First Town In US To Become 100% Wind Powered 391
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 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Moving Air (Score:5, Funny)
Unfortunately, no. All they're blowing is hot air, so it would rise too quickly to be of any use.
Re:Moving Air (Score:5, Insightful)
In this case it's preferable to move your house to an "all electric" footprint as well - as any electricity you use has 0 carbon footprint. There's no benefit to using propane or natural gas for any of your household needs - heating should be 100% electric as well - any sort of furnace will have a CO2 footprint - where electric will not. Now, the 1500 watts of continuous consumption per person seems very reasonable. Get all these people to drive plug-in hybrid cars for their daily commute and their demand may go up a bit more again - but the carbon footprint of the town would virtually disappear. Very good progress in my opinion.
eeePC (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Moving Air (Score:5, Funny)
All the politicians out there that blow hot air all suck as well.
Re:Moving Air (Score:5, Funny)
But, if they blow then suck, you get electricity.
Man, this post could sure be taken out of context.
You want a heat converter (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Only if you mounted the politicians to the blades.
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Not Really... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not Really... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is completely stupid. Well played Slashdot, well played.
Re:Not Really... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Maybe the summary overstates it a bit if you want to be anal-retentive, but this is an interesting story nonetheless. And we all know that being anal retentive jus
Re:Not Really... (Score:4, Informative)
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For this you need a very particular dam. You can't use a run-of-river dam because they don't store water, you need also one who's lake bed is much higher than the turbines so that the dam still has head pressure when its empty which pretty much rules out any dam that was designed for irrigation. You need a decent sized lake at the level that the power turbines discharge to which is fairly rare since collecting water underneath would lessen the head difference. Most dams like this are being used for power st
Re:Not Really... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unburned fossil fuels.
As long as we have significant fossil fuel generation capacity, nobody's lights are going dark when the wind slackens. And we aren't likely to hit the point where wind power generates more power than coal, natural gas and oil any time soon. In the long run we'll need to have other ways of storing and reusing energy that don't rely on fossil fuels, but if we did this sort of thing everywhere we could, the world could conserve its limited supplies of petroleum and coal and reduce its emissions of CO2 and other pollutants.
Also, you might consider why famine is rare in developed countries. That is because our food supply is, in effect. A network with many suppliers. If beef suppliers are having mad cow problems and can't supply the market with enough beef, money flows to poultry and pork producers instead. Any individual food supplier is subject to short term shortage, the network as a whole has diverse sources of food it can draw upon.
A geographically large superconducting grid would smooth over local variations in wind, solar, tidal and other intermittent power sources.
The "use it or lose it" nature of some renewable power sources means that it's may be financially efficient to store any excess production, even if that storage medium is not very efficient itself. If your windmills are going full (err...) tilt in the dead of the night when power is cheap, why not use them to pump water upstream across a dam? Then you can sell that energy in the middle of the day when market prices are higher. Or you could sell an energy contract to an energy intensive factory that can run in the off-hours.
Suppose if your photovoltaic farm is generating power in the middle of the winter, why not put it into a reversible chemical reactor that converts it back into electricity during the summer to run people's air conditioning?
A superconducting grid itself could be a short term storage mechanism; you could pump liquid hydrogen in when demand is low, and extract it when demand is higher.
I see no real short term or long term barriers to the utility of renewable energy as a way of reducing pollution and reliance on politically unstable regimes overseas. The midterm -- well that could get economically tricky. But then, declining oil production will be even more tricky.
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Unless they're off the grid it isn't 100% (Score:4, Insightful)
They might be a net generator of power, but they are ultimately using other power sources some of the time.
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Re:Unless they're off the grid it isn't 100% (Score:5, Informative)
(They aren't though, so your point of needing other auxiliary sources of energy still stands.)
Re:Unless they're off the grid it isn't 100% (Score:4, Informative)
There are few places in the world where terrain suitable for both wind and pumped storage occurs close together.
Most wind power stations will have to rely on gas-turbine backups, which is to say building a wind power station means building both a wind power station and a gas-turbine power station.
Umm...go nuclear?
Pumped storage is not without problems (Score:5, Interesting)
Many resevoirs are designed to operate at a constant level ("head" for us, the difference in height between the surface and the exit of the turbine). Of course a drought could push you out of wack if this is your regulation goal, but, in general, you're going to be sticking to pretty much the same level, and, as a consequence, coast.
With resevoirs which vary according to demand, there can be large head changes over the year and with different demand patterns (and rainfall)--which translate into DRAMATIC changes in the coastline of the resevoir. As you know, the vegetation and soil developement is most at the coast line. When all of this living matter is suddenly put under four meters of water, it dies and is replaced with anerobic systems. This decay produces hydrogen sulphide (generally nasty) and methane (a greenhouse gas IIRC 400x stronger than CO2). This is the origin of concerns about how much greenhouse gas production that hydropower offsets.
Then, when the water level dives down, you kill the anaerobic systems, leaving a barren coastline (both just above and just below the waterline at the coast) which is less hospitable to fish and terrestrial animals whose life is based around this environment.
Up in Sweden, where we have considerable such resevoir regulation, which results in lakes banked by bleached stone for many km in each direction. It has also completely changed the distribution of fishlife in these valleys.
Perhaps you should have read the article (Score:5, Insightful)
"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% (Score:5, Informative)
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So yes, you could have 100% wind power across the nation, without blackou
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Sure, if you ignore the effects of transmission loss in the power lines. Imagine what would happen if California was hot and calm, but the east coast was all gale-force winds. Everybody in California turns on their air-conditioners and plugs in their electric cars at the same time, because it's hot and sunny, so they want to drive their electric cars down to the beach.
Will the gales over on the east coast supply enough wind pow
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Re:Unless they're off the grid it isn't 100% (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Right, but the problem of double-counting remains. There are some utilities in the country that sell "green" energy for a premium, direct to consumers. They claim that this represents energy sourced from wind and solar, anywhere in their network. If 10,000 consumers outside the town claim to be buying win
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Re:Unless they're off the grid it isn't 100% (Score:5, Informative)
Isn't Iceland almost entirely geothermal?
Re:Unless they're off the grid it isn't 100% (Score:5, Informative)
This lowers the cost of transmission because the largest transmission lines can be used 100% of the time at full capacity.
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There's a reason it always comes up (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, they _could_ use peak storage, but they don't. They're on the grid. It does matter.
So they produce 5 MW all the time (wind non-stop). If yearly production is barely above their yearly usage, let's say they use, say, 8 MW peak and buggerall at night. So someone else has to build the extra capacity to produce the extra 3 MW for them.
But wait, they may have a calm day, or a _storm_. During storms you don't make more power, you align the blades so the turbine doesn't spin. So someone else has to have the capacity to produce an extra 8 MW for them, for those cases.
The point is that someone still has to be able to cover the peak power, so just as many power plants have to be built as before. Only now you have to keep some of them idle at peak time, so you don't recoup your investment as quickly.
The total power produced maths are also a bit mis-leading. They use more power at peak, they give some power back when noone needs it. The problem isn't producing enough energy at 1 AM, the problem is producing enough energy at peak times. That's when those brownouts some years ago happened. The rush to build more power plants, and dealing with NIMBY syndrome, is to be able to supply the whole use at peak hours, not at night.
Because wind can and will occasionally fail you, someone has to build the same capacity again as some other kind of power. Only, again, keep it idle a bunch of the time so they won't get their money back as fast.
Essentially, they just passed someone else the cost of building the peak storage for them. They get their peak storage (and more importantly: backup power) all right, only now "Town B" from your example is the one who gets the bill for it.
Now I'm not saying it should be a hanging offense or anything, but it _is_ a problem worth mentioning. If you want to willy-wave about being all green, then actually be all green on your own money.
Otherwise it's a bit like Liechtenstein not having an army or military budget, because their big neighbours get to deal with defending it. Or about how they do great with a lean government and low taxes... by being a tax heaven for guys who made their riches in other countries' economies. It's just passing the bill to someone else, not being the perfect example of a smart conservative government.
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Why do 'just as many' power plants have to be built if more communities can supply a greater percentage (perhaps greater than 100%, perhaps less) of their peak-time-load themselves ?
Wouldn't *fewer* power plants would have to be built - as noted, the system still has to handle
Re:Fossil plants sitting idle (Score:3, Interesting)
I disagree, Talked to a nuclear plant engineer working at a plant with a gas turbine auxiliary plant. They are thrilled when the turbine powers up, because they get paid more for that energy because their willing to fill peak demand. If that plant was put into constant production they would get paid the same rate as the nuclear plant, so reduced joy overall.
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When the wind isn't blowing, they'l have to pick up the slack to make up for the loss... and when it is, they might be able to use that time for maintenance, etc.
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Anyway the article was about wind. The big problems there are small unit siz
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Technically 2nd (Score:5, Funny)
big catch (Score:2, Informative)
Wind power is nice, but the rule of thumb for wind power is that it doesn't actually replace any conventional generating capacity, it merely reduces the utilization at times. S
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Not if you need guaranteed availability for a period of hours - imagine that you have the furnace almost up to temperature and the power gets cut, that would be a massive waste of energy. Also, you talk of scheduling as if we can forecast wind speed days in advance - you can't of course. Which all means that for practically all industrial applicati
Re:big catch (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:big catch (Score:4, Informative)
And what is the average cost of wind power anyway?
According to the American Wind Energy Association's FAQ, "What are the Factors in the Cost of Electricity from Wind Turbines?" [awea.org], wind costs can be under 5 cents per KWH. I don't have an electric bill handy but I think I pay something like 10 cents per KWH.
FalconRe: (Score:2)
To actually replace anything with wind, you'd need a tremendous overcapacity that was sufficiently distributed geographically to ensure that enough of it got wind all the time to meet your total power needs.
There are these magical things called batteries, that store energy when your not using it and allow you to use it latter, so you can get rid of the conventional capacity. Over something the size of the american grid (is it all o the same grid?), you could probably get away with just a days storage
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We could use New Orleans; it's already got the pumps, and it's been demonstrated that it's good at holding water...
(Burn, karma, burn!)
Yay for wind, uh...not? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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The largest wind turbines weigh many tons....the structures that hold them many more. You cannot just plop one of these onto any spot of empty dirt you see. A considerable foundation must be poured of reinforced concreted, which may have to be anchored to bedrock, but IANACE (...civil engineer...). You dont want to have the thing sink or god forbid shift and fall. Even still you couldn't put them denser than the falling distance from one to another or a slight engineering snafu turns your
Re:Yay for wind, uh...not? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not a civil engineer either, but I am training to become one. I think you're worrying way too much here. Yes, you need a reasonable foundation for the thing, but then you can put soil for farming on top of that.
But even that is overthinking the issue; just look at this picture [wikipedia.org]. See the space each turbine tower takes up? Now see the space between towers? Is the former significant compared to the latter? No. Are they, in fact, growing some kind of crops between the towers? Yes. If this weren't true, the picture wouldn't exist!
You don't want to put them close together anyway, because
- the turbine needs to rotate (in the X-Y plane) so that it's always facing the wind and you don't want blades of adjacent turbines to hit each other, and
- if they're too close behind each other, the wake turbulence from the turbine in front reduces the efficiency of the turbine behind.
Oh, and by the way: assuming you arrange the turbines in a square grid, they would have to fall in one of the four cardinal directions to risk creating "the world's most expensive set of dominos." If we assume that the zone where this would happen takes up 1 degree of arc for each direction, there's a (4/360) ~= 1% chance of that happening, assuming a tower fell over in the first place. I'd call that negligible risk.Re:Yay for wind, uh...not? (Score:4, Informative)
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http://www.capewind.org/ [capewind.org]
Cape Wind is proposing America's first offshore wind farm on Horseshoe Shoal in Nantucket Sound. Miles from the nearest shore, 130 wind turbines will gracefully harness the wind to produce up to 420 megawatts of clean, renewable energy. In average winds, Cape Wind will provide three quarters of the Cape and Islands electricity needs.
You'll note from the project's FAQ that the farm is miles from shore and does not impede on shipping lanes. Also note the power generation (up to 420MW).
How far apart will the wind turbines be spaced on Horseshoe Shoal?
The wind turbines will be arrayed in a grid pattern of parallel rows. Within a row, the wind turbines will be .34 nautical miles apart (about 6 football fields), the rows will be .54 nautical miles apart (about 9 football fields).
That's not chump change with regards to ocean acreage usage. But that's the best part. There's lots of ocean out there. And while nuclear energy is a great choice for base load, wind can definitely pick up the slack.
130 turbines... (Score:3, Informative)
To put this in perspective, all the wind power generating capacity currently deployed in California is about 3/4 of one reactor at Diablo Canyon, and that's assuming the wind is blowing constantly at the aver
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The pillar that the turbine is mounted to doesn't take up that much room. I imagine a company would pay a farmer to give them a small chunk (probably 0.01 acres) of land for a turbine. If low-altitude (0-500ft~) sky were prime real-estate then we'd have problems, but luckily no one really wants to build anything there.
Because, it's not like low-flying planes have to criss-cross all over those farmers' fields to apply various pesticides and herbicides or anything.
I'm not saying that it's a bad idea necessarily (this sort of thing should definitely be explored and encouraged), but nothing is ever as simple as it seems when that mental light bulb first turns on.
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There's a great offshore wind project in the Netherlands [planetark.com] we would be well served to emulate. California is between a rock and a hard place since they're net power importers and (due to smog regs) the only conventional power plants they can build are na
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It's a 420MW wind farm being setup off the coast of Nantucket Sound.
Also, check out this page:
http://capewind.whgrp.com/ [whgrp.com]
It's a dynamic page that displays how much power the farm would put out based on the average windspeed for the last hour.
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The earth has managed to power every population that has been on it so far. Now, a population exists where the Earth's current resources can't meet their needs.
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your other arguments seam to be wind power can't make this country self sufficient (agreed.) But their are not enough known nuclear material in the US to be self sufficient in nuclear, so it definitely can't (currently) solve the US energy problems either (unless were willing and able to kick South Africa's ass next.)
Wind [nrel.gov] can provide provide the US with a lot of energy. And an article in Sciam, "A Solar Grand Plan [sciam.com] says that by 2050 solar can provide 69% of the US's energy needs. And while I don't like
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Ugly is subjective, noisy/vibrating/dangerous are engineering problems that we've long ago overcome with far more than just windmills, and no power worth mentioning? That's also highly subjective and depends on the system. As far as I'm concerned any power at all is better th
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Not the First (Score:2)
wha...? (Score:5, Informative)
More questions (Score:4, Informative)
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I can answer some questions from the research I have done, and can give an educated guess on the others.
Are the turbines really powering the town, or is that going into the grid in general?
The turbines are connected directly to the city's high voltage line, which is in turn connected to external generation. IE. the grid. The 4 turbines for the city (Loess Hills) are on a ridge on t
Congratulations! (Score:3, Insightful)
Backup? (Score:2)
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They are connected to the power grid, just like every other city. When the wind turbines fall below local needs, they consume power from the grid. When the turbines generate more power than the town needs, they pump power into the grid for others to use.
They appear to be a net producer, which seems to be a good thing.
It'll take a while to pay this one off (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
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Windmill pumps? (Score:2)
Other Costs (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:SECOND TOWN! (Score:5, Funny)
--The ghost of Nikola Tesla
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Re:1.51 Gigawatts (Score:5, Funny)
Wind can't do it. (Score:5, Funny)
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What? Just stakes? Gotta be kidding me. Where do you identify your cursed items?
No such thing? HERETIC!!
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Because at the time [wikipedia.org], 'gigawatt' was more commonly pronounced with a soft 'g', which is still the official NIST [wikipedia.org] pronunciation. It's only since then, with the rise of computers in everyday life, that the hard 'g' pronunciation has become ubiquitous.
But seriously, you have an active Slashdot account! How could you possibly not know basic Back to the Future trivia like this?
Re:But think of the birds... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:But think of the birds... (Score:4, Informative)
What now? It's been a few years since I took physics at more than an interest level, but that makes no sense whatsoever. If you're talking radial velocity, all parts of the blades take the same time to complete one revolution (obviously), hence the same radial velocity. That same phenomenon says that since all parts must take the same time for a revolution, the further you are from the axis of revolution the faster the linear velocity must be - so the tips cut through the air faster than the inner section of the blades.
Care to explain where the hell you got that piece of "information" from? Logic would say that the tips of the blades should be more dangerous than the inner sections due to the higher linear velocity, however maybe they're also easier to avoid. Whether birds can detect the blades or not isn't my field of expertise.
Re:But think of the birds... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Plus, if they can't figure out that flying into the spinning blady thing is a bad idea, the species is better off without those individuals.
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Or about the energy wasted by AC posters pushing buttons to post replys to Slashdot, per fortnight.
Re:That's some expensive electricity! (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Do the math (Score:3, Informative)
I'm pro-nuclear, and I can't see that happening in California, even if the price of natural gas goes up at the California/Nevada border again, as it did under Enron. California is all about NIMBY. Now build them in some other state and run wires, and California would likely love the idea.
-- Terry
Re:4 turbines for 1300 people? (Score:5, Interesting)
So if we wanted to power say, California, which as of 2006 has 36,457,549 [census.gov] people we would need something around (36,457,549/4=28044 so 28044*4=) 112,177 wind turbines. That is stupid ridiculous!
Yea it's stupid to decentralize power generation when you can concentrate all that power into a few hands instead. Fact is is a farmer can have wind turbines on the farm while still growing food, and they will supplement farmers' income. Wind farms can also be located offshore. Then there's solar [wired.com] and geothermal [ca.gov]. Tidal power can even be used.
Wind power 'feels good' but when you start running the numbers it gets dumb real quick.
In what way? If wind were given the same subsidies as nuclear power [cato.org] the math would change. As it is now nuclear power is a form of corporate welfare.
Falcon