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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.
Too bad the operators of coal plants don't have to take all that into account.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
To decry wind energy, saying we're slowing the rotation of the earth down or something.
The article discusses wind power vs. coal and other types of power purely on the basis of cost, with absolutely no discussion of reliability.
If wind power is as cheap as he claims, then with a reliable storage technology wind would be a total no-brainer. But as it is, wind can only be part of a strategy. You can't count on wind for base load, and when wind varies you need to have other types of power (such as natural gas) ready to pick up the slack.
I'm hoping that the Ambri liquid metal batteries will do everything that Professor Sadoway claims. If so, they will change everything, and I will be cheering for more wind and solar. Until then, wind power only can serve as a niche producer.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
It's true that they kill birds. But so do cars and skyscrapers. And I'd wager that coal - between the waste disposal, emitted mercury, and mining - kills birds, too.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Yep. Pretty certain that Coal kills more birds than wind power. It's just that the birds that coal pollution kills are not killed at the site of the coal plant but all over the globe.
Unfortunately our system of economics doesn't capture these diseconomies.
Imported oil is another one. If you factored in the cost of political and military involvement in the middle east the price of oil would look very different.
Even the high voltage wires used to transport the energy away from the power plants probably kill more birds than the turbines themselves.
Ezekiel 23:20
Yeah but we all know that coal is so 19th century. What about clean coal?
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
And I'd wager that coal - - kills birds, too.
Coal doesn't kill birds. People with coal kill birds . . .
. . . or should that be birds with coal kill birds . . . or people . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Pretty certain that Coal kills more birds than wind power
Is that better or worse?
Killing more birds sounds worse, unless wind turbines kill more endangered (or otherwise valuable) species.
"if you were to take into account mining, pollution, and adverse health impacts of coal and gas ..."
What are the chances that those costs can be "taken into account" (imagined) differently by different people?
I'm not so sure about the assertion that alternative energy sources like wind and solar are considered more expensive than fossil fuels. I always thought that they were considered cheaper but not a serious contender to replace fossil fuel plants as the number of places on the planet that they are reliable enough for baseload generation are limited. And even though they don't contribute to air pollution, they aren't necessarily a magic bullet as they have other environmental impacts in more subversive ways (e.g. solar shades out large areas, which can have detrimental effects on the ecosystem that depends on the sun, especially in the desert where large solar installations are suggested, and wind turbines have a nasty habit of killing birds that try to roost on them). So arguing that wind is cheaper than coal seems to be a bit of a straw man argument.
Which is unfortunate, because even though renewables aren't perfect, coal is pretty bad environmentally and I think we do need to figure out a way to phase it out as soon as possible.
In the past year, three birds have been killed by colliding with my office window. And that is only while I was in my office. In the long run, Darwinian evolution will solve this problem.
Depends on if it is a European or African swallow
I would think a whole other factor is that when wind turbines are new to an area the expertise in putting them up and maintaining them would be low; thus the costs would be a bit higher. But after a decade or so of experience that the local talent would be getting better and better at selecting, installing, and maintaining the turbines and associated electrical infrastructure.
This would be on top of the fact that the turbines themselves are becoming cheaper and better with their nearly continuous improvements. So for anyone making decisions on future projects these numbers would not only be getting more reliable but could end up not being optimistic enough. Whereas with more mature technologies like coal the numbers are going to simply be the numbers.
The study was performed by Ecofys, a renewable energy consultancy, and the cover sheet comes with disclaimers about its accuracy.
The actual report is more interesting than the articles that hype its findings. The core results are seen on page 36 (PDF Sheet 53).
You will find that there are a lot of assumptions. In particular, they place a great cost factor on "depletion of energy resources". That single adder more than doubles their cost for nuclear. The explanation is that this is the cost of using up our uranium supplies. This is on top of the cost of uranium, already included elsewhere. If you read enough youll find that they just made a big assumption and don't yet really have a basis for it. Its quite convenient for them to make an assumption that magically brings nuclear up to their derived cost for solar. Of course, even as assumed, that cost could be mostly eliminated by reprocessing. They also place a cost on "heat production".
There are no cost considerations included for reliability, intermittancy and variablility. Nor direct infrastructure costs associated by technology, such as the need to add new transmission lines to accommodate wind. In fact, that is probably the biggest cost factor left out of the wind result. Section 3.4 talks about trasmission infrastructure. I'll paraphrase.. "we ignored it because it was too hard to figure out". Another nice convenience for them.
Taken at face value, if I'm a renewables guy looking at this report, I'd have to question why more money goes in to solar than wind.
Crowd and historical wisdom: traditional mills used wind or river stream, not coal.
wow I am shocked, a report written by a renewable energy consultancy group and surprise surprise it says renewable energy is cheaper by including a whole raft of external costs.
I wonder how these would hold up in testing this breakdown
http://sheerwind.com/
From people I know in the power industry in the US, backup power is the oft overlooked cost with wind and solar. When you add in the cost of having either storage or another natural gas plant to cover the lulls in the renewable source, it becomes significantly more expensive. It would be like saying, "I own a Nissan Leaf and it costs half as much to drive as a gas powered car. But I also have to own another car for the times when the Leaf is insufficient." Well, that changes the economics for the Leaf substantially. Maybe not enough to make it not work, but it matters. Similar to the Popular Science thing about how having solar panels on the west side of a building would be better for the grid. People generally put them on the south side since they generate more total power, but less during the time when the grid needs it in the afternoon/early evening. Since coal and nuclear do not respond quickly to shifts in demand, it means that they are hurt more by that strategy.
Back to the old line about liars, damn liars and statisticians. (As a statistician of sorts)
Wind was cheaper if you added costs to coal for Global Warming (a large cost), for depletion of energy resources (a medium cost), and in the third category (a small cost even when all elements are totaled) "human toxicity, agricultural land occupation, water depletion, metal depletion, ecosystem toxicity, radiation, acidification and eutrophication."
Interestingly, they also included ozone depletion as an external cost. I didn't realize the ozone layer was affected by coal plants, but apparently it is.
To calculate the damage caused by Global Warming, they relied on some other papers published on the topic. I wasn't able to access those papers, so that is where my summary will end.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Why do you assume that energy costs of materials are being ignored anywhere? For example, in PV manufacturing, they're one of the major components of the PV module cost. Of course people care about them, even if some of them only in financial terms.
Ezekiel 23:20
Last month I got a photo of a bird splattered into the side of my red house. No window for 2 meters. I'd upload it but this is /. not /. beta
Gently reply
If this author were correct, the power companies would already be rushing to build wind-driven turbines. They already have people carefully weighing the costs and benefits of each power-generation method. When I see wind-driven turbines appearing on the windy parts of my horizon, then I'll believe that wind is cheaper than coal.
... for ALL sources of energy, do we calculate cost, from cradle to grave?
For instance, take wind (could be solar, thermal, and all others).
How do we produce the components that make up the turbines and masts and blades and everything else that is needed? Doesn't that genesis start with mining raw materials and doesn't that process involve fossil fuels just for manufacture? What about the space the turbine masts (solar panels, thermal mechanisms, wires, cables, etc.) occupy? What machinery do we use to dig holes and erect them? Are they fossil fuel driven?
For any source like wind, or solar or thermal and others, what are the costs of disposal?
As a physicist, the law of conservation tells me we are never going to get something for nothing.
It's nice to talk about how well an existing wind turbine works, but I suspect the energy we invest in creating, and disposing of, them is more than the energy we get out of them.
However, I don't know that.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Since when did that 'wisdom' imply that wind is more expensive than coal?
Wind was more expensive when wind plants ware scarce and 'expensive' to set up and had a relatively low yield.
Setting up a 25MW plant (what se build now) is cheaper then setting up 5 5MW plants.
It was a no brainer 25 years ago that wind will be in the end cheaper than coal.
Why is everyone 'playing surprised?'
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Well, if they're the ones creating those expenses exist then it seems only reasonable that they should be the ones to pay for them. Or are you honestly advocating on behalf of any asshole who can figure out how to make himself rich by forcing someone else to pay the costs of his business?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
only matter if you're not willing to let people die. Then again most of Europe has some form of socialized medicine. Here in America we don't need to factor in the cost of health.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
so go the bats
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
What is the likelihood of actually benefiting from lower costs due to less net expenditure on, for instance, respiratory illnesses? How does that compare to the likelihood of incurring the far higher $/kWh cost of renewable energy sources?
<mclaughlin-voice> The answers are negligibly small and metaphysical certitude </mclaughlin-voice>
Also, renewable energy consultancy concludes renewable energy is cheaper. Yay for double standards; when oil companies publish pro-fossil fuels research it is dismissed out–of–hand as the junk science/propaganda that it is.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
certain based on what facts?
Half of all birds in the world die each year, that's a fact. Coal is not even on the list of what kills birds in this world, even if you imagine some avian cancer or mercury poisoning is caused by coal.
If this author were correct, the power companies would already be rushing to build wind-driven turbines. They already have people carefully weighing the costs and benefits of each power-generation method. When I see wind-driven turbines appearing on the windy parts of my horizon, then I'll believe that wind is cheaper than coal.
You are forgetting the major factor of externalized costs. Processes have costs that are internal so they have to be paid for by the owner, and external so they get paid by someone else. Pollution is a major source of externalized cost in conventional power generation.
The power company doesn't have to pay for those costs, but society as a whole does, for example in asthma treatments and deaths, or likely in certain kinds of cancers. So the power company will do the thing which is cheaper for *them* but more expensive as a *whole*.
*sigh*
While there is an issue with wind turbines killing eagles it is not nearly as bad as you make it out.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/sep/11/eagle-slaughter-wind-farms-kill-67-eagles-5-years/
Over a 14 year period all American wind farms killed a total of 85 eagles of which only 12 were bald eagles. The article does suggest the number could be much higher but saying 100 bald eagles in one year in one state is a gross over exaggeration.
Can you kill two birds with one coal?
Learn to love Alaska
Just a sec. Are you counting chickens raised strictly for slaughter?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Man, you have to stay out of your office. You are apparently drawing these creatures to you.
Go sit in the forest for a while, and let them settle on the tree branches around you.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
It's "en masse", it's French. You're like those people trying to sound smart by using Latin phrases but incorrectly... per say.
not at all, this is well known biology fact of birds in the wild. Tough life being a bird
Architecture is also starting to consider the problem. Turns out it isn't that hard to make windows that aren't as attractive to birds and some jurisdictions are now mandating more bird friendly design.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
In the long run, Darwinian evolution will solve this problem.
It wont. Evolution does not work that way.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Obviously its cheaper, how could what is effectively a generator with some propellers and an inexhaustible free fuel source be more expensive than something that needs a massive infrastructure of fuel mining, refinement, transport & waste disposal? True, wind does currently have one glaring drawback, it is not an "on demand" power source and must be either used when it is in abundance or stored for later use. But in the long run I think renewables are going to be a no brainer. Fossil fuels are going to have a place for our foreseeable future as well as a backup/baseload/niche energy source but with even moderate advances in energy storage technology renewables in their various forms are probably going to provide a majority of our energy in the coming decades.
Maybe not!
I used to work in a great room (a floor with cubicles). One day, one sparrow came in flying and, finding the neighborhood uninteresting (exactly what we thought about the cubicles), decided to gly away.
Thru another window. A closed one.
We were somewhat startled by the fact, but I was watching it prior to the accident. I left my chair and approached the bird -- pretty much knocked out.
Both legs were straightened and one was trembling. I caught it from the floor, layed it on my hand and after some seconds the eyes opened, but the bird kept still, as if confused.
When it got a little better, I had the idea of putting it on the (open) window frame, hoping it could recover by itself. It took it a minute a half, perhaps, in which he just gradually acquired its senses back, I suppose.
Suddenly it flew away.
It's true that they kill birds. But so do cars and skyscrapers. And I'd wager that coal - between the waste disposal, emitted mercury, and mining - kills birds, too.
OK, as long as they *selectively* kill birds.
I mean, if all they killed were pigeons, that'd be fine, right? We might even build more of them, even without the subsidies...
be berry berry quiet gotta stick it to da man now bend over!
Similarly, biblical correct sex is also safer.
For the 9 year old?
Turbines kill an insignificant number of birds by comparison with Windows. We need to get rid of Windows. Who knew? https://www.sciencenews.org/ar...
More = worse.
Cheaper means only one thing. How much is my electricity bill at the end of the month.
What? You want me the end user to be responsible for the carbon emissions of my energy use? I'm perfectly fine with that ... as long as it's as cheap as it can possibly be.
Ok I may sound like a troll, but the reality is that is exactly how people think. Our local energy utilities have often provided split bills. For a little extra money you can fund a separate unit that is monitored by the government as not for profit, and that fund offsets the cost differences between dirty and clean energy. I bet you can imagine how much of a voluntary uptake there is on people being charged 5c/kWh more.
So, for those of you that didn't follow the link, the summary is a flat out lie:
...when the costs of ‘external’ factors like air quality, human toxicity and climate change are taken into account...
Convenient how they left that part of the sentence out ain't it?
When you drive the price of energy up so high it causes real pain.....then you'll learn what hate is. I'm all for solar and wind if they're competitive. I'm not for tripling my electric bill for some green religious jihad.
Wind energy subsidies amd tax breaks are miniscule compared to those provided to fossil fuels. What fox news incubation tank did you climb out of?
Yup it's all liberal dis-information. Wind power is a joke and doesn't even work.
just to put this in context:
People eat 8 billion chickens in the US per year.
Number of birds estimated killed by windfarms is well under 1 million.
So I guess if they 'don't go to waste' then society doesn't care much.
Does it matter? Fact is either they live in our zoos or confined wildlife regions, or don't live at all.
"Subsidies, tax breaks, under the table deals" - yup, because those never existed before wind power and we had a wonderfully free & incorruptible process of picking electricity sources.
"the PART TIME that the wind blows" - capacity factors have been getting steadily better for some time. While 25-30% was considered quite good for onshore wind just a few years ago, it's now more like 36-43% and some do even better. Offshore wind is significantly more consistent but also expensive.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
See how faar that goes before the latte sippers complain about the power going out all the time.
Polution is bad, mkay, and we should be preparing for the day when cheap fossil fuels are not available, And dumping CO2 into the atmo is probably exacerbating if not causing "global warming".
But it seems like every week we get something like this. They sure are trying hard to sell their fantastic (pun intended) power supply be it wind, solar, or Tesla's magic battery dust.
First, nice low number. Second, "waste" is subjective here. A dead bird at the site of a wind farm will most definitely feed lots of scavengers, be they bugs, foxes, whatever happens to go by. Most of nature won't turn up a free bird dinner, even if it is a little bruised.
I had no idea that the bird mortality rate was that high. Is most of that infant mortality?
When I was staying at the Aria hotel in las vegas, about every 10 minutes you'd hear the telltale "thunk!" sound. Nothing else makes that sound.
The subsidies, tax breaks, etc that you're talking about? That's in the US. This is for the entire EU. But if you want to put it in US terms, maybe you should also recognize tax subisides given for oil exploration, oil logistics (keystone pipeline XL anyone?), public health concerns from smog and carbon monoxide, military protection of oil and liquified natural gas trade routes, military campaign to protect oil pipelines (Georgia most recently), cleanup efforts when some idiot decides it's a good idea to drill somewhere that no submersibles can reach, etc. In fact, the actual price of a gallon of oil in the US is somewhere in the range of $16 when all ancillary costs are factored in.
Turbines kill an insignificant number of birds by comparison with Windows .
We need to get rid of Windows . Who knew?
If Windows does that to birds, just think of what it's doing to the children!!!!! Microsoft should be tared and feathered for this!
Maybe we should use Linux.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
It is not a strawman. dead bats is a problem (not birds.) It is difficult to calculate many problems the coal causes, plus we don't seem to get a great deal of information on the many government subsidies the coal industry has - it is more than solar or wind receive; might even be up there next to OIL in the gov welfare scale? The hypnotic wind turbines have been proven to NOT cause real medical issues. COAL on the other hand is why I can't eat much fish from my local lakes, I'm better off with the less healthy farmed fish because they don't have mercury pollution the coal plants gave us. Plus we get more radiation exposure from coal than nuclear. There are other health issues. Global Warming shouldn't even need to be required to motivate change.
The good part of COAL is that it contributes to global dimming which reduces the impact of global warming (which it also contributes to greatly... I found it comical for that short period where the self branded "skeptics" cited global dimming as if it was a kind of rebuttal. Now they say humans didn't do it and the hypocrites totally forgot their previous dimming propaganda. ) Another plus is that coal seems to help increase the wind energy ;-)
1) Wind power doesn't kill birds. If you want to get picky, they kill less than a long list of things people don't think kill birds, like houses or office buildings which kill MORE birds. It is a non issue. Getting that picky you may as well start complaining about meat eaters since the chicken and duck numbers are really high. How about pet cats?? Wind power does kill a lot of BATS which are unable to avoid them like the birds largely do. Work is being done, it is a real and legitimate problem especially given that most bats are at risk or endangered. Wind's medical complaints have been disproved.
2) An actually smart grid (the non scam kind) or simply a modernized grid where the existing techniques we've had for generations of switching power sources (since coal power has a fair amount of down time) and make the grid capable of similar but more dynamic power allocation. The sun may not shine here today but it was one state away which BTW, is where some of our power comes from when our local sources are not up to the task. A high voltage DC grid needs to be developed... you step down anyhow so we have little reason to continue century old tech...eventually it needs repair anyway. COST: power is cheap during the day, expensive at night... the inverse of today. this is starting to show up in Germany's power market.
3) Nothing is perfect but coal really sucks! If I was for nuke I'd be against it on economic grounds. Nuke power costs more than solar power and takes a decade to build a plant! By the time those two new plants in the USA get built (if they don't end up way behind) you could have built 100s of solar plants of comparable size and output significantly more power for the price years ago! in 10 years solar and battery storage will be even cheaper and better!!! Spend 50% now and in 9 years spend the other 50% plus a battery and probably get twice the output plus the 10 years of partial output. (ignoring all the hidden costs of regulating nuclear and insuring it which government pays for.) All the uranium the USA had (#1 in world) is all dug up and now the USA imports the stuff, rising costs and demands will not lower prices unless you can find quicker, faster, cheaper nuke power.... and those are all STILL 5 years away... Fusion will probably come 1st!
4) Base load demands are not a simple problem. Coal plants on idle are still burning way more than they need just to be READY for baseload. They run way over capacity even if only 1% load is required and they can't switch to meet demand quickly. That adds cost to coal, nuke, and gas power. The overhead cost is mitigated using many techniques that ALSO would apply to other kinds of power, which solar and wind would benefit greatly from (and are in need of advances.) I read about a German town putting in an industrial sized
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Heh. By golly, once it's in your agenda, whatever it takes, eh?
Giant, spinning blades of doom. But that's fine, because liberals like it, because conservatives hate it. Unless it's off the Massachusetts coast. I guess I'm not sure.
Of course they kill birds; they're giant spinning blades of doom, set up in such a way as to maximally extract energy from the air. Birds exist in the air. Therefore, if you're a bird, and you live there, sooner or later, you're likely to get extracted.
But fuck 'em. Price of Progress, eh?
Nuke plants, I would argue, are just tiny little concrete domes by comparison, and birds are free to nest and live among any nooks and airspace they might find. Not to mention the zero carbon. Energy, already stored here by past supernovas. All the energy you want, nobody and no creatures have to die, and the land looks nice with this little white building on it. I won't even go into the fact that we need a few just to burn up the waste we already have, since it can't be stored.
But keep justifying giant, spinning blades; stretching as far as the eye can see...
Not any time soon.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Good to know. Thanks for the knowledge.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
... the Key dodge here is "when health impacts are considered"... but the thing is you can't know what the health impacts are of the coal industry. You can ASSUME those impacts. But you can't say that because there are 5 coal plants there are 522 incidents of lung infection. You can't know that. You could shut down all those coal plants and have the same number of lung infections or quadruple them and have no significant change.
The issue is complicated and people are going to get "emotional" or "political" about this ... I really don't care.
Here is where I am on this issue...
1. I am all in favor of renewables IF they are themselves produced renewably. That is, build your solar and wind power generators using solar and wind power. Ever note that a great many of these technologies are built using nuclear or coal power? I'm not asking that they locate their factories next to the production. If your industrial sector is by some coal power plants and you really have to use coal power... Fine. Buy energy credits from the renewable energy plants or something. I just find the hypocrisy of building solar on coal power to be a little odd when people keep telling me how great solar is and how terrible coal is... If solar is so great, no one has cheaper solar power then a solar panel factory. NO ONE has cheaper panels then them. Which means no one is in a better position to self generate using solar power then a solar panel factory. No one. And if they're not doing that... then I wonder if people are lying to me when they say solar is cheap. Because I'll tell you this... factories that produce coal generators are very happy to power themselves with coal power. Oil refineries are very happy to power themselves with oil. Nuclear reactor factories are very happy to power themselves with nuclear reactors. So why are not solar panel factories powering themselves with solar panels?
2. Any estimation of cost and subsidy has to take all the subsidies and costs into consideration. It is very common for people to cherry pick numbers that make their desired conclusion look more likely.
3. Solar and wind power are by their natures more defuse energy sources that are not as inclined to be centralized. To be truly useful both of these power generation methods needs to be decentralized... ideally to the consumer level. You might consider for example giving every resident a few solar panels to put on their roof along with the associated electrical hardware. Have them be owned by the power utility and let residents put the panels where they want so long as they get sun. Giant centralized plants are sensible with high density energy generation systems. Solar and wind are neither.
4. In respects to wind especially, you need to make these things more aesthetic. Unlike nuclear or coal you need thousands and thousands of these things over many miles. That means rather then one ugly building we're treated to thousands. And because of that you need to have some design flexibility. Now the way they're designed now mostly is to maximize efficiency and cost. Which is fine but it looks like what it is. If you instead put out some generalized design requirements and instead let home owners, towns, local communities decide how they want it to look then you might get wider adoption. Consider for example the windmills of Holland. Not only are they not an eye sore... they're a tourist attraction. Consider further the Hoover dam... tourist attraction... because its art decto stylings make for an attractive photo op.
5. Keep in mind that regardless of everything we need power. So if the renewables aren't up to the job right now... do not screw with power that is at this moment able to meet demand. Doing so will just drive up energy costs which mostly hurts poor people.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
turn 'down'?
for sometime as well. The problem is that in America, it is only cheaper than Nat Gas in a FEW areas. Otherwise, Nat Gas is actually cheaper than most wind. However, it is expected that Nat Gas will hit 5/MMBTU in the coming year, at which point, Wind is cheaper than nat gas.
What is really needed is CHEAP storage. For example, EOS energy is cheap cheap storage. We utilities to expand this, and at the same time, move to microgrids, rather than 3 large grids in America.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
And it really pisses me off when such "whatever it takes" political losers pollute this site and attempt to blame their end justifies the means bullshit on others. Pretending to be far too stupid to have any sense of scale (giant, spinning blades; stretching as far as the eye can see) is an added touch that makes me despair that we've wasted a generation and not protected them from weasels with propaganda.
When did this place turn into an anti-technology site for idiots who wallowed in student politics and never grew up?
Why do "conservative" losers who make fun of others interest in wildlife conservation suddenly pretend to get worried about a trivial number of birds running into a couple of thousand windmills spread over a vast continent? Fuck the tendency to treat various bits of technology as proxies for political parties - stop being cowards and address the politics directly on sites dedicated to such a thing and please leave this place as somewhere to discuss the technology on it's own merits.
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.
If you have enough of the things and they are spread out then the load is not bursty. Grids are huge and span states or small nations.
Apparently the best thing to do with the things is have them as spinning reserve during offpeak times and bring them on one at a time when needed as the peak rises - utterly trivial with modern control systems. In wind farms they are designed to be worked on independently after all.
I suggest you actually look up the current sate of reprocessing, especially the cutting edge MOX stuff at Harford. It's better to get in touch with some reality instead of dreams of it happening at zero cost, you'll understand then why there is still plenty of exploration for cheap to extract ore instead of a real process with real costs before it can produce real fuel.
Setting to bar to unicorn farts and rainbows doesn't do anything other than annoy people.
in case one of the largest units on the grid is down at such a time.
Giant, spinning blades of doom.
They are not. They kill birds, but not in some outsized way compared to other human activities. And if you read about the problem (it is a real problem, not something to be dismissed), you would find that they have improved things for the birds: slower spinning blades, moving rubble piles away from the windmill so that rodents (raptor food) nest elsewhere, etc.
But fuck 'em. Price of Progress, eh?
I'm not willing to stop every activity that kills birds, are you? Why should windmills be held to a higher standard than skyscrapers? The best we can do is minimize our negative impact - we'll never eliminate it.
Nuke plants, I would argue, are just tiny little concrete domes by comparison, and birds are free to nest and live among any nooks and airspace they might find.
I happen to be fairly pro-nuke, but I'm not naive enough to think that nuke plants don't have some pretty serious disadvantages. For one, our government has some policies that frankly make the nukes a bit unfeasible. We could reprocess waste like the French, but that would risk... something, so instead they force us to store it. And store it we do, waiting for them to get off their asses and come up with a long-term storage solution. Nukes also run on uranium, which has to be mined. Mining is definitely not as zero-impact as you intimate.
But keep justifying giant, spinning blades; stretching as far as the eye can see...
They will either justify themselves economically, or they will not. Time will tell.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Maybe if you have a second windmill somewhere - maybe even in another state since grids are big.
Look at a weather map guys.
I had a simple gut feeling seeing a "study" ordered by the European Commission, which I absolutely don't trust for anything. The study is more like a school report and its authors are blatantly partial.
Ecofys is an energy company, part of Eneco group which among things has an interest in a huge wind farm off-shore south of UK called Navitus Bay.
Why not have both? Wind AND Nuke plants. And water. And ...
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The report 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
Sure! Tack in total costs across progenitor markets, and assume a 100% penetration on pollution and health impact. Ignore things like land use, fines for filling endangered species, costs of NECESSARY storage systems, etc, etc.
Yes! We too can cook the books!
Oh yes. And let me know when you have a reliable wind source that blows steadily enough for 24x7 power generation.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
With harder birds that can break thru windows of course.
You're forgetting your bill on April 15th to support the petrodollar and Exxon making 20-40 billion per quarter. Or did you think maintaining economic dominance over the world's gas stations was free?
As a matter of fact: many birds of prey are pretty bad at avoiding obstacles. Not only wind farms are a danger to them, also solitary trees, towers or even large rocks. Because of the wind noise of the rotary wings, wind turbines actually are less dangerous to birds than for instance telegraph poles.
Why do "conservative" losers who make fun of others interest in wildlife conservation suddenly pretend to get worried about a trivial number of birds running into a couple of thousand windmills spread over a vast continent?
Some because they feel it's "payback" for all the arguments they loose and many others because they get paid to do so by the coal, oil and other environmentally hazardous industries.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
I especially enjoyed the fact that oilfield waste pits kill more birds than wind turbines. That takes the issue out of play in this argument right there. You don't even have to argue maters of scale.
If I had mod points at the moment, I'd mark you informative and this would be anonymous.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
You have won the prize for the most narrow sighted post on Slashdot award.
To collect, simply acknowledge the fact that you can't compare prices of anything between different nations due to different:
- Regulations
- Cost of living
- Cost of doing business
- Taxes
- Industry structures
I get paid by the coal, oil and occasionally uranium mining industries but that doesn't stop me from being honest and admitting that there may be a niche for wind. I really do not get these fake conservatives that have decided they they want to lie and be unprofessional just to help me and others in the industry out.
It's pointless and they are just making themselves look like slimy weasels.
No. Birds can perch safely on high voltage wires - and you'll frequently see them do so. The reason is obvious. They aren't connected to the ground; there's no potential difference across their bodies. High voltage wires - provided wires carrying different phases are further apart than the wingspan of the bird - pose no threat to birds.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Cheaper implies less monetary cost. You can't simply go, coal bad, therefore more expensive, as a COST TO OUR HEALTH and have something where you can discuss the cost of producing electricity on a purely business level.
Nor can you predict how the future will be handled. You can't say it's cheaper because then we don't have to build and run the super earth air filter, as we might just die instead.
So no, cost wise, not cheaper. Heatlh wise, better for us.
At least in Germany buildings and structures with large glass panels have stickers depicting predatory birds on them so other bird would stay away.
OK, then why is it estimated that power transmission lines kill (annually) something like 170 million birds all over the US? (source) The current estimates for the same pertaining to wind turbines across the US are on the order of hundreds of thousands per year at most. Some people think that figure is overly optimistic, but it's still a few orders of magnitude lower, so I still doubt it's anywhere close to the power transmission lines figure.
Ezekiel 23:20
Coal and nuclear produce a flat supply curve, a modern city has a wavy demand curve. To meet the demand curve so-called "base load" power already pumps water up hill in off-peak, and uses gas turbines to make up the slack on-peak. In other words, the "complex grid" you say you need to match the demand curve already exists.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Please don't talk about runaway greenhouse effects here on Earth. It really isn't possible.
Quick summary: for a runaway greenhouse effect, you need a big surface reservoir of some greenhouse gas (on Earth, water vapor). Theoretically, you increase the temperature a little, this vaporizes more of the gas, trapping more heat, which vaporizes more gas, and so on until the planet no longer has a radiative balance. Then things get a bit warm.
On Earth, the tropopause generally keeps water vapor near the surface; if water vapor rises to that point, it usually freezes and precipitates. This prevents it from building up in the upper atmosphere. One of the effects of CO2 on Earth is to cool the stratosphere, so ironically adding more of it could be moving us further away from a runaway greenhouse effect.
There is a vague possibility that we might make some lasting change to the climate, but probably not. We're still a few orders of magnitude away from the most drastic outgassings that the Earth has experienced. We're drastically compressing the timeframe of those events, but we will exhaust all fossil fuels long before we match the CO2 emissions of the largest LIPs. We can and seemingly will fuck up the planet for a geologic age, but the planet has recovered from worse extinction events before. We'll have to be satisfied with 90% of terrestrial life, I am afraid that the Ultimate Species Fuckup is beyond us.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Half of all birds in the world die each year, that's a fact.
It's a fact that Wildbirds.com disputes. They claim that even short-lived songbirds have a 50% chance of living 2 years. This is a 'bathtub' curve, with lots of infant mortality, with mature birds generally surviving many years.
No doubt, starvation and predation are responsible for most bird deaths. But just because Heart Disease kills the most humans, doesn't mean we should forgo seatbelts.
Wouldn't the reduction in the number of ground frosts lead to an increase in the number of insects and vermin?
Then easy to cite. Please do. Very interesting.
How many birds do Linux and OSX kill? Perhaps Windows is the better choice for reducing aviacide.
Turbines kill an insignificant number of birds by comparison with Windows .
We need to get rid of Windows . Who knew?
If Windows does that to birds, just think of what it's doing to the children!!!!! Microsoft should be tared and feathered for this!
Luckily, we have lots of feathers from the birds that the Windows have killed.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Either by bridging the gap between line and pole (usually larger birds) or hitting the line itself, which apparently can be hard for them to see in bad weather.
It is not that wind turbines aren't more dangerous than other sources, it is that they are dangerous to certain species such as bald eagles. Conservationists have even sued the government over it.
And here in the netherlands the goverment just axed a plan with windmills out on the sea due to it being much more expensive than using the old crap..
That's why I switched to Linux.
Do you like setting up sstrawmen so you csn knock them over? Does that make you feel better about your otherwise pathetic life?
I do not belive anyone said anything about it being occupied but you. The land has to come from somewhere and they need spaced apart far enough that one doesn't interupt the availible wind power of another though. The energy produced doesn't magically fly through the air either.
The land being occupied is the easiest thing to worry about. Seriously, just eminate domain it and kick them off. If you don't want to do that, then look at puting it in their back yards (nimby), or you can clear cut forests anf place them there or any number of other things. You dificulty is going to be in tieing them altogether and fistributing it reliably to the areas that are occupied.
You don't need to factor in "external" costs. I work in the energy policy field, and this is pretty much the gold standard for comparing cost of electricity generation. Other than energy efficiency, wind is already the cheapest. http://www.lazard.com/PDF/Leve...
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
It does. A lot more. Which is why the Audubon Society (bird folks) feel that fighting climate change and coal power is a bigger deal than fighting wind. http://policy.audubon.org/wind...
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
FYI, that is an example of incorrect behavior. They raped him.
I don't have a bible in front of me to double check. As I remember it they tried to rape him, but he was able to pull out at the last second. He was punished by G*d for pulling out. I've never been able to determine the exact lesson that story was trying to teach. But it could be a case of poor reading comprehension over the years.
He effected a bored affect.
It's true that they kill birds. But so do cars and skyscrapers. And I'd wager that coal - between the waste disposal, emitted mercury, and mining - kills birds, too.
They kill fewer birds that windows glass or cats, and no one is up in arms about cats. It's not really an issue.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
In nearly every instance green liberals play the NIMBY card to ensure that only ugly fat poor people have to suffer with living near the damn things. And when that fails, just scream that they kill migratory birds.
Flint Electric co-operative in middle Georgia. It's actually a little under 10 cents per kilowatt hour. That's just the electrical usage there are some taxes on top of that but that probably works out to another penny or so per Kwh. According to what I read the US varies from 8 to 17 cents per Kwh depending on region. I'm sure California and New York run a lot higher than it does here. We have a lot of hydro-electric and coal plants plus Nuclear in the State. Rates are set by the State public service commission as the utilities are guaranteed a set profit. If they don't make enough we get surcharged and if they make too much we get a rebate.
If God had intended chickens to live out a natural life-span, he would not have invented so many tasty recipes with them as the main ingredient.
... you can keep your wind-generated power.
Bullshit. If there's ever enough solar for that to matter do you really think it's all going to be in one place?
... "by", not "out of"...
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
It may by extincting birds as more buildings are built .
A world without dinosaurs :(
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Or destroy a localized population instead of slightly damaging a broader one .
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
The articles are not credible. Anyone that writes MW/h when they mean MWh has no concept of what they are talking about.
The underlying analysis may or may not be valid. There isn't sufficient definition of the assumptions to assess credibility. The report would not withstand any real peer review.
Bill Gates is a communist -- he's just more equal than the rest of us.
It's true that they kill birds. But so do cars and skyscrapers. And I'd wager that coal - between the waste disposal, emitted mercury, and mining - kills birds, too.
Wind power gives birds a fighting chance. Solar, with the reflector technology that concentrates a beam of sunshine against a target boiler, is fatal if a bird flies through the path.
Which is likely to happen more often?
The saying from some people is "I have a lifetime supply of barbque fowl".
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Bravo. The best future we can aim for is a diverse range of options for energy. If the Boundary Dam clean coal project actually fulfills its claims (93% carbon capture!), that might even be a worthwhile part of the mix, at least on a transitional basis. Nukes will be safer. Particularly if Thorium can be made workable and it can actually process existing waste. There's base load for major population regions. Clean--or at least cleanER-- coal for less-populated regions, more efficient homes and appliances... electric cars and more Ethanol for the remaining fleet... this isn't completely crazy.
I'm having some trouble fathoming how a report like this can ever have a status of "leaked" when it should clearly be public knowledge. Why wasn't this done years and years ago by someone independent? A quick browse through the report shows that data does not appear to be difficult to acquire. In fact, my local authority (bchydro.com) has a lot of this data for their jurisdiction on their website. It makes me wonder if the governments of Canada and the US have this stuff freely available online where one doesn't even have to phone and give credentials before obtaining it.
So why is this report by a thinktank being kept secret? Because they were paid to do so, that's why.
But why is no one outside the paid-thinktanks coming up with any of these kinds of conclusions? Really, do we have to pay people to think now too?
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
So one MWh produced by coal continously is more expensive that a MWh produced by wind, when the wind is blowing, excluding the transmission upgrades required to try to interconnect an entire continental grid to shift vasts volumes of electricity to where its actually needed ? Also not including the transmission losses ?
I am 100% pro solar and pro nuclear. But wind... If its that economical, lets end all per MWh wind energy credits. Then we'll see how many more wind turbines will be installed. Or at least zero out WEC for electricity sold to the grid at off peak hours (like 11PM-6AM), when the grid is often overloaded with too much power exactly due to too many wind turbines and no large scale energy storage.
Wind is a jobs program. It does generate electricity, but not in a reliable way, and when levelized (taking into account natural gas peak plants needed to compensate for when wind+solar is falling short) its is still WAY too expensive. Wind turbines are maintenance hogs. Solar economics is a cakewalk compared to wind turbines installed to catch peak wind from weather phenomena (like most USA wind turbines). Only wind installed in areas that get consistent wind all week long for months at a time makes sense, or with lots of hydro to load follow wind (specially if wind is stronger when its raining less, like in my Brazil northern shore).
They should do the smart thing! Take the 50-year plan and get out of the business producing power business and transition into a pure distribution mode. The power companies should be encouraging us all to go the solar route where-ever economically and technologically feasible. Let the market dictate the rate, end the subsidies for solar installation, and encourage the sell back electricity. All with the understanding that 50 years from now most coal and gas fired plants will close their doors and we'll get all the "free" power we can collect. The idea of owning a mini-solar farm on 5 acres of cheap scrub land and driving an electric car doesn't sound so bad! The 50-year plan will work when resolving many issues. Poverty, unemployment, hand-gun proliferation, drug abuse, urban crime, ineffectual government. It only takes a well reasoned plan and the resolve to see it through.
Are you snow white by chance?
You can always get the "correct" number by adding a fudge factor in to the actual data. TFA is a good example.
First, the "externals" are larger than the real costs of several sources. By far the largest factor in external costs is "climate change" which is itself a fudge factor on the real data. Finally, TFA shows an error bar in the externals which is about the same size as the externals. In other words, the external cost COULD be close to zero.
We just need ultraviolet only grid designs on the first 3 or 4 floors of glassy reflective buildings. People wouldn't notice any difference and birds would stop flying into them. The question is can something similar be done to get birds to avoid windmills. With the answer you might get a yummy patent as a reward.
The externalized costs of coal are greater than the value of the electricity produced, mainly from the effects of pollution on health and agriculture. That's without any reference to climate change at all. http://www.sourcewatch.org/ind...
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
The term for how much mony a power plant generates vs how much money goes into it is Net energy. Wind and solar energy have far greater net energy gains then any fossil fuel or nuclear sources
Uh, if you look at who actually wrote the report, you might want to think about what sort of bias it might contain...
Here is the consultant group that wrote the report:
http://www.ecofys.com/
LOL!
Hey I am not saying the report it wrong, hell I didn't read it... however really? This just seems like something politically motivated, like say justification for the billions spend on Wind Power, saying "see it's the cheapest, honest!"...