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Optimize Offshore Wind Farms Using Weather Modeling
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from a Stanford news release:
"Politics aside, most energy experts agree that cheap, clean, renewable wind energy holds great potential to help the world satisfy energy needs while reducing harmful greenhouse gases. Wind farms placed offshore could play a large role in meeting such challenges, and yet no offshore wind farms exist today in the United States. In a study just published in Geophysical Research Letters, a team of engineers at Stanford has harnessed a sophisticated weather model to recommend optimal placement of four interconnected wind farms off the coast of the Eastern United States, a region that accounts for 34 percent of the nation’s electrical demand and 35 percent of carbon dioxide emissions. ... Among its findings, the Stanford model recommended a farm in Nantucket Sound, precisely where the controversial Cape Wind farm has been proposed. The Cape Wind site is contentious because, opponents say, the tall turbines would diminish Nantucket’s considerable visual appeal. By that same token, the meteorological model puts two sites on Georges Bank, a shallows located a hundred miles offshore, far from view in an area once better known for its prodigious quantities of cod. The fourth site is off central Long Island."
You can't have pristine landscapes, a non-petrol economy AND several kilowatts of electric power at your fingertips, to be switched on whenever you come home. We here in Europe are making choices. We know we have to. So will you, so will you.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
As I understand it, the problem with offshore wind is not the weather, but the insanely high costs of maintenance. Fix that and they might make some sense.
Authors on the West Coast propose wind farms on the East Coast ;-)
cheap, clean, renewable wind energy
Won't. Happen.
Wind is diffuse and intermittent. If it really were "cheap", there would be a sound business case for it. As it is, the costs of storage are forever elided.
Dog is my co-pilot.
As always, nobody wants this stuff where they will have to look at it. Then there's the political brilliance in the linked article: "...the advantage of sharing costs across several states, potentially increasing political support for the plan." Yeah, a bunch of New England states are gonna jump at the chance to pay for something that benefits other states.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
I wonder whether they have considered using the WINDCSAN dataset. It's what I worked on for a couple of years developing much greater accuracies for offshore windspeeds than modelled data - and more accurate than the raw NASA data. We managed to achieve 95% accuracy when compared to in situ metmasts, far better than the 80% accuracy with the raw data. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WindScan
If the truth doesn't fit you. agenda...lie.
The visual appeal is subjective at best - I for one think that offshore wind farms are very cool looking and wouldn't mind seeing a line of turbines off in the distance when I walk out of my backyard and onto my pier.
This overwhelming sense of peace and contentment is probably because I have a mansion in Nantucket with a private pier.
Problem with wind power anywhere is that it tends to blow when the power is not needed. Faking it out by using backup power to fill in the blanks when the wind shifts or dies is not particularly 'green' (in Ontario there has been a quiet but massive deployment of gas turbine generator plants). So with no way to store it and a statutory commitment to buy it when available, not when needed, Ontario follows everyone else with massive costs to pay others to take un-needed wind electricity. And there is another dirty little secret -- because the wind plants interfere with atmospheric mixing, downwind tends to be warmer and drier than it was before. And since ALL energy sources are renewable -- some one has to wait longer for than others, the problem is overrunning the renewal rate of the resource. But people are good at that...
Coal burned in the ISONE (New England minus a tiny bit of northern Maine) comes almost exclusively from South America -- Columbia and Venezuela. It turns out that shipping it by barge is easier than getting it past the railway congested New York City area.
That written, given the current prices of delivered gas and coal, gas is on the margin, not coal. That means additional wind generation likely displaces natural gas generation for most hours of the year. However, given that natural gas prices continue to fall, the dispatch order may switch within the next few years or sooner, especially in non-winter months, relegating coal to peak hours during the week in summer and winter regardless of the wind projects.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm all for installing wind and displacing fossil fuel generation in New England, New York, and (more importantly) PJM (DC to Newark to Chicago triangle, roughly). However, understand that at this point, wind isn't likely to displace coal in New England.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
They used weather statistics to model their theoretical windfarms.
...that it is nowhere near Cape Cod, or Ted Kennedy's ghost will haunt you for ruining his view!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Wind#Controversy
All previous proposals were based off pure guess work?
TWF is 3 times the size of any other wind farm in the US and as I recall the second largest in the world at over 50 square miles. On just about any average day a quick scan over the horizon will show a very small number of them actually turning, even on a windy day. The three units in the center of town, turned on mayb e 1-2 hours in 3 days. I couldn't miss seeing them since they were directly outside my hotel room window.
Wind power is costly (rare earth metals from China in the turbines), requires thousands of acres of land, provides sporadic power (unlike a solar trough there is *no* storage of overage or underage), and in the case of TWF, most of the benefit is not even provided to the local area. One look at the city of Tehachapi will show this local "benefit" since virtually all the power goes somewhere else. The only real benefit is the contractors who stay in hotels in the town but surpisingly the city residents don't receive lower electric rates from SOCAL Edison and the public lands that could have been used for literally anything else were sold in parcels to the electric company. If you add in the real estate, turbine, maintenance, and other costs I would imagine that PPW is likely more costly than a nuclear station. The current situation for SOCAL Edison seems to support this since most of the power comes from the San Onofre reactor complex and not TWF. The economic reality is more valid a point than any political debate about wind power - the value just isn't there. If it was, we'd see every turbine turning if there was enough of a breeze 24/7 365.5 days a year and electric rates in the SOCAL Edison area dropping.
with their high death rates, huge costs, and notorious spills?
First, many people can afford a 100% electric vehicle right now and never pay another dime for gas to commute to work. The Zero XU has a removable battery that I can use to charge at work and at home. The range is sufficient for me to get to work on a single charge. It only costs $0.16 per charge and that's 16 cents that I won't even be paying since I'm going to charge it under my desk at work. The total cost for the bike is less than $8K and it is available for purchase right now.
Second, the ARPA-e independently validated Lithium Ion breakthrough is going to be commercialized in a few years and then Electric cars are going to really be into play for all classes of vehicles including trucks.
This map indicates that Michigan has wind resources consistent with community-scale production. The map shows that the land-based community-scale wind resources in Michigan are concentrated along the immediate shores of the Great Lakes (especially Lakes Michigan and Superior) and on islands. The Great Lakes themselves have good-to-outstanding wind resource.
http://www.windpoweringamerica.gov/maps_template.asp?stateab=mi
Chicago (and Northern Illinois, Northern Indiana, Southern Wisconsin, and Western Michigan) would certainly benefit from these wind farms in Lake Michigan; they could be placed far enough from shore so that there is no 'Nantucket problem'.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
If there were a real business case for this, we would already be switching over to it.
This is no "myth", it is a real consequence of energy diffuseness and intermittance. All pitches for renewables for baseload always end in the punchline, "And we could do it today, if only we find the political will." N.b., the key word "political". That is, the author wishes to force their ineffective, uneconomic solution upon everyone else.
Hidden from view, of course, is the fact that switching to these energy sources will impoverish anyone dumb enough to use them.
Dog is my co-pilot.
The Synrock bit should have been a bit of a clue that I've been following this since before 1986 so the "please educate yourself" comment of yours is a very amusing backfire. Don't just be a silly fanboy, silly fanboys that assume that it's all perfect actually hold progress back (eg. cancellation of the US thorium reactor project because of the implications that current uranium reactors are not perfect).
It's an interesting subject and you can do a hell of a lot better than the watered down propaganda at the link you sent. The numbers have to actually measure something properly to mean anything and a bullshit graph that ignores capital costs is nothing but a trap for suckers. Don't be a sucker. Learn a bit about what you are advocating and after a while you would be embarrassed to link to something like that.
www.climatedepot.com
Add in the fact that wind energy is not viable, and has to be heavily subsidised (that means 'paid for by the taxpayer' or it can't 'compete' in the marketplace), and we have another load of bunkum.