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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."
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.
Windmills don't kill anywhere near as many birds annually as cats or plate-glass windows do, and I don't see anyone moving to get rid of those...
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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 $2 billion as of 2009.
other forms of energy such as solar will have since grown cheaper
Even if that ancient promise were to one day come true it won't matter. Building will not be permitted. Period.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
There's a nice little summary table towards the right here.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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
The costs for a utility scale wind turbine in 2012 range from about $1.3 million to $2.2 million per MW of nameplate capacity installed.
http://www.windustry.org/resources/how-much-do-wind-turbines-cost
Say, a dollar per watt (nameplate).
An installed nameplate terawatt would cost about $1,000,000,000,000. That's a pretty expensive experiment. And wind turbines' real world average output is a fraction of their nameplate rating.
The total levelized cost of an advanced combined cycle natural gas fired plant is about one third less than onshore wind and 80% less than offshore wind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
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'
If you take latent heat out of the air, where does it go?
Washington, DC.
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.