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Study Suggests Generating Capacity of Wind Farms At Large Scales Overestimated
First time accepted submitter AchilleTalon writes "Research by Harvard professor David Keith suggests that the global capacity for energy generation from wind power has been overestimated, and that geophysical / climate effects of turbines will reduce the benefits of large-scale power installations. 'People have often thought there's no upper bound for wind power—that it's one of the most scalable power sources," he says. After all, gusts and breezes don't seem likely to 'run out' on a global scale in the way oil wells might run dry. Yet the latest research suggests that the generating capacity has been overestimated."
A lot of these "hippie favorite" power sources are being crazy overrated of late. People have just stopped talking about it because they're tired of getting shouted down by the naive hippies and their allies who will not brook even the mildest criticism of their unrealistic dreams of a world where everything is powered by wind and solar alone. Dare to stand up an any environmental impact meeting and point out that the physics of many of these technologies just aren't there and that you have to factor in manufacturing costs and impacts, and pretty soon you've got some trust-fund asshole in dreadlocks screaming that you must be a plant from Big Oil.
Some lessons are just best learned the hard way. I just wish they could be learned without wasting my tax dollars on more unrealistic schemes that are going to amount to little, if anything, useful in the end. I'd rather see at least some tax money going to tested technology, like nuclear, that really DOES have great unrealized potential.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
'People have often thought there's no upper bound for wind power—that it's one of the most scalable power sources," he says.
What?! I've been lied to! My father poured foundations for windmills in my hometown and I've been going around saying that they're a great resource for us to have and boy do I feel like I've been duped! Let's read this whole news article and find out all the other lies I've been spouting!
"Wind power is in a middle ground," he says. "It is still one of the most scalable renewables, but our research suggests that we will need to pay attention to its limits and climatic impacts if we try to scale it beyond a few terawatts."
Okay so you write that as your last sentence in the entire article? Crawl in a hole and die. Please. Whoever wrote this news article and summary, please go die. I'm sure the professor's research is sound but the way this press release of it was laid out painted wind as a mythical source of energy so please just do us all a favor and die.
So a few terawatts is what, like 7% of our total energy needs? Okay, let's scale it up to there and then we'll have empirical evidence to support how far we should go.
I don't think anyone suggested we blanket the Earth in windmills or even that wind is the basket into which all of our apples should go but, looking at the high wind areas next to metropolises, you have to admit there's some low hanging fruit out there, yeah?
My work here is dung.
You should try reading the whole article next time. All the way down to the last sentence:
"Wind power is in a middle ground," he says. "It is still one of the most scalable renewables, but our research suggests that we will need to pay attention to its limits and climatic impacts if we try to scale it beyond a few terawatts."
Sounds like Keith is recommending we invest a few terawatts worth into wind and that it's still one of the best renewable options out there. But your knee jerk response didn't give you the time to read the article much less his actual research.
Dare to stand up an any environmental impact meeting and point out that the physics of many of these technologies just aren't there and that you have to factor in manufacturing costs and impacts, and pretty soon you've got some trust-fund asshole in dreadlocks screaming that you must be a plant from Big Oil.
[citation needed] Seriously, tell me where this happens. Your ad hominems and strawmen are really getting old around here, crazyjj.
My work here is dung.
Attempting to Build a nuclear plant has large upfront costs, takes 20 years, and often results in a half-way cancelled project. By the time a plant could be built, and become operational, other forms of energy such as solar will have since grown cheaper than the cost electricity from the new nuclear plant
our research suggests that we will need to pay attention to its limits and climatic impacts if we try to scale it beyond a few terawatts."
OK then, no problem, since all US production is 1.1TW. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States
The UK already figured out that wind power claims are exaggerated. By a lot. "Fuel poverty" is now an 'issue' that appears regularly in the UK press. It's killing people.
Don't believe any of it; they're all oil company shills. Yay saving the planet.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
our research suggests that we will need to pay attention to its limits and climatic impacts if we try to scale it beyond a few terawatts."
OK then, no problem, since all US production is 1.1TW. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States
Jesus Christ, it's one of those trust-fund dreadlocked naive unrealistic shouting asshole hippies that crazyjj warned us about! (all actual words he just used to describe his opponents whom he has no proof exist)
A new study confirms that coal and petroleum are in fact still finite resources.
Given the fact that power generating wind turbines only poke up 30-50m from the surface, I fail to see how the effects are going to be as significant as Keith suggests. Surface winds are already moderated by friction and topographically generated turbulence, while the vast bulk of wind energy exists above the boundary layer. We're unlikely to deploy large wind farms in a linear sequence anyway, so atmospheric coupling means surface winds will only be affected for a finite distance downstream of a given facility.
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
I have 0 expectations on the environmental impact. Our world runs on electricity at this point. We need more of it, not less. So building more wind and solar is not a bad thing. We need coal/gas/nuke/wind/solar/geo/hydro/whatever. We need more power! Building more (and in some cases cheaper) power sources is a good thing. Just remember sometimes an 80% solution is better than no solution which is what most people advocate. Most people seem to think 'we must go all in on tech X'. That is narrow minded silly. We want a good mix of tech then use linear algerbra to help us find the right mix.
People have been predicting cheap energy for longer than I can remember. Energy is going to get more expensive, not less.
The renewables (solar, wind) have fundamental reliability issues. They require an energy storage system, and that energy storage system is expensive.
Nuclear is expensive too, but for different reasons.
Oil and coal will likely stay the cheapest energy storage source for a long time to come. In part, because the concrete and steel to make the nuclear plants and the chemicals to make the solar cells come from heavily energy based sources that use oil and/or coal.
Realistically, investing in different conservation schemes gets way better payback than some renewable energy approaches. It doesn't take much computation to show that switching from always-on incandescent to motion-activated LED light bulbs yields a better return on investment than purchasing solar cells. As gas prices rise and climate change issues increase, North America will simply have to get better at conservation.
There is an environmental impact of wind turbines.
Of course, there is an environmental impact with anything you do. I'm sure there's an environmental impact from LENR in some form or fashion.
First, they are ferocious bird-killers.
"Ferocious"? Well, I can see this is going to be a rational quantitative discussion. They do surveys underneath windmills to try to estimate how many birds they kill. I hate to break it to you but the numbers are pretty darn small. Yes, it is a concern. No, it is not "ferocious."
Second, they are noisy 24/7, so much that it has been to stress animals who can't get away from the noise.
What? [citation needed] Modern windmills are not noisy and I've stood underneath the ones my dad erected and I couldn't hear a damn thing over the wind.
Instead, how about some R&D on something which actually will be useful in densely populated areas? LENR fusion looks promising. If we get that going, especially with carbon atoms as fuel, that would be more important to the world's economy than the Industrial Revolution or the invention of electricity combined.
Look, dude, I'm all for spreading our funding around. And I think we do. I'm really sad that ITER has had so many funding problems but the big difference between wind and LENR is that your if on LENR could turn up nothing. And then where did all your money go? At least wind has something returned as you scale. LENR is just a big output at the very end if it works. That's why their funding is always problematic. Nothing to show until the very end is a huge gamble.
My work here is dung.
the naive hippies and their allies who will not brook even the mildest criticism of their unrealistic dreams of a world where everything is powered by wind and solar alone
What about the naive businessmen and their allies who will not brook even the mildest criticism of their unrealistic dreams of a world where everything is powered by fossil fuels forever?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I had no idea wind power produced that little power.
Biggest single wind farm in the world: Alta-Oak Creek Mojave Project, 320 wind turbines, 36 km^2 area, 800 MW. That's 800MW for 36 million square meters, or 22W/m^2. That's peak power, though; yearly average for most wind sites runs about a quarter of peak.
A real problem with wind power is that it's like water power - there are a limited number of good sites. There are four really good wind power sites on shore in California, and there are big wind farms on all of them. Anywhere else is less cost-effective. There's good wind from the Texas panhandle north to the Canadian border, but not much there to use the power. (Basic truth: if it's a good wind power site, it's too windy for most people to live there.)
And, of course, there's the intermittency problem. Here's California's wind power graph for today. Note that total statewide wind output went up by a factor of 7 in 2 hours, after dropping by a factor of 4 in 5 hours. California buffers some of this by using the dams and pumps of the California Water Project as energy storage, but still, that's a huge variation. Extra generating plants have to be on standby for when the wind dies down. Up to about 15% wind, there's enough slack in the system to handle that. Beyond that, somebody has to build extra plants or energy storage.
Solar is more predictable. Solar energy and peak air conditioning load track closely. A reasonable goal is to get most of the world's air conditioning load onto solar power.
large upfront costs ... takes 20 years ... half-way cancelled project
Bullshit.
That phenomena is unique to Western nations that indulge pressure groups and their abuse of the legal system, coupled with a leadership vacuum. China builds a reactor in under 24 months. The completed cost of an AP-1000 reactor in China is $2 billion as of 2009.
other forms of energy such as solar will have since grown cheaper
Even if that ancient promise were to one day come true it won't matter. Building will not be permitted. Period.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
"Wind power is in a middle ground," he says. "It is still one of the most scalable renewables, but our research suggests that we will need to pay attention to its limits and climatic impacts if we try to scale it beyond a few terawatts."
Sounds like Keith is recommending we invest a few terawatts worth into wind and that it's still one of the best renewable options out there. But your knee jerk response didn't give you the time to read the article much less his actual research.
No, Keith's suggesting that serious research needs to be done to scale wind beyond that point.
"The idea is feasible" is different than "we should execute the idea".
you mean it won't be too cheap to meter?
There's a shocker.. someone painting a rosy picture about green energy that turns out to be fiction. Politicians and scientists (or truth, for that matter) make for the ugliest of bedfellows.
Organization? You must be joking..
The problem you're running into is the difference between energy and power. While it's true that the moving air above the surface contains energy, what is actually useful is the power that is taken up by the air mostly from solar heating, and is ultimately dissipated to friction at the boundary layer. This is the resource that is limited.
other forms of energy such as solar will have since grown cheaper
has already happened. http://about.bnef.com/press-releases/renewable-energy-now-cheaper-than-new-fossil-fuels-in-australia/
our research suggests that we will need to pay attention to its limits and climatic impacts if we try to scale it beyond a few terawatts."
OK then, no problem, since all US production is 1.1TW.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States
So the rest of the world doesn't exist? He meant a few TW for the entire world. Wind turbines will have a major impact on climate change. You cannot take energy of of the air without having any impact on weather or climate patterns.
If you take latent heat out of the air, where does it go?
Quote TFA:
Keith's research has shown that the generating capacity of very large wind power installations (larger than 100 square kilometers) may peak at between 0.5 and 1 watts per square meter. Previous estimates, which ignored the turbines' slowing effect on the wind, had put that figure at between 2 and 7 watts per square meter.
Seriously, you have to wonder how this effect was over-looked by the original engineers.
Yet there appears to be hope. When you look at large windfarms, you will see the older ones were built much more densely than the modern ones, which endeavor not only to place turbines in the gaps between other turbines, but also leave more room between the towers as well as using towers of varying heights.
It would appear that simply reading their meters, the engineers are realizing that densely packing turbines behind each other is going to give progressively less ROI for those that are downwind.
I wonder if the good professor made any differentiations based on the age of the wind farm development?
F. Robert Jack
We're not going to replace all our generating capacity with wind. Or solar. Or wave. Or hydro. Or biofuels. None of them are even close to the scale of hydrocarbon energy as we use it now, nor will they ever be.
If we manage to build about 2500 nuclear plants ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil ) over the next 50 years, and get batteries worth a shit, we might be able to replace hydrocarbon energy in a useful way, particularly if new nuke plants run on relatively safe, common, thorium, however, at the moment, we're still depleting industrial-scale energy much faster than we're building new sources, so I'm doubtful that this reasonably plausible scenario will play out. It would take the kind of foresight, political will and money that most of the world no longer has.
The likely reality is that we need wind, hydro, solar and geothermal so that there will be *some* sort of local, maintainable, electrical power left after hydrocarbons, particularly oil, stop being useful as an industrial-scale energy source (i.e. having enought net energy to run a civilization and at a price that's affordable).
When hyrocarbons cease to be useful, and the international, interdependent web of "just-in-time" supply chains starts breaking down, and we can no longer affordably transport the materials necessary to find, extract, refine and distribute the natural gas, oil or coal to the power plant, what we'll have left is nuclear (which we won't be able to maintain), hydro, wind and solar.
So, if you have grandchildren, or children, you want this. It won't be much. It won't be nearly enough, but by 2050 through 2100, a few less people will be shivering in the dark.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Not forever. Just through next quarter's results. Some fucking dweeb down in the R&D closet in the cellar will figure it out by then, no doubt.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
to 3D print a space elevator and put up some orbital solar power arrays!
http://news.discovery.com/tech/alternative-power-sources/solar-power-to-beat-coal-prices-in-new-mexico-130205.htm
The cheap clean energy is here, and it's getting cheaper. The price of solar is falling fast.
http://www.dmsolar.com/solar-module-1141.html
If you're looking to invest more than $50 on LED light bulbs then today's solar is very cheap these days. Here is a retailer that sells some residential panels for only 0.79 per watt. Solar will only continue from here to become even cheaper
It's just more of the "publish or perish" thing all academics practice. The guy studied a single scenario, and he's saying there's a possibility the benefits be lower than the costs.
Wind power is used on a grand scale in various parts of the world. When someone analyzes all those areas, no exceptions, and draws the same conclusions, then yes, indeed, we have a problem. But this ... this is not science, no matter how many trees that guy killed to get a single piece of paper.
If we really exploited windpower to it's fullest extent, we could actually end up with longer work days!
http://globalslowing.org/
The problem is, linear algebra combined with basic statistics says that wind and solar aren't near reliable enough to be trusted on the baseline, which should be filled by nuclear reactors instead. And the thing about nuclear reactors is that they're so predictable that solar and wind just get relegated to 'extra electricity above and beyond predicted capacity, except when they're nothing,' unless somehow we make a giant leap forward in battery technology.
Bullshit or no bullshit; that's the way it is. You wanna change it? You think you can do that, and have a plant built, before other renewable sources are cheaper than this potential nuclear plant? We've got to play the cards we're dealt
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/02/03/1529651/new-mexico-utility-agrees-to-purchase-solar-power-at-a-lower-price-than-coal/
In some places solar plants are thriving and already are the cheapest form of energy
Someone painting a bleak picture about green energy that turns out to be fiction. Politicians and scientists taking paychecks from established interests make for some really ugly bedfellows.
We've got to play the cards we're dealt
We've long since played cards we've dealt ourselves. That's why there is a vast cloud of pollution drifting out of China. We've feathered our environmental pressure group nest at home and shipped our industry and its energy demands out of "the environment."
new-mexico-utility-agrees-to-purchase-solar-power-at-a-lower-price-than-coal
Mexico doesn't have a Feinstein to wreck their solar build outs. For purposes of this discussion Mexico isn't in "the environment" either. It's just another destination for refugee industries evacuating the US.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Sure... just like you can't use Niagra Falls to run turbines without having a major effect on the.... oh, no... wait.
You see, although you're technically right... you can't take energy out of a system without affecting it, the scale at which we could ever even *HOPE* to usefully harness power from such a system compared to the scale of actual net power available in the whole system is naught but insignificant. To be fair you might appear to some very local effects on things like temperature, wind direction, etc, but then so do things like towns or cities with any large or particularly tall buildings. Ultimately, most of the phenomena that has any real impact on climate in our atmosphere happens at *FAR* higher altitudes than any wind farm blades will reach.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
That's the whole proposal of a Dyson Sphere is to capture all of a sun's energy because it is limited. At present there are three primary sources of power, nuclear decay, solar and gravity. Nuclear decay has issues and it will run out one day whether it's several hundred or several thousands years. Solar is limited mostly by the Earth's surface area and cloud cover. Orbiting mirrors and collectors could potentially expand it in the future making it the only source that can be increased without off world mining. Gravity is the trickiest. It mostly takes the form of hydroelectric and wave power. Fossil fuels are just stored solar. Solar and the pull of the Moon creates most of the wind and wave power. There's also a few things like geothermal but there's been little progress in widely adopting it. Most sources of chemical energy require processing that uses other forms of energy. Fusion is a nice idea but a pipe dream for now. There is simply no unlimited source of energy that can meet all our needs so all it means is we need to use all sources wisely. All the article is saying is it's probably not possible to meet all our energy needs with wind power. In our history we've never met all our needs with one source so it's hardly a reason to abandon wind and the article doesn't propose it it simply says we should know the limits of wind power and not exceed them.
Bullshit.
That phenomena is unique to Western nations that indulge pressure groups and their abuse of the legal system, coupled with a leadership vacuum. China builds a reactor in under 24 months. The completed cost of an AP-1000 reactor in China is $2 billion as of 2009.
That's impressive considering no one has completed building an ap-1000 reactor yet... To know in advance that there will be no overuns hmm.
problem is in the article they are talking about scaling beyond a few terawatts world wide.
new-mexico-utility-agrees-to-purchase-solar-power-at-a-lower-price-than-coal
Mexico doesn't have a Feinstein to wreck their solar build outs. For purposes of this discussion Mexico isn't in "the environment" either. It's just another destination for refugee industries evacuating the US.
Mexico =/= New Mexico. NM has the exact same Feinstein as CA, given that she isn't a state legislator.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Attempting to Build a nuclear plant has large upfront costs, takes 20 years, and often results in a half-way cancelled project.
I am pretty sure that not one of the nuclear power plants used by the US Navy took 20 years to build. The S8G reactor on board an Ohio class boomer makes 220MW of energy. I am pretty certain we could start siting small reactors, operated by former USN personnel, near cities cheaply enough to make nuclear the dominant, and cost effective, electricity source given the political will to do so.
The extreme length of start to finish is 100% related to the number of lawsuits filed by opponents of nuclear power.
BTW...projects are not "half way" cancelled. They may be half way completed when cancelled but "cancelled" is a binary condition.
From your wikipedia link: "Primary energy use in the United States was 25,155 TWh In 2009"
At 8,760 hours per year, that's 2.85 TW AVERAGE, about 5TW peak. So covering the entire planet with nothing but wind farms could power half of the US. The claim is that we could have windmills powering electric cars. Not on this earth, the math just doesn't work.
People have been predicting cheap energy for longer than I can remember. Energy is going to get more expensive, not less.
You can go further on $1 energy (gas, horse feed, etc) today than you could 10, 20, 30, 500 years ago.
I think you meant to say that US and Canadian coal and oil reserves are dramatically overestimated.
There, fixed it for you.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
False. If you'll recall from Econ 101, adding supply isn't the only way to eliminate a shortage.
It's unfortunate for our economy that so few people understand Supply and Demand.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
So...1 watt per sq. meter, where surface area of the earth: 510 x 10^12 = 500 TW.
Nice but not enough. And then, we are only 29% land.
IF they could see them, then they could brake or slow down to miss them as they fly through. Same as you do in your car...
You mean " THE SKY IS FALLING, THE SKY IS FALLING!!" ?
Sorry man, your warning was pre-empted by poultry.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Yeah, well done. Your whole post was an obvious attempt to poison the well, in favor of your obvious biases. Care to make an actual contribution?
All your energy comes from gravity. Those tiny little rain drops that fall from the sky, focussed to stream and ....
river, till they dam and turn the turbine. The star squeezes the photons out of it's plasma soup, flung trough
space to deposit 2 at a time on a hydrocarbon bond. Eons of time, gravity and heat cooking them to
the crude stew you love to eat. Even those crushed atoms to uranium and more, so unstable they fall
off the floor radiating in parts
You need the gravity to pull in earthly mass, spinning and heating with others that pass....
It's gravity that holds the gas with so little mass, and causes it to spin round and round.
Hydrocarbons get more for a plastic part than pushing your lazy ass around. Think about it before
your burn your children supply and die. Same for the nuclear fuel, one day your want it for
the coldness of space, far to far from that race you are, far to far.
Wind Farms 5 miles in the ocean with HomeLand Security sensors & constant wind blowing into the coast. They can always put in bigger motors to generate more electricity. Was it the calculator's fault or Intel Corps CPU messing up with calculations again?
Huh? The article says 'If we were to cover the entire Earth with wind farms, he notes, "the system could potentially generate enormous amounts of power, well in excess of 100 terawatts"'.
...if one effect of warming is increased wind speeds and storm conditions, I'd quite like turbines to suck some of that out of the atmosphere.
Notice it didn't state above what his field actually is, so keep in mind that this is coming from a Professor of Public Policy and not an expert on air flow, wind powered electricity generation, or really anything to do with the topic at all. He may have picked up a few things but I'd say take his advice with a truckload of salt and get a second opinion from somebody that has put their feet on that bit of ground.
There's a tendency to accept words from anyone with an important title in anything so long as it aligns with political dogma, which is dangerous, because it devalues expertise and opens the door to confidence tricksters. The common kneejerk reaction to questioning the expertise or motives of a person is a scream of "ad hominem" - which of course is ridiculous in such a case because granting it value would proposing such stupid relativism as pretending that everyone knows exactly the same as everyone else.
Taking energy out of what system? You aren't taking energy out of the atmosphere in any meaningful quantity. There might be local effects but that's it.
Reminder:
Sun = 174,000 terawatts. All we need is about 15 of that.
From your wikipedia link: "Primary energy use in the United States was 25,155 TWh In 2009"
energy != electricity. please read again. obviously electricity is the right baseline here, since wind farms produce electricity not gasoline.
Wind etc are competing in the peak load space with things like gas turbines and even diesel instead of in the base load space with hydro, coal or nuclear.
Chemical industries use a lot, and on the coal side you need a lot of the stuff to reduce iron oxide and make iron from iron ore - cheap heat or cheap electricity doesn't get those jobs done.
China didn't have an operating AP-1000 in mid 2012, let alone 2009, and I'm not sure if it's been finished since then.
Well supposedly (according to one of the posts in the comments on the original article) only 0.25% of that energy (250TW) gets turned into wind. So you'd be taking About 7% of the total. But relistically a lot of the wind will be effectively unusable: in the middle of the desert surrounded by people that can't afford things that need power, in the middle of the ocean etc. Think hot summer day with say 20% less breeze (you presumably live in a populated area right near where they are going to want to plop these wind farms down). It sucks already, lack of wind could make it suck more (though a gas fired plant produces heat from energy that was normally sequestered so contributes to net heating the "am I hot" factor might be in its favor).
Hurricanes tend to come from the ocean, likely well away from convenient places to put wind farms. You can have some off shore but how far do you go before you can't just build supports but have to make an oil rig sized thing for a couple turbines?
Exactly and the bottom 6B people will want to live just like we do now or better roughly 2-3X more power usage globally. This is assuming the entire surface is used for a wind farm which realistically will never happen.
Oh and since only 0.25% of sun energy becomes wind solar is better, if you can get say 30% efficiency out of 97.5% you'll do a lot better than 100% (which would never happen either) of 0.25%. You'd need a lot less land, can overlap on roofs for example (I don't want something that by definition catches wind fixed to my roof in a storm) which means your production can scale by number of dwellings vs actually being subtracted from as more land is used for housing.
Actually natural gas is the cheapest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source and probably will remain so with all the new sources available due to fracking. It is ~30% more expensive to generate from either oil or coal. But generally your right. It will be a long time before generating something from incoming energy (the sun) will be cheaper than getting something that was stored from the same energy source but combined over millions of years essentially with a straw and a pump similar to how the quickest way to get rich is to rob a bank. Doesn't make it a good idea but ...
crazyjj's key quote: "I'd rather see at least some tax money going to tested technology, like nuclear, that really DOES have great unrealized potential."
Hey, got some cheap reactors at Fukushima for you and they are stuffed with potential. Why don't you go there and swim in the reactor 4 spent fuel pool?
If you take latent heat out of the air, where does it go?
Washington, DC.
why don't we build a gen 4 reactor and actually decommission it when it's useful life is at an end, instead of running it for 10 more years, and ignoring all of the warning signs that it will be in trouble?
ohh and then complain that when a larger event than the facility was designed causes "minor" issues. Should we design all nuke plants to survive a direct hit from 2012DA14 without releasing any more radiation than you receive while flying across the USA in a commercial airliner? How about the moon? what about an off the scales hurricane, while there is a category 10 earthquake, and the "terrorists" try to blow it up? What if the sun explodes or aliens show up?
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
The claim is that we could have windmills powering electric cars.
The greenies ARE wanting to replace gasoline with wind, so energy IS the right metric. Unless of course you're saying electric cars won't ever work, that cars will always have to run on gasoline?
I suppose you could say "wind could provide a fraction of our needs, as long we don't have any electric cars and factories keep running on coal and natural gas." You would be correct if you said "electric cars make renewable energy impossible", but I'm guessing that's not what you're trying to prove.
China builds a reactor in under 24 months. The completed cost of an AP-1000 reactor in China is $2 billion as of 2009.
According to this construction on China's first AP-1000 reactor started in 2009 and is expected to be completed in October of 2014.
We can argue till we are blue in the face about the cause of global warming. The fact remains that if you act and nothing happens with global warming, you louse and end up in a depression, that’s the worst that can happen. The worst that can happen if you don’t act and we do end up with global warming is a complete catastrophe. In the worst case scenario, possibly even complete extinction of life. The truth probably lies in between these extremes. However reasonable people can admit that their opinion on the matter might possibly be wrong. Given that fact and the worst outcome is if we don’t act and we do have global warming, reasonable people must conclude that we must act. The solution does not lie in solar and wind alone, other technologies are needed. Those technologies include an energy production system that can power during loads and periods of time when solar and wind do not provide energy. A major component of that problem can be resolved by removing coal fire plants from the mix by converting them to LFTR Nuclear Reactors. They are super-ultra-safe and provide a million times the power density of coal. There are too many good things to be said about it here in a short space, so I refer you to my website: http://rawcell.com/ to have a look at a plan to convert all coal fire plants to LFTR reactors for only 1.6 Trillion capital cost, with huge future savings. I even have laid out a method of paying it without increasing long term debt.
Damn you physics. I don't like your reality.
... and pretty soon you've got some trust-fund asshole in dreadlocks screaming that you must be a plant from Big Oil.
I don't know if Keith is owned by big oil, but he is president of Carbon Engineering which has ties to the oil industry on the green house gas side of the equation. As to whether that makes his opinion biased or not, that is up to the reader, but he has been an outspoken climate scientist for a long time and has the respect of the scientific community.
Some lessons are just best learned the hard way. I just wish they could be learned without wasting my tax dollars on more unrealistic schemes that are going to amount to little, if anything, useful in the end. I'd rather see at least some tax money going to tested technology, like nuclear, that really DOES have great unrealized potential.
It appears that you got your wish and a lot of your tax money is going to be going towards nuclear after all: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/23/us/underground-nuclear-tanks-leaking-in-washington-state.html
"Research by Harvard professor..." Who cares where he does his armchair science from? The real research is being done by building windmills around the world. Has there been a documented lessening of windflow anywhere as a result?
"as wind farms grow larger, they start to interact"
So don't build them too close together?
"If we were to cover the entire Earth with wind farms, he notes, "the system could potentially generate enormous amounts of power, well in excess of 100 terawatts, but at that point my guess, based on our climate modeling, is..."
My guess.
Guess we'll just have to get to 100 terawatts, then, and then we can test his 'guess' in the real world.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
Er... so... human needs are so insignificant we cannot possibly affect the climate?
Just want to be clear here.
We can't affect the climate by directly tapping energy from wind (or tides, or geothermal) - the scales are so vastly different that we wouldn't even be a blip on the radar.
We can affect the climate by polluting the atmosphere, though. The reason why it works is that, although the quantities we put out there are still minuscule compared to the size of the atmosphere as a whole, they stay there and accumulate - and it's that aggregated effect over decades of pollution that starts showing up, and even then quite slowly. It actually wouldn't matter even then, if it did not induce a number of positive feedback loops (water vapor increase, shrinking ice caps resulting in albedo change, methane released from permafrost and ocean clathrates, airborne fraction of CO2 increasing due to oceans warming) that magnify the initial small effect.
Actually, the hurdles for desert and oceanic wind farms are technical: we still can't transfer that energy efficiently to the consumer. And I'm optimistic about that problem being overcome, which will make deserts a very good place for wind and photovoltaic farms (depending on the local characteristics).
That this one is going to be ignored for entirely valid reasons.
Deniers have pissed in the pool often enough it's not worth even looking at.
How many windmills are blown down in gales?
How many trees?
Given that to wind the surface area of the tree is vastly higher than that of a 200m tall wind turbine, this is not suprising.
Tell me, do you bother actually checking anything? Or do you think with your guts not your brain?
Therefore you can do things like farm on it.
Therefore your energy density per USED UP land is 1000-2000 watts per sq m.
Well, I guess people in America attempt to sell renewables using late-night TV sensationalism. But, even though that is wrong and people should stop doing it, renewables are really a very important source of energy and people shouldn't be impacted by the overall "renewables stink" conclusion that you can easily derive from titles such as the present article. Less than 50%, I'd dare say 10% of everyone who reads this article will actually read the complete original.
I'd give Portugal as an example of good renewable policies. In 2011 the main electricity prodiver's share of renewables was between 40-50% and they're now highly investing in microgeneration photovoltaic solar energy (we're a pretty sunny country, but the bulk of our voltage is hydro and eolic, which may have to do with technicalities). But then again, here's it's more than just a question of ecological and public health responsability, it's an economic long-term investment and national independence, as our production of oil is close to zero.
It's gotta be done by someone, so I volunteer to ally with the naive hippies. They're a lot more fun to be around and I trust them to look after things that really matter a lot more than I do the guys with the suits. At least they're not actively trying to screw us over.
get out of here with your "facts" you legal alien!
New Mexico must be foreign, the guy in paper said so:
http://articles.latimes.com/1996-03-01/sports/sp-41795_1_summer-olympics-ticket
Personally, I will never use solar or wind power except when I'm out camping and then I use solar to charge the batteries for my amateur radio equipment. Other than that, it's not practical. I will use fossil fuels which are much cheaper and efficient until the day I die. Even if they outlaw it, I'll still use them I will not be told what kind of energy to use by energy nazis.
Yes, but you appear to have forgotten that the only way you can control demand for energy is if your model consists of spherical people in a vacuum.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
[citation needed] Seriously, tell me where this happens. Your ad hominems and strawmen are really getting old around here, crazyjj.
Hanalei through Kilauea on the island of Kauai. There resides the highest concentration of hilariously ignorant hypocritical trust fund babies in the world--and yes, I had an experience disturbingly similar to that described by your parent poster.
In many cities and suburbs drying clothing and linen outdoors is forbidden due to esthetics. Instead the electric driers are used, which convert water is vapor first and then condensing vapor on a refrigerated greed. It takes a lot of energy as the physical state of water changes twice: liquid into gas, and then again gas (vapor) into liquid.
The problem of esthetics could be solved by designing an esthetically acceptable outdoors drier. It means 7 billion people could daily dry clothing and linen outside freely.
But drying outdoors is also sort of a "poverty symbol". So the problem of wind power usage has got rather social and design character.
And the wind power (and sun power) are unlimited, at least for drying. Just no limit at all. It even cools environment on hot days.
no text.
Your criticism is for something that was built 70 years ago, was the first of it type, when they had no idea what they were doing?
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Your criticism is for something that was built 70 years ago, was the first of it type, when they had no idea what they were doing?
No, my criticsm is to point out to the OP that his "tested technology like nuclear" has its own share of problems and isn't without cost, the biggest being what to do with the spent fuel rods. The OP was opining that these "new technologies" like wind farms don't pan out and just waste his tax dollars.
As for them not knowing what they were doing, well, these were the guys from the Manhattan project, the top scientists in their field. I'm pretty sure they knew what they were doing, even with the storage tanks. At least I hope so, because it is the same basic method used today and if it is faulty, well, then there are a lot bigger problems to worry about.
Maybe Keith is owned by big oil. Because this "prediction" is already way surpassed by reality.
The study claims that large installations of more than 100 square kilometres will only produce between 0.5 and 1 watt per square meter. In other words, the claim is that a 100 square kilometre wind farm will only have a generating capacity between 50 MW and 100 MW.
But how does that fit with the fact that Denmarks largest wind farm, the Anholt sea based wind farm, has a generating capacity of 400 MW and it only covers 88 square kilometres?
http://www.dongenergy.com/anholt/da/projektet1/saadan_opfoeres_parken/pages/faktaomanholthavmoellepark.aspx (in danish sorry, use Google Translate).
Oh they have a solution in Washington. Not enough wind? Build giant fans with coal plants to make more.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I know like the amount of natural gas in the Marcellus Shale....WAY OVERBLOWN....wait that doesn't help your argument.
combine with the fact that most wind energy is really just repurposed solar heating.
and then theres teh whole thing where just tossing down wind mills everywhere isnt very useful. you only put them where it makes sense. here in oklahoma we have a lot of them, because we have very reliable (basically constant) wind coming up from the south (curves in from the gulf really). the land is flat, so theres little interuption. most nearly any old tree you see around here is bent northward, the wind is so constant.
other good places to put windmills are on mountains, such as the coastal range in Cali, get those incoming winds from off the ocean as the weather sweeps in, and the air piles up and drives up the mountain. in certain places there's reliable wind at the bottom of mountains as the cold air sinks at the end of the day and through the night, and it comes sweeping down the mtn and through the valley.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
addendum:
there's also the implied notion that the amount of energy in the wind system is finite.
that is wrong. since wind energy almost entirely originates from solar heating, it is in no way or shape finite.
at least until the sun burns out
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
How long could you exploit deserts before you'd have environmentalists (probably rightly) complaining that we are destroying habitat for particular animals/plants? I think solar is much better currently capture ~30% of the solar energy vs a portion of the 0.25% of solar energy that ends up as wind. It scales with communities (as you build more buildings you have more roofs to put solar on) vs available space shrinking as the suburbs move farther and farther out and finally it is the minimum distance to at least some of the load on the power grid (ie sitting on top of a house). We'd still need more power than that probably which would require other power sources but solar should definitely be in the mix. Just for power density reasons I don't see how wind beats solar other than in areas with very little sun but lots of wind. Wind is the peaker plants of the green energy mix.
You mean the one they fired 3 years ago to pay for their bonus?
Got you.
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
Check Olkiluoto 3. The delays are not due to "abuse of legal system" nor due to "leadership vacuum" - unless you consider Areva as not having enough leadership.
Also, what happens when there's fine weather for a week
Fine weather means prime conditions for solar power.
Wind is OK when you can balance it with hydro power
Which is exactly what some of the wind proponents are pushing: pump water into a reservoir on windy days and drain it out through a generator on calm nights. That and add "smart meters" to give electric utility customers an hour's notice of the next hour's utility price so that they can plan to run appliances and charge their cars when power is most plentiful.
But how does that fit with the fact that Denmarks largest wind farm, the Anholt sea based wind farm, has a generating capacity of 400 MW and it only covers 88 square kilometres?
Except it's not finished yet (aiming for the end of 2013 it looks like), and 400 MW is listed as the theoritical maximum power rating - it remains to be seen how much it will actally produce.
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
I'm not saying that might not be true, but that's not what I actually meant.
What I mean is simply that when it comes to wind power, we can only tap into a very tiny percentage of the total power that is actually there, because most of it happens at an altitude that is far higher than what we engineer devices to utilize.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
those living on less than one US dollar per day
If the cost of living in these countries is so low, then perhaps the problem is that their currencies haven't inflated yet. The "Penn effect" is the observed tendency of exchange rate discrepancies to overstate poverty, and the Balassa-Samuelson model predicts that the quickest way to reverse this discrepancy is to produce an exportable good. If a currency is used mostly for locally consumed goods and services, then there won't be much demand among buyers in other countries for that currency. Producing goods for export will increase demand for the currency and increase internal demand for labor, inflating labor prices across the board as local services compete with the export industry for labor.
Our best hope is to use human bodies for fuel. We simply have way too many people. Each person requires a certain amount of energy and even though some methods of generation are more efficient than others when you have limitless births your future is grim. When the English possessed the Arab states they actually burned mummies to power their steam locomotives. In a nation of 350 million souls we surely could somehow burn our dead efficiently and produce energy. Or we could feed our dead to hogs and use the methane from hog waste as well as providing affordable bacon and ham for the nation.
The fact is, that power plants simply dump electricity to their respective grid. In the USA, we have 3 grids. Grids operate like a lake. Water is dumped in via multiple rivers. Those closest to it will likely get those molecules, HOWEVER, some will spread around. IOW, if somebody pisses enough in that lake, you will also drink some of it. That is a FACT.
As such, you have whatever energy is dumped to that grid, so you are already using green energy. Here in America, you would be using about 38-40% coal, 25-26% natural gas, 20% nuke, less 1% oil, and the rest is all renewable. That means that fossil fuel in America is around 66%, AND DROPPING. AE is around 15%. That include 7% hydro, and another 6-8% in wind, solar, geo-thermal, tidal, etc.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'm not a greenie or a statist like most here, but don't forget to mention the difference between surface area and volume. A thin layer of anything covering the earth is within our grasp, but creating a geologically substantial volume of anything - even trash - is difficult.
There is nothing theoretical about it. There are 111 turbines and each will produce 3.6 MW. Multiply those two numbers and you get 400 MW.
Anholt will produce power in wind speeds between 2 m/s and 25 m/s. Above 25 m/s the turbines will be stopped to protect them from damage. Yes, that happens once or twice a year around here.
But notice that full power is archived already at 13 m/s wind speed. This means the wind farm quite often will be producing at the full output of 400 MW.
Anholt may not be finished yet, but it is not exactly the first offshore wind farm around here. We got two 200 MW offshore wind farms already. What remains to be seen is the so called capacity factor rating. How much energy will be produced on average? The 200 MW offshore wind farms have a capacity factor of 43% meaning they are on average producing 86 MW. Sometimes they will do 0 when there is no wind and often they will do 200 MW - average that and you get the 86 MW. Anholt is expected to get similar numbers.
The original article did not say average power produced. They said generating power. But even if they had been calculating the average power they would still be wrong. Anholt will produce at least 160 MW on average, more than the larger estimate of a 100 square kilometre farm, and it is smaller than that. Anholt is in fact doing twice the larger estimate if you go by average and almost five times their estimate if you go by generating power.
It seems to me that if you do a study, it would be wise to look at what is already out there in the real world!
Photovoltaic energy on top of the buildings doesn't really scale with building size, so forget about it for anything but low-rise buildings. But low-rise buildings means more space dedicated to humans instead of wildlife. I think the ecologists may have something to say about that too ;)
You can have wind _and_ solar power together, by the way: you can put solar stations on the south facing slopes and wind stations on the north facing ones. You can even mix and match them because solar onbly works during the day, but wind is there at night too.
Solar does someone scale with building size. There are materials now that can be applied to windows for solar generation too. Of course in a forest of skyscrapers you get a bunch of shade but at the moment there are only ~15 cities in the world with more than 100 of these buildings and even there the vast majority of the city is still probably 20 stories or less (which with a road in between would probably mean a lot of the building across the street is out of shade).
Peoples mentality might change but there still is about 50% of the worlds population living in rural areas and even those in urban areas a lot of them aren't living in dense cores so you'll always have sprawling buildings. Factories are another issue: most people don't want multistory factories. Regardless the sprawl needed for solar is much less because you can overlap generation with buildings and the W/m^2 is much higher.
Another idea I have (living in cold climate) would be enclosed parking garages (not necessarily multistory I mean just inclosing the suburban parking lot) with a relatively light weight roof (probably need something like a shed to have enough rigidity) and cover the sucker with solar. Cars get sheltered from snow rain etc so less crap weather for owners to walk through. The parking lot would likely last longer because it wouldn't be exposed to the elements and need to be plowed all the time. The solar could be provided to the cars as charging stations: free/cheap charging for customers would both be a perk to shop and an incentive for people to get solar/hybrid cars.
This study errs in its assessment of potential wind energy resources by ignoring real-world data and experience and instead relying on crude theoretical modeling techniques. In reality, wind project developers and investors work closely with atmospheric scientists and other experts to make sure that their projects will produce as much as expected, and real-world data from large-scale wind installations in the US and Europe confirms that they do. Regardless of who is correct, the inescapable fact is that America's developable wind energy resources are many times greater than our country's energy needs.
For more, see:
http://www.awea.org/blog/index.cfm?customel_dataPageID_1699=21714
Michael Goggin,
American Wind Energy Association
It's easier to choose not to climb the tree in the first place, or to choose appropriate safety gear if another activity requires climbing, than to choose not to get pelted with bullets from an assault rifle.
As I have already written before, I don't consider this a matter of exclusion: you can have solar and wind power generators, and using building's surfaces to get more energy is a good option.
The thing is the building volume generally doesn't grow with the cube of it's height. Generally people want windows in every room/work area (even cube dwellers generally have one wall that has windows in their area) which limits you to a rectangular base with on side relatively narrow (essentially two room widths wide by however long you want at the base). But yeah a mix is going to be best it just doesn't make sense to me to be planning on paving the desert with panels or wind farms before you have saturated the available roofs (and for new buildings at least consider wall treatments as well).
I agree with most of what your say, with the exception of:
"Basic truth: if it's a good wind power site, it's too windy for most people to live there"
That is a load of garbage.
If you want the "Basic Truth" about wind power I will give it to you:
Basic Truth about Wind Power: MOST of the best locations for wind power is off shore. MOST of the land located close to off shore are owned by wealthy people. MOST wealthy people like to keep their wealth. SOME of the wealth is tied up in expensive cottages and shore land. They expect the worth of that land/property to be degraded by Wind Power. Wealthy land owners and cottage owers can pour a lot of money into a lobby group to kill any Wind Power project. Typically they join/form some sort of "green" "enviromental" group that has huge concerns about the windmills killing bats, birds, creating noise, and being natually astheticlly displeasing, etc... Using this window dressing and a war chest full of money they hire lawyers and lobby government until the issue either goes someplace else, or it is delayed until it fails or the company gets too frustrated. These are essientially landowner and cottage owner assoications pretending to be enviromently groups to shut down these projects for the sole purpose of protecting their interests insofar as how much their land is worth.
So not so basic, but the truth is it is total bull. There is no pressing enviromental concern (I am sure there are a few nut cases that believe their own cool aid), it is all fabracated more less (or hyped and propaganda) by wealthly landowners that own expensive cottages and don't want them devalued by having some windmills stuck off shore wreaking their view. Which is crazy and sad if you ask me. I think they look cool myself.
In the few cases I have seen of successful projects 200MW+ it was on an island (i.e. you don't have to have expensive waterfrontage) and the company was smart to enter into agreements with land owners to buy their land at good prices (probably a drop in the bucket if you are rich or your cottage is worth a few million), or even I think more interestingly giving a percentage of profit earned by that particular windmill directly to the landowner (which I think is really cool). However it is unlikely that would work for the hyper rich and their cottage properties (not to mention if it is off shore, they don't own the land, so they shouldn't/wouldn't get anything anyway).
Anyway I am not one of those nuts that think wind is going to save us all. But I think it is an important component of any power strategy, particulary if you have pumping and resoviours available for use in storage. I think it is crazy that these things are being killed not only by a very select few, but likely the most well off in our society. It is sad.