First Town In US To Become 100% Wind Powered

gundar99 writes "Rock Port Missouri, population 1,300, is the first 100% wind-powered city in the US. Loess Hill Wind Farm, with four 1.25-MW wind turbines, is estimated to generate 16 gigawatt hours (16 million kilowatt hours) of electricity annually. 13 gigawatt hours of electricity have historically been consumed annually by the residents and businesses of this town."

Moving Air

Would the wind turbines be more efficient if they brought a bunch of politicians into the town?

Re:Moving Air

Would the wind turbines be more efficient if they brought a bunch of politicians into the town?

Unfortunately, no. All they're blowing is hot air, so it would rise too quickly to be of any use.

Re:Moving Air

Unfortunately no.

All the politicians out there that blow hot air all suck as well.

Re:Moving Air

If they blow and suck at the same time, then you're probably right.

But, if they blow then suck, you get electricity.

Man, this post could sure be taken out of context.

You want a heat converter

Would the wind turbines be more efficient if they brought a bunch of politicians into the town?

It's hot air, but it's not moving very fast and there's a hell of a lot turbulence. I'm thinking politician fueled Stirling engine.

Now, is there any place where a large number of our founding father's are buried? Because we could double our efficiency by putting the politicians over their graves and harnessing the founding father's spinning motion.

Technically 2nd

Washington has been run on pure hot air for decades.

Yay for wind, uh...not?

I'm not sure what the metric is exactly, but it has to do with something like, megawatt-hours-produced-per-acre. This measurement is used when discussing power production by some engineering geeks somewhere...sorry, just trying to point the discussion down a path quickly here and not really set it up too much. :-)

In short, as cool as we all would like wind power generation to be, it just falls way too short in the aforemention critical statistic. If you've seen the wind farm outside of San Fran, you know how big they can get. The nuke plant between SD & LA (iirc) is but a postage stamp compared to that windfarm and it probably has about twice the power output.

Wind is not population density friendly. At some point, land costs wipe out any efficiencies.

wha...?

Ow. My brain hurts after trying to read that article. Did someone randomly select quotes and comments from a bag? Here's a better written version, though still light on the information (no figures for cost per kWh) http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1568/ [ecogeek.org]

It'll take a while to pay this one off

At $0.11 on average per kWh, the savings is $1.7m annually, plus another $300k from the energy they sell to the power company. That's 45 years to recoup the investment ($90m), not including maintaining the turbines for 45 years (more info here [ecogeek.org])

Still, I think this should be the new standard for sustainable living and development.

And to put 16 gigawatt hours into perspective... the average household in America uses around 11,000 kWh annually. See Official Government Website [doe.gov]

Rock Port, MO needs to add their watts saved [whosavedwatt.com] to the total. It's like they switched out 64,000,000 incandescent bulbs for CFCs!

Re:1.51 Gigawatts

That's 1.21 Gigawatts, but nice try.

Wind can't do it.

I'm sorry. But the only power source capable of generating 1.21 gigawatts of electricity is a bolt of lightning. And unfortunately, we never know when or where they are going to strike.

Re:Unless they're off the grid it isn't 100%

They could be relying solely on wind power -- it's perfectly possible using pumped storage [wikipedia.org].
(They aren't though, so your point of needing other auxiliary sources of energy still stands.)

Perhaps you should have read the article

It's a short article, FP isn't all it's cracked up to be:

"What we're celebrating is that the wind farm in Rock Port can produce more energy each year than what this community uses, and that has never been done before," Chamberlain said.

And that's why everyone showed up. From the celebration and speeches downtown to the city's power plant, the guy who made it all happen explained what it is all about.

"What we're showing here is the city is producing 2 megawatts more than they need, so in essence, this meter is running backwards," Chamberlain said.

Re:Unless they're off the grid it isn't 100%

If you draw a box around a year and this town and measure the inputs and outputs, the town is a net producer of electricity, assuming their forcast of consumption holds true. Ergo, by Jedi logic, they are 100% wind powered. Your commentary on the matter elegantly illustrates the difference between erudite and pedantic for the rest of us. Thank you, not everyone could have done so as gracefully.

Re:Unless they're off the grid it isn't 100%

I knew there would be a post like this. This always comes up when people discuss wind and solar. First, if they were not on the grid they could use "peak storage". There are a number of ways to do that. In areas where water and elevation are available, you can pump water back up a hill into a holding pond and re-cycle it through a turbine--augmented hydro power. Other methods of peak storage include: flywheels, batteries, and even compressed air pumped into abandoned mines that have been properly sealed to hold in the pressure. Choice of method depends on a variety of factors of course.

Now, since they are connected to the grid, the peak storage issue isn't very important. They just feed the grid when they have excess, and draw from the grid when they don't. Therefore, they are actually *over* 100% since they are expected to feed the grid more often than they draw from it. If everybody did what they did, then peak storage would be required because it is possible for calm conditions to persist over fairly wide areas--perhaps wide enough to make transmission impractical. The only difference here is that they are using the grid as a virtual peak storage system.

When wind power is sent to "town B", they can idle one of their fossil-fuel generators. The fuel un-burned by said generator is another way to account for peak storage.

Using the grid as peak storage just makes better econonmic sense than building your own peak storage and declaring independance like some kind of cult or something.

Wind power has other issues though, mostly aesthetic.

Re:Unless they're off the grid it isn't 100%

Well, not quite on the variability in the US at least. Connecting geographically spreadout wind farms yields at least one third of the power as steady and, if I recall, closer to 60% when most of the wind belt is connected. http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2007/december5/windfarm-120507.html [stanford.edu]

This lowers the cost of transmission because the largest transmission lines can be used 100% of the time at full capacity.

Re:Unless they're off the grid it isn't 100%

Outside a few small mountainous countries with heaps of hydro such as New Zealand, we are all dependent on fossil fuel or nuclear at least part of the time.

Isn't Iceland almost entirely geothermal?

Re:Not Really...

Not only that but couldn't you argue that because it pours that power onto the grid it might as well be any town? It seems like somebody nearby has a wind farm and therefore that city is thusly powered by wind. Couldn't my town be completely powered by wind out of the Loess Hill Wind Farm if it takes less than 16 gigawatt hours? Local windfarm produces more than local towns power consumption? It isn't like the town owns the wind farm... it's exactly like there's a windfarm near a town!

This is completely stupid. Well played Slashdot, well played.

Re:Not Really...

You guys are all nattering nabobs of negativity :)

The town that you claim is powered by the wind can't be TOO far away, or line losses would eat up too much power... in any event, the claim isn't much of a stretch as the city does now produce more wind power than it consumes total power.

Re:SECOND TOWN!

DC was first!

Damnit, zombie Edison, you lost. Get over it!

--The ghost of Nikola Tesla

Re:big catch

Indeed, domestic applications are pretty unforgiving of random fluctuations too - sorry kids, we can't have dinner tonight, the wind isn't blowing.

That's why you need energy stores, like hydro plants. When there's not enough energy going in you open the valve, and when there's an excess you pump stuff up to the top again, they already do this with conventional power sources why would wind be any different.

And what is the average cost of wind power anyway? Probably a lot higher than coal even with large carbon taxes.

How? coal power stations have all the initial costs of wind farms and then a fuel cost, a waste cost and an environmental cost.

Re:But think of the birds...

Those poor birds.

That's mostly a legend, remaining from the times of small, very fast rotating wind wheels.

Nowadays, this isn't an issue any more: The wheels are much higher (less birds) and slower
(birds can react to and avoid them). I've been to a couple of recent generation generators,
and have even climbed one (great view) - there wasn't a single dead bird lying around in the
vicinity. Yes, I looked for them.

Re:But think of the birds...

Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say. Of course, cats (also bad rubbish, btw) kill over a billion birds and small animals in this country each year, so the few killed by turbines (see sibling post) are pretty insignificant.

Re:That's some expensive electricity!

A really quick Google search turned up this article [cnn.com] which will hopefully put things into a bit of perspective. $2 billion to build a coal plant; while I grant you it'll generate more than 16MWh/year, is still a damn hefty pricetag. How many year (nee: decades) will it take to pay one of those off?

Also, FYI; 40 year mortgage amortizations are becoming very commonplace while some companies are looking towards the prospect of 50 year ams.

As for maintainence costs; how much does it cost to maintain a coal fired plant? How much does it cost to maintain a nuclear plant? How much does it cost to handle the waste product from same? How much ongoing environmental impact is there?

I'm no tree hugger by any stretch, but the fact that a town was able to generate an annual surplus of natural energy with no environmental by-products is a pretty decent little achievement. A small step towards reducing our reliance on fossil fuels.

This project is way overpriced

Way, way overpriced. Four 1.25MW turbines for $90 million, or $18/watt? That's far too high. Compare the Cedar Ridge project [alliantenergy.com], with 41 turbines of 1.65MW capacity each for $180 million, or $2.6/watt. That's a real not-to-exceed number. The American Wind Energy Association likes to talk about $1/watt, but that's seldom achieved.

$18/watt is either wrong or a rip-off.