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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.
So you think we need to get rid of 6 out of every 7 people. Will you be first in line?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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...
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
> 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.