How Viable Is Large Scale Wind Energy? 345
New submitter notscientific writes "Renewable sources of energy are obviously a hit but they have as yet failed to live up to the hype. A new study in Nature Climate Change shows however that there is more than enough power to be harnessed from the wind to sustain Earth's entire population... x200! To generate energy from the wind, we may however need to set up wind farms at altitudes of 200-20,000 metres. To be fair, the study is purely theoretical and does not look at the feasibility of such potential wind farms. Regardless, the paper does provide a major boost to backers of wind-generated energy. Science has confirmed that the sky's the limit."
Hmm... (Score:4, Interesting)
I know folks that build those giant wind turbines. They think they build a good product (and they do), but not a single one thinks it'll be more than a supplemental. If for nothing else... Not In My Back Yard.
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Well, some other folks are building storage facilities to store the electricity. It seems that the people running the infrastructure really believe in this wind energy... and they expect it to be big, together with solar energy.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Interesting)
I know people who work with both the turbines and the energy grid.
Wind power is ready for prime time. Gas is cheaper, but if you factor in a reasonable cost for it's carbon footprint Wind is right there.
Storage, on the other hand, is not ready for prime time. Without storage it's going to be hard to break 20%. I understand that some parts of the country have maxed out how much wind they can have. They have to turn on / off the gas turbines to make up for sudden power surges / drops that it's not worth it anymore. There are a lot of interesting ideas but they have yet to prove themselves.
Give it a few years and then we can see if wind can break the 20% mark.
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The big advantage of gas turbines is that they can very rapidly adjust their output based on demand (unlike coal and nuclear, for example). It makes gas ideal for the transition while we move towards more renewable energy.
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By your definition all power generation can respond quickly to load changes. That removes all meaning from the phrase. Throwing away energy by venting the steam or turning the wings out of the wind or dumping the electricity in resistor arrays does NOT count, all technologies can do that.
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Citation?
Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Informative)
I checked my energy bill the other day and I was amazed by discovering that HALF of my electricity comes from wind turbines! And I live in the most populated area in my country, just a few Km from the capital, not in some little village in the mountains. If they're supplying me like this, they must be doing the same to millions of people. Count in hydro and only one quarter of my electricity is polluting. Also, we don't have coal or gas, but we have plenty of free wind and sun. Less imports, good for the economy.
So, it's possible. What's the big deal?
About the NIMBY argument in GP: We have a shitload of mountains and hills, It's not like the turbines must be installed on your roof! Or you prefer a coal plant in your backyard? Always the same old and tired arguments...
Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Informative)
It seems that the people running the infrastructure really believe in this wind energy.
The big government grants they're getting to build said infrastructure probably contributes significantly to their enthusiasm.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
True. But luckily we neither need, nor want, one single answer that solves everything. We're better off in a multitude of ways from havign a healthy mix of different energy-sources, rather than being subject to the whims of a single one.
It's better to have some hydropower, some wind, some sun, some nuclear, some hydrocarbons, some tides, some biomass instead of putting all our eggs in one basket. As such, "can we cover our entire energy-needs *only* with wind?" is the wrong questions. The right question is if wind can be one part of the overall solution, it seems pretty clear to me that the answer to that is "yes".
As for NIMBY, there's solutions to that. Fewer people are bothered by wind-farms being installed a few miles offshore, such as those in the UK and Denmark currently, for example.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
To avoid NIMBY, there are lots of turbines in NW Indiana-- out in the corn and soybean fields. At night, there is this weird horizon of blinking red aviation warning lights as the props turn from horizon to horizon in seeming unison. Better than the coal-fired plants with plumes you can see for a hundred miles.
Multiple sources, as you cite, are a great idea.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, even offshore wind-farms [cnn.com] can bother people. Because NIMBY just has no limits.
The proper term is BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything)
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think CEOs (and their families) of companies should be required to live downwind/downstream from their plants. Would make them think twice about cost vs pollution issues.
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Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Interesting)
Water heaters should not be running at all unless someone is taking a shower. It is called on demand hot water, tank style heaters need to go. Normally this is gas fueled, not electric.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
The big problem we have now is not energy production. It is energy storage. We need to shift energy consumption to when we have a surplus of production. If you can have your electric water heater (there are electric tank water heaters) only heat up at night when electricity is cheap, then you are shifting energy consumption and making the system more efficient. It would be worthwhile loss in efficiency (heat loss from the tank). On demand water heaters cannot shift energy consumption, so while they may be a little more energy efficient, they would be much less grid efficient.
So, once the "smart grid" has been deployed, we might move AWAY from on demand water heaters and back to tanks.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Interesting)
A little more? We are talking about 25% more.
You would have to boil the water at 2am and insulate the heck out of the tank if you wanted to have hot water at 10am
.
I would imagine more likely we will use a large thermos style bottle connected to an on demand system. At night it would fill the thermos and only then run again if needed.
Old style thin tank heaters are going away.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Informative)
Old style thin tank heaters are going away
Not any time soon. Price out 'on demand' systems. Then look at the upkeep costs. They have quite a bit to go before they're ready for main street. They don't save all that much power when compared to a modern tanked system. They require large electric feeds.
Now, solar hot water boosters might make inroads in parts of the US where it's appropriate (just like the rest of the world, sigh) but I don't see the tankless systems as really taking off.
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storing hot water for domestic use is a trivial engineering problem. your 25% is wrong... it's more like 10% for a standard tank... and slightly better insulation would fix even that. there are tanks now with 3" of insulation that lose very little heat. also bear in mind that 10% number is only as big as it is because the amount of energy most people use for Domestic hot water is very small, like 40-50 gallons a day. it's not objectively very much energy in any case.
on demands don't make any sense for a
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ceramic bricks are not a better storage material than water. especially not if you need water as an end result. you might be able to achieve higher densities with ceramics by jacking the temperature up higher, but you'll never achieve the level of cost effectiveness with ceramics that you can with water and insulation.
you can question my on demand assertion, but for anyone with regular DHW usage it's pretty easy math. the efficiency gain never even comes close to balancing out the increased first and mai
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What are you talking about?
My hot water tank is set to 60 degrees, and is heated between 3am and 6am. at 11am (when I often shower at weekend) it's still hot enough to burn yourself so can't have lost much, and stays warm enough to be washing things right up until I go to bed.
And it's not like I use some magic, it's just got an extra layer of insulation over the standard (giving about 6" of insulation in total). No thermostat needed just an extra £8 cylinder jacket.
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It is the pipe losses that make tank water heaters inefficient. What does make sense is tempering systems for hot water to warm up inlet water 10-20 degrees, ideally as heat pumps using the refrigeration for something else like a freezer or air conditioning.
Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Informative)
On-demand DHW is not always the right answer. (Score:4, Interesting)
My basement is almost a museum of water heater technology - when we moved in, there was a huge multi-fuel (coal or oil) Victorian segmented iron boiler sitting right next to a 1970s style uninsulated storage water heater.
I ripped out both (I broke a 1-ton come-along pulling the boiler up and out) and installed a state-of-the-art Aquastar on-demand gas water heater and lived with it for four years. Then I ripped that out and replaced it with a heavily insulated storage water heater.
Want to guess which one was cheapest and most efficient in real world use? Hints: I have two teenagers in the house these days, and I have my own well.
Don't make on-demand water heating a golden hammer. [wikipedia.org]
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Water heaters should not be running at all unless someone is taking a shower. It is called on demand hot water, tank style heaters need to go. Normally this is gas fueled, not electric.
actually, on demand water is only slightly more efficient than a well insulated water tank heater, and i think the tradeoffs make it not worth the switch. effectively, the tank acts as an energy storage system, which means that you can use a much slower flow of energy over a longer time to heat the water.
this instantaneous demand requirement means that the equipment is much more complicated and expensive to make, needs regular servicing, and has a shorter lifetime, meaning even more manufactured costs, not
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On demand water heaters have 20-25 year servicelives. cost about 1.5 times as much but are 25% more efficient.
The rest of what you said is more or less correct.
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On demand water heaters have 20-25 year servicelives.
Not necessarily. I looked at these things carefully. Talked to a couple of contractor friends and my local electrician (or someone like him). COMMERCIAL units are often rated at 20 years - and priced accordingly. Residential units are pretty junky. Just look at the forums on the things. The elements corrode unless your fanatic about water quality (which can be expensive in and of itself). Unlike my tanked system where I can get an element for ten dollars at the local hardware store, the tankless elem
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If you're using electricity, heat pumps are two to three times more energy efficient than conventional electric resistance heaters [energy.gov], at least in warmer climates. And as a bonus, you can use even the waste cold to cool your home in the summer.
No, it isn't the tank style heaters that need to go, but any heaters that use electric resistance to create heat, unless you're in a very cold climate.
Your choice (Score:5, Insightful)
You can get nuclear powerplant, a solar array, a coal burner, a gas burner, a wind farm. But something is going to have to generate that electricity you keep on consuming.
Make a choice. Oh wait, I forgot. Democracy, power without accountability. You can vote to have your cake and eat it to.
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Fair [pjm.com] enough [caiso.com].
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Not In My Back Yard
If course not! Put it on my roof, not in my yard.
While it can be done... (Score:5, Interesting)
....No one has actually _built_ a wind power turbine setup that operates at well above the ground. I mean, consider the issues involved:
1. How are we going to keep those turbines up at altitude?
2. What are the costs of tethering these high-flying wind turbine installations?
3. Will these installations become hazards to migratory birds flying at high altitude, let alone passing airplanes of all sizes?
I'd rather build hundreds of nuclear reactors based on the safe liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) technology instead in the short to medium term, and in the longer term build space-based solar power arrays parked in geosynchronous or near-geosynchronous orvbit.
Re:While it can be done... (Score:5, Insightful)
....No one has actually _built_ a wind power turbine setup that operates at well above the ground. I mean, consider the issues involved:
1. How are we going to keep those turbines up at altitude?
2. What are the costs of tethering these high-flying wind turbine installations?
3. Will these installations become hazards to migratory birds flying at high altitude, let alone passing airplanes of all sizes?
4. How much damage will these things do if they start shedding parts.
I'd rather build hundreds of nuclear reactors based on the safe liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) technology instead in the short to medium term, and in the longer term build space-based solar power arrays parked in geosynchronous or near-geosynchronous orvbit.
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You are absolutely correct. If the installation starts shedding parts, they will becoming back to the ground at pretty high velocity, as we all know from the "blue ice" dropping from airplanes and punching holes through the roofs of houses below.
Re:While it can be done... (Score:4, Interesting)
Ah, I once thought as you do, but then a measure of common sense asserted itself. Consider the fact that the cost of getting to geosynchronous orbit is, per kilogram, larger than the energy output of a kilogram's worth of cells over a lifetime of "forever" (or damn near). Consider further that a gigawatt's worth of space array, beaming its energy back to the ground (at some cost in efficiency, transmission losses) is more or less a gigawatt-scale space weapon if it is aimed somewhere other than whatever patch of ground set aside as a receiver. What can go wrong? Consider that you can avoid this problem, sure, by using a very weak beam, but then you have to use a very large piece of ground as a receiver, one that increases in size with the geometry of latitude giving you a second trade-off between area of receiver and atmospheric loss at higher latitudes versus the difficulty of very long distance power transmission from the equator to the temperate zone. Consider that TOA insolation is only a factor of two or so larger than BOA insolation (so it's not like you get a lot more power by being out of the atmosphere) and land is cheap in the desert, and there is plenty of desert. Finally consider that land is REALLY cheap on your own rooftop, which very likely contains ALMOST enough area to completely supply your own house's energy needs and can "store" energy by simply dumping surplus back into the grid during the day at reverse cost to be drawn out again at night "for free", even without an ever-improving local storage option.
Consider that the cost of actually putting 5 kW of solar cells on your roof NOW is more than break even on a 20 year amortization or less (in many parts of the country) with the amortization schedule dropping with the cost of solar cells and other improvements in the technology. The cost of solar cells per delivered watt has been dropping exponentially with a halving time of around a decade for the last three or four decades. It is currently between $1 and $2 per watt, plus installation and hardware costs. At $1/watt -- already available to large commercial buyers -- the amortization time for a 5 kW rooftop installation is order of a decade: it will generate order of $1000 worth of electricity per year, enough to pay off a $7000-8000 loan and even make a profit over that time. I've spent more than that on high efficiency furnace/AC for my house -- several times over, sadly -- with an even longer amortization. And, of course, anything that is "profitable" on the scale of individual rooftops is far MORE profitable on an industrial scale with industrial economies of scale. $1/watt retail is $0.50/watt wholesale in volume, and even allowing for installation and operation and maintenance costs, POWER COMPANIES will be GIVING you units to put on your roof -- as long as they can sell you slightly discounted power from those units. Or building large arrays themselves, but then they have the pesky problem of buying kilometer-square chunks of land here and there.
So the real problem with putting solar cells in space is that if the price drops, as one can very reasonably expect, to under $1/watt full retail over the next decade, solar generation will proliferate like a weed all over the world not to save the whales or lower carbon footprint but because it is the cheapest or second cheapest way to make electricity. This will happen even if there ARE no breakthroughs in gigawatt-scale 24 hour plus storage, although I personally think that physicists and engineers will beat the storage problem too within the next decade -- the payoff for doing so is huge. Sure, we'll still need bridge power -- nuclear and probably coal or natural gas -- but the actual draw on those facilities will decrease to a fraction of what it is today. Whence, then, the incentive to put a massive Dr. Evil prequalified space maser up there at a cost of hundreds or thousands of dollars per watt, vulnerable
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....No one has actually _built_ a wind power turbine setup that operates at well above the ground. I mean, consider the issues involved:
1. How are we going to keep those turbines up at altitude?
2. What are the costs of tethering these high-flying wind turbine installations?
3. Will these installations become hazards to migratory birds flying at high altitude, let alone passing airplanes of all sizes?
One mechanism that's been investigated is kites at high altitude, steered by robots. They'd be pretty simple devices, but big. Fly them in a power position to reel out line, powering a generator on the ground. Move them to a parked position to reel them back in, using less power than they supplied on the way up. Repeat.
Another option, previously a /. story, is to have kites pull around an enormous "wheel". ISTR researchers concluding that an arrangement like this on the site of a decommissioned nuclear plan
Re:While it can be done... (Score:5, Funny)
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> I'd rather build hundreds of nuclear reactors
Uhm, no. We *already* have plenty of safe "free" energy.
* wave (Why do you think our planet even has a moon in the first place!)
* geothermal
* solar
The problem with wind and most energy solutions is NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard).
Plus if we were really smart we could launch small low-weight satellites that were fitted with solar cells to capture energy 24-7.
Nuclear is too high-maintenance and the negative risks FAR out weight ALL the other alternatives. How ma
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There's a lot of things that many naysayers said weren't possible. The human mind is a powerful thing. The written and spoken word lets us hand down the knowledge we gain from our mistakes to our succ
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Chernobyl and Fukushima are bad examples because:
- The RMBK reactor design of Chernobyl was inherently "fail dangerous". Only the Soviets were insane enough to build reactors like this. Not even the Chinese are interested in fail dangerous designs. It had a positive void coefficient so when the coolant (water) boiled, the reaction rate went up, meaning it could get into a positive feedback loop and explode (and this is what it indeed did).
- Fukushima was built in an area subject to tsunamis. If we keep reac
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Uhm, no. We *already* have plenty of safe "free" energy.
* wave (Why do you think our planet even has a moon in the first place!)
* geothermal
* solar
The problem is collecting that energy, which invariably requires massive amounts of land and resources.
The problem with wind and most energy solutions is NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard).
Yes, and so it would be far preferable to use technologies which have a very small environmental footprint, and which can be placed anywhere. Conventional nuclear has the same problem, though arguably on a smaller scale, and it is still intractable.
Nuclear is too high-maintenance and the negative risks FAR out weight ALL the other alternatives. How many more Chernobyl and Fukushima "incidents" before we learn that we are not smart enough to safely run nuclear reactors.
An objective view does not support this conclusion. That aside, conventional nuclear does have scalability and cost issues. Our failing is not in designing s
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....No one has actually _built_ a wind power turbine setup that operates at well above the ground. I mean, consider the issues involved:
Nobody has built a setup that's able to deliver grid power yet, but there has been considerable work done on the problem. There are flying wind harvester prototypes such as KiteGen [youtube.com].
1. How are we going to keep those turbines up at altitude?
2. What are the costs of tethering these high-flying wind turbine installations?
The wind keeps them flying as long as the wind is blowing and when it's not blowing there's no need for the harvester to be at altitude because there's nothing to harvest. The costs involved with building and installing a device are likely to be considerable, but the labor costs involved in running the thing could potentially be
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It's funny how you come up with a laundry list of criticisms of these wind farms - but pronounce an unbuilt theoretical reactor to be "safe".
It's even funnier that you think space based solar will ever be economical.
Re:While it can be done... (Score:4, Funny)
1. How are we going to keep those turbines up at altitude?
It's obvious. We need to get a bunch of cobblestone blocks and make a huge spire. Then we place the wind turbines at the top and build out. Once we are done, we pull out our diamond pickaxe and get rid of the cobblestone stairs up to the wind farm. Oh wait.... Too much Minecraft last night....
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By the way, the #2 and #3 issues I mentioned are related, because if the tether breaks, we could have an uncontrolled "fly away" situation that could become a major hazard to aviation, especially since the plans for these high-flying wind turbine installations involve putting them near or just above the same flight level as modern airliners (9,000 to 11,000 meters altitude).
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It should be easy to "get it", they are ugly industrial plant. If we have to have them they should be kept to industrial areas (or better still out at sea). I don't want one in my back yard, or yours, or anyone else's because I can still see it. I do not even want the things spoiling other peoples areas where perhaps I shall never even go.
They are much worse than a static object (like a conventional power station,
Consistent availability is the issue (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Build backup power sources which can meet all your energy demands (for when there is no wind)
2. Overbuild the wind farms and build massive battery backups to store and distribute excess power (expensive and still no reliable)
3. Rebuild the electric distribution infrastructure to share power across much larger regions (to do effectively require tech we haven't perfected).
No matter how you cut it, building an adequate wind power infrastructure is prohibitively expensive because you have to plan for periods of your total output being zero. No matter how much technology improves, this will always be the case (well, until we can control weather).
Re:Consistent availability is the issue (Score:4, Interesting)
the real reason it's expensive is that the parts cost and take energy to make.
now, something that might be feasible could be covering for example entire alps in small http://www.windside.com/ [windside.com] installations. if only for the reason that such installations don't depend on massive 50 meter blades.
of course, nature freaks would freak from that.
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Look at your turbine, now look at me, look back at your turbine, your turbine is now a diamond!
You have got to be kidding... (Score:3)
...pretty little things, the turbines at Windside. Do you notice how they provide all sorts of figures, except the generating capacity? There's a reason for having long honking blades - you gather power from a larger area. These generators aren't much wider than the post they sit on, and they aren't going to generate much power at all. The best you can get are these quotes:
"The core of our business is based on small turbines charging battery banks that power small DC systems"
And this incredibly misleading q
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It's not their fault if you don't look around their site for a link as obvious as Power Production [windside.com]
We at Windside belive that the energy production should be informed in kWh/year basis and this production figure should be based on measurements done in real life circumstances.
Commonly used maximum rated power has very little to do with real life results and therefore it is important to find out how many kWh the turbine is like to produce on annual basis at different wind speeds.
Followed by a chart of KwH mapped against turbine size and average wind speed.
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The overriding problem with wind power is that, for large parts of the world, it is not constant or predictable.
I get the impression (though I have no source) that at higher altitudes, wind is not only faster, but more constant.
Re:Consistent availability is the issue (Score:4, Funny)
1. Build backup power sources which can meet all your energy demands (for when there is no wind)
That's not hard to solve. That's why we have politicians.
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One major potential source of battery backup is electric vehicles. Even after their batteries are no longer usable in the cars (about 75% of capacity) they can be used as backup for wind and solar. That also requires either the vehicles or the charging stations to include inverters that can feed power to the grid.
Geographic diversity can do some mitigation of wind variability, but storage is better. Not all storage needs to be in batteries. For example, compressed air and flywheels are other storage tec
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You're oversimplifying this.
If you try "baseload wind power" there's plenty of more info, here's one quote [theconversation.edu.au]:
Addressing Intermittency from Wind and Solar Photovoltaics
Wind power already supplies over 21% of Denmark’s electricity and 15% of Spain and Portugal’s.
Although the output of a single wind farm fluctuates greatly, the fluctuations in the total output from a number of wind farms geographically distributed in different wind regimes are much smaller and partially predictable.
Modelling has also shown that it’s relatively inexpensive to increase the reliability of the total wind output to a level equivalent to a coal-fired power station by adding a few low-cost peak-load gas turbines that are run on renewable biofuels and are operated infrequently, to fill in the gaps when the wind farm production is low.
Current power grid systems are already built to handle fluctuations in supply and demand with peak-load plants such as hydroelectric and gas turbines which can be switched on and off quickly, and by reserve baseload plants that are kept hot.
[Recent studies] (http://www.nrel.gov/wind/systemsintegration/wwsis.html) by the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory found that wind could supply 20-30% of electricity, given improved transmission links and a little low-cost flexible back-up.
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No matter how you cut it, building an adequate wind power infrastructure is prohibitively expensive because you have to plan for periods of your total output being zero. No matter how much technology improves, this will always be the case (well, until we can control weather).
Well, no. The actual figure used by planning is 13% of nameplate for peak hour 6 to peak hour 9. (Solar is planned at 38% of nameplate.) Lots of studies are on-going to understand how to forecast wind power much more accurately based on wind plant telemetry and other meterological data. Right now day ahead accuracy has a mean error of around 15%. Hour ahead is much better - about 2%.
That said, yes, it's still a challenge. But batteries aren't the only solution - storage comes in many forms, e.g. CAES, flywh
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Liquid-metal batteries [cnn.com] are reliable and inexpensive (or so their inventor claims). It will be a while yet before they're widely available, but Khosla Ventures has invested in a startup to bring them to market. It may not be the silver bullet, but it will help.
Red herring (Score:2)
True, but for SOME parts of the world the wind is both strong and predictable, or when it fluctuates it's on a timescale of hours which is adequate to increase or decrease output from conventional power plants to balance. Let's get these areas harnessed first and see where we're at instead of acting like it's fundamentally flawed because it doesn't work so nice "for large parts of the world". Oh
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It always is only local.
There are places that have wind nearly 24x7. Think along the shores of the great lakes. Much of which are now brownfields. Perfect places to put wind turbines, and they are doing just that.
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living along one of the Great lakes, in the Buffalo NY area, and having a large windfarm in the Southern tier, I can tell you that your assumption is false.
Yes, we often have "wind" coming of of the great lakes. the problem is that it is often little more than a light breeze. I have personally been out near the wind farm on what I considered a breezy day and saw the windmills sitting idle. (it was not a scheduled maintenance day either.) They need sustained winds higher than 15 mph to turn, and the aver
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I live in West Seneca. I drive to Buffalo everyday, I see the turbines turning on the brown fields. Am I imagining that?
Lots more vineyards by lake Ontario than Erie, in WNY. Even more out by the fingerlakes. If you get a chance head out there and check out the distillery. Avoid their vodka though, it is not good.
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Re:Consistent availability is the issue (Score:5, Interesting)
It's being done in the U.S. as well [pjm.com]. Also known as pumped storage or pumped hydro.
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This also happens near where I grew up in Wales. However, I think its capacity is pretty low, and to increase it you'd have to flood another valley to make a new reservoir. This tends to be unpopular with the people who live there.
While informative... (Score:2)
This study is at best incomplete. Reading through this, I am not sure they understand the true limitations to wind power. Air density and strenght of textiles are the limiting factors. As we increase altitude, we lower air density. Using our current technology at a lower air density will result in less efficiency. In order to maintain output would requrie either a much larger aparatis or far more of current technologies. We can't go much larger as very quickly we run into the similar problem that the
Theoretically, sure (Score:4, Insightful)
Theoretically there's plenty of wind power.
Theoretically there's plenty of solar power.
Theoretically there's plenty of geothermal power.
Theoretically there's plenty of power in the vacuum of space.
It's that niggling practicality of GETTING and USING that energy that confounds us.
Arguably, I'd say the only one that's really proven itself over the long term is solar; as the Earth is essentially a closed system with only solar energy as an input, it's proven that there is amply "enough" input solar energy falling on half of the globe at any given time to drive that system.
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It's that niggling practicality of GETTING and USING that energy that confounds us.
It's not even that hard. Those approaches have to compete with established means of power generation. If current power generation was more expensive, the alternatives you mention would be used more than they are now.
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Thank you for so clearly illustrating my point.
Look at the SIZE of that solar farm. Its well over 4 times the surface area of the Apple building itself! Yet this is what it takes to power ONE BUILDING. JUST ONE. Can you imagine the sheer size of the solar plant required to power a mid-sized city? What about a BIG city like NY or LA? What about the entire country? It boggles the mind!
of course, let's not forget that those panels are opaque, so nothing can grow underneath them. The environment loss to
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In June 2010, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said $557 billion was spent to subsidize fossil fuels globally in 2008, compared to $43 billion in support of renewable energy.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Federal_coal_subsidies [sourcewatch.org]
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I'm fine with not propping up ANY energy supplier. I'd also like to reduce (not eliminate, just reduce) the onerous amount of regulation surrounding power generation. That's half the problem right there.
And please don't bring out the "if we reduce regulation even an iota, rivers will be toxic and full of three eyed fish" strawman. The US has ABSURD regulations in all areas on power generation.
It's not as though we are at the "just enough to stop polluters" level. We passed that DECADES ago and are now
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They would survive fine if their competitors had to pay for waste disposal. Hell, nuclear would be a lot more attractive too, if coal plants could not just use the atmosphere as their dumping ground.
Nuclear power does not survive on the open market. It never has and likely never will. The time to pay back cost is so long that government loans are needed, the site cleanup costs are so far the taxpayers problem and disposal is still an unsolved issue. I like wind power, I love nuclear power, but neither of th
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Your argument is absurd on the face of it.
Asking coal fired (or natgas or Hydrocarbon) plants ot NOT have emissions is akin to asking solar farms to produce power without killing all the plant life under them or wind farms not to hurt thousands of birds with spinning blades.
There is a basic environmental price to pay for ANY power generation. You can't ignore it for one type of power generation just because you prefer it.
Also, the vast majority of the costs of Nuclear power generation are legal (fighting
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I did not mention natgas and for good reason. It does not send mercury and tons of radioactive material into the air. Coal power is dirty, face it. Nothing can be done about that, the very material it burns is highly contaminated.
Nuclear power costs are actually far more about plant construction. Look it up. Cheap coal and gas are why we do not have more Nuclear power. Nuclear power plants take decades to payback their investment. Not once has one been built without government loans and insurance. The free
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Coal is NOT a dirty power source. You seem to be under the impression that coal power is a bunch of guys shoveling coal into a furnace with black sooty smoke pouring out the the top.
In reality, coal firing is fairly clean. Not as clean as other methods, to be sure, but acceptably clean. We have a coal-fired plant here in my area. It sits right along the Niagara River and I see it every day as I drive to work. I've also been inside it. It is a marvel of technology. Using powdered blown coal dust, hot
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How do you get that solar power from the light side of Earth to the dark side of Earth?
You don't. You introduce variable tariffs so that night-time energy costs more than daytime energy. Then people will buy storage heaters.
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So, your solution to the major problems of using inadequate power generation systems is to force people (using the power of government, which inevitably involves guns and killing) to do with less and to spend more money?
Glad you aren't running things.
Bob Dylan was right ... (Score:4, Funny)
He knew that: ''The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind''
as the doctor says... (Score:4, Insightful)
+ they will compete and advance technologically
+ they won't all fail at once
+ they will all pollute in a different way, diluting the total footprint
No energy form is safe, no energy form is (totally) clean.
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Wasn't it Jeanette Winterson who said that?
We need a diverse Energy. (Score:3)
We need to really diversify our energy.
That included using Wind, Solar, Tidal, Hydro, Natural Gas, Coal, Nuclear...
We need to stop focusing on Green Energy but focus on diverse energy, so we can hedge the trade-offs each offer.
Even coal. While coal has the biggest environmental impact. It is currently the most plentiful in the United States, and shouldn't be discounted.
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Ok, right, you can still use coal... but add the post-combustion treatment to reduce pollution and ways to grab the CO2 (if everything else fails, plant enough trees)
coal is cheap because there is no output treatment as it should, they just vent it to the atmosphere and is someones else problem. It shouldn't! they must take care of their pollution treatment. that way, the coal isnt that cheap (so bigger change for the other alternatives) and coal can finally became a little cleaner and not one of the worst.
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Ok, right, you can still use coal... but add the post-combustion treatment to reduce pollution and ways to grab the CO2
I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, or at least to take a look back at the USDOE's Aquatic Species Program [nrel.gov], in which the gas output of coal plants is filtered through algae ponds, sequestering up to 80% of the CO2 output while improving algal growth rates. There are probably hundreds of opportunities of this type out there, like collecting methane from sewage ponds [go2watersolutions.com], which using AIWPS [ponce.tv] simultaneously offers extremely low-cost and high-effectiveness sewage treatment while using "traditional
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Well... you could but... (Score:2)
I got the OPPOSITE conclusion from the same paper. (Score:3)
If you're going to invent 20,000ft windmills, then you might as well invent a magical creature who defecates some super-fuel, like Lord Nibbler.
Really you only get a fraction out of the theoretical power stated in the paper. You're looking at about 1/3 to 1/5 of what they state for output, realistically. And how would you have a wind farm near an airport? To me, I read this as the absurd stunts that wind would have to pull off to be viable. The fact that it ignores the practical application means this is nothing than fiction, and should be treated as such, because no one except Charlie Sheen gets to live in a fictitious world. So there you have it wind adherents: you're all Charlie Sheens!
Meanwhile, Sharp has a solar panel that is 43% efficient. Lets contrast that with the theoretical maximum of 59% for wind mills. there's a 16 percent advantage... but unlike solar cells, windmills can never be more efficient than 59%. Also, windmills need regular service being a mechanical apparatus. Solar cells, even the ones that move, don't have the same ear and tear as a a windmill.
In the end, wind doesn't work, even when you have subsidies.
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Once you factor in night, that 43% efficiency drops to 21.5%. The wind turbine still works at night. The solar panel doesn't.
You need to take into account capacity factor [wikipedia.org]. Overall average capacity factor for solar in the U.S. is 0.14. That is, if your solar panels have a nominal generating capacity of 100 Watts, their output averaged over a y
Ah yes, the anti-wind shills are here (Score:4, Informative)
Every time a discussion about wind power comes up, some troll (usually with a very high UID, sometimes with an account created solely for the purpose) asks how putting up windmills will affect weather.
The answer should be fairly obvious. We have cut down a shitload of trees, which normally slow down wind. Putting up windmills? Slows down wind slightly, increases turbulence significantly, causing minimal localized temperature effects [scientificamerican.com]. Kind of like putting up trees. If there is any significant effect, it will be moderating, which is a good thing.
In addition, wind turbines don't actually cause any heating worth mentioning, unless perhaps they catch on fire. This is covered in the linked article, which had the GP actually cared about this issue, they would have found with google and read already. They cause thermal mixing, which can raise temperatures at a specific point, but which don't raise temperatures in a region. It only results in higher measured temperatures in a relatively small area downwind. This is expected due to (fractionally) lower wind speeds and greater thermal mixing.
In summary, anyone who expresses concerns about wind farms affecting weather is a shill, a troll, or an idiot, because these are not real concerns, and this is a well-known fact.
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Re:Ah yes, the anti-wind shills are here (Score:4, Insightful)
What happened with the tone in slashdot?
People stopped givingup on chasing away stupid people, with the result that there are more stupid people.
Can we share our clearly non-universal knowledge by answering questions politely instead of demeaning people for no apparent reason?
The knowledge might as well be universal, because you can ask google (via keywords or plain English) what effect windmills have on weather, and it will tell you that the effect is negligible. This is actually easier and takes less time than posting a comment on slashdot, let alone waiting for the response. Therefore, it is either trolling (either for money or not) or a very stupid thing to do. I would call it incredibly stupid were it not for the ample evidence of how very credible it is, since many people seem to think it's a better idea to ask their trivial questions in a slashdot comment and attempt to get an answer via crowdsourcing than to ask a software agent designed specifically for the purpose and stocked with the bulk of human knowledge.
I'm guessing most people here are adults, and an adult tone of conversation should be expected.
Even if I couldn't tell from your UID that you haven't been here long, I would be able to tell from this sentence.
Re:Ah yes, the anti-wind shills are here (Score:4, Insightful)
And you're confident that will still be the case if enough wind farms were to be deployed at altitude to provide all the power we need?
Effects of wind farm, known: mixes the air so that temperature readings just downwind are higher, then the air thermally stratifies and things are back to normal not far from there.
Effects of multiple wind farms: since the net result of one is zero, the net result of many will be zero. However, putting up sufficient wind power means we can reduce the use of other kinds of power which actually do have a negative effect on climate (from our POV.)
Zero times any number is zero. HTH!
. I think your overreaction to a simple question paints you as a pro-wind power shill/troll.
My posting history proves otherwise. You are welcome to peruse it.
There is nothing about calling a troll a troll that results in it being an overreaction.
At best the question was a stupid one that would have better been answered by asking google than asking slashdot. In the old days, I would have been moderated up for pointing that out. Unfortunately, whoever moderated that comment voted for stupidity. Luckily, some more discerning and/or intelligent people seem to have moderated my comment in between that one and this one. Unfortunately, you have also left a comment here. (Amusingly, there is an even lower-quality anonymous and cowardly comment next to yours.)
Slashdotters, let's stand up for quality comments. If I say something stupid, I expect to be downmodded. Let's extend that courtesy to others as well.
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The turbines are industrial bird-killing machines, they make lots of noise
Nope.
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"The turbines are industrial bird-killing machines,"
You need half a dozen of them to read the killing power of _1_ cat.
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I would say that would be about one third the effect of adding three bazillion joules of energy into the wheather system by nuclear reactors with 33% thermal efficiency.
Re:Climate Damage? (Score:4, Insightful)
Compare the amount of energy available to the amount we are using. Then reply to yourself telling the idiots that modded you up to stop doing that.
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While the blurb on slashdot doesn't mention it and this is one of two recent studies on the matter of both how much energy we can get. They also both looked at the environmental impact of taking that much energy out of the climate system. Their is a change of 3-4 degrees C increasing) at ground level using wind power and a change in percipitation of up to 10 percent. Which in my mind is not terribly good results.
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Yeah that's certainly a justified question. Lot's of research needs to b done, like with any other technology that we might want to deploy on a planetary scale.
There are already some studies on the effects of commercial wind farms on the micro climate around the farms which seem to indicate some warming at the ground level. There are several studies that attempt to quantify the amount of birds killed (per unit of energy delivered). There are anecdotal horror tales about people being poisoned in the mining c
Re:Climate Damage? (Score:5, Insightful)
People have studied it, and nothing significant happens because you don't stop the wind, just slow it down very slightly like all the trees you chopped down and terrain you flattened used to.
I really can't believe this got modded up even by one point. It is on about the same level as people who worry that Britain will be blown away by all the windmills, sailing off into the Atlantic.
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Greedy, already established power companies that don't want the competition (or government required lowering of the rates due to lowered operating expenses). These companies do not hesitate to hire lobbyists to pay off corrupt politicians to block the project.
People who say "oil power is great, just not in my backyard" who complain about assorted eyesore or low frequency rumble problems, or [insert local complaint here]. Some problems are real bu