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How Viable Is Large Scale Wind Energy?
New submitter notscientific writes "Renewable sources of energy are obviously a hit but they have as yet failed to live up to the hype. A new study in Nature Climate Change shows however that there is more than enough power to be harnessed from the wind to sustain Earth's entire population... x200! To generate energy from the wind, we may however need to set up wind farms at altitudes of 200-20,000 metres. To be fair, the study is purely theoretical and does not look at the feasibility of such potential wind farms. Regardless, the paper does provide a major boost to backers of wind-generated energy. Science has confirmed that the sky's the limit."
Yea, I'll wait for more wind farms to actually be build.
I know folks that build those giant wind turbines. They think they build a good product (and they do), but not a single one thinks it'll be more than a supplemental. If for nothing else... Not In My Back Yard.
....No one has actually _built_ a wind power turbine setup that operates at well above the ground. I mean, consider the issues involved:
1. How are we going to keep those turbines up at altitude?
2. What are the costs of tethering these high-flying wind turbine installations?
3. Will these installations become hazards to migratory birds flying at high altitude, let alone passing airplanes of all sizes?
I'd rather build hundreds of nuclear reactors based on the safe liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) technology instead in the short to medium term, and in the longer term build space-based solar power arrays parked in geosynchronous or near-geosynchronous orvbit.
How would this affect the local weather?
The overriding problem with wind power is that, for large parts of the world, it is not constant or predictable. So while your wind farm may meet your energy demands for one day, it might not the next... and there is no way to predict or plan for these boom/bust periods. The only way to address this is:
1. Build backup power sources which can meet all your energy demands (for when there is no wind)
2. Overbuild the wind farms and build massive battery backups to store and distribute excess power (expensive and still no reliable)
3. Rebuild the electric distribution infrastructure to share power across much larger regions (to do effectively require tech we haven't perfected).
No matter how you cut it, building an adequate wind power infrastructure is prohibitively expensive because you have to plan for periods of your total output being zero. No matter how much technology improves, this will always be the case (well, until we can control weather).
Bunch of massive towers, we are speaking skyscraper strength in a support, essentially. In fact, skyscraper it up and use all the floors as energy storage.
Massive links between all of these. A chain-grid could work, but it'd need to be real tough and not move much otherwise it makes the wind-capture less efficient.
Slap a bunch of turbines on them.
Best part about this is you can have turbine-grids all the way from the top to more-or-less the bottom, without all of the costs of building a support for every single one of them or building a skyscraper that can house people.
Of course, you will need to make sure that the skyscraper-like support can also support all that wind coming in at any direction or else it is going to fail horribly.
Optionally you can use that wind power directly to pump water up the skyscraper supports to produce a more solid power-flow. (but admittedly since these are high up they'd be getting essentially constant wind, but still better to be stable)
Even better idea, put all of these between skyscrapers in cities. Not large-scale ones, just ones good enough to capture the winds travelling in and around cities.
This study is at best incomplete. Reading through this, I am not sure they understand the true limitations to wind power. Air density and strenght of textiles are the limiting factors. As we increase altitude, we lower air density. Using our current technology at a lower air density will result in less efficiency. In order to maintain output would requrie either a much larger aparatis or far more of current technologies. We can't go much larger as very quickly we run into the similar problem that the folks working on the space elevator have... It would rip itself apart. Increasing the number of turbines to account for the loss in air density would not be economicly smart. I can see that they really would like to push air power, but there are physical limitations to what we can do currently.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
We will need major advances in materials to do something like this (on a huge scale affordably).
Theoretically there's plenty of wind power.
Theoretically there's plenty of solar power.
Theoretically there's plenty of geothermal power.
Theoretically there's plenty of power in the vacuum of space.
It's that niggling practicality of GETTING and USING that energy that confounds us.
Arguably, I'd say the only one that's really proven itself over the long term is solar; as the Earth is essentially a closed system with only solar energy as an input, it's proven that there is amply "enough" input solar energy falling on half of the globe at any given time to drive that system.
-Styopa
There are several startups working on exploiting high-altitude wind energy. The basic idea is to have something flying in the air, instead of building very large towers. Two of the more advanced companies are:
Makani Power (Bay Area): They build a small plane that is tethered to the ground. It flies circles in the sky, the propellers are the generators.
http://www.makanipower.com/
Enerkite (Germany): They launch a kite into the air, also tethered to the ground. A generator attached to the cable generates energy most of the time while the cable is unrolling. From time to time, energy generation is stopped and the kite is pulled in.
http://www.enerkite.de/
It is yet to see which concept will win (leightweight kite: + easy and cheap, generator on the ground; - hard to launch, no direct flight control, generation stops in regular intervals; airplane: + much better flight control; generators can be used to launch and land; - much more complex, heavier).
Is anyone going to study what happens when you suck a bazillion joules of energy out of the the wind? Why don't we convert the entire gulf stream to energy? We don't need that pesky gulf stream that bad, do we?
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
He knew that: ''The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind''
just because oranges are healthy, you shouldn't have a diet based SOLELY on oranges. What you want is a good mix of different clean energy sources because:
+ they will compete and advance technologically
+ they won't all fail at once
+ they will all pollute in a different way, diluting the total footprint
No energy form is safe, no energy form is (totally) clean.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
We need to really diversify our energy.
That included using Wind, Solar, Tidal, Hydro, Natural Gas, Coal, Nuclear...
We need to stop focusing on Green Energy but focus on diverse energy, so we can hedge the trade-offs each offer.
Even coal. While coal has the biggest environmental impact. It is currently the most plentiful in the United States, and shouldn't be discounted.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The funny thing is that pundits seem to think wind energy has no impacts. But check on the raptors... If the dams create so much fuzz because they interfere on fish spawning, though it is a far more reliable energy source, I wonder what we should think of wind.
1)They do kill birds, but... does anyone know the number of birds killed by oil polution?
2)It's true. I wouldn't want one in my backyard, but... I can live with one at 300 meters away.
3)If only we had some sort of grid.
People always approach this issue from the wrong angle. The solution doesn't lie in huge corporate entities producing vast amounts of power which they then dole out making a profit. That is why the technology fails. Plus wind farms are UGLY UGLY . People always talk about how wind speed is not adequate in such a such situation to produce power but thats only coming at it from a megaproject viewpoint. Very small wind turbines are quite functional at winds in most locations a good deal of the time (some turbines function with winds as little as 7 kms an hour). There could be lots and lots of people producing some of their power through wind with small unobtrusive wind turbines.
The real stumbling block is control. Some people want to have control over other people. If people produced their own power others would be just one less way they have control over them. It is really as simple as that.
Every time a discussion about wind power comes up, some troll (usually with a very high UID, sometimes with an account created solely for the purpose) asks how putting up windmills will affect weather.
The answer should be fairly obvious. We have cut down a shitload of trees, which normally slow down wind. Putting up windmills? Slows down wind slightly, increases turbulence significantly, causing minimal localized temperature effects. Kind of like putting up trees. If there is any significant effect, it will be moderating, which is a good thing.
In addition, wind turbines don't actually cause any heating worth mentioning, unless perhaps they catch on fire. This is covered in the linked article, which had the GP actually cared about this issue, they would have found with google and read already. They cause thermal mixing, which can raise temperatures at a specific point, but which don't raise temperatures in a region. It only results in higher measured temperatures in a relatively small area downwind. This is expected due to (fractionally) lower wind speeds and greater thermal mixing.
In summary, anyone who expresses concerns about wind farms affecting weather is a shill, a troll, or an idiot, because these are not real concerns, and this is a well-known fact.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The turbines are industrial bird-killing machines, they make lots of noise
Nope.
No sig today...
It can't be done because I say it can't be done.
Innovation in energy technology stopped in the late 19th century and if it's not fossil fuels, then it's not energy.
Go Romney/Ryan 2012
You are welcome on my lawn.
Ugh, sure its a great idea, but I'd be more interested in something that actually did address the logistics. In North Iowa near my hometown, there is a field that they keep the parts for some of the wind turbines, those tings are massive, the field is right next to the railroad tracks because these things are so massive. There's a whole slew of parts just waiting to be assembled into a productive turbine (or 20). But what about the power lines being run to these things? The cost to put one up? legislation that has to be navigated to accomplish all that, the unsung heroes of these kinds of big ideas are the ones who actually (figure it out) and get it done (Logistically).
People don't need to know wonderful and useful $Green_energy_of_the_week is, they need to know how realistic it is (or isn't). Ignoring the fact that you have an implementation problem doesn't make it look any more attractive when it comes time to write the check. Unfortunately that doesn't get much attention because it's the un-interesting part of the problem.
Good leaders run toward problems, bad leaders hide from them.
...pretty little things, the turbines at Windside. Do you notice how they provide all sorts of figures, except the generating capacity? There's a reason for having long honking blades - you gather power from a larger area. These generators aren't much wider than the post they sit on, and they aren't going to generate much power at all. The best you can get are these quotes:
"The core of our business is based on small turbines charging battery banks that power small DC systems"
And this incredibly misleading quote: "The biggest Windside wind turbine is currently WS-12. It is 6 meter high and its diameter is 2 meters. WS-12 produces annually approx. 8600 kWh at the average wind speed of 5 m/s". Note: kilowatt-hours, with no time period stated. They probably mean per year. So we may well be talking about a 1kw generator. Again, they most carefully do not say.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
:..used a model which considered the theoretical limits of energy extraction from the wind to postulate some astonishing results. Low-altitude winds near Earth's surface hold at least 400 TW of power. But go higher up to altitudes between 200 m and 20 km and the winds confine a massive 1,800 TW, at least. Such an extraordinary amount of power can sustain an equivalent of 200 Earth habitations (Earth's global energy demand is 18 TW)!
This is a similar statement to ones like "enogh sloar energy hits the Earth's surface in one hour is enough to power the entire world for a year". Just as nobody is planning on covering the world surface for an hour to collect our annual energy needs, nobody is planning on covering the earth with stacked turbines from 200M to 20,000 M.
calculating available energy is one thing. solving practical questions another. science is not engineering.
i think we all know that there is abundant energy available in any number of forms. we've known that for a long time. turning that knowledge into processed/products/techniques that are practical, economic, possible has been hard without even considering sustainability or cleanliness.
good to know the numbers, but there are many barriers remaining.
We did a quick thought experiment on this in a Mechanical Engineering class at the University of New Hampshire. Assume highly efficient wind turbines (90% +), 75 foot wingspan, 25 feet apart, arranged in a line. Assume a certain airspeed that blows some percent of the time. We found that to equal the power output of Seabrook nuclear power plant, which doesn't even power the whole state of NH, it would take a line of turbines stretching from Portsmouth to Washington DC.
On another note, I wonder if solar panels in orbit combined with a Tesla Wardenclyffe Tower type device could work... hmm...
Wind power (and all forms of renewable energy for that matter) have two main problems.
Greedy, already established power companies that don't want the competition (or government required lowering of the rates due to lowered operating expenses). These companies do not hesitate to hire lobbyists to pay off corrupt politicians to block the project.
People who say "wind power is great, just not in my backyard" who complain about assorted eyesore or low frequency rumble problems, or [insert local complaint here]. Some problems are real but most are not. Yes, large wind and solar farms are unsightly but there must be some kind of reasonable compromise in order to satisfy both sides. If someone were to invent a box that produced free power with no environmental impact I think you would be surprised at the number of people that would complain about how it should be made illegal because ...
You can get nuclear powerplant, a solar array, a coal burner, a gas burner, a wind farm. But something is going to have to generate that electricity you keep on consuming.
Make a choice. Oh wait, I forgot. Democracy, power without accountability. You can vote to have your cake and eat it to.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"The turbines are industrial bird-killing machines,"
You need half a dozen of them to read the killing power of _1_ cat.
Sorry, this off, but I am sick and tired of hearing about ‘safe’ LFTR technology with no supporting explaination. I have heard people claim that boiling water reactors were safe because if you lost the moderator (the water) the main chain reaction shuts down. It does, but that is not the problem. The problem is the decay heat for all the short-lived actinides; if you lose cooling, your reactor fuel turns into a very difficult to contain lava. Why is this any different in a LFTR? The fluoride salt would not burn and you may be at less risk from a hydrogen explosion, but decay heat would still vaporize a lot of truly nasty stuff.
I also do not understand the claim that they produce less spent fuel waste. (I will leave off the rant that spent fuel waste is not and never will be the real danger of nuclear power, the real danger is and always will be reactor malfunction.) I understand that some of the actinides can be ‘burned up’ in the reactor. Conventional reactors do the same, but may be the process is more efficient in a LFTR. However, there are several very dangerous reaction products (like Strontium90 and Caesium137) that have dangerous half lives (short enough to be hotter than Hell and long enough to be with us for a while) and have negligible neutron cross section. Once created, there is simply no way to get rid of these other than long-term storage.
True, but for SOME parts of the world the wind is both strong and predictable, or when it fluctuates it's on a timescale of hours which is adequate to increase or decrease output from conventional power plants to balance. Let's get these areas harnessed first and see where we're at instead of acting like it's fundamentally flawed because it doesn't work so nice "for large parts of the world". Oh wait, that's already happening...
"Renewable sources of energy are obviously a hit but they have as yet failed to live up to the hype."
This is sort of like saying in 5,000 BC that the wheel had as yet failed to live up to the hype. Or in 1700 AD the steam engine, or in 1930 nuclear medicine or in 1940 the transistor. These things take time to develop. Patience.
My basement is almost a museum of water heater technology - when we moved in, there was a huge multi-fuel (coal or oil) Victorian segmented iron boiler sitting right next to a 1970s style uninsulated storage water heater.
I ripped out both (I broke a 1-ton come-along pulling the boiler up and out) and installed a state-of-the-art Aquastar on-demand gas water heater and lived with it for four years. Then I ripped that out and replaced it with a heavily insulated storage water heater.
Want to guess which one was cheapest and most efficient in real world use? Hints: I have two teenagers in the house these days, and I have my own well.
Don't make on-demand water heating a golden hammer.
Whenever I've driven through a large-scale wind farm I'm always amazed by how many aren't turning despite the wind blowing. I assume that there isn't a "need" for the power at the time, so they're turned off or whatever you do with a giant windmill to not make energy.
Even though the real-time grid doesn't need the power, why not divert it to create hydrogen via electrolysis? The hydrogen could be converted to methane on site, eliminating the hydrogen storage and transport issues, and we already have a huge base of things that can use natural gas already.
This way the mills could be turning whenever there is wind, which presumably is much of the time in locations chosen for wind farm installs. The gas production could be used in a variety of ways, either pipelined to a power plant for use when the wind doesn't blow or merged with the existing natural gas supply.
It'd be curious to know if anyone has actually looked more closely into this -- ie, what percent of the time are wind farms not contributing to the grid, how much electricity does this represent and how much downline methane does this represent? It may not be enough volume to be worthwhile, but it just seems ridiculous to build wind farms that are only used some of the time.
I know there are other energy storage schemes, but most of them seem unlikely (underground stored high pressure air) or geographically restricted (pumping water uphill into a reservoir for hydroelectric use) and they also don't generate a long-term storable, portable fuel, either.
If you're going to invent 20,000ft windmills, then you might as well invent a magical creature who defecates some super-fuel, like Lord Nibbler.
Really you only get a fraction out of the theoretical power stated in the paper. You're looking at about 1/3 to 1/5 of what they state for output, realistically. And how would you have a wind farm near an airport? To me, I read this as the absurd stunts that wind would have to pull off to be viable. The fact that it ignores the practical application means this is nothing than fiction, and should be treated as such, because no one except Charlie Sheen gets to live in a fictitious world. So there you have it wind adherents: you're all Charlie Sheens!
Meanwhile, Sharp has a solar panel that is 43% efficient. Lets contrast that with the theoretical maximum of 59% for wind mills. there's a 16 percent advantage... but unlike solar cells, windmills can never be more efficient than 59%. Also, windmills need regular service being a mechanical apparatus. Solar cells, even the ones that move, don't have the same ear and tear as a a windmill.
In the end, wind doesn't work, even when you have subsidies.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
to store and release energy.
http://www.nypa.gov/facilities/blengil.htm
When there is too much power for the grid to handle, they pump the water up the mountain into a reservoir. As demand for power increases, they allow the water to flow back down into a lower reservoir that turns power generating turbines. Think massive capacitor.
The area around the facility is a beautiful park. The visitor center explains how the whole thing works.
People stopped givingup on chasing away stupid people, with the result that there are more stupid people.
Wow, I really proved how smart I am with that sentence, didn't I?
/off
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Depending on energy consumption levels, I think it would be possible over time.
One problem is that compared to conventional sources, it is awfully expensive. So it would have to take place over a long period of time just to be able to pay for it.
The second problem is other than the fantsy in the article of these things at 20,000 feet, which might as well be on the moon, the BEST place for these things is off shore. Which is were rich people have cottages. Solving the NIMBY issue, is I think easily the BIGGEST issue to solve.
The thrid problem is even if you solve the first two, the is the simple fact that the wind is not a constant source of energy. Perhaps you could have some sort of energy sharing distrabution where when windy in one area and not another they cover one another. However this means overbuilding a lot, and there is finite room, and it would just add to cost and time. You can also use water storage and things like that, but again, only so many finite areas where this is possible, and that can only do so much.
One +/- of wind, is that it is very expensive to maintain as all those thousands of turbines need to be serviced and fixed. However think of the jobs it would create, in wind power manufacturing, and all those wind repairmen. It is also not rocket science, the technology could be repaired by people trained pretty easily.
Anyway I am a big fan of wind for many reasons, however a lot of earthy tree hugging types have some pretty unrealistic ideas. I think the government just needs to man up, tell the cottagers to piss off, and start a multi year (decades really) campagin of building and/or private incentives for companies to do so.
...then they will have a cooling effect. Depending on how many of these are in the air at a given time and the size of the wing surface, and if might actually be measurable. If shutting down all air traffic in the US after 9/11 caused the temperature to go up, then having hundreds of thousands of these things in the air could affect the climate. It would be almost like having a permanent cloud.
Although I'm working on fusion, I hope that my work will be obsolete before it even gets going, because we'll have plenty of wind or solar power to go around. I think of fusion as a backup plan.
I tried to look into it.
Utility companies make it hard for people to generate their own power, basically you need to be a large corporation that can sue utility company.
Meanwhile in Denmark, Germany wind power works! Because government made the rules that force utility companies to provide connection to the grid.
Recently Spain introduced the rules to help wind power. Now 16% of demand is covered by wind power. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Spain
You just need comprehensive rules and the government which supports citizen-made wind projects, instead of corporations.
Wind power produces:
20% in Denmark (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Denmark)
16% in Spain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Spain)
8% in Germany (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Germany)
Wind power works best with:
High winds
Low elevation
Cool temperatures
because they provide higher energy density.
Those interested please read "Wind Power" by Paul Gipe, or many other books.
...a study found that large scale hamster wheel energy farms could theoretically power 100% of humanity's energy needs.
Heck, you could argue that if we just had enough humans riding on stationary bikes we could power 100% of humanity's energy needs.
The problems with wind are:
1) expensive capital investment;
2) expensive upkeep;
3) real life output a fraction of any rated capacity;
4) intermittent real life output.
We gave wind up in the 18th century because it wasn't worth it. Trying to revive it with subsidies is as silly as trying to resurrect the whale-oil industry since it's "renewable".
And you need about 10,000 turbines to equal the number of birds that die by flying into windows (in the USA).
No sig today...
Of course wind power "works". Wind power has been used for millennia. It's just a question of where to put them. (On top of mountain ranges perhaps?)
I've been in the vicinity of a couple dozen of them over the last two months. Huge, beautiful, majestic - those are the words I'd use to describe them. The people living on the Alleghany ridge like them much better than the grotesque, vapor belching nuclear, coal and gas facilities they also live near. Take a ride up I-99, cut over on Rt. 22 and pick up 422, turn around and go back when you hit I79. They are beautiful, and (due to their titanic mass) slow-moving and quiet.
No.
Hur hur hur look how clever I am!
Tom Murphy, a physics professor at UC San Diego has a great blog called Do the Math that covers this specific topic (viability of wind power on a massive scale along with other sustainable energy sources) using reasonable estimates on each resource potential.
tl;dr;
While wind is a significant resource, it's not useful everywhere - solar energy has a lot more potential to be used everywhere. Which makes sense since in the end - wind power is derived from solar power. But wind has other advantages (primarily cost right now) which means that we should deploy it wherever it makes sense.
Wind energy is viable if you store the energy in a solar steam drum.
I grew up in Pincher Creek, Alberta, Canada. It is known for being on jeopardy as "the windiest place in North America." My father is a carpenter and laid the cement foundation for thousands of windmills (quite interesting as they take many, many, cement trucks of concrete). There are literally windmills everywhere there.
Firstly, windmills are HEAVILY government subsidized. And not just to get the industry off the ground, or for a short period of time. The problem is, there isn't yet a good way to put something on the grid that turns on/off the way windmills do. Secondly, (and this is huge), the amount of torque that windmills have often grind the sh*t out of the gears soon as they go a bit too fast or other complications occur. OFTEN THIS COST OUTWEIGHS THE PROFIT THAT THE WINDMILL GENERATES. The wind farms have to constantly hire contractors to fix windmills, and usually they just end up replacing them. This is a little-known fact that the public isn't made aware of.
Secondly, windmills do a significant amount of damage to the environment. A friend of mine worked on a "bat crew." Near my small town, there are a few hundred windmills that are in a bat migration route. Every year, each windmill accumulates a few hundred dead bats. The bats die because the windmills don't jive with their sonar and they smack into the windmill. Her job was to study the dead bats and do research on them. If a few birds die at a oil complex, it's a media disaster. But the thousands of bats that died near my hometown? Nada. Probably because bats are cute and cuddly like birds right?
Let's just run a long hose from the sun to Earth. Problem solved.
"The focus of their research was to determine the geophysical limits of energy extraction from the Earth's wind, disregarding such things as economic, social or environmental factors."
In other news, the Sun is hot, and the dark side of the moon is cold...
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
http://blog.heritage.org/2012/05/09/interior-looks-to-expand-permits-for-killing-bald-eagles-to-accommodate-wind-energy/
So I guess cats can kill bald eagles now?
The problem is not that there isn't lots of renewable energy sources out there. This study hardly breaks in any ground in that regards. The energy production problem is not a scientific question of, "is there enough energy?". The problem isn't even an engineering question: "How the heck do turn it into electricity?" That's also quite easily done. The real question is a combination of engineering and economics: "How can we turn it into electricity efficiently?" Or rather, "How can we turn it into electricity in a cost-effective fashion?" A paper that says, "We can build wind farms 20km up in the air," isn't much of an answer. Sure, this study says we could do it and not wreck the global climate, which is good to know, but not very helpful. We _could_ build solar farms in space and beam the power down, and power the whole planet that way. It would also be horrendously expensive. We could use hamster wheels to power the planet, but we'd need an awful lot of hamsters...
Mind you, there are some really cool proposals for doing lofted wind turbines and kite-based power. That's the exciting question: "Can these guys make money doing it?"
And how would you have a wind farm near an airport?
How about not doing that? They don't put nuclear power stations near airports either.
You have to define, "good," before explain to me what makes any proposal, "better."
Read: Green Illusions a book about, "The Dirty Secrets of Green Energy." It's an eye-opener. Particularly regarding the hype surrounding high tech proposals to allow us to be saved from ourselves, including but not limited to Big Wind.
In the long run it's inefficiency and extravagant, wasteful, consumptive lifestyles that have to change. The means by which we provide energy is less important than how we use it. In the U.S. the focus has been taken away from efficiency, even though it's the single most important aspect of our behavior to change.
As usual the politics of big money has obfuscated the importance of real change in favor of whatever can be used to wring the biggest profits out of any single market solution, and Big Wind is no exception. The Bush era DOE report that the Obama administration still uses to champion wind farms inaccurately skews the promise of wind energy with overly optimistic estimates of 35-52% "Capacity Factor," and the lies routinely told by the American Wind Energy Association as well as the highly connected consulting firm of Black and Veatch (who helped rewrite the DOE report) routinely underestimate costs by 2/3.
Personally, I've come to the conclusion that the best thing for humanity to pursue is a combination of strategies with the end goal being a much smaller, highly educated population living in a civilization that's designed and engineered to be as compact and energy efficient as possible.
Now ask me if I believe we can avoid a few global catastrophes before we agree to pursue this track. If you answer yes, get back to me after the next round of religious and/or food riots takes place.
So bald eagles regularly die by flying into windows to the point where a federal permit is required to kill them? Love to see that citation, please.
Talked to a landlord recently that also does his own water heater replacements. Some recent EnergyStar requirements (worthy sounding in spite of his complaining) have increased the prices enough that he'll probably switch to tankless systems on the next replacement cycles.
time for the space elevator, now covered in turbines!!
With all those blow-hards, the wind turbines could generate all the electricity that America ever needs!
How much does the cable weigh?
Polly put the kettle on
How much does the cable weigh?
We having cold tea.
So, how close do any of you live to a nuclear power plant? Or, for that matter, to a coal-fired one?
In the meantime, and this comes up since I drove to Worldcon a few weeks ago, *and* note this is since 2008.... .
Given the drought, and the way the cornfields look, I'm *sure* the farmers are very happy with the income from the rental for the windmills.
mark
I beg to differ. Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant is ~70 miles from BWI. That's between 8 and 15 minutes. That's sufficiently close in plane time.
Rather irrelevant though, they are designed to survive impact from a 747. The terrorist angle was covered during planning.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
You'll notice that they never talk about how fossil fuels need backup or nuclear power stations go down or break and need backup either.
Apparently to these bananas, only renewables are intermittent and less than 100%, and coal or nuclear 100% is entirely fine and lovely and great and brilliant.
Oh, no, you're talking bollocks. As usual for a dipshit idiotic denier.
After hunting, the next highest source of man-made eagle deaths has been collisions of eagles with buildings and power lines. So yes, like other birds, they do fly into things and get hurt from it, wind power or not.
Once you factor in night, that 43% efficiency drops to 21.5%. The wind turbine still works at night. The solar panel doesn't.
You need to take into account capacity factor. Overall average capacity factor for solar in the U.S. is 0.14. That is, if your solar panels have a nominal generating capacity of 100 Watts, their output averaged over a year after you factor in night, bad weather, angle of the sun, and maintenance is about 14 Watts. 14 Watts in real-world use per 100 Watts of rated capacity. The desert Southwest can get up to 0.18-0.19, but for the country overall it's 0.14.
Wind's capacity factor on land is about 0.20-0.25. Ideal locations (certain areas of Scotland, Spain, Portugul, and offshore) can hit 0.40-0.50. So multiply your max conversion efficiencies with capacity factor and you get solar = 6% best case, wind = 12% worst case.
I'm a strong nuclear proponent, but even I've been saying that wind has been on the cusp of becoming cost-competitive with nuclear and coal. Solar OTOH is still over 5x more expensive.
No fair. You can't use off-shore wind farms and not include off-shore solar farms.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Numbers of efficiency regarding solar or wind are completely pointless. Efficient in relation to 'what'? ...
What exactly is consumed so that consuming less makes it more efficient?
In the end it is only space/ground
Efficiency as the layman defines it only counts e.g. for a coal plant where a plant that uses less coal but yields the same amount of electric power is more efficient.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I needed a new way to get hot water in the house last month. I looked at all the options from a long-term hassle vs cost perspective.
On-demand house water heaters are 4x-8x more expensive than the tank heaters initially. If you want location specific on-demand heaters, you need these for every show, tub, and sink.
The only people that want/like on-demand water are:
* salesmen selling that it
* people who where talked into it by those salemen
The whole-house gas water heater costs $35/month. to run. Gas is cheaper here than electricity, though that is pretty cheap too - thanks to 5 nuclear plants between 100 and 250 miles away.
Personally, I don't have any issue with nuclear power, though I'd prefer wind and solar. Both wind and solar aren't cost effective here. It is very calm and 250 cloudy days a year.
In the end there are existing windmills that prove you wrong. Hardware beats invitations to hallucinate.
I have a small farm that is in a co-op that has 130 generators I believe it's now the largest wind farm in MI. So far, it has been averaging around 94% utilization for the last two quarters and that includes scheduled downtime for maintenance. They have been able to produce power reliably for those 6 months at a rate where they can easily sell it to the electric companies (Consumers and DTE) who can then resell that power at regular rates and still make a profit. DTE was so impressed that they purchased about half of the turbines in our area. A 2 year study prior to the start of the project indicated that the project should be able to continue at this level of performance, but the true test will come with several years of operation. Another thing in their favor is they did not have to build power lines to tie into the grid or expand the grid. Unused capacity in the area was far more than needed. Of course they did have to build an infrastructure that did tie into their on substations. This system is doing so well that 3 other projects are now under way in the Southern part of the county and into at least one neighboring county.
Why is anyone talking Large Scale wind farms?
Why aren't they talking micro-generation?
If every new building stuck up a couple of vertical-axis wind-mills on their roof, there wouldn't be a such a large push for more capacity, and maybe the bird-life wouldn't be decimated either. It's unlikely that it will REPLACE the requirement for plant generation, but it will reduce demand.
In terms of storage, there are facilities being installed (basically big flywheels) that will draw excess power during off-peak periods and then supply it back to meet peak demand.
Efficiency -> making the most of what you have.
Using huge amounts of land for generation plants just seems silly, when the suburban real-estate, where the power is needed, is already available.