Expanding the Electricity Grid May Be a Mistake 412
Perhaps T. Boone Pickens was onto something. Al writes "An article in Technology Review argues that plans to string new high-voltage lines across the US to bring wind power from the midsection of the country to the coasts, could be an expensive mistake. What's needed instead are improved local and regional electricity transmission, the development of an efficient and adaptable smart grid, and the demonstration of technology such as carbon capture and sequestration, which could prove a cheaper way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions than transmitting power from North Dakota to New York City."
Yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, because we all know that every locale has magic electricity faeries just waiting to produce low-carbon-footprint electricity.
Problem with wind and solar? (Score:5, Insightful)
All this talk about solar and wind energy being "free" and building these giant wind farms and turbines has had me wondering about something that I never see addressed. Has anyone considered the meteorological effects of removing all that energy from the atmosphere? I mean wind and solar energy serve a FUNCTION, they move our weather systems around, melt our snow, power our rivers, etc. You start taking a significant chunk of that energy out of the atmosphere, couldn't you end up with climate changes that could be even more devestating than the global warming you're trying to avoid?
No energy is truly "free," after all. But environmentalists keep talking about wind and solar as if there's NO downside whatsoever. It seems to me that there might be a pretty big one.
Carbon capture and sequestration (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:local power - yes, carbon capture - no ? (Score:1, Insightful)
just how the fuck do you propose to do that? This is article is nothing more then trying to grab money and move it to the northeast v.s. the midwest. This has nothing to do with the environment. By the way, how many fucking wind turbines you think we need to put in NYC? I'll give you a hint, it won't work.
It makes perfect fucking sense to put wind farms where the *gasp* wind is.
Re:Problem with wind and solar? (Score:4, Insightful)
yeah, like building 1 billion houses has no impact. or demolishing 10 billion trees.
Re:Problem with wind and solar? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:There's another advantage (Score:5, Insightful)
There's an old story about the Communists in China digging a dam, and an observer asks why they're using shovels instead of excavators. "To create more jobs", they say. "Oh, I thought you were building a dam. If it's jobs you want, take away their shovels and give them spoons."
Two Words (Score:3, Insightful)
Nuclear Power.
Re:There's another advantage (Score:4, Insightful)
You're trying to balance it so that you've maximized the output and efficiency while minimizing the cost and environmental impact. It's not easy to do by any stretch of the imagination. That's why you're wanting to decentralize it, but you're having to also bear in mind that transmission lines and extra workers do add to inefficiencies inherent in the system.
On top of that, you've got to be aware of regions like the west coast, south and new England which are all subject to their own geographic oddities and risks. So that you can minimize the consequences of a hurricane, earthquake or eruption.
Nuclear! (Score:3, Insightful)
Just about anything but nuclear [blogspot.com] is a mistake.
Re:Yeah (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, because we all know that every locale has magic electricity faeries just waiting to produce low-carbon-footprint electricity.
Well, there is one extremely low carbon footprint technology [wikipedia.org] that we know works and scales well. Too bad the people who oppose it do so without offering any real alternative besides the "renewables" that we've been waiting decades for or the prospect of a lower standard of living.....
Re:Problem with wind and solar? (Score:3, Insightful)
I happen to agree with you but the devil's advocate in me replies that they said the same thing about the Buffalo.
Penny wise $billions foolish (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Problem with wind and solar? (Score:5, Insightful)
All this talk about solar and wind energy being "free" and building these giant wind farms and turbines has had me wondering about something that I never see addressed.
Yeah it's only brought up in every single /. discussion about wind power.
You start taking a significant chunk of that energy out of the atmosphere, couldn't you end up with climate changes
Yes but what makes you think wind power could ever take a 'significant' chunk of energy out of the atmosphere? A windmill only takes a tiny fraction of the energy out of the wind that moves through the area described by its rotation. The wind passing through that area is a tiny, tiny fraction of the atmosphere energy that passes over the windmill. You could cover the earth with wind farms, and you'd be taking a tiny, tiny fraction of the atmosphere's energy. And up to a certain, very large, point it isn't even clear we'd be removing more energy than the trees that existed before industrial logging and agriculture cut them down.
Could it affect the climate? Yes. Is it a reason to worry? No.
No energy is truly "free," after all. But environmentalists keep talking about wind and solar as if there's NO downside whatsoever.
Seriously, compared to what it is replacing, it is so close to zero impact as to be indistinguishable. When every fossil fuel plant has been shut down, and when we're contemplating blanketing whole continents with wind/solar farms, that's when the impact of these technologies will be significant. Then maybe we'll have to find a better solution, but hey thanks to getting rid of all the coal plants we should have plenty of time to do so.
I don't think any environmentalist would claim that they have literally NO impact, outside of this relative comparison where it is only hyperbole of the smallest order. Yes, wind isn't "truly free". No, that's not a reason to stop building wind farms as fast as possible, because "not free" isn't within orders of magnitude of "as costly as current power sources". This concern is so far out there that it just reeks of grasping at straws. The fact is that for today and the foreseeable future, the environmental benefit of wind farms is unequivocal and enormous.
Re:Problem with wind and solar? (Score:2, Insightful)
Solar is free in the sense that you describe. All the electricity it generates that is spent will eventually heat up some load somewhere, and unspent energy will just heat up the surface, just like if it were a tar covered roof. Nothing is lost, since the energy removed still enters the system in the same quantity, just somewhere else, hopefully nearby.
Re:Problem with wind and solar? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure they said the same thing about pumping pollution into the air, too. The volume of pollution pumped out of factories vs the volume of the atmosphere, it'd never be significant. What do you know - as more people started jumping on the bandwagon, new technology found new ways to pump out pollution. If we invest heavily in wind farms, new technology will come along to extract more energy in less land footprint.
And who says what "significant" is? Maybe the amount of energy available is barely over the cusp of self-sustainability, and extracting a couple hundred MW* completely ruins the jet stream, plunging us into droughts and famines the likes we've never seen? Or maybe the extraction of minor amounts of energy destabilises the jet stream such that it causes hurricanes in places that would never otherwise see them? Who knows? How can we know? Of course, maybe we have to be taking out huge amounts of energy to make that difference - we don't know that, either. (It's probably somewhere around 1.21 jiggawatts...) The question to me isn't whether we should or not (we should), it's what do we do to fix it if we do take too much out? If you think pumping out too much CO2 is bad, this has potential for much worse. Then again, it might be nothing. Can't tell.
* yes, W, not J. The sun is replenishing the energy in our atmosphere, so I'm assuming here that you have to take out energy above and beyond the energy added to the ecosystem by the sun on a continual basis to effect any change.
Re:Problem with wind and solar? (Score:5, Insightful)
There have been some studies, for example "The influence of large-scale wind power on global climate" [pnas.org].
Re:Problem with wind and solar? (Score:3, Insightful)
But look at the size of the windmill farms if they were to generate ALL of our power.
Re:The quarter wave problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Conservation is the easiest and cheaper way to implement technically, but it seems, at least in the USA, very difficult for the people to accept.
There will _always_ be more people.
There will _always_ be greater demand for resources.
This seems very difficult for conservationists to understand.
You were right with the nuclear argument if we can just deprogram^H^H^H^Heducate the populace about how safe it really is; at least enough to placate the NIMBY crowd.
Re:Problem with wind and solar? (Score:5, Insightful)
I see it raised all the time. Nobody ever answers it because we all know that we have deforested the crap out of the earth, and we could put up thousands of windmills and never come close to slowing the wind down as much as all the trees removed from the planet by humans (and not replaced.)
Re:The quarter wave problem (Score:2, Insightful)
There are many existing HVDC lines all over the world. Utilities have been using them for over 25 years.
They are used in long high power lines to avoid the inductive impedance losses inherent in AC power
Re:Yeah (Score:3, Insightful)
It's ironic that the people who could ultimately end up wrecking the earth are the "greens" and the"save the earth" types who'll do anything they can to prevent nuclear power.
Isn't ignorance wonderful?
Re:Problem with wind and solar? (Score:5, Insightful)
People have looked at Wind right side up, upside down, back and forth and have raised issues that make anti-nuke people look sane. The problem with Wind is that it is a real threat to coal, so there is a lot of paid for flack. Especially if combined with NG and/or Nuclear with utility level Solar for peaking in the right areas. Given good distribution we know we can use wind turbines to over 30% electric power because it is being done right now in various European grids. The issue will really be capital cost and marginal cost. The scary thing for the coal folks is that there is no ongoing resource cost and as wind turbines get out of the 20 year capital payoff period they are going to be the cheapest marginal cost electricity.
Wind Power right now is close to 3% of U.S. electrical production and doubling again in 3 or 4 years. (And that is ignoring Picken's "plan" which was partially a front to own gas and water transport rights) Over half of all new power plant license requests in 2008 were for wind power. Nobody is calling for Plains to Coast power lines except for coal companies so they can criticize them. Intermediate level regional interconnects are what most propose now and they will be another up front capital cost item that will cause greatly reduced cost in 20 years or so. The better the regional interconnects the less variable the wind power is, and the cheaper the balancing cost.
Of course as Wind Power grows there are starting to be boondoggles and all the other BS things that go along with big time capital enterprises. Wind is the first "alternative" power that will have to deal with those issues and that is actually a sign of maturity to me. It becomes more like any other big business. We really are on the wave for wind as long as it isn't shut down by coal interests.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The quarter wave problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Why is this an either or proposition? The beauty of conservation is that it is completely technology independent.
Re:Yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
Too bad the people who oppose it do so without offering any real alternative besides the "renewables" that we've been waiting decades for or the prospect of a lower standard of living.....
I've met the opponents of nuclear energy, and they're not tree-huggers. They're your neighbors. They drive SUVs, have backyard cookouts, and they buy still buy mylar balloons even though so-and-so says the kill whales (the kids love them... what can you do?). In fact, they don't even care about the possible environmental impact of nuclear power plants --- just as long as they're nowhere the hell nearby.
Some people delude themselves into the idea we'd be building nuclear plants everywhere if it wasn't for those environmentalists (and their pesky dog! [newsgab.com]) In real life, there's about a snowball's chance of nuclear plants being constructed near major population centers. In part that's because the economics suck, but mostly it's because Joe and Jane sixpack don't want them there.
It may feel nice to shout hypocrisy at those evil environmentalists, but it's a mug's game. So get it out of your system, go learn a bit about this great country we live in. Then come back and maybe you can contribute something.
AC / DC distinction irrelevant to the article (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:small nuclear powerplants (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
there's about a snowball's chance of nuclear plants being constructed near major population centers. In part that's because the economics suck, but mostly it's because Joe and Jane sixpack don't want them there.
There are already nearly 100 nuclear plants in the U.S. alone, and the people being served by them seem generally fine with it and do not fear it.
Most of the fear-mongering comes, historically, from environmentalists, who essentially place the environment above the well being of humans. Virtually every proposed form of energy production is disliked by core environmentalists, including wind (which takes 10's of thousands of acres of turbines to equal a medium-sized coal plant) and solar (taking 12.5 square miles of cells to match a large coal plant). And those only generate energy when the wind is blowing, or the sun is shining.
The only form I haven't heard environmentalists condemn is geothermal (probably because I'm ignorant of it), but geothermal causes earthquakes [nytimes.com]
Re:Yeah (Score:3, Insightful)
It sounds like you are simply lumping various completely independent groups of people together as "enviromentatlists" based on very selective critiera.
This over-simplification of the infinite number of different opinions out there into two opposing camps of either pro/anti something is rarely helpful, despite its common usage in the mainstream media (e.g. conservative/liberal labels which mean very little).
As in the link you provide, the opponents aren't representatives of some "enviromentalist" half of society, they are purely a bunch of people concerned the geo-power station will cause earthquakes. Their opinion on (for example) global warming or rainforest deforestation is not-stated and probably completely varied amongst the group.
This leads to many absurd situations, for example where someone who doesn't believe in GW (so opposes the geo-power station because they are worried any earthquake risk however minor) ends up being labelled an "enviromentalist" just because they are worried about a particular enviromental effect of the geo-power station.
Re:Yeah (Score:3, Insightful)
It's ironic that the people who could ultimately end up wrecking the earth are the "greens" and the"save the earth" types who'll do anything they can to prevent nuclear power.
Isn't it ironic that those who want nuclear power are "Hooked on Subsidies [cato.org]"?
Falcon