Damien1972 sends in a report on a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, which finds that wind power could provide for the entire world's current and future energy needs. "To estimate the earth's capacity for wind power, the researchers first sectioned the globe into areas of approximately 3,300 square kilometers (2,050 square miles) and surveyed local wind speeds every six hours. They imagined 2.5 megawatt turbines crisscrossing the terrestrial globe, excluding 'areas classified as forested, areas occupied by permanent snow or ice, areas covered by water, and areas identified as either developed or urban,' according to the paper. They also included the possibility of 3.6 megawatt offshore wind turbines, but restricted them to 50 nautical miles off the coast and to oceans depths less than 200 meters. Using [these] criteria the researchers found that wind energy could not only supply all of the world's energy requirements, but it could provide over forty times the world's current electrical consumption and over five times the global use of total energy needs."
Most people whining about noise and environmental impact are talking about older designs, or do not realize there is a net improvement in environmental impact over the alternatives. The alternative to green power is not 'no power', but is dirty power. The NIMBY crowd would be more than happy to Luddite civilization into the stone age, and then complain about the lack of affordable power. Californians are the worst at this -- in the US, anyway.
Newer wind turbines have the blades further away from the supporting tower, which reduces the noise considerably. The bird and bat deaths can be substantially mitigated by making sure your turbines are out of known migration paths, and by making the blades rotate slower. The number of bird & bat deaths that would result from a polluted environment by non-green power is a much more serious problem. Proper wind turbine technology & placement is a FAR lesser evil here, IMO.
This report is... interesting. Placing that many turbines in very remote areas is going to be ridiculously expensive to run transmission lines to, and deal with the effects of intermittent addition of energy to the grid. An electrical grid is a temperamental mistress at the best of times. The technology CAN be had, but it's not as simple as just hooking up a turbine to a grid without some real smarts in between. Also, having trained people available to do regular maintenance on such extremely remote sites (and getting replacement parts there) is not gonna be cheap.
Still, better that that an unlivable planet. But we need to take a serious look at MODERN nuclear power, especially with re-using the waste, gas-cooled pebble bed designs, Thorium designs, etc. Trying to make ONE solution fix the problem is completely idiotic.
This report is... interesting. Placing that many turbines in very remote areas is going to be ridiculously expensive to run transmission lines to, and deal with the effects of intermittent addition of energy to the grid. An electrical grid is a temperamental mistress at the best of times. The technology CAN be had, but it's not as simple as just hooking up a turbine to a grid without some real smarts in between. Also, having trained people available to do regular maintenance on such extremely remote sites (and getting replacement parts there) is not gonna be cheap.
They already do this quite regularly with the oldest green source of power you managed to omit: Hydroelectric. There are a great deal of dams within British Columbia and Alaska out in the middle of nowhere - and they've been relatively successful and constant power sources.
Most people whining about......environmental impact are talking about older designs, or do not realize there is a net improvement in environmental impact over the alternatives.
You know, that statement works great in the context of nuclear power too...
The NIMBY crowd would be more than happy to Luddite civilization into the stone age, and then complain about the lack of affordable power. Californians are the worst at this -- in the US, anyway.
You mean like Senator Ted Kennedy (www.boston.com):
...But, it turns out, Kennedy's antipathy to furtive rules changes and backroom power plays stops at the water's edge -- specifically, the waters of Nantucket Sound, which separates Cape Cod (where the Kennedy family has an oceanfront compound in Hyannis Port) from the islands of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. A shoal in the center of Nantucket Sound is where Cape Wind Associates hopes to build the nation's first offshore wind farm -- an array of 130 wind turbines capable of generating enough electricity to meet 75 percent of the Cape and Islands' energy needs, without burning any oil or emitting any pollution. The turbines would be miles from any coastal property, barely visible on the horizon. In fact, Cape Wind says they would be farther away from the nearest home than any other electricity generation project in Massachusetts.
But like a lot of well-to-do Cape and Islands landowners and sailing enthusiasts, Kennedy doesn't want to share his Atlantic playground with an energy facility, no matter how clean, green, and nearly unseen. Last month he secretly arranged for a poison-pill amendment, never debated in either house of Congress, to be slipped into an unrelated Coast Guard bill. It would give the governor of Massachusetts, who just happens to be a wind farm opponent, unilateral authority to veto the Cape Wind project.
Besides transmission issues, what about land use? I mean, what will we eat if all our agricultural land is covered by wind turbines? It is a nice mental exercise to cover all the world's non-aquatic, non-forested, non-urban, and non-polar land with wind turbines, but do wind turbines really integrate well with all the other rural land uses (particularly agriculture) that we have?
Many farmers are making a _killing_ off of leasing their land for wind turbines. Some are only able to keep their farms going _because_ of the wind turbine land leases. So yeah, it works pretty well, actually.:)
Helen Fraser and her husband lived just over 400 metres from a turbine. She says the sound and strobing effect caused her to develop headaches and body aches, and her caused her husband's diabetes to get worse.
Somehow I'm having a hard time imagining how diabetes is influenced by a big windmill. I suppose she could be ranting and raving about the turbine so much that her husband's stress levels affected his diabetes.
by Anonymous Coward
on Monday June 22, @06:19PM (#28431107)
Right so this is assuming we put these rather large ugly things everywhere that hasn't already been greatly disturbed by people. I know they are excluding forests. but just because you don't have to cut down a tree doesn't mean it isn't a spot worth preserving.
Personaly I think that we really ought to build more nuclear power plants. Yes there is waste but overall it is fairly clean and cheap and would do more for preserving the environment and supplying electricity than this would.
The thing that always seems to concern me is this: is it possible for the large amount of energy pulled from the winds to change weather patterns even slightly? I know it sounds stupid, but could even a very slight change over the planet potentially have an impact? Perhaps it is safest that we diversify our energy production. So much wind, solar, atomic etc.
Nulcear YES
Wind YES
Oil YES
Solar YES
Coal YES
Natural Gas YES
Tidal YES
There is no one size fits all people! You 'open minded' people need to open your minds to the real problems and solutions we already have available!
And Holland's tourism industry would crash, I mean without the windmills, why would you want to go to the Netherlands... I mean isn't that what draws all those young folks to Amsterdam these days?
I thought it was the copious amounts of marijuana that made Amsterdam a compelling destination. LOL!
You must be real fun at parties, explaining the punchline of every joke. If that gets "insightful" moderation, I just want everybody to know that water is wet. (Or is that informative?)
I've often thought that if it's economically viable to go to the trouble of all that engineering for offshore oil exploration, extraction and processing, surely it's viable to build vast offshore wind farms where there's plenty of room, plenty of wind, and no neighbours to object.
This article doesn't mention anything about mass energy storage. Without that, if we try to increase wind's share of power generation too much, it'll destabilize the grid (I've heard figures of 20-30% for this previously, but can't find a convenient reference).
From TFA: "despite these limitations, it is clear that wind power could make a significant contribution to the demand for electricity"
I don't think they're saying that the would should be entirely wind-powered. They're pointing out that there's so much untapped wind power that we should stop thinking about wind power as only a minor source of energy and invest more toward developing the resource.
by Anonymous Coward
on Monday June 22, @06:33PM (#28431369)
Scientists confirmed today that Global Slowing is real. After years of speculation, it's now been confirmed that our harnessing of wind power for our energy needs is slowing the Earth down, and within a matter of decades, the Earth will come to a complete stop. Scientists are currently unsure whether this Global Slowing can be reversed, but some have proposed using fossil fuels to create artificial wind to help the Earth keep moving.
I was looking for a quote about "open mouth, change feet" - completely unrelated to this topic - just a few moments ago, and ran across this post that really fits:
The summary of the numbers in that article (replacing US coal-burning plants with offshore east coast windmills):
So, we have, just for the towers nacelles and fans: - A workforce of 170,000 people, just to work at the plants to construct them. - 120 huge factories to construct. - Wind towers every 375 feet for the whole length of the Atlantic Coastline and stacked 38 rows deep. - Construct those towers, nacelles and fans at the rate of one every 8 minutes for 40 years, in the Atlantic Ocean. - $10.4 Trillion in today's dollars (conservatively).
It gets more ludicrous than that, when you consider continental shelf, keeping shipping lanes open, etc.
Admitted, adding on-shore windmills would be more doable, but still - it is quite pricey and impractical.
Large industries operate with those kind of numbers all the time. How many power plants have been constructed over the years, and what did it cost?
The worldwide auto industry produces roughly 50 million cars a year [worldometers.info]. That works out to ~1.6 per second. Scary statements like "OMG We have to make one every EIGHT MINUTES" are peanuts to large-scale industrial production: we make cars roughly 750 times faster than you're saying we'd need to build turbines.
Wind towers every 375 feet for the whole length of the Atlantic Coastline and stacked 38 rows deep
The aesthetic impact of that is the only part of your post that gives me any concern. The rest is perfectly doable.
It bothers me when people talk about our energy "needs", as though without some particular number of number of Watts, the world ends.
Are they better considered our energy "wants at a given price point"?
When I hear "need", but don't hear a "for what" part soon after, I get suspicious. Was the term "energy needs" a rhetorical device introduced by governments or energy suppliers to distract from the fact that we can live on varying amounts of energy consumption.
Geothermal does not have the pollution problem, does not have visual problem, the problem of messing with birds or whatever, and the latest technology allows them to drill geothermal wells in very low temperatures or dry wells by pumping water in to the earth, rather than needing to find a particular geothermal friendly area. Even if just limited to areas naturally conducive to geothermal, there is likly just as many areas in the World where geothermal can be built (if you include all the places you can not build wind turbines like the middle of a city). Best of all, it is 24 hours, always on energy using the same technology we already use for our oil based society (drills, turbines, etc). It is "shovel ready" and producing energy right now all over the World.
Can anyone give me something that beats all of that in terms of energy to cost (including environmental)?
The answer to this is fuel cell plants powered by hydrogen derived from electrolysis. Supplemented by nuclear baseload power if desired.
There have been some good advances in cheaper electrolysis latley.
Every joule of energy we get on the earth, without tapping geothermal sources, originally comes from the sun. The only question is which source is the most economically (from an energy standpoint) obtainable and environmentally sustainable.
Wind and sun to electric current seem to be the best bets, since they don't require any intermediate steps like biomass or super old biomass, also known as oil. Solar-thermal molten salt storage for overnight and cloudy weather with natural gas backups will probably be the winner for much of our electricity needs. Colder climates will rely on wind and geothermal differential generators.
The important thing is that we invest now in technologies that allow high efficiency transfers of electricity, because we're going to need to balance the load across the country. This, in combination with building efficiency improvements and abandoning the urban sprawl model, should have us well on our way to sustainability.
Pumped storage, nanotech ultracapacitors, flywheels, fuel cells even will store energy for a calm day. If you have a fairly efficient electricity grid you won't even need to store that much because the chances are it will be windy in some place within reach.
On calm days the sun usually shines so photo voltaic cells come into play. Don't like those? just use solar concentrators or stirling engine-based solar panels, wave energy, put alternators into the stationary bikes at the local gym.
Of course the amount of energy required is greatly exaggerated these days because there are a lot of poorly insulated houses and an awful lot of people using incandescent lighting and 'wall warts' (and also wall marts) powering stand-by equipment are ubiquitous. It would be great if everyone had a 12v transformer providing power to 12v sockets around the house and maybe an ultracap that would store some energy so the transformer wouldn't be going all the time.
I'd go off the grid if i could. I kind of feel people have become overly dependent on electricity - one day I was in a shopping mall in London and a girl actually started screaming the second the power went out. I have a generator and a 600w invertor here but the last time the power went I didn't even bother using them
Single Wire Earth Return is a standard way to distribute electrical power to remote places in my country. The current density in the return path is very low because the medium which carries it has a high cross sectional area.
Lets say the cable going one way carries 1000 Amp with a cross section of 0.1 square metres. If the return path uses 100 square metres the current density would be 1000th of that in the cable.
I've heard of the dihydrogen monoxide, there's a cemetery in my town where every single corpse buried there was a dihydrogen monoxide drinker. obviously, that compound has a 100% lethality rate.
It'd seem having massive wind turbines would slow down the movement of air, which might lead to scenarios where the current global warming scare would be merely a trifle.
Not if you fit the turbines within the Senate's chambers...
Some wind turbine designs are far more bird friendly than others. The standard "propeller" based designs tend to be pretty bad. Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (Pac Wind [pacwind.com] and Helix Wind [helixwind.com]) can be much more bird/bat friendly.
by Anonymous Coward
on Monday June 22, @07:23PM (#28432073)
Well... wind energy is mostly solar energy, like hydro, and frankly, fossil fuels. Basically, none of it matters anyway. It's all just one stupid big game to control and regulate access to energy since available and exploitable energy is the single requirement for increasing standards of living. Since you can't have any rich people without poor people, do the math. Why do rich people want to regulate easy access to energy? So that poor people will cook their food, clear their house, and fight their wars.
You have a really valuable argument that people should spend a lot of time worrying about. It's a real shame that most people won't see it, since it's posted anonymously. Wind [weatherquestions.com] is essentially created by heat from the sun. Using all these wind turbines will obviously make the sun go out.
The original article was suggesting that there is so much wind around that wind power is a viable power generation method, not that this should actually be done. There's problems with every method of power generation - they all remove energy from the environment.
Maybe with all the deforestation going on there's now too much wind? Maybe we need some way of slowing it down.
How much energy will it take to create these wind turbines?
The last ROEI, Return on Energy Invested or the length of tyme wind genies need to run to produce as much energy as the energy needed to make the genies, was something like 5 years. Given that there are still Jacobs wind turbines [wikipedia.org] still running after 50 years after the last ones were made, that's a pretty good ROEI.
Ditto for the network connecting them to the people who want to use the electricity.
That's the biggest problem to suppling enough electricity everywhere, almost no matter the source of energy. MIT's "Tech Review" published the article "Lifeline for Renewable Power [technologyreview.com]" going over this. Basically HVDC, High-voltage direct current [wikipedia.org], transmission lines would have to be strung up to distribute electricity from where it's produced to where it's used. It would also require a smart grid. Even without HVDC lines strung up, the power outages or blackouts in the Northeastern US/South Eastern Canada a few years ago showed the power grids need to be upgraded.
Let alone, if we have nearly unlimited electricity what will we do with the heat?
If human machines take energy from the wind, do work, and return waste heat to the atmosphere, then I think the cycle would repeat itself: The warmer air near the concentrations of machines (cities) would cause weather and wind just like the uneven heating of land and water does.
Let alone, if we have nearly unlimited electricity what will we do with the heat?
The energy in the wind would eventually dissipate as heat anyway (friction with land, ocean waves, etc). This is why the wind doesn't keep getting strong and stronger without limit. Wind power would actually lead to less net heat emission (0) than most other forms of energy production: fossil fuels and nuclear release energy previously stored away as something other than heat, geothermal speeds the heat release from the mantle, and solar decreases the earth's albedo. Hydro is less obvious... it seems heat neutral but it may even increase the albedo by forming new lakes.
To put this all in perspective, the world power consumption is something like 15 TW. The total amount of solar power incident on the earth is about 130,000 TW.
Paint them black and cover them with photovoltaic cells.
I see a red windmill and I want it painted black
No birds fly anymore I want them to turn black
I see the vanes turn round dressed in voltaic cells
I have to turn on lights until the darkness goes
The long term plan is to let evolution take its course. Eventually we'll be left with Ninja birds that have learned how to avoid wind turbine blades. These will then be put through further training to teach how to stop crapping on my car right after I've washed it.
Building a wind turbine is proven, and cost effective. "Clean coal" or as we call it in real life, bullshit, has yet to be proven as either successful or economically viable. The faster we drive a stake through coal's heart, the better.
I *think* your opinion is based around obsolete designs. I'm not certain. Perhaps you have good reasons for your beliefs that you didn't mention. It's certain that I don't trust the messianic proponents of either wind or solar, but I do notice that the amount of investment in them has been increasing at a substantial rate over the last decade. To me that means that they must be at least close to sufficiently efficient. (I should have been cured of this belief by bio-ethanol for gasoline, but I haven't been, and consider that a statistical aberration cause by a strong political pressure group.)
If I'm wrong, could you please offer me a link to substantiate your opinions? Academic sources are preferred over either governmental or industrial.
The economy would go into the toilet and that would raise the real cost of power to even higher, and the demand would go down even more. By the end of the year we'd be all living in dirt huts. But, ya know, reality.. never let it get in the way of an indignant cause.
If you're concerned with reality, why not examine it rather than putting up a straw man?
A real solution would build out wind and solar resources over a number of decades, and wind down coal usage as the load gets shifted over.
Nobody is proposing anything remotely like forcibly converting the entire world to wind/solar within one year.
by Anonymous Coward
on Monday June 22, @08:02PM (#28432573)
Australia does not depend wholly on coal, you know. In fact, wind power generation is increasing by a large amount.
How do I know this? My brother works at the wind farm on the south coast of south-eastern South Australia (it's near a place called Millicent). He is currently working extremely long hours constructing yet another batch of turbines. This is the second batch he's worked on in only a few years, and both batches are huge (we're talking dozens of turbines, not just a handful). So, it's not some feel-good experiment, it's a full-fledged economically-viable business.
As for solar energy, Australia has so much sunlight we'd have to be crazy not to make use of it. I know there are problems with transmission if you put a big solar plant out in the middle of nowhere, but that's not what I'm talking about. Think about all of the roofs in all of the cities - not just residential, either. How much solar energy is being wasted just bouncing off of the corrugated iron roofs of warehouses and factories? Put solar collectors on them, and they'd probably generate more power than they'd use - at least during the day, and most factories shut down at night.
Solar collectors may only run during the day, and may lose efficiency during cloudy days, but consider this - when is the single biggest draw time? Summer, during the day, when all those air conditioners are running. This also happens to be when the skies are clearest and the solar radiation received at its highest - therefore when the solar collectors would be at their most efficient.
Yes, we may not be able to just ban coal - yet. But we can easily reduce the dependence on it if we look outside the box, and don't just bag alternatives out of hand.
Except (Score:5, Informative)
overstated or misunderstood wind turbine problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people whining about noise and environmental impact are talking about older designs, or do not realize there is a net improvement in environmental impact over the alternatives. The alternative to green power is not 'no power', but is dirty power. The NIMBY crowd would be more than happy to Luddite civilization into the stone age, and then complain about the lack of affordable power. Californians are the worst at this -- in the US, anyway.
Newer wind turbines have the blades further away from the supporting tower, which reduces the noise considerably. The bird and bat deaths can be substantially mitigated by making sure your turbines are out of known migration paths, and by making the blades rotate slower. The number of bird & bat deaths that would result from a polluted environment by non-green power is a much more serious problem. Proper wind turbine technology & placement is a FAR lesser evil here, IMO.
This report is ... interesting. Placing that many turbines in very remote areas is going to be ridiculously expensive to run transmission lines to, and deal with the effects of intermittent addition of energy to the grid. An electrical grid is a temperamental mistress at the best of times. The technology CAN be had, but it's not as simple as just hooking up a turbine to a grid without some real smarts in between. Also, having trained people available to do regular maintenance on such extremely remote sites (and getting replacement parts there) is not gonna be cheap.
Still, better that that an unlivable planet. But we need to take a serious look at MODERN nuclear power, especially with re-using the waste, gas-cooled pebble bed designs, Thorium designs, etc. Trying to make ONE solution fix the problem is completely idiotic.
Parent
Re:overstated or misunderstood wind turbine proble (Score:5, Interesting)
They already do this quite regularly with the oldest green source of power you managed to omit: Hydroelectric. There are a great deal of dams within British Columbia and Alaska out in the middle of nowhere - and they've been relatively successful and constant power sources.
Parent
Re:overstated or misunderstood wind turbine proble (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, that statement works great in the context of nuclear power too...
Parent
Re:overstated or misunderstood wind turbine proble (Score:5, Informative)
You mean like Senator Ted Kennedy (www.boston.com):
But like a lot of well-to-do Cape and Islands landowners and sailing enthusiasts, Kennedy doesn't want to share his Atlantic playground with an energy facility, no matter how clean, green, and nearly unseen. Last month he secretly arranged for a poison-pill amendment, never debated in either house of Congress, to be slipped into an unrelated Coast Guard bill. It would give the governor of Massachusetts, who just happens to be a wind farm opponent, unilateral authority to veto the Cape Wind project.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/05/07/kennedy_doesnt_play_by_the_rules/ [boston.com]
Parent
Re:What about other uses? (Score:5, Interesting)
Besides transmission issues, what about land use? I mean, what will we eat if all our agricultural land is covered by wind turbines? It is a nice mental exercise to cover all the world's non-aquatic, non-forested, non-urban, and non-polar land with wind turbines, but do wind turbines really integrate well with all the other rural land uses (particularly agriculture) that we have?
Many farmers are making a _killing_ off of leasing their land for wind turbines. Some are only able to keep their farms going _because_ of the wind turbine land leases. So yeah, it works pretty well, actually. :)
Parent
Re:Except (Score:5, Insightful)
Helen Fraser and her husband lived just over 400 metres from a turbine. She says the sound and strobing effect caused her to develop headaches and body aches, and her caused her husband's diabetes to get worse.
Somehow I'm having a hard time imagining how diabetes is influenced by a big windmill. I suppose she could be ranting and raving about the turbine so much that her husband's stress levels affected his diabetes.
Parent
Hmmm interesting but not (Score:5, Insightful)
Right so this is assuming we put these rather large ugly things everywhere that hasn't already been greatly disturbed by people. I know they are excluding forests. but just because you don't have to cut down a tree doesn't mean it isn't a spot worth preserving.
Personaly I think that we really ought to build more nuclear power plants. Yes there is waste but overall it is fairly clean and cheap and would do more for preserving the environment and supplying electricity than this would.
I wonder how long it would take... (Score:5, Funny)
... to have a noticeable impact on the Coriolis force?
Energy has to come from somewhere... (Score:5, Interesting)
A more Viable option (Score:5, Insightful)
tourism (Score:5, Funny)
And Holland's tourism industry would crash, I mean without the windmills, why would you want to go to the Netherlands... I mean isn't that what draws all those young folks to Amsterdam these days?
Re:tourism (Score:5, Informative)
I thought it was the copious amounts of marijuana that made Amsterdam a compelling destination. LOL!
You must be real fun at parties, explaining the punchline of every joke.
If that gets "insightful" moderation, I just want everybody to know that water is wet. (Or is that informative?)
Parent
Offshore (Score:5, Insightful)
I've often thought that if it's economically viable to go to the trouble of all that engineering for offshore oil exploration, extraction and processing, surely it's viable to build vast offshore wind farms where there's plenty of room, plenty of wind, and no neighbours to object.
Energy storage? (Score:5, Interesting)
This article doesn't mention anything about mass energy storage. Without that, if we try to increase wind's share of power generation too much, it'll destabilize the grid (I've heard figures of 20-30% for this previously, but can't find a convenient reference).
Has anything panned out on that front? (i.e. been cheap enough for wide-scale use?) Pumped-storage hydro [wikipedia.org], Sodium-sulfur batteries [wikipedia.org], etc?
The usual comment... (Score:5, Funny)
Let's fill the world with gigantic metal spinning blades suspended hundreds of feet in the air. What could possibly go wrong?
I think we're missing the point here... (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFA: "despite these limitations, it is clear that wind power could make a significant contribution to the demand for electricity"
I don't think they're saying that the would should be entirely wind-powered. They're pointing out that there's so much untapped wind power that we should stop thinking about wind power as only a minor source of energy and invest more toward developing the resource.
News From Slashdot 2029 (Score:5, Funny)
Scientists confirmed today that Global Slowing is real. After years of speculation, it's now been confirmed that our harnessing of wind power for our energy needs is slowing the Earth down, and within a matter of decades, the Earth will come to a complete stop. Scientists are currently unsure whether this Global Slowing can be reversed, but some have proposed using fossil fuels to create artificial wind to help the Earth keep moving.
An interesting counter-article (Score:5, Informative)
I was looking for a quote about "open mouth, change feet" - completely unrelated to this topic - just a few moments ago, and ran across this post that really fits:
http://papundits.wordpress.com/2009/04/11/salazars-wind-power-first-open-mouth-then-change-feet/ [wordpress.com]
The summary of the numbers in that article (replacing US coal-burning plants with offshore east coast windmills):
So, we have, just for the towers nacelles and fans:
- A workforce of 170,000 people, just to work at the plants to construct them.
- 120 huge factories to construct.
- Wind towers every 375 feet for the whole length of the Atlantic Coastline and stacked 38 rows deep.
- Construct those towers, nacelles and fans at the rate of one every 8 minutes for 40 years, in the Atlantic Ocean.
- $10.4 Trillion in today's dollars (conservatively).
It gets more ludicrous than that, when you consider continental shelf, keeping shipping lanes open, etc.
Admitted, adding on-shore windmills would be more doable, but still - it is quite pricey and impractical.
Doug
Re:An interesting counter-article (Score:5, Insightful)
Large industries operate with those kind of numbers all the time. How many power plants have been constructed over the years, and what did it cost?
The worldwide auto industry produces roughly 50 million cars a year [worldometers.info]. That works out to ~1.6 per second. Scary statements like "OMG We have to make one every EIGHT MINUTES" are peanuts to large-scale industrial production: we make cars roughly 750 times faster than you're saying we'd need to build turbines.
The aesthetic impact of that is the only part of your post that gives me any concern. The rest is perfectly doable.
Parent
The original article (Score:5, Informative)
In case someone's interested, it is available free here:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/06/19/0904101106.abstract [pnas.org]
What are "needs" ? (Score:5, Insightful)
It bothers me when people talk about our energy "needs", as though without some particular number of number of Watts, the world ends.
Are they better considered our energy "wants at a given price point"?
When I hear "need", but don't hear a "for what" part soon after, I get suspicious. Was the term "energy needs" a rhetorical device introduced by governments or energy suppliers to distract from the fact that we can live on varying amounts of energy consumption.
Geothermal is better (Score:5, Insightful)
Geothermal does not have the pollution problem, does not have visual problem, the problem of messing with birds or whatever, and the latest technology allows them to drill geothermal wells in very low temperatures or dry wells by pumping water in to the earth, rather than needing to find a particular geothermal friendly area. Even if just limited to areas naturally conducive to geothermal, there is likly just as many areas in the World where geothermal can be built (if you include all the places you can not build wind turbines like the middle of a city). Best of all, it is 24 hours, always on energy using the same technology we already use for our oil based society (drills, turbines, etc). It is "shovel ready" and producing energy right now all over the World.
Can anyone give me something that beats all of that in terms of energy to cost (including environmental)?
Re:Wind Could NOT Provide 100% of World Energy Nee (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Not many choices... (Score:5, Insightful)
Every joule of energy we get on the earth, without tapping geothermal sources, originally comes from the sun. The only question is which source is the most economically (from an energy standpoint) obtainable and environmentally sustainable.
Wind and sun to electric current seem to be the best bets, since they don't require any intermediate steps like biomass or super old biomass, also known as oil. Solar-thermal molten salt storage for overnight and cloudy weather with natural gas backups will probably be the winner for much of our electricity needs. Colder climates will rely on wind and geothermal differential generators.
The important thing is that we invest now in technologies that allow high efficiency transfers of electricity, because we're going to need to balance the load across the country. This, in combination with building efficiency improvements and abandoning the urban sprawl model, should have us well on our way to sustainability.
Parent
Re:Not many choices... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not true; you forgot nuclear. Uranium and other heavy elements don't come from the sun. Sure, they came from a star, just not ours.
Parent
Re:Not many choices... (Score:5, Insightful)
Every joule of energy we get on the earth, without tapping geothermal sources, originally comes from the sun.
There's actually another exception: nuclear energy. It comes from supernovas that predate the solar system's formation.
Parent
Re:Not many choices... (Score:5, Insightful)
One more exception: Tidal power comes from the earth's rotation in the presence of the sun and the moon.
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Re:Wind Could NOT Provide 100% of World Energy Nee (Score:5, Interesting)
On calm days the sun usually shines so photo voltaic cells come into play. Don't like those? just use solar concentrators or stirling engine-based solar panels, wave energy, put alternators into the stationary bikes at the local gym.
Of course the amount of energy required is greatly exaggerated these days because there are a lot of poorly insulated houses and an awful lot of people using incandescent lighting and 'wall warts' (and also wall marts) powering stand-by equipment are ubiquitous. It would be great if everyone had a 12v transformer providing power to 12v sockets around the house and maybe an ultracap that would store some energy so the transformer wouldn't be going all the time.
I'd go off the grid if i could. I kind of feel people have become overly dependent on electricity - one day I was in a shopping mall in London and a girl actually started screaming the second the power went out. I have a generator and a 600w invertor here but the last time the power went I didn't even bother using them
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Re:Wind Could NOT Provide 100% of World Energy Nee (Score:5, Informative)
Lets say the cable going one way carries 1000 Amp with a cross section of 0.1 square metres. If the return path uses 100 square metres the current density would be 1000th of that in the cable.
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Re:Wind Could NOT Provide 100% of World Energy Nee (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:What about friction? (Score:5, Funny)
It'd seem having massive wind turbines would slow down the movement of air, which might lead to scenarios where the current global warming scare would be merely a trifle.
Not if you fit the turbines within the Senate's chambers...
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Re:What about friction? (Score:5, Funny)
Not if you fit the turbines within the Senate's chambers...
damn that's a lot of hot air right there.
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Re:What about friction? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Impact on birds... (Score:5, Informative)
Some wind turbine designs are far more bird friendly than others. The standard "propeller" based designs tend to be pretty bad. Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (Pac Wind [pacwind.com] and Helix Wind [helixwind.com]) can be much more bird/bat friendly.
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Re:What if we take away too much wind? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention that wind energy is constantly refreshed by solar input.
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Re:What if we take away too much wind? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well... wind energy is mostly solar energy, like hydro, and frankly, fossil fuels. Basically, none of it matters anyway. It's all just one stupid big game to control and regulate access to energy since available and exploitable energy is the single requirement for increasing standards of living. Since you can't have any rich people without poor people, do the math. Why do rich people want to regulate easy access to energy? So that poor people will cook their food, clear their house, and fight their wars.
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Re:What if we take away too much wind? (Score:5, Funny)
You have a really valuable argument that people should spend a lot of time worrying about. It's a real shame that most people won't see it, since it's posted anonymously. Wind [weatherquestions.com] is essentially created by heat from the sun. Using all these wind turbines will obviously make the sun go out.
That would be a real problem.
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Re:What if we take away too much wind? (Score:5, Informative)
The original article was suggesting that there is so much wind around that wind power is a viable power generation method, not that this should actually be done. There's problems with every method of power generation - they all remove energy from the environment.
Maybe with all the deforestation going on there's now too much wind? Maybe we need some way of slowing it down.
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ROEI, Return on Energy Invested (Score:5, Interesting)
How much energy will it take to create these wind turbines?
The last ROEI, Return on Energy Invested or the length of tyme wind genies need to run to produce as much energy as the energy needed to make the genies, was something like 5 years. Given that there are still Jacobs wind turbines [wikipedia.org] still running after 50 years after the last ones were made, that's a pretty good ROEI.
Ditto for the network connecting them to the people who want to use the electricity.
That's the biggest problem to suppling enough electricity everywhere, almost no matter the source of energy. MIT's "Tech Review" published the article "Lifeline for Renewable Power [technologyreview.com]" going over this. Basically HVDC, High-voltage direct current [wikipedia.org], transmission lines would have to be strung up to distribute electricity from where it's produced to where it's used. It would also require a smart grid. Even without HVDC lines strung up, the power outages or blackouts in the Northeastern US/South Eastern Canada a few years ago showed the power grids need to be upgraded.
Falcon
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Re:Actually its nastier to bats (Score:5, Informative)
If human machines take energy from the wind, do work, and return waste heat to the atmosphere, then I think the cycle would repeat itself: The warmer air near the concentrations of machines (cities) would cause weather and wind just like the uneven heating of land and water does.
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Re:Actually its nastier to bats (Score:5, Interesting)
The energy in the wind would eventually dissipate as heat anyway (friction with land, ocean waves, etc). This is why the wind doesn't keep getting strong and stronger without limit. Wind power would actually lead to less net heat emission (0) than most other forms of energy production: fossil fuels and nuclear release energy previously stored away as something other than heat, geothermal speeds the heat release from the mantle, and solar decreases the earth's albedo. Hydro is less obvious... it seems heat neutral but it may even increase the albedo by forming new lakes.
To put this all in perspective, the world power consumption is something like 15 TW. The total amount of solar power incident on the earth is about 130,000 TW.
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Re:Impact on birds... (Score:5, Funny)
Paint them black and cover them with photovoltaic cells.
I see a red windmill and I want it painted black
No birds fly anymore I want them to turn black
I see the vanes turn round dressed in voltaic cells
I have to turn on lights until the darkness goes
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Re:Think of the birds! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Cost? $$ and practicality? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:All we need now (Score:5, Interesting)
I *think* your opinion is based around obsolete designs. I'm not certain. Perhaps you have good reasons for your beliefs that you didn't mention. It's certain that I don't trust the messianic proponents of either wind or solar, but I do notice that the amount of investment in them has been increasing at a substantial rate over the last decade. To me that means that they must be at least close to sufficiently efficient. (I should have been cured of this belief by bio-ethanol for gasoline, but I haven't been, and consider that a statistical aberration cause by a strong political pressure group.)
If I'm wrong, could you please offer me a link to substantiate your opinions? Academic sources are preferred over either governmental or industrial.
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Re:All we need now (Score:5, Informative)
The economy would go into the toilet and that would raise the real cost of power to even higher, and the demand would go down even more. By the end of the year we'd be all living in dirt huts. But, ya know, reality.. never let it get in the way of an indignant cause.
If you're concerned with reality, why not examine it rather than putting up a straw man?
A real solution would build out wind and solar resources over a number of decades, and wind down coal usage as the load gets shifted over.
Nobody is proposing anything remotely like forcibly converting the entire world to wind/solar within one year.
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Re:All we need now (Score:5, Insightful)
Australia does not depend wholly on coal, you know. In fact, wind power generation is increasing by a large amount.
How do I know this? My brother works at the wind farm on the south coast of south-eastern South Australia (it's near a place called Millicent). He is currently working extremely long hours constructing yet another batch of turbines. This is the second batch he's worked on in only a few years, and both batches are huge (we're talking dozens of turbines, not just a handful). So, it's not some feel-good experiment, it's a full-fledged economically-viable business.
As for solar energy, Australia has so much sunlight we'd have to be crazy not to make use of it. I know there are problems with transmission if you put a big solar plant out in the middle of nowhere, but that's not what I'm talking about. Think about all of the roofs in all of the cities - not just residential, either. How much solar energy is being wasted just bouncing off of the corrugated iron roofs of warehouses and factories? Put solar collectors on them, and they'd probably generate more power than they'd use - at least during the day, and most factories shut down at night.
Solar collectors may only run during the day, and may lose efficiency during cloudy days, but consider this - when is the single biggest draw time? Summer, during the day, when all those air conditioners are running. This also happens to be when the skies are clearest and the solar radiation received at its highest - therefore when the solar collectors would be at their most efficient.
Yes, we may not be able to just ban coal - yet. But we can easily reduce the dependence on it if we look outside the box, and don't just bag alternatives out of hand.
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Re:But... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:But... (Score:5, Informative)
What will lubricate the turbine bearings?
Polytetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE for short (AKA Teflon®).
how will we paint the machines?
Soy/Rapeseed(canola)/nut-based oil pigment paints
how will be mine the materials that go into these things?
Mine? Use electric power. Though you could also recycle! 10,000 drinks cans = 1 turbine nacelle (Note: Completely wild guess, but you get the idea)
how will we make the fiberglas?
Glass-Reinforced Soy-based plastics? Carbon Fibre?
without oil?
There are already solutions to all your problems.
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