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Gas Wants To Kill the Wind
RABarnes writes "Scientific American has posted an article about the political efforts of natural gas and electric utilities to limit the growth of wind-generated electricity. Although several of the points raised by the utilities and carbon-based generators are valid, the basic driver behind their efforts is that wind-generation has now successfully penetrated the wholesale electricity market. Wind was okay until it became a meaningful competitor to the carbon dioxide-producing entities. Among the valid points raised by the carbon-based generators are concerns about how the cost of electricity transmission are allocated and how power quality can be improved (wind generation — from individual sites — is hopelessly variable). But there are fixes for all of the concerns raised by the carbon-based entities and in almost all cases they have been on the other side of the question in the past."
Gas Seeking to Break Wind
"I'm not a quack, I'm a mad scientist! There's a difference." - Dr. Cockroach
Without subsidies, there is no political influence. And without political influence, lobbying wouldn't work and you are exposed to market forces... That's just bad business.
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So its bad for the government to help support clean energy. I notice you don't bring up all the tax breaks and corporate welfare the oil gas and coal co's get and how huge it is compared to what green energy gets.
The spelling and grammar police can kiss my ass
Any economist will tell you there needs to be ways of moderating the natural boom-bust cycle of capitalism.
No, some economists would say that government attempts to moderate the boom-bust cycle of capitalism (such as the Fed's action to purposely burst the stock bubble of the late 1920's through deflation) have often proven to be worse than letting the economy alone. Keynesian stimulus spending rarely works well, because even if it works in one's theory, in practice governments never save during good times, and when spending happens it is inefficient, slow, and corrupt.
This rap video provides one viewpoint along these lines.
Now keeping the banking system intact is a separate issue - although I think it will be many years before we know if saving "too big to fail" banks was better or worse than letting them fail.
1) Cover our eyes and let companies do whatever they want.
2) Suffer from energy spikes, speculative bubbles, piss poor infrastructure and a ruined environment.
3) Shovel billions into corporate coffers so they can sock the money away in offshore accounts while simultaneously failing to develop energy alternatives
4) Failure!
You have to subsidize new technologies because corporations cannot justify R&D to their shareholders. BP and Exxon cannot manufacture solar panels unless they can demonstrate higher profits, which one can't do until the technology is sufficiently developed, which one can't do without huge investments.
Technology has thrown the entire paradigm of free market economics for a loop. The amount of technology and science that go into an average product make information asymmetry astronomical. This requires more government regulation, not less.
The thing is Wind is Flaky, Personally I like to have power all the time, even when there is no wind.
There are two solutions to this problems:
1. Giant Batteries/ Flywheels/ Water storage hills
2. Gas Supplement.
The Reason you use gas is it's easier to turn on and off the Coal/Nuclear.
IMHO Nuclear>Gas+wind>coal
Granted this is a simplistic approach, But Gas is coming either way. There is going to be a ton of it on the market soon.
Standard Disclaimer: the company i work for would benefit by me making these statements.
The problem is the high voltage transmission infrastructure that no one wants to build. FTFA:
Reaching a goal of 20 percent wind generation in 2024 would require construction of 10 inter-regional high-voltage lines spanning a total of nearly 22,700 miles, at a cost of $93 billion. Such an ambitious goal won't be achieved under a business-as-usual approach, the study concluded.
Not only will it cost an enormous amount of money, but it will have to cross State lines, meaning it will take multiple
regulators, multiple special interests, and multiples of everything else you can think of in order to become reality.
Infrastructure is one of America's top 5 problems for the 21st Century.
Not only do we require trillions in new infrastructure,
there are still trillions in repairs we've been putting off.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
such as the Fed's action to purposely burst the stock bubble of the late 1920's
It couldn't be that everyone had over leveraged themselves... if that were the case, something like the Glass-Steagall Act would have keep the markets free from similar crashes. Oh, that's right... it did for nearly 70 years until it was repealed in 1999.
Keynesian stimulus spending rarely works well, because even if it works in one's theory, in practice governments never save during good times, and when spending happens it is inefficient, slow, and corrupt.
Then why are all states at the top of GDP per capita Keynesian or sitting on top of valuable natural resources?
Now keeping the banking system intact is a separate issue - although I think it will be many years before we know if saving "too big to fail" banks was better or worse than letting them fail.
The sound Canadian banking system holds the real answer: do not led greedy investors lurk in the shadows. Never take cops off the beat. Government oversight and transparency are the only realistic methods to preventing speculative bubbles, among other things.
Gee, if only there were a bunch of people who needed jobs who could do this for us.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Your math is misleading. You give the cost of a wind turbine in quantities of one and then multiply it without taking into consideration volume discount and economy of scale, so your bottom line is probably twice what it would cost. Even so, it's still competitive with building a new nuclear power plant.
Cost of a new nuclear power plant
But then when the wind farm is built, the fuel costs nothing, there is no cost associated with storing and disposing of spent fuel rods, and there's no possibility of a nuclear meltdown and the inadvertent release of radioactive material into the environment.
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Mussolini
Wind and solar power have radically different properties with respect to the national grid, and you can't just plunk them in and go on.
Actually their properties are a good enough match for certain loads that, within appropriate fraction-of-total-grid-capacity limits, you CAN just plunk them in and go on. (Part of the concern is over the push to exceed those fractions.)
Solar and wind both vary wildly at a single-mill or roof-full-of-panels level. But spread them out over a few square miles (do individual clouds, gusts, and storm cells aren't the issue) and multiple sites separated by tens and hundreds of miles (so local weather timing also gets many distinct samples) and the rapid variations average out. They become at least as predictable as the weather - which is very predictable at a 3-day level.
Solar matches the air conditioning load pretty closely - though it leads it a tad. Wind does the same with a slight lag. complimenting solar. It also peaks in the afternoon (due to "lake effect" and tracks the general load peak very well.
Wind also has a component that tracks HVAC load well: Temperature differences drive both wind speeds and need to heat/cool to keep things comfy, while wind speeds drive heat loss-gain through insulation by air infiltration and conduction between surfaces and the air. So higher winds drive both higher geneeation and higher heating/cooling loads to consume the generated power.
So up to a point adding solar and especially wind to the grid - if it's spread out a bit - IMPROVES the grid's ability to handle the cyclic nature of the load and REDUCES the variability that you need to cover with "peaking plants". You still need to keep some other capacity on line to cover the variations. But you needed that anyhow: The load is almost totally UNcontrolled and can vary even more rapidly than the output of a wind farm as a storm cell passes through it. The name of the game is to match the two sides of this equation.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Yes $7 billion dollars.
So... only the cost of about 3 stealth bombers, then?
And you guys bought how many of those? How are they doing in Afghanistan, by the way?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC