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US Dept. of Energy Wants Bigger Wind Energy Ideas
coondoggie writes "The Department of Energy wants to kick up the research and development of offshore wind projects as it looks to achieve its goal of producing 20% of the country's electricity from wind farms by 2030. The DOE Wind Program is looking to focus on what it calls specific advanced technology, gigawatt-scale demonstration projects that can be carried out by partnerships with a wide range of eligible organizations and stimulate cost-effective offshore wind energy deployment in coastal and Great Lakes regions of the country. The agency is also looking for more research that can help address market barriers in order to facilitate deployment and reduce technical challenges facing the entire industry, as well as technology that will reduce cost of offshore wind energy through innovation and testing."
Xcel has contracted an additional three hundred megawatts of wind energy by 2010 and must obtain ten percent of its own electricity from renewable sources by 2015. Xcel is expected to increase its wind power contracts from 302 megawatts to one 1125 megawatts by 2010.
If you're worried about avian species, Wikipedia quotes two studies that found in seven months a death of 1.1 to 1.4 birds killed per windmill. Bats are higher but it's lower than bat deaths related to lighthouses, communication towers, tall buildings, power lines, and fences. So while unfortunate, it could probably be viewed as acceptable.
The advancements in turbine technology and infrastructure will always be needed but to answer the DOE's "Annual installations need to increase more than threefold." Why don't they just buy up a bunch of (relatively) cheap farmland in Minnesota? I think you can get away with negotiating the small plot of land they use and service roads through fields while still letting the bulk of the land be used for farming. Farmers already maneuver around sloughs that rise and fall with the water table. I don't know how the rights to offshore wind farms work or what the costs to permits are but it seems like you'd just have a strip of them so why not just do a huge block out in the middle of nowhere instead?
You can see which states really took off with wind power, I don't know why you're highlighting coastal areas and the Great Lakes when Colorado and Texas have demonstrated an equally large potential.
My work here is dung.
And who can blame them, right? I wondered when I'd start to see fresh pleas for alternative energy sources. If you've got that card, now is the damned best time to play it with the BP disaster fresh in everyone's minds.
I'm just waiting for some Calamity to hit. I mean, Offshore drilling is an entirely different ballpark, but we've put a lot of research into that and we still mess it up.
I mean, how do these platforms cope with hurricanes? I've always wondered. I have a feeling that since a windmill will have most of its machinery above water level, it'll be more susceptible to high winds (which is the idea I know, but I mean twisting metal high winds)
Might seem counter intuitive but a 2007 article in Wired said:
Hurricanes could be a problem, so they decided to outfit their windmills with hydraulic lifts scavenged from oil-industry machinery; the system would lower the turbines in the event of a squall.
I think under the water is the safest place during a hurricane. Oh, and the timing is too perfect so I cannot omit this paragraph:
But first they needed to secure government approval. Their first stop was the state of Louisiana, but the bayou bureaucrats rejected the proposal. “They saw us as competing with oil and natural gas,” Schoeffler recalls.
Perhaps Schoeffler should ask Louisiana now if it's alright for them to compete with offshore oil?
My work here is dung.
I hope the offshore aspect solves the NIMBY mentality I often encounter whenever wind energy comes up.
Here's an example. One of my colleagues bought a lakefront property in rural Ontario. A couple of years later, a farmer on the *other side* of the lake leased land to a wind energy provider. They pay $10k per turbine per year, so ten of them went up. My colleague sold his property shortly thereafter, saying that he couldn't stand the turbines.
Can anyone explain this? I'm genuinely curious to know why some people dislike turbines.
Light the blue touch-paper and retire immediately.
Place the wind farms around the Beltway. There is plenty of hot wind coming from Washington.
Wind turbines constantly adjust their blade angles to match the wind. The idea is to keep them turning at a constant rate no matter what the wind speed is (i.e. they *don't* spin faster in high winds then in low winds). In a hurricane they just turn the blades to minimum angle and keep right on generating.
No sig today...
Geronimo whereby they built nine Suzlon turbine windmills next to my hometown (PDF) to produce enough electricity for 6,500
I have heard of this project in some industry publications. I think it's a good one, but I will add some comments. The stated output of the wind farm is 18MW nameplate. That means under ideal wind conditions, so on the average day it will probably produce something like 12MW and maybe single digits on a bad day. A small coal plant produces 600MW rain or shine and a large plant can do 1200W; a nuclear plant can do 2000W. It takes a lot, lot, lot of turbines to offset one traditional plant making wind more expensive per megawatt.
My question for you is simply whether or not you think small towns across the US would want nine to forty windmills next to their town so they could have cheap renewable power nearby?
I would. A lot of people do not for many reasons.
The first is that it's more expensive. Try raising electrical bills 1% to raise capital for a major wind project. Again hearings, lawsuits, studies, public meetings, congressional acts, it goes on and on. It would be an unnoticeable amount of money on the average bill and huge groups will fight tooth and nail to block it. Regardless of the long term advantage.
Second is the environment, scenic, conservationist, NIMBY groups who all have factions that hate wind turbines for a myriad of often conflicting reasons and ideology. When you pose the option, "would you prefer coal or NG?" They always reply with canned bullshit about everyone should conserve and use less therefore requiring no new power plants, which is a reasonable goal to reach for, but is not a realistic energy plan given population growth and basic freedoms.
Third are the entrenched power plant owners who do not want competition in markets where they have enjoyed near monopolies for decades. They are a major force of lobbying against wind development both in government and "grass roots" efforts to clandestinely support the first two groups. If you follow the money that the first two use to hire their lawyers a lot of it comes indirectly from power plant owners.
But if you're in the industry, you're telling me that's not a good business plan?
Compared to producing the equivalent power with coal or natural gas, the distributed wind option is more difficult and expensive. One major reason is that it's harder to operate because the output of wind generators is not constant, consistent or controllable. That means you also need "back-up" generation powered by traditional fuels on standby and expensive power electronic control devices to correct the power factor on line-commutated turbines. What this essentially means in less technical language is that the way wind turbines work is somewhat passive to the grid; they cannot operate without the larger generators online to regulate and control the voltage level. Given a stable voltage and frequency, wind generators can inject supplemental power into the grid but without large generators nearby to provide control and regulation the wind turbines are essentially useless. The equipment that allows wind generators to stand-alone and self-regulate is very, very expensive and not worth the relatively small amount of power wind turbines produce.
It's a complicated balancing act that is harder to set up and manage than a coal or NG plant which essentially has a knob the operator can set and that plant will kick out that much power, voltage and frequency 24/7. There is also the issue of having many more assets out in the field that require annual maintenance and skilled labor.
This is why I'm a huge advocate of nuclear power with wind and solar supplements. Nuclear power is fantastic at supplying base load generation and stability in the grid without the pollution of coal or NG. Wind and nuclear compliment each other very well and reduce the emissions to basically zero while providing ple