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US Wind Power Is Expected To Double In the Next 5 Years
merbs writes: The U.S. Department of Energy anticipates that the amount of electricity generated by wind power to more than double over the next five years. Right now, wind provides the nation with about 4.5 percent of its power. But an in-depth DOE report (PDF) released yesterday forecasts that number will rise to 10 percent by 2020—then 20 percent by 2030, and 35 percent by 2050.
Overpopulation is sooo last generation-but-one's issue.
Evidence for this (and by "this", I mean that sustainable population is ~1 billion)? From the looks of things, we're managing to support seven billion-plus with fewer people starving than was common when I was growing up half a century ago. And higher standards of living.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
> That's quite a statement to make ...because it's completely wrong.
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2895013/new-solar-installs-beat-wind-and-coal-two-years-in-a-row.html
Geez people, this was posted here all of *yesterday*.
This. Grandparent shouldn't have been modded up.
Earth's sustainable population using current tech is somewhere between 9 and 12 billion. People are only going hungry for political reasons. There's plenty of food, it just doesn't get to those who need it. As to energy, there's not enough resources readily available for everyone to live at U.S. levels, which are frankly a bit wasteful; but, it is possible to pull everyone up to a similar standard of living, in time.
Affects of wind turbines on the atmosphere have been studied. Of course they have a localized effect. Short version is the turbines cause local mixing of higher altitude and ground level air, resulting in minor changes to local weather down-wind. The mixing and turbulence will affect pollen and dust in different ways, depending on particle size and where they were (high/low) to begin with. Overall you're pulling heat out of the atmosphere; so, not a bad thing. Turbine numbers would have to get truly massive in order for them to have any significant global effect.
> We're exhausting arable land at an alarming rate,
No we're not, not even close.
Today the planet will generate 6,000 calories for everyone on the planet. You need 2,000, so *using today's agriculture* we could support 21 billion people.
However, a considerable amount of currently used land is used extremely inefficiently. About half the planet's arable land is using stone-age methodologies and crop varietals, which offer about 1/4rd the payload per acre or less.
So if all we do is introduce modern methods to the rest of the existing used land, that will increase production to the point where something like 50 or 60 billion can be fed.
And of course, the techniques are improving all the time. I have a friend in the industry who visits the contests across North America. Over the last 10 years the record for corn production per acre has improved something like 15%. There is no sign of this slowing down.
And of course the system as a whole is unbelievably inefficient because we have a meat-heavy diet. We take thousands and thousands of calories and turn them into tens or hundreds. And even our choice of meat is terrible; beef is far, far less efficient to produce than chicken.
The world is literally awash with food, so much that the vast majority of the calories we make are ultimately thrown away. We could *easily* double the population with zero changes to the existing production methods.
> Organic, chemical-free agriculture cannot support our numbers
Completely incorrect. "organic methods could produce enough food on a global per capita basis to sustain the current human population, and potentially an even larger population, without increasing the agricultural land base"
Organic methods generally produce about 80% per acre of basic foodstuffs compared to non-organic methods. That would mean, say, 5,000 calories per person per day on existing land. Still way more than we need. And if we were to eat a little less meat, especially beef, that would free up a lot more.
The difference is not output, but cost. Organic methods generally use much smaller plots of single crops interspersed with similar sized different crops. This means harvesting is more expensive than, say, driving a reaper around a 5000 acre plot. Weeding and pest control are likewise more expensive and time consuming.
But that's it. And since food costs for the average Canadian have dropped from 40% of their take-home pay to under 9% - in spite of far greater amounts of eating at restaurants and other expensive options - we clearly have significant amounts of money we could use to pay for it, if we wanted. I personally don't care, nitrogen is nitrogen.
Seriously, read a little. Start on the Wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_farming
I recently noticed an interesting convergence. The long term growth of both solar and wind capacity is exponential. The growth rate for solar is higher than for wind power but wind power is currently ahead in capacity. If we take a capacity factor of 20% for solar and 30% for wind, how long does it take to cover the roughly 20 TW of world energy demand?
For solar, taking 200 MW of capacity in 1995 and 100,000 MW in 2012 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... we get to 100,000,000 MW in 39 years from 1995 since (log(100 TW)-log(200 MW))/(log(100,000 MW)-log(200 MW))/17 years)=39 years. So 2034 is when we may expect solar PV to cover all energy demand.
For wind, taking 7,600 MW of capacity in 1995 and 369,553 MW in 2014 http://www.gwec.net/wp-content... we get to 60,000,000 MW in 39 years from 1997 since (log(60 TW)-log(7,600 MW))/(log(369,533 MW)-log(7.500 MW))/17 years = 39 years. So, 2036 is where we may expect wind power to cover all energy demand.
So, within just a couple years of each other, either technology can be projected to grow to cover all current demand.
A driver for ongoing exponential growth for PV is the still falling cost of manufacture. It is expected that panels will cost $0.36/W to produce in 2017. http://www.greentechmedia.com/...
This seems to be a faster rate than pledges coming in for Paris are anticipating so we might have some confidence that those pledges are going to be met.
You run into the huge issue of peak need vs lowest production - in just seconds.
This is a common myth. Wind turbines have an immense amount of inertia. They don't suddenly accelerate with every gust, or suddenly stop when there is a lull. The UK National Grid uses a time frame of 15 minutes for predicting wind generation output, during which the output never varies by more than a small amount.
Solar is also very predictable. We have excellent cloud cover monitoring from space. Although clouds do move over areas the geographic distribution of domestic solar evens the fluctuations out and makes them predictable. For larger installations cloud cover can be predicted in advance, and utility scale batteries have been available to further smooth output for a while now (sodium sulphur, typical installation is about 50MWh).
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