Let me spell it out for you. If you live in the USA and you have not seen instances where people are being exploited by their employers because it's difficult for those people to find another job then you have either led a very sheltered life, sleepwalk through life, or are lying. It's starting to look a hell of a lot like the latter.
Poor guy, how embarassing for him. That could have been avoided with a few clicks.
As with much of this stuff it's a shell game and he was relying on the people he's attempting to con to not go to the trouble of looking under the shells.
I wish this site would go back to more technical articles instead of the "science denial"/"oil is the only true energy" political bullshit that crops up every now and again to encourage people to mindlessly shout for their political tribe. This article is a troll IMHO.
What matters is when wind becomes cheaper than coal. That's when things get interesting.
It fills a different niche so doesn't have to MW for MW. Currently if you need another 2MW you have a choice of bringing another windmill on line or firing up something like a 350MW coal unit. In that case it's shitloads cheaper than coal. If you need another 300MW the coal is going to be vastly cheaper than running a huge pile of windmills. Somewhere in between there is a crossover point where the wind is cheaper than the coal.
That is an odd definition of payback. The raw material cost of creating something is irrelevant since you cannot buy anything at cost: there are always value-add processes and profit margins to consider.
If you do it in dollar terms the payback will be much faster in some markets due to insanely high spot prices for peak power. In others it won't. Even in the same place six months later it may have much slower financial payback. Energy payback is far easier to determine.
Almost as if being for or against green energy were an overt political statement than a well thought out business plan and energy policy.
Hence the USA developing a lot of solar technology, not selling it in bulk for ideological reasons and letting China take the market. The USA is not capitalist, it is an oligarchy where some industries own more of political parties than others so the ideology of "we must do what is to the benefit of the oil industry over others" meant that other industries suffered.
OK, so then did it include the costs of the other sources?
With respect, if you are going to go that far you need at least a crude model of a real power grid to plug it into and the answer is going to vary very wildly depending on which one you use, the local climate etc.
It's also worth noting that the only people who advocate single sources of energy for a grid are salesfolk, fanboys, or people getting some sort of financial benefit from the salesfolk (eg. "lobbied" people in politics). Real grids tend to have things like pump storage or gas turbines to plug the gaps already in addition to a mix of energy sources - monocultures lead to single points of failure. So with some models you'd have another source paid for a decade ago with only running costs to worry about and others you'd need to buy something new.
Consumption varies as well. Wind is a nice way to deal with that since you can bring more power on line as needed in little 2MW chunks instead of having to fire up a boiler ahead of time to get 350MW.
With respect, wind turbines are tiny and although a great deal of maintenance is required it is both trivial and not constrained by time. So you are down 2MW - big deal, get around to fixing it next week when the crew is free. Gas is also small and high maintenance with respect to coal (three to five years between shutdowns on well run coal fired plants), but it doesn't take very long to either build or fix the things in comparison. The major reason wind is now a player is that the things are both a lot more reliable and easier to get going again than they used to be. Crews apparently swap things out and transport the damaged parts to be repaired in a shed instead of way up in the air.
I soon realized it was the slowest and clumsiest means of programming I had ever used
I doubt it is as slow as LabView:( Never go full GUI.
Once you go past anything that can be flowcharted on a single A4/letter sheet of paper you end up with lines crossing both over and under so it becomes a "write only" program that is not easily debugged and difficult for anyone other than the original writer/drawer to understand.
Sadly other places have the same rises and some surpass Germany. It's as if Enron wrote the Standard Operating Procedures for "electricity traders" worldwide and now pointless middlemen infest most electricity industries. It sucks immensely. For example, Australia has much lower wholesale electricity prices than Germany yet has much higher retail prices than Germany with the distributors blaming their con on increased infrastructure. That price gouging has driven residential solar to around a two year payback when sized appropriately for consumption.
You failed to point out what clue there was to identify you as putting it forward as a serious suggestion. Your rants about "reading comprehension" and "second language" appear to only be an attempt to blame your own stupidity for putting up such an inflammatory statement on others by pretending you never did it. Quite disgusting and even cowardly in my opinion.
The colony that became Sydney didn't have a famine because nobody thought to bring the trees. They had trouble because nobody thought to bring the bees.
Australia has plenty of pollinating insects but they have short tongues and can't easily get into those deep European flowers. Agriculture had trouble until some hives were shipped out.
Similarly with interplanetary colonization we've got to work out what unexpected requirements there are - hence NASA growing tomatoes at the South Pole and similar experiments.
I understood what you wrote but apparently not what you meant. Now you are having trouble understanding what I wrote. My language skills or lack thereof are clearly not the problem here. I suggest stop trying to blame me for your "joke" gone wrong and your naive view of the world.
Is English your 2nd language or something?
How cute. Getting lectured on English by an American with very little life experience after such a dramatic mistake as your one above.
It's amusing that you were accusing me of a reading comprehension failure yet managed to miss words such as "reacting" that provide a context you appear to have missed. I suggest you pay a bit more attention to what is going on around you before suggesting that your opinion is "reality".
Care to point out the sentence I "didn't read" that provided the information that you were not being serious? It appears that the reason I did not read it is because you did not write such a thing.
I am not suggesting workers try to become employers in reality because I don;t think that the labor market is so lop-sided in reality.
You should have made it more clear that was your opinion - personally I think you should take a look at unemployment figures and consider if you want to revise your opinion if you want to provide more than attempted jokes in very poor taste, or even if you want to throw words like "reality" around. Stuff happened in 2008. There's still people reacting to that in a way that IMHO makes the market very lopsided and I must admit I'm amazed that you do not appear to be aware of that.
I'll get started. There appears to be a policy of demolishing anything that could be seen as a legacy of the previous government so that when the elections next come up there is nothing left that reminds voters that anything positive was done by them. While that's bad enough on it's own there are some long running things that date back longer that have been removed as well just in case the other party can get some political milage out of it.
The Broadband Network is now in the hands of an utter loser called Ziggy who is very well connected politically, thus went from running a science lab with about 200 people to running a government owned telecommunications company with enough people to have more than 64k desktop computers (they tried to get all of them on one pre-AD microsoft domain and ran out of numbers), back to the lab for a decade then wheeled out again to run the NBN. No other management experience. It's like putting a hot dog stand guy in as CEO in McDonalds and the NBN is really only necessary because of the way Ziggy and the bandit that followed him fucked up Telstra so badly that parallel communications infrastructure is now necessary. I live less than 5km from the middle of a State Capital and my phone line has ~1930s lead wrapped in paper in the line - every time it rains a lot my phone line drops out for a few days. So why doesn't private enterprise take up the slack? Very well crafted barriers with threats of jail time for stepping on Telstra's toes. The "right of way" was sold with Telstra.
Ignore the hate radio bullshit, it seems a few of the more out of touch types from the north shore of Sydney now embedded in Canberra are the ones trying to demolish what Australia has become. Cut back on training and import skilled workers instead, bringing back British titles, the list is long of radical changes they are forcing on the country - yet they call themselves "conservative".
Anyone who thinks that Man can build Tornado Killer Walls should ask themselves why we can't predict gigantic storms on a regular and professionally reliable basis
Turbulent flow is hard to model. That's why we still put aircraft models in wind tunnels instead of doing it all on computer.
predicting how to stop tornadoes from hitting the midwest
Waaaay down south there's the Roaring 40s and the Furious 50s due to the prevailing winds going around the globe and little or no land in the way. If a lot of the midwest storms are due to nothing being there to break up the wind then it's not entirely insane to suggest breaking up that wind. It only gets insane when impractical suggestions are made as to how. For all we know it may be practical (or not) to put some objects upstream of densely populated areas to break up the wind, and they may not even have to be as insanely high as suggested to kick some air up high enough to disrupt storms. See examples of lines of trees planted along roads in cleared areas for an example of changing microclimate - it works there - maybe it's not entirely insane to scale it up and perhaps at least divert smaller storms.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me spell it out for you. If you live in the USA and you have not seen instances where people are being exploited by their employers because it's difficult for those people to find another job then you have either led a very sheltered life, sleepwalk through life, or are lying. It's starting to look a hell of a lot like the latter.
I even put the words "ahead of time" in an attempt to head off comments such as the above.
It's not "random". It's when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining and you can plan around what is know about those events.
You don't get grid-wide failures of wind do you?
As with much of this stuff it's a shell game and he was relying on the people he's attempting to con to not go to the trouble of looking under the shells.
I wish this site would go back to more technical articles instead of the "science denial"/"oil is the only true energy" political bullshit that crops up every now and again to encourage people to mindlessly shout for their political tribe. This article is a troll IMHO.
It fills a different niche so doesn't have to MW for MW. Currently if you need another 2MW you have a choice of bringing another windmill on line or firing up something like a 350MW coal unit. In that case it's shitloads cheaper than coal. If you need another 300MW the coal is going to be vastly cheaper than running a huge pile of windmills. Somewhere in between there is a crossover point where the wind is cheaper than the coal.
If you do it in dollar terms the payback will be much faster in some markets due to insanely high spot prices for peak power. In others it won't. Even in the same place six months later it may have much slower financial payback. Energy payback is far easier to determine.
Hence the USA developing a lot of solar technology, not selling it in bulk for ideological reasons and letting China take the market. The USA is not capitalist, it is an oligarchy where some industries own more of political parties than others so the ideology of "we must do what is to the benefit of the oil industry over others" meant that other industries suffered.
With respect, if you are going to go that far you need at least a crude model of a real power grid to plug it into and the answer is going to vary very wildly depending on which one you use, the local climate etc.
It's also worth noting that the only people who advocate single sources of energy for a grid are salesfolk, fanboys, or people getting some sort of financial benefit from the salesfolk (eg. "lobbied" people in politics). Real grids tend to have things like pump storage or gas turbines to plug the gaps already in addition to a mix of energy sources - monocultures lead to single points of failure. So with some models you'd have another source paid for a decade ago with only running costs to worry about and others you'd need to buy something new.
Consumption varies as well. Wind is a nice way to deal with that since you can bring more power on line as needed in little 2MW chunks instead of having to fire up a boiler ahead of time to get 350MW.
With respect, wind turbines are tiny and although a great deal of maintenance is required it is both trivial and not constrained by time. So you are down 2MW - big deal, get around to fixing it next week when the crew is free.
Gas is also small and high maintenance with respect to coal (three to five years between shutdowns on well run coal fired plants), but it doesn't take very long to either build or fix the things in comparison.
The major reason wind is now a player is that the things are both a lot more reliable and easier to get going again than they used to be. Crews apparently swap things out and transport the damaged parts to be repaired in a shed instead of way up in the air.
I doubt it is as slow as LabView :(
Never go full GUI.
Once you go past anything that can be flowcharted on a single A4/letter sheet of paper you end up with lines crossing both over and under so it becomes a "write only" program that is not easily debugged and difficult for anyone other than the original writer/drawer to understand.
Sadly other places have the same rises and some surpass Germany. It's as if Enron wrote the Standard Operating Procedures for "electricity traders" worldwide and now pointless middlemen infest most electricity industries.
It sucks immensely.
For example, Australia has much lower wholesale electricity prices than Germany yet has much higher retail prices than Germany with the distributors blaming their con on increased infrastructure. That price gouging has driven residential solar to around a two year payback when sized appropriately for consumption.
You failed to point out what clue there was to identify you as putting it forward as a serious suggestion. Your rants about "reading comprehension" and "second language" appear to only be an attempt to blame your own stupidity for putting up such an inflammatory statement on others by pretending you never did it. Quite disgusting and even cowardly in my opinion.
First you produce hydrogen gas from a hydrocarbon, which requires a lot of energy, and then you add nitrogen to get ammonia.
The difference between Manning and this prick is that this prick is making a profit out of selling the secrets.
That brings us full circle back to pollination.
The colony that became Sydney didn't have a famine because nobody thought to bring the trees.
They had trouble because nobody thought to bring the bees.
Australia has plenty of pollinating insects but they have short tongues and can't easily get into those deep European flowers. Agriculture had trouble until some hives were shipped out.
Similarly with interplanetary colonization we've got to work out what unexpected requirements there are - hence NASA growing tomatoes at the South Pole and similar experiments.
How cute. Getting lectured on English by an American with very little life experience after such a dramatic mistake as your one above.
It's amusing that you were accusing me of a reading comprehension failure yet managed to miss words such as "reacting" that provide a context you appear to have missed. I suggest you pay a bit more attention to what is going on around you before suggesting that your opinion is "reality".
Care to point out the sentence I "didn't read" that provided the information that you were not being serious? It appears that the reason I did not read it is because you did not write such a thing.
You should have made it more clear that was your opinion - personally I think you should take a look at unemployment figures and consider if you want to revise your opinion if you want to provide more than attempted jokes in very poor taste, or even if you want to throw words like "reality" around.
Stuff happened in 2008. There's still people reacting to that in a way that IMHO makes the market very lopsided and I must admit I'm amazed that you do not appear to be aware of that.
I'll get started. There appears to be a policy of demolishing anything that could be seen as a legacy of the previous government so that when the elections next come up there is nothing left that reminds voters that anything positive was done by them. While that's bad enough on it's own there are some long running things that date back longer that have been removed as well just in case the other party can get some political milage out of it.
The Broadband Network is now in the hands of an utter loser called Ziggy who is very well connected politically, thus went from running a science lab with about 200 people to running a government owned telecommunications company with enough people to have more than 64k desktop computers (they tried to get all of them on one pre-AD microsoft domain and ran out of numbers), back to the lab for a decade then wheeled out again to run the NBN. No other management experience. It's like putting a hot dog stand guy in as CEO in McDonalds and the NBN is really only necessary because of the way Ziggy and the bandit that followed him fucked up Telstra so badly that parallel communications infrastructure is now necessary. I live less than 5km from the middle of a State Capital and my phone line has ~1930s lead wrapped in paper in the line - every time it rains a lot my phone line drops out for a few days.
So why doesn't private enterprise take up the slack? Very well crafted barriers with threats of jail time for stepping on Telstra's toes. The "right of way" was sold with Telstra.
ASIO like it and whenever a new government looks weak and easily influenced they roll it out again to give it another try.
Ignore the hate radio bullshit, it seems a few of the more out of touch types from the north shore of Sydney now embedded in Canberra are the ones trying to demolish what Australia has become. Cut back on training and import skilled workers instead, bringing back British titles, the list is long of radical changes they are forcing on the country - yet they call themselves "conservative".
Turbulent flow is hard to model. That's why we still put aircraft models in wind tunnels instead of doing it all on computer.
Waaaay down south there's the Roaring 40s and the Furious 50s due to the prevailing winds going around the globe and little or no land in the way. If a lot of the midwest storms are due to nothing being there to break up the wind then it's not entirely insane to suggest breaking up that wind. It only gets insane when impractical suggestions are made as to how. For all we know it may be practical (or not) to put some objects upstream of densely populated areas to break up the wind, and they may not even have to be as insanely high as suggested to kick some air up high enough to disrupt storms. See examples of lines of trees planted along roads in cleared areas for an example of changing microclimate - it works there - maybe it's not entirely insane to scale it up and perhaps at least divert smaller storms.