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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.
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!
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!
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
Your conception of large wind-farms is out of whack. Modern turbines are pushing 200 meters tall now, with rotor diameters of up to 150 meters. Turbine farms are limited by the area of land they're placed on, and the wake of other turbines greatly affect placement. On small farms they can get them as close to each other as 4 to 10 rotor diameters, but on bigger farms the minimum is 15x the size of the rotors. So if we're talking about real industrial scale wind farms where the turbines are in the 200 meter tall range... then they have to be placed over a mile apart!
A single one of these modern giant turbines produces about 7MW of power and costs about $14 million to build. The smallest reactor in the US (not counting test reactors and such) is in Fort Calhoun, Nebraska and produces 478MW. It would cost close to a Billion dollars and take up nearly 70 square miles of land to use wind to produce the equivalent amount of power as the smallest nuclear reactor in the country.
We have absolutely no idea what affect a windfarm of that size would have on the environment. If we had enough farms to power the entire country? Again, we have no idea, but the effect would likely be dramatic. You can't take that kind of energy out of our weather systems and expect mother nature to roll over and take it.
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'
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"'.
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.
It would cost close to a Billion dollars and take up nearly 70 square miles of land to use wind to produce the equivalent amount of power as the smallest nuclear reactor in the country.
We have absolutely no idea what affect a windfarm of that size would have on the environment. If we had enough farms to power the entire country? Again, we have no idea, but the effect would likely be dramatic. You can't take that kind of energy out of our weather systems and expect mother nature to roll over and take it.
We've deforested far larger chunks of land without causing blood to rain down from the sky,
and there are multiple countries that have re-forested areas larger than 70 square miles.
China is aggressively planting trees everywhere it can. Since Y2k, they've added ~11,500 square miles of forest per year.
Part of those 11,500 square miles of forests are an attempt to stop the Gobi desert's southern and eastward creep.
China's been doing a shitty job with their foresting efforts, but 70 square miles is childs play compared to what's happening around the globe.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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'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.