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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"
While overpopulation is a problem it *has* certainly not a root cause of hunger and energy shortage, etc..
Re wind power - this will be easy to determine - what is the speed of the wind at different altitudes before and after the wind farm. If there is a major difference AND if wind farms become major fixtures on the landscape (meaning they cover a significant portion of an area's total acreage) then we have a problem.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
So you think we need to get rid of 6 out of every 7 people. Will you be first in line?
Wind is the playground bully. Bigger than everyone, towering above all the other kids. It' a big blowhard, mouthing off at the slightest provocation. Flailing it's arms around and thumping anyone who gets in it's way. No one likes a bully.
I bet someone has. Try to do a little googling on the bird issue, for instance: Windmills kill 58000 to 440000 birds in US per year. Domestic cats kill 3.7 billion (3700000000) birds in US per year. http://www.brighthubengineerin... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
-- Make America hate again!
Has anyone studied the effect on the environment of taking all of that energy out of the wind? What if seeds and dust aren't carried as far? How does that affect terraforming? What about migratory birds? Has anyone bothered to solve the problem of mass kills during migration season?
These questions will never be answered, I don't think, because the politics that drive wind power are the same as those that drive anthro climate change - "We're right, shut up if you disagree?"
The Earth is going to be destroyed by people (on both sides of the political aisle) who refuse to take a reasoned approach to our energy crisis. The root causes of our energy shortage, climate change, starvation, hunger, crime, and disease, are all one in the same: OVERPOPULATION.
We're 7 times as numerous as the Earth can sustain. Unless and until we fix that problem, our habitable climate WILL be destroyed.
"Informative"? WTF mods, just wtf. Let's see: YES, they have studied it: wind speeds beyond the wind farm in question are not changed any measurable amount by the operation of the farm. Don't worry, pollen and dust will still get all over every fucking thing. Terraforming? Wtf, no. Bird issues are being addressed by implementing various repellent techniques, and the number of birds killed is actually already extremely low (far less than the number killed by household cats but you aren't here on /. to whine about getting rid of cats, are you).
As for your overpopulation assertion, Thomas Malthus died 150 years ago, and still isn't close to being right.
The politics of anthro climate change are "It doesn't exist, shut up, stop telling me the 'science'". You are stupid not because you disagree, but because your arguments SUCK.
You are correct that overpopulation used to be a problem, but the developed world has basically solved that issue. See Japan, where the population growth is basically negative. Note, we have always had a solution to overpopulation, it is called WAR - kill enough people and the problem is solved. But recently we have come up with far better solutions involving birth control.
Your malthusian prediction is garbage.
Overpopulation is no longer the primary cause of climate change, instead greed for the Western European lifestyle is the primary cause. The solution to that will almost certainly be technological improvements across the board, and energy - including wind - will be the primary tech improvement that eliminates the problem.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
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.
But you can't say we're sustaining that while we use up fossil fuels faster than they are being produced.
> 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*.
Has anyone studied the effect on the environment of taking all of that energy out of the wind? What if seeds and dust aren't carried as far?
This is such an unfounded concern, I'm not even sure where to start. I grew up in the prairie of Minnesota and I could only hope that the wind is reduced there. It is absolutely brutal at times and causes erosion and top soil loss. Why do you want dust carried far? What seeds are you concerned about falling too close to the parent plant? I just, this hasn't been studied because there's nothing to argue about. Like solar there's a lot of energy to be harvested. There's no way to harvest all of it, a lot of it is dissipated as friction against water and earth and I can't think of one positive purpose of that friction.
How does that affect terraforming?
How does that affect our ability to transform the planet into a more livable human environment? I can't even parse this or apply it to the topic at hand. "How does that affect X?" when X has nothing to do with the discussion just sounds like fear mongering.
What about migratory birds? Has anyone bothered to solve the problem of mass kills during migration season?
This is well documented and researched but I am constantly confused as to why "migratory birds" are the stipulated losses. It's any birds. Migratory or not. And the numbers have been scientifically estimated to be 140,000 to 328,000 per year. But we're getting smarter about designing these windmills to prevent avian death.
These questions will never be answered
Well, the first two are just too fucking vapid and inane to be answered. The latter, I've answered for you.
, I don't think, because the politics that drive wind power are the same as those that drive anthro climate change - "We're right, shut up if you disagree?"
You know, that could be said about any politics anywhere because modern politics are about inaction and hot air. Companies and scientists are trying hard to expand our energy portfolio away from fossil fuels. And that's smart whether it's biofuel algae, solar, wind or even failed corrupt initiatives like corn ethanol. In the end there are going to be regionally localized energy productions that will account for a large amount of that local populace's consumption. This will likely still be augmented by fossil fuels -- maybe as emergency or backup but I don't think we'll ever see them completely removed from the equation.
The Earth is going to be destroyed by people (on both sides of the political aisle) who refuse to take a reasoned approach to our energy crisis. The root causes of our energy shortage, climate change, starvation, hunger, crime, and disease, are all one in the same: OVERPOPULATION.
We're 7 times as numerous as the Earth can sustain. Unless and until we fix that problem, our habitable climate WILL be destroyed.
Scientifically, can you explain how you came to calculate the multiplier of "7 times as numerous as Earth can sustain?" Because the idea that the Earth can only sustain a nice round even number like a billion people raises suspicions. But it's pretty evident that nothing is going to talk sense into you, Malthus. Science and human ingenuity has gotten us past radical adj
My work here is dung.
Has anyone studied the effect on the environment of taking all of that energy out of the wind?
Yes. It's basically a nonissue.
What if seeds and dust aren't carried as far?
Then they settle someplace else. No actual evidence exists however to indicate wind turbines are actually causing such an effect however on any sort of substantial scale.
How does that affect terraforming?
We're on Terra so terraforming on terra is meaningless.
What about migratory birds? Has anyone bothered to solve the problem of mass kills during migration season?
The number of birds killed by wind turbines is a rounding error compared to the number killed by domestic cats.
The Earth is going to be destroyed by people (on both sides of the political aisle) who refuse to take a reasoned approach to our energy crisis.
What energy crisis? We have no lack of energy. We have a pollution crisis due to a lack of clean energy sources. Wind is demonstrably cleaner than some of the alternatives. There is no ideal energy source with no problems so it's a minimization problem. What is the least worst way to supply energy without resulting in catastrophic climate effects.
The root causes of our energy shortage, climate change, starvation, hunger, crime, and disease, are all one in the same: OVERPOPULATION.
There is no energy shortage. Climate change is due to pollution, not overpopulation. Starvation and hunger are distribution problems, not production problems. Crime has existed since the dawn of mankind and has nothing inherently to do with overpopulation. Same for disease. At most some of these problems can be exacerbated by population but population is not the root cause of any of them.
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.
Oh, you too? In Quebec we're swimming in surplus hydroelectricity, yet they're building turbines everywhere and increasing our rates as much as they can.
Mostly random stuff.
So I guess punk band FEAR has what you want:
There's so many of us
There's so many of us
There's so many
Let's have a war
So you can go and die!
Let's have a war!
We could all use the money!
Let's have a war!
We need the space!
Let's have a war!
Clean out this place!
Let's have a war!
Jack up the Dow Jones!
Let's have a war!
It can start in New Jersey!
Let's have a war!
Blame it on the middle-class!
Let's have a war!
We're like rats in a cage!
Let's have a war!
Sell the rights to the networks!
Let's have a war!
Let our wallets get fat like last time!
It already started in the city!
Suburbia will be just as easy!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
> 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
Actually I don't believe any of those numbers.
If every of the (far less) 400 million US inhabitants owned a cat, there would be 400 million cats, obviously. To kill close to 4billion birds per year, every cat needs to kill 10 birds per year. For every cat that is kept inside the house, another cat has to kill twice as many birds.
Bottom line that number makes no sense. Same for the birds supposedly killed by wind turbines. (the two numbers you give are already apart by a factor of ten!)
Also, if a bird is so stupid to get killed by a relatively slow moving wind turbine, I would consider: Darwin at work.
Migrating birds are not really affected at all, they don't fly in such low altitudes.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
As to energy, there's not enough resources readily available for everyone to live at U.S. levels, which are frankly a bit wasteful;
Western Europe has similar or (certainly on average) better standards of living than the US, but uses a fraction as as much energy. A typical German household uses half as much energy as a US one, yet has the same quality of life.
We should be aiming to pull most of the world up to European standards, and the US down to them.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
A typical german household is not using half of an american but less then a fifth. I only use like 3500kWh per year in a 100 square meter flat (just think square yards or multiply by nine for square feet) + natural gas for heating in winter and hot water.
I arguable save a lot more than the average german. The amount of energy/CO2 americans use is absurd.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
The amount of energy taken out is surely small. It's not like the other side of the windmill has no air movement. The blades only capture a part of the wind's energy; the air has to keep moving beyond the blades, otherwise the wind would hit the blades, stop, and the blades wouldn't move. Gently blow on a pinwheel and you'll feel the air moving on the other side of the pinwheel. No one asks this question whenever we put up a new 10 story building, but they must absorb more wind energy. A 10 story building is a solid block and stops almost more of the wind that hits it; I assume some air is buffeted out and moves around the building, but not much. In addition, wind mills don't run if the wind speed is above or below a certain speed. I want to say something like 25mph, but I can't be arsed to google right now. Buildings block all the wind, regardless of speed. Well, up until the wind knocks them down. I'd bet a whole dollar that the buildings in a single large city like New York, London, Chicago, etc. capture and disrupt far more wind energy that every windmill on the planet today and every one planned for the next 20 years.
Those parentheses are a contained sentence, maggot! Where's your capitalization and period? I see a space there at the end, too. Drop and give me 50 WPM!
Natural gas from gas wells is not just burned off or vented. It is sold. There is flaring from some oil wells that produce natural gas. The linked DoE study aims to lower the cost of wind power well below the cost of natural gas, so your main point seems mistaken. http://energy.gov/sites/prod/f...
the distribution and storage are extremely lacking.
THIS! West Texas is a wind power gold mine. It is not, however, a large population center. Almost all the power generated from the wind farms in West Texas go to Dallas. The problem was while everybody was building wind farms nobody was increasing the grid capacity to Dallas. These wind farms were actually shunting excess electricity into the ground because electric storage was cost prohibitive. The Texas Public Utility Commission (PUCT) launched an initiative in 2008 to expand transmission capacity. That was completed in 2013. Last year another project was approved to connect Texas' grid with the rest of the nation's. And storage technology has improved significantly in the last five years as well. If storage tech can become even more cost effective I suspect an explosion of solar/wind.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
I can tell you are not a cat owner. The ones that do go outside, which is the majority, kill far more than 10 birds per year. 10 birds per day perhaps, during the summer months. Seriously, cats are one of nature's most efficient hunters and kill for amusement even if you feed them well and give them toys.
Wikipedia has more details, including multiple sources for the numbers. 4bn is a bit high for just birds, but the lower limit on mammals is 6.9bn with an upper estimate of 20bn/year. Cats really, really like murdering things smaller than themselves. All day, every day, as often as possible.
Interestingly, the number of birds killed by wind turbines is similar to the numbers killed by nuclear power, and much lower than the numbers killed by coal.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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).
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I love your optimism. Love it!
However you are leaving out one critical piece of the puzzle when it comes to agriculture: Water.
Where can we start?
How about the Cripps Institue predictions about water in the Western US/Colorado River Basin, that are now playing out.
How about Californias Central Valley?
How about overdrilling and polluting the aquifer under Sao Paolo in Brazil?
What about the overdrilling in India due to cheap and illeagal diesel pumps?
Etc;
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
"Has anyone studied the effect on the environment of taking all of that energy out of the wind? What if seeds and dust aren't carried as far? How does that affect terraforming? What about migratory birds? Has anyone bothered to solve the problem of mass kills during migration season?" try reading this, it can answer most of your questions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
"The root causes of our energy shortage, climate change, starvation, hunger, crime, and disease, are all one in the same: OVERPOPULATION" - what about greed? there are too many obese westerners and the easterners are catching up as they get polluted with the western ways of waste
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
You know 200 years ago London looked like Beijing does today because of all the coal smoke, right?
All of the wind and weather on planet Earth is a result of temperature inversions caused by solar heating. It seems to me that energy from wind should be less efficient than energy from solar due to thermodynamics. Why then is solar more expensive?
That response was a perfect demonstration as to why engineers really need to study basic economics. And also take a more comprehensive look at issues.
Production is free. Harvesting is expensive. Distribution is expensive. Time shifting is expensive. etc. Add it up.
That "someone" is Hydro-Québec, which is owned by the government of Quebec. They bring the government over 2 billion dollars per year and pump about 10 billion a year into the local economy.
"Are you hungry? I haven't eaten since later this afternoon." -- Primer
> On the wind side there are substantial additional costs over dispatchable sources
No, there are not. I posted the numbers. Integrating wind is cheap, and the numbers keep going down because the equipment is getting better. The vast majority of "the equipment" is a PC running software you can buy from IBM.
When they invented coal fired power in the 1880s do you know what the interconnect cost was? Infinity. That's because they didn't have a grid, and the plants went up and down all the time. In spite of this, they built it out successfully anyway. They figured out how to interconnect two generators that would otherwise be running out of phase, how to keep voltages under control, how to handle generators going offline out of the blue.
Now after over 100 years, do you think we know more or less about how to hook up generation to the grid? More? Well if infinity was small enough to handle 100+ years ago, how can you possibly believe it's a) more difficult, or b) more expensive?
This isn't theoretical. We're actually adding this capacity as I type this. The grid is not failing. The companies are not going out of business. Everything is working just fine.
200? Try 60:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog
~4000 dead.
It says If we want the benefits of wind doubling, we should subsidize wind farms. It blatantly says toward the end that this is not the Business as Usual model.
False. Bird deaths due to wind turbines are a rounding error.
http://www.stateofthebirds.org...
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time