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Wind Power Is Cheaper Than Coal, Leaked Report Shows
merbs writes: A leaked report shows wind is the cheapest energy source in Europe, beating the presumably dirt-cheap coal and gas by a mile. Conventional wisdom holds that clean energy is more expensive than its fossil-fueled counterparts. Yet cost comparisons show that renewable energy sources are often cheaper than their carbon-heavy competition. The report (PDF) demonstrates that if you were to take into account mining, pollution, and adverse health impacts of coal and gas, wind power would be the cheapest source of energy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Barton#Position_on_wind_energy
In June 2010, Barton questioned the wisdom of deficit spending to fund an extensive national wind turbine energy generation grid. He said, "Wind is God’s way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas where it’s hotter to areas where it’s cooler. That’s what wind is. Wouldn’t it be ironic if in the interest of global warming we mandated massive switches to wind energy, which is a finite resource, which slows the winds down, which causes the temperature to go up? Now, I’m not saying that’s going to happen, Mr. Chairman, but that is definitely something on the massive scale. I mean, it does make some sense. You stop something, you can’t transfer that heat, and the heat goes up. It’s just something to think about."
There is a Norwegian-Danish link up though, and Denmark are currently running on more than a third wind power; actually the first 6 months of this year, they were over 40% wind power.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Of course, when you "distribute" your plants off-shore, you also need wires and supporting towers to transfer the electricity to the grid. (Science hasn't quite developed phasor transmission yet.) And when you factor in the "externalities" of building and maintaining that infrastructure (to get the power from where the wind blows to where people actually live), and the "externality" of power loss through the wires and transformers connecting those wind generators to the main grid, I'll bet the actual costs for wind-power aren't as favorable as you think.
See what you do to calculate the area of a square is you take the square of the length of one side. So 11 x 11, IIRC, is 121 square miles. 121 square miles * 640 = 77,440 windmills. So, you're right, it is a bit more than a square 11 miles on a side, but it's pretty close.
Stop repeating this crap. Wind turbines are not a significant impact on bird populations compared to many other sources, and are not a serious concern except in areas where they are specifically likely to impact an endangered species. There are people out there with a significant financial incentive to convince you that wind power is bad for the environment, and it's a lie.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_wind_power#mediaviewer/File:Bird_mortality.svg
Note that that's a log scale.
we'll be looking at a full on runaway greenhouse effect such as devastated Venus.
Nope. The Kombayashi-Ingersoll limit says that a Venus-style runaway greenouse is not possible on earth because the sun isn't bright enough unless you brought the albedo down below about 7%.
We're losing polar ice and there are other changes too. How much will that affect the albedo?
Albedo is currently 30%. Losing ice cuts the albedo (this is known as the "ice-albedo feedback"), but not anywhere like from 30% to 7%. Clouds provide a lot of albedo and they're not going anywhere.
55 million years ago, during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal maximum, the sun was almost as bright as today, there was about 4 times as much CO2 in the atmosphere as today (basically, there was a carbon infusion into the atmosphere roughly equivalent to us burning all known coal reserves), and there was no permanent ice on Antarctica or Greenland, but there was no runaway greenhouse effect. We can also calibrate the strength of the ice-albedo feedback from its contribution to Pleistocene ice age cycles, during which as much as 30% of the earth's land mass was covered with ice and snow.
Don't get me wrong: Global warming is a very real and serious threat. But there is no plausible way it could possibly produce a boil-the-oceans-dry runaway greenhouse effect like we see on Venus. If you're looking for a good scientific treatment, see David Archer's textbook "Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast" for an introductory-level treatment or Raymond Pierrehumbert's book, "Principles of Planetary Climate" for a very rigorous calculus-based Ph.D. level treatment. Also, Andrew Ingersoll, who discovered the runaway greenhouse effect, has a good primer, "Planetary Climates." Realclimate.org also has a good short and clear treatment.