Offshore Windpower To Potentially Exceed US Demand 679
SpuriousLogic writes to mention that a new Interior Department report suggests that wind turbines off US coastlines could supply enough electricity to meet, or exceed, the nation's current demand. While a good portion of this is easily accessible through shallow water sites, the majority of strong wind resources appear to be in deep water which represents a significant technological hurdle. "Salazar told attendees at the 25x'25 Summit in Virginia, a gathering of agriculture and energy representatives exploring ways to cut carbon dioxide emissions, that "we are only beginning to tap the potential" of offshore renewable energy. The report is a step in the Obama administration's mission to chart a course for offshore energy development, an issue that gained urgency last year amid high oil prices and chants of 'Drill, baby, drill' at the Republican National Convention."
Unexpected impact? (Score:1, Insightful)
So what happens if we start taking a large percentage of world energy requirements from wind power... Will we inadvertently cause a change in the weather through reduced windspeeds?
Maybe we should test it first? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah yeah, heard it all before (Score:2, Insightful)
"The biggest wind potential lies off the nation's Atlantic coast, which the Interior report estimates could produce 1,000 gigawatts of electricity ..." ...when the wind's blowing. Unfortunately being somewhat fickle it doesn't always do that and when it doesn't you need backup generators. In fact you'd need to backup ALL the wind power generators with equal rating backup systems and since these would probably coal and/or nuclear which can't be started up and shut down on a whim and so need to run 24/7 anyway it makes a mockery of the whole enviromental argument for wind.
And thats before you get into power transmission issues - windy sites generally arn't near big cities.
Re:There's wind in them thar.... oceans? (Score:5, Insightful)
talk about single point of failure. If another country (or terrorist) wanted to seriously hurt the US, they'd just have to target a broad swath of these offshore windmills. A pretty easy target I'd think?
Much like computer systems...I'd like to see a heterogeneous solution....windmills, nukes...and perhaps some legacy fossil fuel plants and a backup.
Re:Makes me wonder about cabling (Score:4, Insightful)
And here, the parent illustrates why this will never happen.
Years and years in environmental impact studies, many more years of court battles, then the legislatures and Congress stepping in to support the NIMBY positions of their constituents.
To make this happen, Barry will have to wield near dictatorial powers and sweep aside most of the legal avenues people have to fight against something like this if they disagree.
Hmmm...Barry? Dictatorial powers?
Maybe we will have wind farms after all.
Re:Yeah yeah, heard it all before (Score:3, Insightful)
That's why I don't buy the idea of one centralized generation facility. I like the idea of home based generation. A small wind turbine, solar cells, etc. on each home that generates enough electricity for the home and feeds excess to a national grid. Of course, the grid would need some changes to make it "safe" to transport electricity from homes in California to Kansas if it were needed for some reason.
About birds. (Score:5, Insightful)
Just to cut off this dead birds argument before it starts... I know a guy that runs some wind farms in Cali here (the livermore ones) and as a test they decided to shut off one half of their farm for a month and see the difference in birds killed.
They found like 4 dead birds in the field where they were off and around 8 dead birds where they were on. So each half of the farm might kill an extra 4 birds a month versus having standing towers. That's 96 birds a year for a very large windfarm.
You know what kills WAY more birds than that per year? Housecats. Example quote from some government study in the UK:
"In 1990, researchers estimated that "outdoor" house cats and feral cats were responsible for killing nearly 78 million small mammals and birds annually in the United Kingdom."
full link: http://library.fws.gov/Bird_Publications/songbrd.html [fws.gov]
My mom's house also has a large window that kills a few birds a year, I'm sure for every house and building that adds up.
Point being, winds farms have effectively NO impact on birds! Thanks
-Taylor
Re:The problem with wind (Score:2, Insightful)
Ahh, but if you have enough wind turbines distributed over large and varied areas (East, west, and gulf coasts), I'd think that you'd never have a situation where all such areas were becalmed.
Just have to go massively parallel... heck a Beowulf cluster :p
To me, the idea of such a massive amount of clean power would make some of these "hydrogen economy" ideas feasable.
Of course, being a programmer, I have a "belt and suspenders" mentality too: so go for lots of really big solar farms too, just to cover the bases.
Intriguing at any rate.
Re:Makes me wonder about cabling (Score:3, Insightful)
I almost forgot. They have these nifty little things called CIRCUT BREAKERS that can deal with cut cables.
Re:Maybe we should test it first? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Makes me wonder about cabling (Score:3, Insightful)
You're going to have a choice of what to put in your collective backyards: ... go round and round.
Nuclear power stations, which cause cancer when they go wrong.
Coal power stations, which cause cancer.
Or wind turbines which
Re:Makes me wonder about cabling (Score:5, Insightful)
Years and years in environmental impact studies, many more years of court battles, then the legislatures and Congress stepping in to support the NIMBY positions of their constituents.
No, you just need a powerful Senator:
Kennedy doesn't play by the rules [boston.com]
Short version: a proposed wind farm off Cape Cod was torpedoed by Kennedy with a poison-pill amendment to a bill. It wasn't just his constituent's backyard: it was his backyard.
Re:Floating Cities (Score:3, Insightful)
Well except the fact you're completely isolated and have to pay massive amounts of money to get anything you want. I personally don't find politicians more onerous than having no easy access to a grocery or hardware store. But I'm also not an idio... errr... libertarian.
Re:About birds. (Score:3, Insightful)
Since when is double == none?
Is This A Problem Somehow? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:There's wind in them thar.... oceans? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a pretty weak argument when you consider that we have the Coast Guard, the largest Navy in the world, and the most advanced monitoring of our coasts. Not to mention the sheer size of the United States and the fact that these windmills could be deployed on two different oceans. We are not talking 100 Windmills here. Also, I am sure the military will find a way to make these Windmills useful to our national defense. I doubt missiles, but those poor whales are probably gonna have more sonar pollution.
Re:Makes me wonder about cabling (Score:3, Insightful)
There may also be significant benefits to the sea life with artificial reefs in the shallow water anchoring structures. I gather that windmills are safer for birds than they were years ago (I have no firm reason to believe it) so these structures could potentially provide some nesting grounds and if not we could work on a way to keep birds away from them.
If the economics of it don't work or the damage outweighs the benefits then I say we shouldn't pursue it but I do't think the nation that put men on the moon 40 years ago should be dissuaded because a project is difficult.
Re:There's wind in them thar.... oceans? (Score:5, Insightful)
Terrorist FUD. Google up maps of oil, gasoline, and NG pipelines. Small bombs, big boom, no energy, no economy, no transportation, no food once the supermarkets run dry.
With Windmills, terrorism would be harder to perform and easier to fix. Either you have to attack thousands of windmills over hundreds of square miles, or the trunk lines transporting power. I suspect it is much easier to put out the fires associated with blowing up an electrical line than it is for pipelines, and much easier to lay cable than pipe. Plus, with electricity, the "pipe" fills immediately -- with liquids and gasses, even once repaired, flow is much slower. Oh, and undersea cables are much harder to get to than pipes running on or close to the surface of the ground, i.e., no fancy submersible required -- a 4wd Subaru Wagon would be about all you need to get bomb materials to pipelines. And some shovels perhaps.
Anyway, the last 8 years of terrorism talk seem to have you unduly paranoid. A terrorist could totally cripple the US right now by targeting pipelines.
Just like the "ugly" oil rigs at sea? (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't we currently prohibit big bulky energy-producing contraptions off just about every mile of coast of the US? At least 50 miles out anyway in most cases and none that I know of off California.
I'm not saying I oppose the turbines, but it seems like a bit of hypocrisy when you consider that oil rigs are not allowed.
Re:There's wind in them thar.... oceans? (Score:5, Insightful)
Shit (Score:3, Insightful)
They would just make their own government and find themselves within a few dozen years or two crisis right back where we are.
Never under estimate the people to give up their freedom if someone else offers to make it all better.
Re:Floating Cities (Score:3, Insightful)
There's some actual variations on this, whether it's Gulching or trying to form a Minarchist nation, it has been attempted. I'm sure there actually are gulching communities out there...
Not sure if you're sarcastic, but it actually does sound like paradise to me.
Re:Yeah yeah, heard it all before (Score:3, Insightful)
Except the Southern half of that coast for a good four months of the year.
Bermuda High [usatoday.com]
I live in Southeastern Virginia. In the summertime, there isn't much wind unless there's a storm. Yes, right along the coast, you get morning and evening breeziness due to temperature differences between the air over the water and over the land. Once you get a few miles off shore it's, as the locals say, "slickcalm." The same is true a few miles inland.
I often can see the harbor in Norfolk looking like a mirror at night; not even the slightest hint of a wave, absent the occasional passing boat.
And, of course, those four months when this sets up are the months when power is at peak demand (A/C for the folks inland who get up to 100F, and have no breeze or water temperature stabilization at all. It's not at all uncommon to see a 25 degree difference in temperatures between Williamsburg and Virginia Beach during the day in the summer and at night in the winter.)
There seems to be a bit of missing pragmatism in Obama's energy plans. There is no way to know if this will work as well as his experts expect. But an ounce of Uranium, or a barrel of oil will contain the same amount of energy in ten years as they do today. Focusing solely on "green" sources of energy is a huge leap of faith.
Re:There's wind in them thar.... oceans? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly, these windmills will be far apart and designed to withstand hurricanes and swells in the deep ocean. It would take a lot of work and sizable force to disable a significant number without being noticed.
Re:Floating Cities (Score:2, Insightful)
A well-rounded isolated community would be self-sufficient for daily needs.
And calling someone an idiot because they'd rather be left alone by the government? I'm sorry I consider my life my own and only my own.
Re:There's wind in them thar.... oceans? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, these offshore windmills mustn't be within eyesight of any rich people's homes...
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny-liwind1221,0,5450016.story [newsday.com]
Re:Makes me wonder about cabling (Score:2, Insightful)
If I recall, he's not the only Democrat to have done this recently.
It irks me when folks make it "Democrat" or "Republican" thing. It's not. It's a POLITICIAN thing. You know why the Kennedy's are all "serving the public"? Because their father, Joseph P. Kennedy, the bootlegging, mafia connected, stock market manipulating crook, cheating, adulterer, and I think he also liked to have sex with little boys (can't slander a dead guy!), said that the real power is in politics. Not just being a rich guy. Hence, he pushed his kids into politics for POWER. The same goes for the Bush family or any other person in politics. It's for power. Which means, you have Republican politicians catering to the religious loonies and Democrats catering to the leftist loonies leaving the sensible folks out in the cold because we don't make a big enough stink about anything.
And if the folks in MA would stop electing Kennedy, he wouldn't have so much power. But hey, He's a KENNEDY! His brother was SHOT!
Fantasy land verses reality (Score:2, Insightful)
I love fantasy land but there's a reality to confront -- civilization's energy requirements grow exponentially. Hundreds of thousands of years ago we used kilowatts. A few thousand years go it was megawatts. Today we use terawatts. Energy requirements aren't going to go down, no matter what some treehuger tells you. Thirty years from now we need solutions that produce petawatts. So if you're going to solve the future energy problem, what sort of solution do you implement? Happy little windmills that produce one billionth of what you need, and do it unreliably?
There's only one solution I know to this problem, and that's Thorium reactors. It's the only solution that gives us petawatts in thirty years without miracles. It's the only solution that doesn't destroy the environment. It's the only solution that has plenty enough fuel to last us until we move to exawatts.
Re:Just like the "ugly" oil rigs at sea? (Score:3, Insightful)
You *do* realize that oil rigs aren't allowed, not because they're unattractive, but because they *fuck up the environment* (can we say "ocean pollution"?), all while just continuing the dependence on fossil fuels, right? Or do you really believe that opposition is based on poor aesthetics?
Re:Makes me wonder about cabling (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe it's Wagoneer. I think he'd have a right to that opinion.
I don't know for sure, of course. I'm not a true believer in the one Obama way, which probably makes me evil somehow.
Re:Maybe we should test it first? (Score:3, Insightful)
Do it this way, wind for the eastern half of the country, solar for the western half.
But it has to go further. We need to push the government to fund research into energy storage technology for vehicles. We already have the motors and controllers down, what we need is for the same vehicles to get 150 to 200 miles per charge, and to charge in minutes vs. hours. Super-Capacitors look like they'll meet some of the requirements.
Then we can stop buying oil and natural gas from the middle east. With no money their insane brand of Islam doesn't spread very far.
In addition to funding research we also need to have very steep subsidies to make electric vehicles affordable for the first decade, until production changes to all electric drive vs. internal combustion drive.
Re:Maybe we should test it first? (Score:2, Insightful)
A nuke would do just fine. A 25 megaton warhead would destroy everything within a 20 mile radius. The resulting tsunami would probably take out anything that the initial detonation missed. And depending on the range of the EMP, if any of the windmills managed to survive, their motors and control circuitry would be ... in less than optimal condition.
Of course, it's not just terrorists you need to worry about. Good luck trying to protect your floating cuisinarts in a time of war. And what about natural disasters? A good tornado plowing through the area would decimate your generating capacity. A Tsunami would wipe out the whole field. It's just a shitty idea in general.
You sir, are insane. Let me explain why. If someone is going to throw a 20 miles radius killing everything nuke, I would much prefer it be 20+ miles away than, say, centered on NYC, LA or another high population/economic center.
What do you think is a "good" tornado? I'm guessing one with a 100 mile funnel that travel's a thousand miles, becuase the "little" F5's that are the largest we've ever measured wouldn't take out more than a dozen large turbines if they are 1 per square mile.
A Tsunami? Really? A wave that takes out thousands of 300' high windmills in deep water is sure as hell going to kill every land mammal (like humans) that lives on the same side of the mountains as the ocean that wave comes from. I think A/C power is pretty far down the list of things to worry about when the signs of civilization if the state you used to live in get utterly wiped out, on a scale tens of thousands of times larger than Katrina or the Indonesian quake a few years back.
You post, good sir, is the most insane post I've ever read on Slashdot, in a well over a decade.
Re:There's wind in them thar.... oceans? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:There's wind in them thar.... oceans? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not trolling.. but all 6.7 billion people on the planet just breathing alters the climate.
With the knowledge that common sense isn't always so common, the obvious decision isn't always the right one and that we should question everything... I think it's obvious that using wind energy is better than using coal energy due to cost, sustainability and reduced negative impact on our environment.
As for putting all of our eggs in one basket, I think we should keep existing fossil fuel plants as backups.
What I REALLY think we should do though is start using nuclear breeder reactors to recycle our nuclear fuel and start switching to majority nuclear power until we really figure out the best sustainable solution, keeping the issue you bring up and others in mind.... but the few anti-nuke mouths are just too loud.... meh.
Re:There's wind in them thar.... oceans? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's certainly a possibility. The question is: what will the effects actually be?
Winds are driven largely by energy from the sun, and the (gravitational pull of the) moon, and the rotation of the earth. Those are three sources of almost unimaginable power.
It's certain that windmills will pull some energy out of the system, but it's unlikely that they'll pull enough to cause anything more than a small local disruption.
Now, with hydropower, we have the same troubles, but the system is much more limited. Single rivers, single dams, etc. The big problems we have there are all things dealing with suspended particulates: silt drops out of the system, makes the rivers shallower. I don't see a real comparison, barring a big "Dust Bowl" type situation.
CO2 is a bit different because it's (according to the prevailing wisdom) screwing with one of the inputs, to wit, it's increasing the retention of heat energy from the sun. That's got the potential to cause more long range problems than something that moves around energy in the existing system.
Re:There's wind in them thar.... oceans? (Score:4, Insightful)
We need a mix of power plant types in order to function. Nuclear and coal take a long time to come online (if you try to cold start one to meet short term demand, that demand will be gone before the plant is at full power). Wind and hydro are not particularily controllable--hydro can be smoothed over time but ultimately you can't make more power than flows into the resovoir over a long period of time. Things like natural gas and pumped hydro give you the fast control you need to meet fluctuations and peak load...a gas turbine can go from cold to full power in seconds and pumped hydro can be stopped/started/modulted as fast as you can open a valve. They don't make sense for meeting stable base load though because natural gas is expensive and can be inefficient and pumped hydro requires input power to fill the resovoir (and there are very few "great" locations to install pumped hydro plants).
The only way wind could power everything is if we had enough energy storage capacity to provide for the country when the wind isn't blowing (many sites die down at night) and to suck up excess when the wind is blowing hard and nobody is using power.
Makes up for the lost forests I guess... (Score:3, Insightful)
The windmills take out energy by providing resistance against the wind and converting that energy into motion.
Think of how many acres of rainforest are destroyed every year (or day), and how much has been destroyed overall in the last hundred years or so. Those trees cut the wind also and transferred that energy into movement of leaves, branches, or entire trees.
I think even if we got all the world's energy from wind, it wouldn't even be close to the number of trees which have been cut.
Matters of scale. (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem here is that the scale involved is enormous. One day of an average hurricane releases roughly the energy equivalent of an entire year of electrical consumption...for the entire planet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(energy) [wikipedia.org]
Re:There's wind in them thar.... oceans? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why is it that nukes are believed to be some sort of energy panacea? There is an extremely limited supply of efficiently fissionable fuels, controlled fusion is still pretty much a pipe dream, the waste precipitates are extremely toxic with no safe disposal options, there is virtually unrivaled and potential for large scale disaster to occur, power output per plant is so massive that trying claim it will decentralize energy production is laughable, and every dollar we sink into it is another dollar we won't be putting into more long-term solutions with lower associated risks.
I'm also wondering how a large number of autonomously operating off-shore wind farms can possibly be considered an "easy target" for terrorist attack... do you have any idea just how much coastline the US has? It would be FAR easier and more effective to blow an Alaskan oil pipe (especially since that's hundreds of miles of pipe which can be rendered completely useless, extremely costly AND environmentally disastrous with only a single point of failure), or even to attack a power transmission station outside of a large city. That's like saying that personal automobiles lack heavy armor, so it would be easy for a terrorist to just hit all of them with RPGs and bring all transit to a screeching halt...
Re:There's wind in them thar.... oceans? (Score:4, Insightful)
1970 called, they want there Nuclear complaints back.
"he waste precipitates are extremely toxic with no safe disposal options"
Actually the plants like LFR produce little waste and the wast they do ahve has a half life of about 90 years. Meaning in 200 years it is at background radiation level.
Yes, it is toxic, but then so is coal. And we can manage something like 200 years.
"there is virtually unrivaled and potential for large scale disaster to occur, "
You mean besides a coal fire?
"power output per plant is so massive that trying claim it will decentralize energy production is laughable, "
I don't even know what you are saying there.
"and every dollar we sink into it is another dollar we won't be putting into more long-term solutions with lower associated risks."
and that makes no sense. No one is saying Nuclear is the only way to go, but right now it is a very good way t go. It gives us breathing room while we continue to roll out things like Industrial SOlar Thermal.
That is a long term solution. BUt it will take a complete rewiring of the grid to get that power to soome places in the US.
"I'm also wondering how a large number of autonomously operating off-shore wind farms can possibly be considered an "easy target" for terrorist attack... do you have any idea just how much coastline the US has?"
they don't do well in hurricanes, tornadoes, and typhoons. Plus there will need to be a lot of underwater cabling..a whole lot. Which have it's own toxic disadvantages.
Do you realize the cost to maintain those thing? the cost to bring out new blades? Off shore wind is not practical on a large scale.
Wind power for alrge scale will be freaking expensive.
Solar Thermal is the long term solution. Seriously cost effective, easy to maintain, and the cost goes down.
Solution to the wrong problem (Score:3, Insightful)
The reasons wind power is not a good idea for a large fraction of the baseline power supply has nothing to do with the amount of power needed, and everything to do with other economic and technical concerns that this does nothing to address. In particular:
1)Part of the reason wind power is not even more expensive is that other power plants can adjust their output according to changes in wind pattern and demand. As the fractional wind-power output increases so does the amount of backup power or energy storage schemes you need to compensate for the variations. This problem is often misunderstood by many. It is not that 100% cannot be done. Using hydroelectric pumped storage, it would be very possible to cover an entire country's energy demand from wind, the problem is that it gets expensive. Denmark, which gets a sizable fraction of its power from wind kinda manages because they exchange power with its neighbors, effectively using Swedish and German nuclear plants as backup, but this obviously won't work if everybody did it.
2)Wwind power is still multiple times the cost of coal or nuclear. Yes, in many countries nuclear is subsidized, and there's decommissioning costs of nuclear plants and waste handling costs. There have been delays, Finland's new reactor is estimated to cost twice what originally planned. EVEN SO, the cost of wind power ends up being higher for on-shore wind farms, and higher still for off-shore ones. Don't believe me ? Go check out the UK's royal academy of engineering report on the cost of electric power production. If you've ever been to England you know it can get quite windy, and they still see more than twice the costs for wind than for nuclear. I've seen many proponents of wind power claim randomly that wind would be cheaper when you remove subsidies and include life-cycle costs and decommissioning. Turns out that even if you allow for a doubling of estimated nuclear prices ( including decommissioning ) this is simply not true. There's of course also the questionable logic in basing the decision of what energy source to use on "best case" prices for wind and "worst case" prices for nuclear, but even if you do so you have to bend the numbers a bit for wind to come out in favor.
3)Much of the speculation of improved wind turbine efficiency is downright impossible due to physical constraints. Because you need an airflow through the turbine to extract energy, a wind turbine can never extract all the energy ( as that would leave the air stationary ). It turns out that the laws of fluid dynamics puts an upper limit on the conversion efficiency (which is related to how much teh airstream expands as it moves through the turbine), and as a consequence the hoped for dramatic improvements in efficiency simply cannot happen. At the very best a wind turbine that today gets 40% conversion efficiency could get 59% ( the theoretical maximum ) , meaning a 50% improvement in energy output. This is not alone enough to put it on par with nuclear and fossils. Any other improvement would have to come from either stronger off-shore winds or reduced material costs. Unfortunately the extra cost off of-shore construction and maintenance makes off-shore wind farms more expensive than land based ones, and since capital production costs is also the main cost in nuclear energy, changes in material prices are likely to benefit or hamper nuclear as well as wind, without altering the relative price between the two.
4)Many of the claimed benefits of wind power over nuclear are dubious. As with Nuclear power stations, wind farms are only "carbon-free" if you ignore the CO2 output associated with creating the steel and concrete used in their construction, yet the emissions from producing steel for nuclear plants is often used as an argument for why wind would be better than nuclear. It is true that wind power does not produce radioactive waste, but in practice even the overly-cautious deep geological repositories planned in Sweden and Finland contribute only a fraction (less than 10% ) of the cost of the
Re:Solution to the wrong problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Jesus Christ it isn't perfect, it is just clean energy that is there for the taking.
So let's take it.