Actually, the behaviour of wind and load that you describe makes me believe that you don't know the climate of The Netherlands. Air conditioning is seldomly used there, as temperatures rarely rise over 30 degC, so the peak consumption is in winter mornings and afternoons/evenings. Which coincides (on a monthly scale) nicely with the wind production, which is driven by the North Atlantic lows and not by some thermal coastal effect as in more southerly (subtropical) climate zones. Actually, what I describe here is valid for most of Europe, including northern Spain (except that they use air conditioning there).
While the whole idea is just peak shifting, for all practical purposes it's a large battery for electricity implemented in a few lines of software. That's what's making the project so interesting - and the sheer amount of refrigerated warehouses in Europe.
Before you declare nuclear to be the end-all of things, have a look to this graph, showing a seven-fold increase in uranium prices during the last four years. Essentially the same thing that happened to the oil price. Out of interest, how many percent of running cost of a nuclear plant is fuel? For wind, it's zero.
Of course, there's the long-term option of fast breeder reactors and fancy new technology, but I have yet to see a proposal that makes them economically viable - against wind power, that is. Or even gas.
Re:Americans don't want more vacation time!
on
On Point On Slacking
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· Score: 1
Actually, I'm not sure whether the French (or other Europeans) spend less overall - sure, they drive smaller cars, but they blow more money on the 2-5 (mostly international) vacations a year.
I did a round-the-world trip some ten years ago (being European), and about half-way into the trip (after some three months), I had met as many Venezuelans (sp?) as US citizens - and that was through SE Asia, Australia and New Zealand. Plenty more Canadians though.
Hi, anyone up to date with the availability of OLED TVs? The promise is great, the colours are magnificent, the power consumption a nuclear plant or three less than of all other technologies (especially CRT and Plasma), and it's the flattest technology available. However, I still have no firm availaibility date for those.
It would be really nice to have wind turbines available in Google Earth - it would make wind farm visualisations (like for instance, the infamous Cape Cod wind farm) directly accessible. Anyone having a WT model, please upload it.
Thanks for a great post dissecting a lot of prejudices against wind power. While I agree with the very most of your post, here is one piece I can shed a little light on (non-strobing, I hope):
They talk about the strobe effect at sunrise and sunset having the potential to cause seizures and migraines. I'd be interested to know if there is a single documented case of this ever happening.
Yes, there are cases of that happening, I was housed in an office where that happened up to an hour a day, and it is very disturbing. There is no good cure for it, and that is why in Germany, there are regulations that you have to shut down your turbine if the number of flicker hours in any given window around the turbine is exceeding 20 a year. Which essentially says, don't build these things too close to housing. But that's a good idea anyway...
Yep, sorry about that - didn't catch that you were on the environmental issues. Which are quite local, and manageable, I believe.
On the other hand, if you distribute wind power sufficiently, it always will blow somewhere, even (admittedly) you need a large area and it will only be a small amount (roughly 10% or so for a smaller nation) of the installed capacity which you can pretty much rely on. The concept to google for is the Capacity Credit.
According to a talk at the Global Wind Power Conference 2004 in Chicago, you could put up wind power worth about 800 GW on the better sites and still compete against 4$ gas. Even if you only assume a load factor of 0.3, that is 2.1 PWh. Compare this to a current total electricity generation in the US of about 4 PWh (Figure from IEA for 2001). I'm not quite sure how much of that is coal, but I would figure that wind can come into the same ballpark. So the potential is not the limiting factor - it's the grid and the will.
RE: - granting huge tax credits for solar heating/electric panels on private and commercial buildings
Solar panels take more energy to make than you get out of them.
Solar panels (that is, solar for heating) are essentially some blackened glass tubes pre-warming water. Are you trying to tell me that making a glass tube and exposing it to some soot is using more energy than is contained in water being prewarmed from 4 degC to 12? And if you confuse that with PV, the recoup time for modern PV is in the few years range, with a lifetime of beyond 20 years.
There are some parts in your post that I'm not as knowledgable about - I just assume I can ignore them safely as bull as the other thing I actually have a beef with:
RE: - massage research into alternative energy
There really isn't very much that's viable, unless you know a way to call up wind on demand and get rid of clouds.
Unless you have either one (solar or wind) with more than 80-100% instantaneous demand, it is quite manageable. Start with coming up to that, and fret about clouds and calms later. And then research how you can make more than 100% instantaneous demand possible (storing in batteries, hydrogen, heat, cold, etc).
First, you want to avoid the common solar panels, which are previous generation solar panels. The harm they do for the environment during production is not recouped by energy production during their lifetime.
Bzzzzzt, wrong. The first solar panels were just about breaking even over their quite long lifetime (I've seen 30 year old PV panels, still in nice working order), but these days, you're recouping the energy needed for manufacture in the order of a few years of operation, less if you put them where there is plenty of sun.
BTW, wind mills don't work, not the way you seem to think. They especially don't work in places with highly variable wind, like Massachusetts. You need *reliable* and high density energy production. Wind power is a supplementary energy source.
Well, that OTOH is at least not very nicely formulated. If you spread out wind power over some hundred kilometers, then the combined production has fairly slow swings, which in most cases even are predictable. The total wind power production for Germany for example can be predicted day-ahead with an accuracy of about 4-6% mean absolute error (normalised with installed capacity). Which means that wind can contribute about 20% to the total yearly demand without large problems for the grid operator. Denmark is long-term plans to achieve 50%, which is quite ambitious.
Dollar for dollar, coal is simpler better than any other alternative for generating electricity. If you'd like to see wind, solar and hydro power reign supreme, be prepared to pay several dollars per kilowatt-hour instead of the 8 to 20 cents you're paying now.
Bzzzzzt, wrong. For solar the price is indeed not quite competetive, but wind can generate for below 4 UScents/kWh at the best sites. AWEA or EWEA (American or European Wind Power Association, both.org) have some (for advocates pretty accurate) figures regarding the economics.
I wonder how this is too little, too late against the new alliance of 3G company 3 (available in AT, AU, HK, DK, SE, UK, IT, amongst others) with Skype, offering skyping via 3G. This should definitely get the international call prices down, a process which has begun in some places already.
There is the Seaflow project in the Bristol channel (that's England / Europe), which does pretty much the same thing. There is at least one more of these underwater ocean current devices that I don't remember, and I've recently visited the Enermar system in the Strait of Messina. See this Uni Strathclyde site on more details. A good Google search term is Ocean current energy, or Marine current energy.
Enough Karma Whoring for this time! It's a pity they won't go with offshore wind energy - the resource at the proposed offshore site was quite good, so the cost would have been quite tolerable, especially against shipped in 70$/brl oil. However, it's going to be interesting to see whether they can make this work. It's interesting that Current to Current can offer a price per kWh without having prospected the currents in detail... and hopefully, the device is very reliable, because getting divers into 75-200 m depth is hardly simple (means, it takes time to fix things).
It's a Volkswagen Lupo 3L. It's actually roomier than you'd think - we went two people for two weeks holiday (not camping though) in it. Unfortunately, production stopped this year, and there is no direct successor in sight. I have to get rid of mine due to some 7-pound changes in the family set-up (it's our only car), that's why I was looking for a new one. I was really happy with it, especially on the fuel pumps - a full tank was (including European taxes) between 20 and 30 euro, and got me up to 1000 km far!
Sure, if you trade a somewhat crappy small engine against one that doesn't break a sweat for doing its chores, no surprise that you'll have a better ride. I myself have a three-cylinder 1.2 litre diesel, and at red traffic lights it just stops!! So no wum-wum-wum all the time, just real silence. And it's extremely efficient: I get more than 60 mpg, or in real life about 3.x l/100 km (that's in the high twenties for km/l). Only in the cold mornings it sounds like a truck, but that has to be expected. It goes away after some kilometres, and then it sounds like a oversized sewing machine. OTOH, I just test drove the new VW 2.0 TDI in a Seat Toledo, with 16 valves and 330 Nm torque! Talk about fun driving! And it went 17 km/l.
So yes, the older and too small turbodiesels are not so good, but once you get to the reasonable sizes (PSAs 1.6 is a fine engine too), you should be better off.
Aside, is it true that Diesel fuel in the US is more expensive than regular unleaded?
Does anyone have an idea when there will be a box set of the second (or first, whatever) trilogy? I just want to have one box, like I have the one box of the original trilogy.
While maybe technically not a EULA, I had to sign a waiver before I was let on the cruise ship in Puerto Rico, essentially saying (quite explicitly) that there was no implicit or explicit acknoledgement of the seaworthiness of the ship, and of the suitability of the food and drinks for human consumption. I tried to argue with the girl at the counter, and she found it strange too, her supervisor found it strange too, but of the many thousand customers they serve every day, I seem to have been the first one to be actually miffed by it...
Actually, the better fuel efficiency is the reason why German car manufacturers have put their money on the Diesel instead of on Hybrid technology. The extra kilos to lug around for the batteries and hybrid motors can be a disadvantage as well.
I myself drive a VW Lupo 3L, and usually get for the 35 km commute to work (half of it is motorway) an average of 3.5l/100km (that's the funny way to express fuel consumption in Germany, and it is the number shown in my dashboard). That is just shy of 30 km/l, or 70 (?) miles per gallon. About once a year (it only works in the summer) I try to actually get down to 3l/100km, and that means that a 30l tank is good enough for 1000 km. Not too bad... Of course that entails driving 90 km/h behind trucks, instead of the usual 130.
The car is what I've seen described as a start-stop hybrid, ie it stops the engine at a red traffic light, but doesn't use breaking energy recovery. And it's a lot of fun to drive, despite the fairly limited HP rating.
I've seen promotional (or were they instruction manual introductions?) videos with jumping anti-tank mines, which were launched by a medium range rocket system (MARS?). They were a little smaller than R2D2, would fall down from the rocket with small parachutes, and then fold out some metal strips as feet hinged at the bottom. Think of a flower, just upside down. They then would sit there and wait for tanks (or rather, the magnetic field associated with a tank) to come through the area, and would jump on these feet towards the tanks. The video looked like they could jump up to 5 m high, and maybe 10-20 m long, which on the moon would make quite a distance. It might be not too good for sensitive equipment though...
Re:So when's Mars coming up? - Check out WorldWind
on
Google Moon Debuts
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· Score: 1
Mars (as well as the Moon and even the Death Star II) are available for NASA's WorldWind toy. It's very much like Google Earth, but for some reason or other, I like it better. If only they could get better resolution pics...
Not too shabby. What I wonder, is there anywhere a good reference card for HTML in 1-4 pages? And throw one in for CSS while you're at it. To print out, and keep around for reference? Or is modern HTML too large for that? (Last time I really did HTML, I coded HTML 2.0 in Notepad.)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the behaviour of wind and load that you describe makes me believe that you don't know the climate of The Netherlands. Air conditioning is seldomly used there, as temperatures rarely rise over 30 degC, so the peak consumption is in winter mornings and afternoons/evenings. Which coincides (on a monthly scale) nicely with the wind production, which is driven by the North Atlantic lows and not by some thermal coastal effect as in more southerly (subtropical) climate zones.
Actually, what I describe here is valid for most of Europe, including northern Spain (except that they use air conditioning there).
While the whole idea is just peak shifting, for all practical purposes it's a large battery for electricity implemented in a few lines of software. That's what's making the project so interesting - and the sheer amount of refrigerated warehouses in Europe.
Before you declare nuclear to be the end-all of things, have a look to this graph, showing a seven-fold increase in uranium prices during the last four years. Essentially the same thing that happened to the oil price. Out of interest, how many percent of running cost of a nuclear plant is fuel? For wind, it's zero.
Of course, there's the long-term option of fast breeder reactors and fancy new technology, but I have yet to see a proposal that makes them economically viable - against wind power, that is. Or even gas.
Actually, I'm not sure whether the French (or other Europeans) spend less overall - sure, they drive smaller cars, but they blow more money on the 2-5 (mostly international) vacations a year.
I did a round-the-world trip some ten years ago (being European), and about half-way into the trip (after some three months), I had met as many Venezuelans (sp?) as US citizens - and that was through SE Asia, Australia and New Zealand. Plenty more Canadians though.
I always felt that was odd...
Hi, anyone up to date with the availability of OLED TVs? The promise is great, the colours are magnificent, the power consumption a nuclear plant or three less than of all other technologies (especially CRT and Plasma), and it's the flattest technology available. However, I still have no firm availaibility date for those.
Cheers, g.a.g
It would be really nice to have wind turbines available in Google Earth - it would make wind farm visualisations (like for instance, the infamous Cape Cod wind farm) directly accessible. Anyone having a WT model, please upload it.
Thanks a lot!
Yes, there are cases of that happening, I was housed in an office where that happened up to an hour a day, and it is very disturbing. There is no good cure for it, and that is why in Germany, there are regulations that you have to shut down your turbine if the number of flicker hours in any given window around the turbine is exceeding 20 a year. Which essentially says, don't build these things too close to housing. But that's a good idea anyway...
Yep, sorry about that - didn't catch that you were on the environmental issues. Which are quite local, and manageable, I believe.
On the other hand, if you distribute wind power sufficiently, it always will blow somewhere, even (admittedly) you need a large area and it will only be a small amount (roughly 10% or so for a smaller nation) of the installed capacity which you can pretty much rely on. The concept to google for is the Capacity Credit.
According to a talk at the Global Wind Power Conference 2004 in Chicago, you could put up wind power worth about 800 GW on the better sites and still compete against 4$ gas. Even if you only assume a load factor of 0.3, that is 2.1 PWh. Compare this to a current total electricity generation in the US of about 4 PWh (Figure from IEA for 2001). I'm not quite sure how much of that is coal, but I would figure that wind can come into the same ballpark. So the potential is not the limiting factor - it's the grid and the will.
Solar panels (that is, solar for heating) are essentially some blackened glass tubes pre-warming water. Are you trying to tell me that making a glass tube and exposing it to some soot is using more energy than is contained in water being prewarmed from 4 degC to 12?
And if you confuse that with PV, the recoup time for modern PV is in the few years range, with a lifetime of beyond 20 years.
There are some parts in your post that I'm not as knowledgable about - I just assume I can ignore them safely as bull as the other thing I actually have a beef with:
Unless you have either one (solar or wind) with more than 80-100% instantaneous demand, it is quite manageable. Start with coming up to that, and fret about clouds and calms later. And then research how you can make more than 100% instantaneous demand possible (storing in batteries, hydrogen, heat, cold, etc).
Bzzzzzt, wrong. The first solar panels were just about breaking even over their quite long lifetime (I've seen 30 year old PV panels, still in nice working order), but these days, you're recouping the energy needed for manufacture in the order of a few years of operation, less if you put them where there is plenty of sun.
Well, that OTOH is at least not very nicely formulated. If you spread out wind power over some hundred kilometers, then the combined production has fairly slow swings, which in most cases even are predictable. The total wind power production for Germany for example can be predicted day-ahead with an accuracy of about 4-6% mean absolute error (normalised with installed capacity). Which means that wind can contribute about 20% to the total yearly demand without large problems for the grid operator. Denmark is long-term plans to achieve 50%, which is quite ambitious.
Bzzzzzt, wrong. For solar the price is indeed not quite competetive, but wind can generate for below 4 UScents/kWh at the best sites. AWEA or EWEA (American or European Wind Power Association, both
I wonder how this is too little, too late against the new alliance of 3G company 3 (available in AT, AU, HK, DK, SE, UK, IT, amongst others) with Skype, offering skyping via 3G. This should definitely get the international call prices down, a process which has begun in some places already.
There is the Seaflow project in the Bristol channel (that's England / Europe), which does pretty much the same thing. There is at least one more of these underwater ocean current devices that I don't remember, and I've recently visited the Enermar system in the Strait of Messina. See this Uni Strathclyde site on more details.
A good Google search term is Ocean current energy, or Marine current energy.
Enough Karma Whoring for this time! It's a pity they won't go with offshore wind energy - the resource at the proposed offshore site was quite good, so the cost would have been quite tolerable, especially against shipped in 70$/brl oil. However, it's going to be interesting to see whether they can make this work. It's interesting that Current to Current can offer a price per kWh without having prospected the currents in detail... and hopefully, the device is very reliable, because getting divers into 75-200 m depth is hardly simple (means, it takes time to fix things).
It's a Volkswagen Lupo 3L. It's actually roomier than you'd think - we went two people for two weeks holiday (not camping though) in it.
Unfortunately, production stopped this year, and there is no direct successor in sight. I have to get rid of mine due to some 7-pound changes in the family set-up (it's our only car), that's why I was looking for a new one. I was really happy with it, especially on the fuel pumps - a full tank was (including European taxes) between 20 and 30 euro, and got me up to 1000 km far!
Sure, if you trade a somewhat crappy small engine against one that doesn't break a sweat for doing its chores, no surprise that you'll have a better ride. I myself have a three-cylinder 1.2 litre diesel, and at red traffic lights it just stops!! So no wum-wum-wum all the time, just real silence. And it's extremely efficient: I get more than 60 mpg, or in real life about 3.x l/100 km (that's in the high twenties for km/l). Only in the cold mornings it sounds like a truck, but that has to be expected. It goes away after some kilometres, and then it sounds like a oversized sewing machine.
OTOH, I just test drove the new VW 2.0 TDI in a Seat Toledo, with 16 valves and 330 Nm torque! Talk about fun driving! And it went 17 km/l.
So yes, the older and too small turbodiesels are not so good, but once you get to the reasonable sizes (PSAs 1.6 is a fine engine too), you should be better off.
Aside, is it true that Diesel fuel in the US is more expensive than regular unleaded?
Now that sounds like a good trick - where do you get those 7-day weekends from?
You're looking for this: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/press/repo rts/windforce-12-2005. The source might have their own agenda, but the science and technology reported is sound, and they provide links to further reading. Otherwise, try EWEA (ewea.org) or AWEA (awea.org).
Does anyone have an idea when there will be a box set of the second (or first, whatever) trilogy? I just want to have one box, like I have the one box of the original trilogy.
I hear there is a paper clip in your MS Office installation, whether you need it or not...
While maybe technically not a EULA, I had to sign a waiver before I was let on the cruise ship in Puerto Rico, essentially saying (quite explicitly) that there was no implicit or explicit acknoledgement of the seaworthiness of the ship, and of the suitability of the food and drinks for human consumption. I tried to argue with the girl at the counter, and she found it strange too, her supervisor found it strange too, but of the many thousand customers they serve every day, I seem to have been the first one to be actually miffed by it...
Actually, the better fuel efficiency is the reason why German car manufacturers have put their money on the Diesel instead of on Hybrid technology. The extra kilos to lug around for the batteries and hybrid motors can be a disadvantage as well.
I myself drive a VW Lupo 3L, and usually get for the 35 km commute to work (half of it is motorway) an average of 3.5l/100km (that's the funny way to express fuel consumption in Germany, and it is the number shown in my dashboard). That is just shy of 30 km/l, or 70 (?) miles per gallon.
About once a year (it only works in the summer) I try to actually get down to 3l/100km, and that means that a 30l tank is good enough for 1000 km. Not too bad... Of course that entails driving 90 km/h behind trucks, instead of the usual 130.
The car is what I've seen described as a start-stop hybrid, ie it stops the engine at a red traffic light, but doesn't use breaking energy recovery.
And it's a lot of fun to drive, despite the fairly limited HP rating.
I've seen promotional (or were they instruction manual introductions?) videos with jumping anti-tank mines, which were launched by a medium range rocket system (MARS?). They were a little smaller than R2D2, would fall down from the rocket with small parachutes, and then fold out some metal strips as feet hinged at the bottom. Think of a flower, just upside down. They then would sit there and wait for tanks (or rather, the magnetic field associated with a tank) to come through the area, and would jump on these feet towards the tanks. The video looked like they could jump up to 5 m high, and maybe 10-20 m long, which on the moon would make quite a distance.
It might be not too good for sensitive equipment though...
Mars (as well as the Moon and even the Death Star II) are available for NASA's WorldWind toy. It's very much like Google Earth, but for some reason or other, I like it better. If only they could get better resolution pics...
See: worldwind.arc.nasa.gov .
Not too shabby. What I wonder, is there anywhere a good reference card for HTML in 1-4 pages? And throw one in for CSS while you're at it. To print out, and keep around for reference? Or is modern HTML too large for that? (Last time I really did HTML, I coded HTML 2.0 in Notepad.)