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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
Authors on the West Coast propose wind farms on the East Coast ;-)
"As I understand it, the problem with offshore wind is not the weather, but the insanely high costs of maintenance."
Will it need thousands of armed people spending a trillion in foreign lands?
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
Yep. Without subsidies, wind is not economically viable at present -- probably never will be. A lot of people are making good money from the subsidies right now, including even (in Europe) being paid not to operate the farms.
What people seem to forget is that this was also politically-fashionable in the 80's for a while too, there's plenty of rusting turbine hulks in California and Hawaii -- albeit of less efficient machines. When wind finally runs out of subsidies, it will die another death -- just like the last time.
There are better, more efficient, sustainable sources of energy out there. Just all the money's being wasted on wind right now, because that's where the free lunch is. This is not a good thing.
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.
Not sure which better, more sustainable things there are. Solar? Nuclear? We've already damned up just about every river, so there's not much more hydro to utilize.
Sources I know about: coal, natural gas, oil, hydro, geo-thermal, nuclear, solar - both mirror based and "traditional" solar cell based, wind. Feel free to supply any I've forgotten.
Coal, even "clean" coal is generally looked at as a dirty energy source. We're about tapped out on Hydro, far as I know, and it has significant environmental impacts. I'm not sure where we are on geo-thermal or what the environmental impacts are with this. Natural gas is fairly abundant, but there are grave concerns about the new fracking processes being employed, and the fact that the companies don't even have to disclose the "secret" chemical soups they're using. Oil is environmentally, monetarily, politically costly, and costly in human lives. Nuclear has potential - it's not renewable, but it provides a lot of energy per plant. Of course, the downsides are fairly well publicized.
That leaves us with solar, which, if I'm not mistaken, costs more than wind. On the other hand, in the deserts of Eastern CA and Nevada, it's at least a more predictable energy source than wind. It also has the potential of storing some of its energy via large vats of liquid salt so, with more $$$, it can even generate energy at night. I wouldn't say that acres of land devoted to mirrors and a tower is any more unsightly than a mere tower with propellers, but that's just me. At least the sites are not located where many people are likely to be situated.
Maintenance costs, low capacity factor, and the diffuse nature of the energy source it is trying to harvest
You're being sarcastic, I know. But the parent has a point. Maintenance via engineering and technicians is far cheaper than boots on the ground halfway around the world. The hazards are far worse too.
The reality is that the day of cheap energy in the form of BTUs are over. We can bitch moan and complain all we want. The party was fun while it lasted. Sobering up to reality is the part that sucks.
My advice. Start getting used to leaving your windows open. Soon you'll find that running your AC gets expensive. Driving too. I'd like to plant a victory garden myself, but these days that will land you in jail. Fun times ahead.
Life is not for the lazy.
All previous proposals were based off pure guess work?
The base load problem is a myth. It's an artifact of the fact that today, renewables are a small fraction of the total power stream. If you have a diverse enough set of large enough, widely-spaced enough power sources, you can ensure that at least a few are producing enough power to run the country. Any minor gaps can be filled in by voluntary demand reduction and intermittent / pumped hydro.
Actually, running your AC is about a perfect application for solar PV. You need it most when the Sun is shining the hardest.
The interstate highway system wouldn't have been built without govt money, but I think people find it useful now. Once there are enough turbines generating power people will probably forget who built the farms, like they seem to forget who built the roads, and the sewers, and GPS, and etc., etc.
Just because it's costing taxpayer money now doesn't make it bad. Not to mention that apparently the oil industry is still getting handouts from the govt which they don't need.
The problem is simply this.....electric cars don't work, they aren't economically feasible ATM. Even with government subsidies the Volt is over $40,000 and i bet if you look the biggest use of gasoline is the working poor who sure as hell can't afford to get rid of that 99 Explorer they have paid for for some vehicle that costs $40k and will need the $17k+ batteries replaced in less than 7 years without the vehicle being stowed in a garage (which most poor don't got).
And please don't bring up public transport because 1.-in many areas like pretty much the entire rural states it simply doesn't exist and wouldn't be economically feasible to build, and 2.-Buses quickly become overrun with the scummiest of the scum so nobody wants to ride them. i know in my home state I'd rather ride on a prison bus than take public transport, at least the prison bus has armed guards.
so you are looking at a couple of choices, you 1.-pay trillions in taxes to give the masses electric cars AND you pay trillions to replace the batteries they can't afford when they die, or 2.-you pay trillions for public transport AND trillions more in both security and in keeping lines in rural areas open. Since neither of these will actually be possible thanks to the states being broke and the majority of a certain party signing Grover Norquist's 'No new taxes on teh rich EVAR!" pledge I simply do not see how non fossil fuels are suppose to replace boots on the ground in either the short OR the medium term. Doesn't mean we shouldn't be paying for research, after all some scientist may come up with a super cheap battery tech that will make it work, but right now the math just doesn't compute, sorry.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
The reality is that the day of cheap energy in the form of BTUs are over.
Simply untrue.
Nuclear.
Wind is already viable. I'm on the east coast and using 100% wind energy and marginal cost is a few bucks per month. It's a small price to pay for clean air. You can find a clean energy provider in your area from this useful page by the Department of Energy.
Current nuclear is cost competitive. It is not science fiction. Please educate yourself.
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.
From the point of view of the UK National Grid, wind is NOT considered intermittent. But nuclear is. Why?
From a grid management perspective, if your wind farms are generating 2GW of power now, they will likely be generating 2GW or very near that in 20 minutes time, and it's very predictable over the next few hours what the wind generation is going to do.
However, Sizewell B could go offline in 2 minutes time meaning the grid suddenly loses well over 1GW of generating capacity in one sudden, enormous hit. This never happens with wind, because it's generated by thousands of small generators instead of one huge one, and the wind never *suddenly* stops, it always takes a few hours for the wind to slow down so you have plenty of notice. But you won't have any notice of a sudden shutdown of a large coal or nuclear power station, so you must keep enough spinning reserve online to cope with the possible sudden failure of one or more large power stations. If you don't have enough spinning reserve, well, you end up with something like the great north east blackout a few years ago in the United States if a large power station goes offline.
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