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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."
'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
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!
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.
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!
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/
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
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...
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
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
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'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 ...
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.
... 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
Pascal's wager is stupid when it comes to conventional religion, and just as stupid when it comes to global warming.
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.
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.