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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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And the wind patterns. 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.
Plus it kills a lot of birds.
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...
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?)
...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.
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The movie had an old lady on the church steps singing:
"Feed them birds. Turbines. Turbines.
Feed them birds. Turbines go slash."
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.
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.
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.
is ingesting Were nullified by vitality. Like an
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.
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.
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).
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.
Wind power is not what proponents make it out to be. The noise is horrible. Building the infrastructure in remote places costs more than you think and damages the environment. They don't last as long as you imagine and often require more maintenance than planned. The power they generate often causes more problems for the grid then one would think. Currently hydro is the only viable energy storage option; building more would be catastrophic for the environment. They look like shit.
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.
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 need room temperature superconductivity working before long distance cables can deliver power. Otherwise most of it is lost.
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)
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.
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.
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?
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.