature. You sir are making stuff up to support your beliefs. Lets see a single source for a single thing you said.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
I do believe you arnt supoused to mod people down for disagreeing with them.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
Why was this modded down? I see nothing trollish here, just another point of view.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
He didnt say that your putting words in his mouth.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
Wind has a high Energy Return On Energy Invested (EROEI) but it's not as high as many people think. Similar to nuclear. Sure: X kilos of U generate gobs of power, but building, maintaining, decommissioning, and dismantling the plant and its waste is very energy intensive.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Its a FALSE argument to claim alternatives can not work because they can't provide constant power.
There is a whole world of power storage solutions out there being completely ignored OR people are simply ignorant. It could be come an industry on some level or be a completely private industry where anybody with the tech could buy power and sell it back later for a profit.
We can leave the market to handle load balancing. Look at flywheel power storage, flow batteries, hydro power storage, or even fuel cells. These and new technologies will provide methods to balance the load and possibly help fund power storage technologies that will end up in other applications.
Its possible there will be smaller scale cheap solutions for use by block or by building. For example:
Heating/cooling is the largest thing we need and while it is not all electric (cooling is almost all electric) it does use a lot of power. We can store hot and cold cheaply and easily as well as insulate against wasting it. I'm not talking about cutting usage like that is another problem, its part of distributing load balancing the load AT THE SOURCE instead of just at the power company. Heat storage, cooling storage refilled when it can be. Sure, electric is a problem NOW but it might not be forever... and if it is, there is still a grid storage industry.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
The problems with renewable are not all lies, certainly the coal companies have an agenda but so do the hippies who routinely ignore the economic costs of building solar panels and wind turbines. Our best solution is a combination of Nuclear and renewable. Renewable can't provide the volume of electricity needed on it's own, it also uses allot more resources to produce solar panels and wind turbines than it does to build a nuclear power-plant (for the energy produced).
Renewable has along way to go before we can use it as our primary power production but Nuclear is a good support for it until it can eventually advance enough that homes may be able to produce their own onsite power.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
You are so utterly off base here. The rotation of the earth is due ENTIRELY to the conservation of its momentum from the protoplanetary cloud it condensed from. As the nascent Earth coalesced, its radius decreased; conservation of momentum dictates that for a smaller radius, the mass must rotate at a higher velocity; think spinning on an office chair with your arms and legs splayed out, then bringing them in; you will being spinning faster. That is why the earth rotates. The only forces that are currently acting on the earth that could affect its rotation in any meaningful way is that of gravity; the earth-moon system being the main culprit. As the moon exerts a gravitational force upon the earth, the resultant movement of the oceans (in the form of tides) causes a "bulge" of water on the surface of the earth. The bulge however is not perfectly aligned with the moon due to the relative rotation of the earth. The offset causes a torque (rotational force) slowing the rotation of the earth as well as increasing the distance the moon orbits at.
Wind on the other hand is a result of a heat gradient between two locations on the planet's surface. Seeing as this force originates and terminates on the surface of the earth, there can be absolutely no net impulse given to the earth, let alone its rotational momentum.
Killing birds, disrupting the landscape, and even maintenance are all at least somewhat reasonable critiques of wind power. Claiming it will result in draining the Earth's rotational momentum is just ridiculous and totally incorrect.
We "all know" that socialism is evil, and soaring taxes are the death of our economy. Yet the United States economy was perhaps strongest in the 50s and 60s, and we haven't had tax rates that high ever since. Yes, you heard me right: tax rates were HIGHEST in the 1950's and 60's. They were higher in the 1980's than they are now.
In fact, if taxes were the indicator of prosperity, then actual prosperity is virtually a reverse graph of the tax rates! It's one of those baffling facts that get in the way of the rhetoric for so many. see for yourself...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Wind proven has been proven ineffective in Northern Europe where the most electricity is needed in the dead cold of the dark winter. Usually Wind Power is working under 20% of the time. If we'd have much wind power we'd be sleeping in cold rooms and probably very very dead.
Go nuclear! (and then fusion when it becomes available)
Nuclear is GREEN!
And the typical environmentalist green hippie doesn't understand that Wind Power costs so much more than nuclear that it is insane. To keep the prices near the same for end users the governments invest huge amounts of money to wind power. Without government funding nobody would never ever use it. Its so friggin expensive.
this weekend large portions of Spain suffered extended blackouts as a number of the electric company's network routers were overwhelmed by an unexpected surge of traffic. This was apparently the result of an article about Spain's wind-based electrical program being published on slashdot.org, and the ensuing traffic overload from attempts to access the power generation graphs on the public site...
-- *My* journal is more interesting than *yours*...
Good thing we didnt cut down massive amounts of the worlds forests or we might speed the wind back up..... oh wait a sec..
Congrats on your PhD, but i'm glad they didn't ask you this question on your quals. And as this is covered in physics 101, qualification dropping is meaningless. You can't just hand wave and say, oh it would have been heat. Your assumption that angular momentum is only effected by torques is flawed. Yes that is angular momentum 101, but it certainly fails to describe what is accelerating the blades of the windmill. Or will they turn indefinitly too?
1. Solar panels are pretty crap by any standard. Cheap thin film panels will come out (about the same time as Duke Nukem 3D), but until then they are only useful in special applications. You can heat hot water with solar panels. I'm not sure if you can heat a whole house. Are you talking about photovoltaic panels generating power to run electric heaters, or using sunlight to heat water (which plugs into the central heating)? Because the second option is much more efficient.
2. Wind generators don't sit "on your house". The performance of a wind generator scales with the square of their blade length (since their power goes up with the flux of the wind that they sweep). A tiny little house sized generator is a waste of time and money. The wind generators that you want to use have blades that are bigger than a 737.
I'm not talking about conservation.
And this: Population increases exponentially ... is bullshit. If it did, it would fill the universe in a matter of years.
Have you considered becoming a spokesperson for wind energy? Seriously.
moox. for a new generation.
Conservation laws are not handwaves, they're a very useful way of considering problems like this as they let you disregard a whole lot of irrelevant detail. Yes, some angular momentum will go into the windmill blades but it won't accumulate over time, as it will be recovered when the blades stop turning.
I read " Tech Allows Stable Integration of Windows In the Power Grid". Almost gave me a heart-attack.
Do you really need a source stating that nature is dependant on solar power ?
"chlorophyll" - google it.
I love how the very article you linked not only mentions the various environmentally detrimental effects, and laws changed to make them even more harmful, but also directly links references detailing the issues. Allow me to make some abridged quotes...
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo
"Coal and oil are plentiful, cheap, and easy to use."
This is true. Within 50 years (oil) it won't be, and coal will follow eventually.
What then, Mr. Smarty Pants?
Thanks for the answer. But if that's the answer, I have another question : why in the name of all that is good and holy are we paying tax money to people/companies/utilities for installing this equipment ? Just propaganda ?
Are we totally insane ?
One should look at exactly where the money for such projects is going. If it is being used to clean up the pollution, then fine, but it it is flowing into the general fund while the "problem" goes unresolved, then it really is nothing but a tax. Remember, you get something for a fee. You get nothing for a tax (other people might get something, but it will be far less than you gave, after government costs are considered).
"Excuse me, but caring about our planet does not make somebody stupid."
"Caring about our planet" doesn't make you smart, either. And there's ample evidence from history to show that people who substitute zealotry for serious thought usually end up causing more harm than good.
"Caring only about your pocketbook, however, does make you a greedy asshole."
The original poster made some fairly specific points, all of which are arguably true. Sure, the "eyeline" thing is pretty subjective, but the fact that a certain prominent political family in Mass. has blocked local wind power for that same reason makes it hard to completely dismiss.
But you respond with an ad hominem argument: He's greedy! He doesn't care about the planet!
When solar and wind become profitable and efficient then everyone will use them. Until then they're luxury items.
Frankly we need more greedy people in the environmental movement. I want ultracapacitors to make someone as wealthy as Bill Gates. I want some anonymous engineer toiling at a startup company to invent artificial photosynthesis and never have to work again in his life. I want the Polywell fusion guys to make a breakthrough and be able to buy their own private islands.
When people get rich is when good things happen.
"And thinking that eveyone must have the same order of priorities as you does make you stupid"
Yeah, because berating folks as "greedy assholes" is always the best way of showing respect for other people's priorities.
But if you do want to hear another person's priorities, then I think the answer is blindingly obvious: nuclear power. Unfortuantely the nitwits who have infested the environmental movement can't seem to get past their superstitious fear of it. Or maybe they don't really want cheap, affordable and safe energy so much as different kind of power entirely.
And Daddy won't you take me back to Muhlenberg county,
Down by the Green River, where Paradise lay.
"Well I'm sorry, my son, but you're too late in askin'."
"Mr. Peabody's coal train has hauled it away."
So many analyses seem to compare the potential output with what is now being used, but just look around - especially at night - and you'll see that HUGE amounts of energy are being wasted on poor insulation, lights left on, heating large, deserted spaces, etc., etc. Renewable energy, YES! but we also need to seriously reduce our usage.
Oh and did I mention that these technologies could one day remove the USA's dependence on foreign oil, reduce medical problems, protect the environment, decentralize the electrical system, reduce power lost during transmission (local power generation), and be better suited to installation in 3rd world countries?
I thought that's what Chuck Norris was for....
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
I wasn't being sarcastic, I actually agree with you on all those points. It's a fucked thing to do.
I have some background in NucEng and power making in general. The grids need very stable supplies of power. The mere fact that it changes from day to night or visversa TWICE! a day already makes solar unstable enough to be a problem. Forget clouds and all that other stuff. Wind!? Gusts, squall lines, yikes! Trying to add these things to what we got won't work. We need new paradigms to electric power gen, and much broader PHYSICAL distribution of power to really use these sources. The REAL problem of competing with Coal, Hydro, and Nuke is that those sources can turn on and give you a steady 250MW for three+ months straight without a pimple of variation. So, we have electric distribution grids built around that kind of source. We need better grids for real wind and solar.
Oh yeah? This comment goes to eleven!
Nah, stating the obvious is just a hobby for me.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I especially liked the really STUPID part that wind and solar "hugely expensive" relative to coal and oil, while failing to take into account the cost of lung, heart, brain, and kidney cells into the cost.
With thinking by "accountants" like these, no wonder the spread between the US and other developed countries in terms of life expectancy continues to widen.
If it is being used to clean up the pollution, then fine, but it it is flowing into the general fund while the "problem" goes unresolved, then it really is nothing but a tax.
Sure, the government might waste the money, but the pricing signal remains. The whole point of this is that it adds to the cost of doing something that is felt to be bad, and thus provides economic pressure to have different behaviour. The cold-hearted-money-loving accountant doesn't care whether the increased cost goes towards cleanup or towards the governor's yearly orgy - in either case it costs an extra $0.009 per KWH (or whatever) to buy from "Bob's House of Dirty Electricity" as compared to "Bob's New House Of Clean Goodness", and so decisions can be made accordingly.
I do agree which what might be your overall point - if our accounting and knowledge was perfect, we could just somehow mandate that each economic activity (such as power generation) was required to pay the full cost of that activity (including polution, CO2 emmission, bird chopping, eyesore value, etc) and the money so generated would be used to mitigate those negatives. In such a system, it wouldn't matter if we used coal or wind or corpses stolen from graves for power generation since the cost for fixing all the downsides of the method of chosen would be embedded in the final price and at the "end of the day" all of those downsides would be fixed by application of the charged money to systems that would actually fix them.
I doubt we will the the "ideal" system any time soon. Systems I have seen proposed for carbon taxing that do not attempt to use the tax money to mitigate the problem generally just plow the taxes raised into general revenue, but then reduce other taxes so as to be revenue neutral. This seems like a reasonably good idea - reduce the overall tax rate and shift it to the shoulders of those doing things that are disproved of. If everyone cleans up their act and the funds generated via the "sin tax" fall, then of course one needs to either find more "sins", or charge more for the current ones, or shift the taxes back to the "regular" system. Or manage with lower taxes, but that seems about as likely as the "perfect" system as detailed above.
Ah, my apologies. Was sorta on a drive-by read & retort blitz, as I know the oil trolls love to respond to articles like this with "Blaarhgg, tha lib'rals is a'killin' this couuntry!" or "Green energy is a lie!" etc...
Upon some reflection, there actually is incentive: re-vegetation gets the EPA off the mining co's back, plus they can then sell the now-flat land to a developer. Of course the local ecology is shot, but hey, as long as they're turning a profit, right?
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo
The problem is, what if something is considered to be bad, but actually isn't, or is in fact good? Your "price signals" wind up distorting the market, creating black markets, increasing crime (even crime unrelated to the thing that is being taxed). Attempts to prohibit something though taxes are just as oppressive as attempting to prohibit them by force, because at the end of the day, it's the same thing. EIther way, you have turned your government into the mafia.
No good can or will ever come out of any carbon tax scheme, unless the proceeds are used to mitigate the "problem", and ONLY for that purpose, and in a way that applies proportionally to EVERYONE producing said product. If you tax carbon, you have to tax every living person on the planet, as we all produce carbon through respiration.
You may think that is crazy, but a system can only be tested for its fairness by taking it to its extreme. Government programs and taxes always fail such tests, and in the end, they fail in real life as well, because they push it too far, in pursuit or personal power. It's a nasty business, and it does nothing but invite corruption.
You may think that is crazy, but a system can only be tested for its fairness by taking it to its extreme. Government programs and taxes always fail such tests, and in the end, they fail in real life as well, because they push it too far, in pursuit or personal power. It's a nasty business, and it does nothing but invite corruption.
Pardon me? All government programs, and taxes, everywhere fail in fairness tests? ALL of them? And then they ALL fail in real life too? Are you saying that every government in the world is failing in every measure? What colour is the sky in your world?
I agree there are difficulties in any enterprise, all the more so as you scale up the number of participants, but you know, we have been doing not-so-bad in this self-governing thing in the past hundred years or so here in the "western world". I certainly would chose to live under these societal conditions compared to pretty much any others that have actually survived more than a generation or two in the past. Even the "worst" of the "western world" societies doesn't seem to have significant numbers of people trying to emigrate.
Anyhow, as a counter-example, in the 1970's the USA put an effective tax on air pollution through the use of various cap-and-trade systems. It effectively put a price on what previously had been free - spewing pollution into the air. That seems to have worked well - and the money raised was not put into pollution cleanup to my knowledge. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_Rain_Program#Success
As an asside, this was an interesting discussion of the differences between emission trading schemes and emission taxes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissions_trading#Prices_versus_quantities.2C_and_the_safety_valve
Well, I was talking about the programs (such as Medicare and Social Security), and the taxes (such as the income tax, which started out as a 1% tax on the ultra-rich that is now a 20% tax on everyone), but yes, one could say that is true of all governments, because governments rely on guns to enforce their will, which inherently leads to unfairness. And then, the speed with which they fail is proportional to what extreme they take the measure, with the Khmer Rouge being an extreme example of application of force leading to the end of their government, while Western government have tended to do better as they hide their guns so effectively that most peole don't even think about what would happen if they don't follow the government's arbitrary mandates, they just do. Some programs might be sustainable over multiple generations, but waste and corruption inevitably bloat these programs and any taxes that are imposed, speeding the demise of either the program, or the government. The example you cited has showed short term success, but it will be corrupted eventually unless they end it now. Similar effects could have been had through consumer advocacy groups and protests, which were effective in stopping the practice of killing dolphins caught in tuna nets, among numerous other successes.
All government programs and taxes eventually collapse in on themselves. If you don't believe me, watch the western world over the next five years. If you want an example where this has already happened, look at Argentina in 2000 (previously a 1st world country, now a marginal "2nd world" nation).
The government that governs least governs best. This country went from being a backwater to being the greatest industrial power the world has ever known in only a hundred years due to such policies. It took slightly under a hundred years to drive out our industrial base and hovel ourselves for at least a generation with taxes and regulations. The successes of the western nations have been dependent on the power of their economy, which had been built up by 100+ years of free market capitalism. Socialist policies now in place have been draining those countries of their wealth, just like the spoiled heir who appears rich but in reality has frittered away every last dime and has more debt than assets by a high multiple. Soon he'll be out on the street, with the rest of us. People look at places like Scandinavia and claim that socialism works there, but the reality is that the Scandinavian nations are currently living off of the wealth they accumulated over the course of five hundred years of free market operations (really more like twelve hundred, but the theft of other countries' wealth doesn't really count, even though they had free markets with minimal use of aggression within their own borders).
I agree with you with regard to solar power. I live near Edmonton, only Latitude 54. Even here solar is a poor option, as our greatest need is at the time of minimum sun.
House scale wind is a bad bet at the best of times. The energy gradient with height makes it silly to build at this scale. Larger towers in our parks and school yards are a better bet locally, but given the large variability in wind and terrain, wind farms are even more practical.
Wind farms are practical given correct siting. Southern Alberta has several now, and is looking to expand -- currently limited by our transmission line capacity.
As to the impact of pulling all our energy from wind: The net effect of wind in general is to move excess heat from the equator to the pole. Slowing this down, creates a larger delta T. My bet is that even if we powered the planet with wind energy, giving every person on the planet the amount of energy a north american uses, that the change in delta T would be buried in the measurement uncertainty.
Has anyone demonstrated even a local climatological effect from a wind farm?
High altitude wind turbines may become practical, and can provide power with only seasonal variation instead of hourly variation.
Certainly the environmental impact of large areas of solar cells is something to be considered. Usually however in the setups I've seen, less than 50% of the land can be actually be used. The net effect is to create a patchwork. Since there are many plants that grow in partial shade, I don't see this as insurmountable. It will change the environment. Not certain if the change will be bad or good.
A lot of the area that best suited for solar power is land that is not productive in the biological sense -- the number of grams of carbon fixed per square meter per year is small. The patchwork shade may actually increase both productivity and diversity.
A large enough area covered even 50% with solar cells will change the local albedo. The area will get hotter, and create it's own wind.
However even in our climate a south facing window is a net heat gain over the heating season. As I write the temp has been going between -7 at night to +7 in the day. We heat two bathrooms that are on the north side of the house. We run a fire in the living room for about 3 hours in the evening. The rest of the heating is waste heat from living and passive solar.
In much of the north, the most economical energy action we can undertake is to re-insulate our houses. Take off the siding, add 4" or 6" of breathable styrofoam, put the siding back on. I live with 10,000 (F) degree heating days. If you are at 60 degrees, you have an even colder climate, unless you are on the Left Coast.
Working on a neighborhood scale instead of a individual house scale, solar ponds may be viable. I haven't crunched the numbers accurately, but to first order, a volume of water the same volume as the house heated to 180F will heat it for the year. This assumes an effective house envelope of R4 including windows and air leakage, a floor plan in the proportions of the golden rectangle, two floors, and a heating season of 250,000 degree hours. It ignores solar gain by the house. It ignores loses moving heat from the store to the house.
I've read of a shop in Montana that is mostly solar heated even at -20F. Home made system. 2x4 air space on the south wall. When the temp at the top of the airspace is warmer than the shop, a furnace fan exchanges air between the air space and the shop. This makes for a workable environment from about 10 a.m. to 5 p.m, longer hours in fall and spring.
This idea is not as viable here. Montana is as cold as my part of Alberta, but even in mid winter they get substantially more sun than we do. Here it is necessary to either have supplemental heat mid-winter or to figure out a way to store heat on an annual basis.
In remote locations wind power may have a very good return. A friend in a small northern community said that he paid 25 cents / kwhr. That was when
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.