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Energy Dept. Wants Big Wind Energy Technology In All 50 US States
coondoggie writes: Bigger wind turbines and towers are just part of what the U.S. needs in order to more effectively use wind energy in all 50 states.That was the thrust of a wind energy call-to-arms report called "Enabling Wind Power nationwide" issued this week by the Department of Energy. They detail new technology that can reach higher into the sky to capture more energy and more powerful turbines to generate more gigawatts. These new turbines are 110-140 meters tall, with blades 60 meters long. The Energy Department forecasts strong, steady growth of wind power across the country, both on land and off shore.
(insert joke about needing to install wind turbines near locations where there's a lot of hot air, i.e. politicians)
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Government funds rebuilding the power grid infrastructure because vast quantities of wind power destablizes grid. And in other, other news, government funds development of massive grid-level storage batteries because quantities of wind power are generated at the wrong time of the day for utilization.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
All that energy comes from the agitated atmosphere exacerbated by carbon emissions. Which also threatens the birds.
This get's me thinking........what about having high-altitude turbines, suspended under giant balloons that are anchored to the surface? Instead of harnessing wind power on the ground, harness it at 30,000 ft and run a giant power cable down to a base station. Just make sure you pick an area away from civilian airline routes.
Any major cost/feasibility issues I'm overlooking?
I hope you're being sarcastic. It doesn't kill a lot of birds. Please go look up the word "scale" in the dictionary and try to wrap your tiny understanding around global numbers.
As someone who spent some years in county government where various wind projects have taken place, one thing is true... Without a shell game of tax dollars shuttling in and out with many transfers of project ownership, there would be NO turbines standing. You do realize that even when those monsters are turning in the wind, they usually are just lubricating internals and not generating?
.. should alert the alert reader to the DOE's approach on things. Unfortunately the US public hasn't yet been hammered with sticker shock yet unlike the UK and German ratepayers. (Well, Maine rates jumped 19.6 percent last year due to "upgrades" "required" to ease a transmission choke near a wind facility whose power gets shipped to Massachusetts- Maine doesn't need the excess power by they pay for it nonetheless.) The US public as a whole doesn't yet understand that wind turbines GUARANTEE simple-cycle gas plant proliferation and lots more fracking to supply the natural gas to the gas plants needed to ramp when the big boys don't spin (and they don't spin, a lot, averaging 19-28 percent capacity factor, some as low as 6 percent). So the DOE and its "friends" at GE and the White House can proceed unfettered, the public oblivious, the corporate-owned press scamming well-meaning environmentalists into thinking these things are going to save the planet. HmmHmm and be sure to factor in replacing them every 15 years and uprating the transmission system on your monthly bill. Oh yes let's not think about the polluted lakes in China killing villages from metals poisoning a result of mining rare metals used in the wind turbine generators. Best of luck to all! Maybe in 400 years, humanity will be using a sensible stable power design based on engineering rather than ideology and lining the pockets of one's "friends".
the thump/thump/thump of the blades (like a whirleybird *old ref* overhead for days) during the prevalent low wind conditions doomed this project even though it lasted long enough to depress property values within 15 miles. low frequencies travels far.
http://www.greenoptimistic.com...
Lost in space at an early age. Survived the vacuum. Now rebuilding castle in air.
Can someone help me understand EROEI ("Energy Return on Energy Input").
All the research on future sources of energy (that I can find) say that we're doomed as a civilization because the EROEI for renewables isn't as large as that of fossil fuels.
Okay, EROEI is the energy you get out minus (or divided by) the energy you put in, I get that. Fossil fuels take relatively little energy to gather, and generate lots of energy so their EROEI is rather large.
Wind and solar require a larger energy input per energy out, so it's EROEI is smaller but still greater than 1, even after accounting for mining the raw materials.
I'm not clear how the economic conclusion is reached that solar and wind cannot power our civilization. If we have enough rooftop solar and wind farms to generate all the energy we need as a civilization, and if there's enough left over to make *more* solar and wind installations over time (to replace the warn out bits), then why does EROEI matter?
Assuming that EROEI is a net energy positive (with a reasonable margin of error), why does it even matter at all?
(Also note: world population growth is slowing, and is steady or decreasing in all industrialized nations (including the US if you deduct immigration). The standard economic model assumes infinite consumption, but is that assumption correct? Is there be an upper limit to personal comfort in terms of energy use? Or at least diminishing returns? Would finite population and finite consumption invalidate the standard economic model?)
That energy has to come from somewhere and blocking the surface wind reduces the air velocity and increases the amount of heat at ground level.
Trees also block the wind. So a simple solution is to require anyone erecting a windmill to cut down a tree to compensate.
A more complicated solution would be to improve math and physics education, so even dimwitted people can figure out that the amount of energy windmills extract from the atmosphere is utterly inconsequential.
yeah, common sense
'This get's me thinking" ..but not enough to know when to not use an apostrophe...
Cut down three trees and bolt them onto the hub as the windmill blades.
That way you have trees AND turbines.
Screw it, cut down another two trees and nail them end-to-end for a mast, then attach the three trees as blades.
I think I'm onto something here... Can we make generators out of stripped bark? I might have been playing too much Minecraft.
... that education would also kill once and for all the Space Nutter delusions.
...is not the wind, is not the turbines, and not really the way the grid works, it's the fact that the grid doesn't run to where the turbines are likely to be built, where the wind energy is most available. Boon Pickens had a similar idea about 10 or so years ago, and his ideas got shot down for this reason.
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
Not every state is suitable for large-scale wind energy production.
But hey, a government contract is like found money.
Wind is already generating a significant amount of power in windy locations. For whatever reason, this report goes on about what it would take to build more towers in parts of the country where there just isn't much wind. Seems like a lot of wishful thinking.
Plus it kills a lot of birds.
Incorrect.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The movie had an old lady on the church steps singing:
"Feed them birds. Turbines. Turbines.
Feed them birds. Turbines go slash."
Old fashioned, smaller, more closely spaced and higher speed turbines killed lots of birds. Modern turbines tend to be much larger, rotate a lot more slowly, are more spread out (lower density) and kill very few birds, basically because birds find the more spaced out slower moving turbines much easier to avoid.
As to disturbing wind patterns: I stand to be corrected, but I suspect that a century or two back there would have been a hell of a lot more trees than there are now that would have perturbed wind patterns a hell of a lot more than a (relatively) few spindly poles with big fanlike things on them.
harness it at 30,000 ft and run a giant power cable
Here are some of the issues;
1. How heavy is a 30,000 ft cable that can carry the electricity? Probably tons
2. How strong must the cable be to be able to support itself? As the cable get stronger it also gets heavier and the baloon gets bigger which requires a heaver cable to hold it. It is an infinite circle.
3. How much tension will the supporting balloon place on the cable and turbines? As the balloon gets bigger there is more surface area and therefore more tension on the cable.
I doubt very much that one can build a 30,000 ft cable that can support itself, carry electricity and hold back a balloon large enough to support the cable and turbines. It is the same issue that is holding back the space elevator but on a smaller scale.
Sorry, already been done. Although not at 30,000 feet.
There are 10 companies listed in this article from a few years ago
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energ...
and store the excess power as compress air is bladders at the bottom of the lake.
Really they need to stop the power companies from punishing consumers who try to implement green energy. After installation and monthly fees for "accepting" your electricity back onto the grid, you are lucky to break even.
As the cable get stronger it also gets heavier
not always true. carbon fibre is less weight than steel, but if layed out correctly can be stronger
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Are the Feds encouraging biomass digestors, to turn all the bird carcasses around the blades into methane?
This has to be a consideration, because, really, the birds also do matter. What are the wind energy folks doing to work on the issue?
It's 2015. Where is my Mr. Fusion
So what happens when a tornado hits, rips off the 60 metre blades and throws them around?
I mean that sort of thing can't happen, can it?
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
So, in a world where the best EROEI available is 20, only 4% of all that societies efforts need to be devoted to obtaining energy. In a world where the best EROEI is 5, 20% of all the work is devoted to getting the energy to power civilization. At EROEI of 2, fully half of all our efforts as a civilization are devoted to energy extraction/production and everything else (agriculture, industry, medicine, art) has to fit into the remaining half of our time and resources.
So as EROEI drops, sometime before you hit 1, you're left with a nation of nothing but farmers and people working in solar panel factories, and any further decrease in EROEI means choosing between food on the table and power when you hit a light switch. At that point (if not before) civilization collapses.
it may be anecdotal but growing up in an area that has been significantly engineered (north Texas) I have seen the effect that a wind break has over heat and wind patterns at the ground level. Pity you are to much of an idiot to recognize such.
did you read what you linked to?
It kills enough birds that the following is part of the PDF you linked to: Reducing or eliminating direct sources of mortality could save millions, if not
billions, of birds annually. The best ways to reduce bird mortality include:
Collisions: Following bird-friendly window practices, reducing
night lighting in and on tall buildings, warning auto drivers in highcollision
areas, installing flashing rather than steady-burning lights on
communication towers, and locating wind turbines away from areas of
high bird concentrations (especially areas that pose threats to particular
species such as eagles).
Since 1978, utilities have been obligated to purchase electricity from qualified facilities (QFs) under a law called PURPA. Net Metering isn't a federal requirement, but PURPA sure as heck is.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Big Wind in contrary to small and well distributed (rooftops) solar. Sounds like someone is pushing an energy technology with an agenda. I guess finally it will be again a wrong choice, due to someone's deep pocket influence.
Did YOU read it? The relative impacts of wind turbines compared to all of the other sources they talk about are vanishingly small. They're saying turbines could be placed better than they are, but anyone using bird deaths to justify staying away from wind power is just flat-out misinformed or lying. On the scale of things threatening birds, it just barely even registers.
Somthing to think about; if you remove a dam and the pond from hydro and just use the turbines it is exactly the same as wind; weather dependent and uncontrollable. The pond and dam are the grid storage that make hydro rock-solid baseload.
Not true for all the US; in New England the strogest wind is off the coast and most of the population is on the coast line.
Want to save 70 million birds a year? Build more wind farms : Renew Economy
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Wind destabilizing the grid is a non-issue at the moment; renewables are only 2% of our generation as a whole. Worrying about that now is like trying to optimize code that does not even compile yet.
In the long term, though, I can see this being an issue if grid storage does not pick up on its own. There is a fight brewing already in some places that gas power plants are the only solution to counter potential renewable growth and keep the grid stable.
I think to make progress we need to end this fuel uses mantra (coal is baseload, gas is peaking, solar is unpredictable). This severely limits thinking in policy. Like we overhauled energy policy and extracted generation from distribution in the past, I think we need to overhaul again and strictly extract generation from storage in future policy.
That way all generation is treated equally and we create a new clean and clear market for electric storage for private firms to compete in (much like firms compete for gas storage).
Oh don't give me your logic and facts, everyone knows wind turbines have a huge impact on the atmosphere but billions of tons of carbon dioxide doesn't affect the atmosphere at all
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Vanishingly small? That's with today's deployment of turbines. What happens once the big build-out happens?
Once we cover the planet with wind turbines, we can dramatically decrease the wind on the planet. A cool breeze will be replaced with a dead lifeless stifling hot atmosphere. Of coarse we could use environmentally friendly nuclear power to generate out electricity but the Jews realizing this would be cheap unlimited energy for the masses started a massive campaign of public fear to discredit nuclear power. Don't like my anti-jewish rhetoric, well I don' like the Jews anti-nuclear rhetoric. Yes jews do control the media. It's all the jews fault.
The department of energy may WANT renewable sources of power in all 50 states, but as long as the Koch brothers are allowed to buy politicians it is never going to happen.
Also no one has ever made a cable anywhere near that long. An electrical conductor can weigh upwards of 3/4 of a ton per 1000 feet. The conductor alone could be 20,000 tons. Stronger yes, strong enough to support the weight of 30,000 feet plus the weight of the conductor plus the pull of the huge balloon? Doubtful.
Which is enough to melt four hundred billion tons of *land* ice per year, for the last 13 years.
http://climate.nasa.gov/vital-...
That's not much, right?
SolStats shows a chart from UK Department of Energy and Climate Change, that says UK electricity prices have jumped 50% higher than five years ago
Just curious which one of you is lying - the UK trying to scare people into buying more alternative energy as ,energy prices rise (though of course they don'y say WHY they have risen...) or you trying to avoid scaring people from realizing wind power is quite a lot more expensive?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Here we have a hint of something that might work better than just bigger blades on a larger tower... http://www.gizmag.com/vortex-bladeless-wind-turbine-generator/37563/
In the last few days, I think slashdot is getting into the wind energy business. ie, putting up political articles. There are other websites (soylentnews, dailykos, breitbart) for political type stuff.
(snort)
Whilst I applaud their initiative in wanting Turbines across the US, the future's power supply is not going to depend on *one* source of power. Building bigger wind turbines is all well and good, but we should also be looking at other alternatives. Solar, Tidal, Thermal & Wind on the clean end, Methane/Gas on the dirtier side and even Nuclear Technologies (I hear Thorium as a fuel over Uranium is worth a look in) are all going to play a part in replacing coal/oil as a primary power source.
LOL You're saying there was no wind before the industrial revolution ?
You should be keelhauled
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
That is why you use a kite and not a balloon.
Also you don't let the turbine fly but use the tension on the cable to run a generator on the ground.
But well, there are flying turbine concepts, too.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
We throw you in first, to stop the whining.
That is why you use a kite and not a balloon.
Do you have any idea how big a kite that can hold 30,000 feet of electrical cable would be? We are talking about 20 tons for the conductor alone.
Also you don't let the turbine fly but use the tension on the cable to run a generator on the ground.
Tension generators work by letting the kite pull a cord which is attached to a generator. The kite is the partially furled and reeled part way back in, and the process repeated. The prototypes I have seen have many issues and none use tethers anywhere near 330,000 feet long.
>A more complicated solution would be to improve math and physics education, so even dimwitted people can figure out that the amount of energy windmills extract from the atmosphere is utterly inconsequential.
You haven't actually determined that, you're just pulling it out your ass.
we could start by killing all the domestic cats as they are biggest cause of bird death and that would more than make up for the few lost by turbine death
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
You brought the 30,000 feet issue :D which is actually only 10km, so not very long.
20 tons? You did the math? sounds not much to me.
An airplane weights like 130 tons.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
in five minutes because of a steam leak in the non-radioactive area, you claim this proves nuclear power safe, and "forget" that your power grid infrastructure was destabilised by gigawatts going offline in minutes. In THAT case, there's other generation, the system is fine.
It's the same thing here, moron.
Hell, when the break comes up in the middle of The Big Game, all those people making coffee/heated snacks in the microwave "destabilise the grid" because demand shot up immensely in a minute.
There's nothing that the introduction of wind power can do to the grid, even if it's 100% or more of the base load, that isn't already being DONE to the grid.
So what do you do when your clothes are in the airing cupboard? Do you hang around waiting for the dryer to finish so you can get them out of the nice warm environment they are in where mould and so forth will find a nice home?
No.
Because you're talking bullshit, and god knows why you insist that it MUST be done in the dryer, MUST be done while you wait and CANNOT be done if we use renewable energy.
The electrical signal reacts at the speed of light in the medium.
How the hell do you think you can get GHz CPUs sending signals the 5mm it needs to get across a chip if it doesn't go at several billion millimeters a second (which is tens of thousands of meters per second)?
You don't know the difference between sea ice and land ice - even when it's pointed out to you repeatedly - so I don't know why anyone should ever attempt to learn from you. You might be right, but you've been so fantastically wrong in the past and not even realised it.
You just told everyone you don't know what you're talking about. Thanks!
You need room temperature superconductivity working before long distance cables can deliver power. Otherwise most of it is lost.
I don't know where you come from, but if a windmill or a wind turbine makes any noise at all, it is time to put some grease on the bearings. Modern wind turbines run at their own pace and synchronize the frequency themselves before adding the power to the grid. And what I really cannot understand is why people complain about wind turbines being ugly and not about flood-lighted billboards. These are really ugly, but nobody complains about them.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
You don't know the difference between sea ice and land ice - even when it's pointed out to you repeatedly - so I don't know why anyone should ever attempt to learn from you. You might be right, but you've been so fantastically wrong in the past and not even realised it.
LOL looks like I have a fan or a stalker. Glad I have made an impression on you, who are you again ?
If it's 30,000 ft at 3/4 ton per 1000 ft, don't you mean 22.5 tons? Not 20,000 tons?
The first link from energy.gov - a publication of the United States government - it providing turbine heights and blade lengths in meters?! Damn, we've been infiltrated by those metric commie bastards!
(please tune your sarcasm detectors to their optimal setting, in case you couldn't tell I was trying to make a joke)
Yeah, it would be far easier to launch a few sats in space to collect solar, beam the energy back down as microwave, and collect with a large spread out antenna grid array on the surface. If I recall, it's very safe for people and wildlife directly in the rays path.
Life is not for the lazy.
My area has frequent hurricanes. I do wonder how durable windmills are in a storm and how quickly they can be repaired and made to function after a storm. To me it seems like some way to fold the blades against the mast would be required. I've never seen any articles about high winds and windmills. Near me we need the type of strength that can survive near 200 mph. gusts and battering that can last for several days.
"exacerbated" - look it up. (not that I think GP makes such a great point)
I'll just leave this here:
http://www.altaerosenergies.co...
Not at 30k feet, but it exists.
Also: Not sure why you would want one baloon at the end of one heavy 30,000 foot cable. Maybe a smaller balloon dividing the cable into smaller unsupported spans would help? But then there's all the wind resistance, I dunno, that would be a tough one to design for all weather possibilities.
Small songbirds, yes. Bald eagles, not really.
We know wind energy doesn't work in many areas; this is another prime example of yet more Fed fail. The stinks of artificially pumping up an industry. Just another bubble created by the fed.
Fail, again, Fed. Lolz.
Death from indigestion, perhaps?
off Nantucket as told here
Plus it kills a lot of birds.
Not really that many, beside the fact that it only kills the birds that aren't smart enough to keep out of the way. We are simply encouraging the evolution of smarter birds. Who wouldn't want that?
The concept seems simple but the implementation is quite complex.
Wind, like solar, is a temporal energy and not 'available on demand'.
I am not going to downplay them, but we need a way to power the 'grid' of power we use today and in the future. Adding supply methods, like wind and solar, are good. But we also need to invest in non-renewable energy that is reasonably clean.
To me, Thorium based nuke power is preferable to uranium/radium based. It can consume our current stockpile of waste (and plutonium). The byproducts from thorium reactions are shorter lifetime and less radioactive. Thorium is not limited to just 'rich countries' and is no worse to collect/process than uranium. It is almost impossible to generate weaponizable materials. If built right, they could be built into 'containers' and drop shipped to current/old coal power plants to provide the hot water for the same turbine generators.
The first Thorium reactor was turned off for weekends when it wasn't needed at Oak Ridge TN for years. If built correctly, it CANNOT 'melt down'.
Currently India and China, and to a minor extent Canada, are actively developing the technologies with production coming soon. The USA did the basic research and now it will probably be sold back to us for us to be a consumer rather than a producer nation.
We need to research and support ALL the directions to make inexpensive energy available. Support renewable (solar and wind), higher efficiency living (insulate, water/vapor barriers, Energy Star or better ratings, and non-uranium based nuclear engineering.
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."
I can't wait for cheap fusion to take these environmental, tax revenue wasting proposals and toss them in the fire.
The noise is not from bad bearings but simply from the blades whooshing through the air. I don't have first-hand experience but those who live near turbines say it can be pretty severe. I can see a place for turbines offshore and in the wide-open spaces of the Great Plains where there is ample wind. But in the more populated east and west coasts, the noise and visual pollution just aren't worth it, especially when the wind is so intermittent. The few remaining undeveloped spaces there deserve to be left alone. Are we to have every Appalachian mountain ridge dominated by turbines even larger than the monsters already in use? In the long term, PV solar with battery storage is the only sensible solution. It's a little too expensive now, but in 10 years if not 5 years it will likely be comparable to wind and cheaper than any fossil fuel. By the time mega-turbine wind gets going, it will already be obsolete.
Then you don't even understand a wind turbine. High wind conditions force them to shut down.
How safe it is depends on how wide the beam is, and the wider the beam, the greater the energy loss. (It would be a death ray at a narrow beam) Solar panels in space have huge technical problems. You need to build something with a very large surface area rigid enough to keep its shape and tough enough to handle debris hits while light enough to transport it into orbit economically. Once it is built, you have to prevent it from blowing away as it will be a great solar sail.
I think there was a Brickleberry episode about that...
I'm probably wrong with my layman's understanding of how it works, but if you consider conservation of energy, the additional thermal energy from AGW would cause atmospheric agitation. I just meant to illustrate that any slowing of wind would likely be offset by the surplus of energy produced by the trapping of thermal energy caused by greenhouse gasses.
I had to google what keelhauled meant.
I can't say what the environmental impact of massive wind generation will be. Altering the atmospheres transport systems is certainly going to have an effect what, well what it will be is hard to tell.
I can say this the effect of quadrupling energy costs
http://shrinkthatfootprint.com...
Isn't going to be good for the human environment.