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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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Wow. Everyone on /. is now dumber for having read that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3JzbWVDzac
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.
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.
...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.
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.
Not really a fair comparison. Nuclear plants are pretty sizeable (Seabrook is about 1200 MW, I think). Interconnection projects (biomass, coal, diesel, methane, hydro, etc) average out at around 150 MW to 200 MW if you include proposed nuclear plants. If you only look at non-nuclear proposed interconnection projects, the average size is not even 120 MW.
The average proposed wind project in the Eastern Interconnection, for reference, is 160 MW.
Wind energy is viable if you store the energy in a solar steam drum.
"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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.