Researchers Claim Wind Turbine Energy Payback In Less Than a Year 441
mdsolar (1045926) writes "Researchers have carried out an environmental lifecycle assessment of 2-megawatt wind turbines mooted for a large wind farm in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. They conclude that in terms of cumulative energy payback, or the time to produce the amount of energy required of production and installation, a wind turbine with a working life of 20 years will offer a net benefit
within five to eight months of being brought online."
Watts Up With That? has a more skeptical take on the calculations.
Sounds about right... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sounds about right... (Score:5, Insightful)
a little rivalry is a good thing.
I'm a fan of both and still believe that putting all your eggs in one basket will just lead to other problems.
Re:Sounds about right... (Score:5, Interesting)
Diversity is critical in energy production - is part of why certain groups insists on dismissing any green source that is not capable of meeting 100%+ of energy-needs.
Wind and solar have this in common (Score:3)
Therein, as the "Watts Up With That?" commenters point out, lies the problem. You can *only* achieve that kind of ROI if you're connected to a power grid that will pay you fixed rates for your excess power when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, and guarantee availability of power in other circumstances (against base rates).
Power plants have a nasty habit of costing money every second while they're being kept in read
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They're both very volatile and cannot be counted upon to meet base-load demand.
This is a myth. All electricity generation in a developed country is indeed connected to a grid. There is never a time when there is no wind/solar/hydro/tide/wave power from anywhere.
Furthermore theses sources are pretty predictable.
Renewables can form part of the baseload, just as other sources can. Diversity is always the key.
Anything you read on Watt's Up With That is inevitably bullshit. It's a site that will make any argument to match a far right wing agenda. It's anti-science.
Re:Sounds about right... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Sounds about right... (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember those politicians are fueled by those of the Koch bros. ilk.
I couldn't help but notice that the wind map used by Watts Up was from some random day and not representative of prevailing winds AT ALL!
Perhaps someone there had a bit of cranial rectumitis when Googling for a wind map for their "research"( first clue, midwest winds prevail from the southwest 90% of the time and the map has north winds displayed, FAIL! I can show you an area in eastern Colorado where the wind nearly NEVER stops) I would suggest their research is not much more than jealous bunk. Anyway, to couple wind with solar power is a common solution to the fear that Watts Up is trying to instill in the reader.DUH! If it isn't windy, the sun shines most days in most places, so if one isn't producing, the other will in enough quantity that your batteries need not be drained. Further, the wind industry is producing jobs and boosting economy in rural areas that need it. Fuck the Kochs and their worry about their and their investors wallets. Plenty of other investments out there.
Re:Sounds about right... (Score:4, Insightful)
The latest thing I've seen from the Koch camp (I assume that's where it's from) is some picture about wind farms killing birds, and comparing them to gas and oil, and complaining that gas and oil companies have been fined for various practices yet they don't kill any birds (I guess they forgot about all the birds caught in oil spills).
Re:Sounds about right... (Score:5, Interesting)
except, that are at least 4 types of energy ... coal, oil, gas, wood,gravity
there, fixed it for you. otherwise dams would generate no electricity at all, would they?
whenever I see discussions like this, I think:" is this an IRS convention or what?!?!". all these modelling is heavily dependent on transferring tax money from other things to Renewable energy subsidies. In no paper, or law, the requirement is for the plan to provide continous, on demand generation. Do that and every analyst will become far more honest.
one of the reasons? if like in Italy a renewable energy producer gets paid a multiple of the marginal price when he produces, all projections should be made with the same producer installing continous capacity on his own, with the attandant environmental impact statesments, pollution control, etc, or buying the availability from someone else, at twice the same price. the obligation on the grid operator to retire and pay produced energy would have a limit at the continous capacity declared by the operator.
Re:Sounds about right... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually no matter what methods are used for large scale energy production it will always be "consumer pays", so if you as a home owner want to offset your electricity bill then solar panels are the way to go, but only after you have done your homework and by that you need to work out the initial costs verses the longs term benefits. Unfortunately it is so easy for so called "experts" to rip people off since most people have no idea how to work out what really is best for themselves in regard to energy utilisation.
Re:Sounds about right... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sounds about right... (Score:4, Interesting)
Look into super-conducting cables. So far, only Germany has managed to get a 1km long super-conducting cable in place for a still tiny % of the energy necessary to make this global grid work in the way you're talking about.
1/3 Local nukes+1/3 wind+ 1/3 solar > coal
Re:Sounds about right... (Score:5, Interesting)
The grid loss is something in the figure of 5% 7% of total power production germany.
That is regardless of the source. Difficult right now is the transport of wind power from the 'far' north to the 'far' south, because of lack of power conduits, not because of 'grid loss'.
The loss is usually about 7% per 1000km transport distance, however it depends on voltage. E.g. Kasachstan uses 1mega Volt lines, where the grid loss is about 6% per 10,000km, not 1000.
Superconductors are likely not a solution, I guess they are simply to expensive and if one breaks you have a long long long downtime.
A bit simpler are high voltage direct current conduits, the power companies are shifting slowly to them for long range power transport.
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The grid loss is something in the figure of 5% 7% of total power production germany.
Germany covers about 138,000 square miles, which makes it just a smidge larger in area than the state of New Mexico. Scaling a grid up from the size of a single state to the entire Continental US is likely to be a whole different kettle of fish.
OTOH, you could argue this extra geographic spread is a good thing, as it affords a US electric consumer the same variety of locale for wind generation that has proven adequate in Germany, within their one state alone. New Mexico is a lot poorer and less populated
Re:Sounds about right... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sounds about right... (Score:4, Interesting)
You mean HVDC cables? They're installed all over Europe and are working fine, thanks. It would be pretty straightforward to have several of them piping solar power from the Sahara and wind power from the North Atlantic into the same grid with very minimal transmission losses.
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There are already 2 AC underwater cables between Spain & Morocco, in operation for over a decade and there are several HVDC cables over 100 miles long; one is almost 400 miles and carries up to 700 MW. and has exceeded revenue expectations from the outset.It's the NorNed Interconnector.
Re:Sounds about right... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's because the power is generated as close the user as possible. Only the balance is transmitted through long cables, and then even at high voltage to prevent losses.
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http://askjaenergydotcom.files... [wordpress.com]
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Sure, lets build a grid capable of handling 10000 times more than the local demand will ever amount to because we're piping electricity from all europe to china through it.
Or we could take the money that would cost and use it to produce any other form of electricity locally.
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as far as I know we do not have such a thing like Europe/Asia/Africa grid
There are some parts of Europe shipping electricity to Africa now. And some movement of Electricity across the Africa/Asia border. So Africa is connected to Europe and Asia. How well it shares beyond that, I don't know. I would presume some power goes between Asia and Europe as well. But I haven't seen any details on that part.
Most of the hard work is done. Well, aside from leaving power lines up in the middle of wars. There are some spots that need more work, but a global grid isn't as absurd as so
Re:Sounds about right... (Score:5, Interesting)
Wind is actually pretty reliable over the short term. A bit of smoothing helps, and Japan has already deployed 50MWh batteries for that purpose. Even without smoothing with a number of turbines distributed geographically the output doesn't vary much over an hour, and is quite easy to predict a few hours in advance. That gives other sources plenty of notice to ramp up.
Home owners can't really lose with solar PV, unless they somehow get screwed on workmanship or installation costs. The panels with always pay for themselves in a few years and it's shear madness that new houses are being built without it.
Re:Sounds about right... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Home owners can't really lose with solar PV, unless they somehow get screwed on workmanship or installation costs. The panels with always pay for themselves in a few years and it's shear madness that new houses are being built without it.
If you're going to live in the house for at least the break-even time then yes, you probably can't lose. However, I'm less convinced that it adds so much to the value of the house: if there are 2 identical houses for sale, but one of them has a brand new £20K installation of PV panels on the roof, are people really going to pay £20K more for that one? I suspect not, because its an up-front cost and some people simply won't be able to afford that much up-front. (Ok, so people will tack it onto
Re:Sounds about right... (Score:4, Insightful)
> Home owners can't really lose with solar PV
Unless, of course, you happen to live somewhere other than Southern California or Arizona, where weather conditions don't permit the sun to shine at sufficient intensity over the whole year. Here in the mid/upper midwest, the payback period for a solar installation on my house works out to be 17 years. Wind, on the other hand, can be cost effective if you have sufficient land space to put up a tower. I see a few of my rural neighbors with wind turbines on their properties.
Solar is there too (Score:3)
"The photovoltaic (PV) market is experiencing vigorous growth, whereas prices are dropping rapidly. This growth has in large part been possible through public support, deserved for its promise to produce electricity at a low cost to the environment. It is therefore important to monitor and minimize environmental impacts associated with PV technologies. In this work,
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WUWT (Score:5, Insightful)
The rebuttal is from a climate-change denial site?
What the fuck is this, Fox News? What's next, Free Republic?
Fuck you, Timothy. Seriously, just fuck off.
--
BMO
Re:WUWT (Score:4, Funny)
Re:WUWT (Score:5, Informative)
"A 2.0 MW wind turbine would generate 6.12 GWh per year, assuming a 35% capacity factor." [ourenergypolicy.org]
Right in the fucking source paper. They don't even have that as an argument...
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I suck at reading scientific literature though so I can't find where he defined the total energy cost of the wind generators. Could you please tell me which page it's on? I'm looking for the GW number that was used to compare with your quoted GWh number to give a payback time.
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You don't place a commercially used win turbine (or a wind farm) at a place where according to expected wind speeds over the year your 'capacity factor' is only 35%.
Something like that you only do as a privat owner where you perhaps build a 10kW plant because you only need 5kW, and for some reason, kick in wind speed or shut down wind speed or simply price, you find that interesting.
Commercial wind farms are usually build where the 'capacity factor' is far above 100%.
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While 35% is definitely possible, I think it's probably above average. I doubt that most wind farms achieve that.
It's not clear where your claim comes from either. It's not like you can just say, "I think [35% is] probably above average. I doubt that most wind farms achieve that."
Googling it, average wind farm capacity factor seem to be around 27-40%, depending on turbine, location etc. Newer model turbines like the GE 1.6-100 [ge-energy.com] claim over 50% CF thanks to design improvements.
Re:WUWT (Score:4, Informative)
The proper fiscal calculation is. Work out the total capital cost and calculate the monthly financial payment based upon borrowing all that money and then add in monthly maintenance and administrative costs, deduct that from the value of the average energy generation forecast and associated revenue, what you have left over is profit on the investment. Technically in financial circles the investment starts paying off in the first month or it never really does. In total over the life of the system, you check to make sure it pays itself off before it expires.
Any other arguments are meaningless, extra generators, mass storage etc need to be costed completely separately as they are about recovering energy costs from other sources, so you just really compare them to the wind generators and in the case of batteries storing the energy of wing generators to sell it other times, versus other energy generation methods.
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Re:WUWT (Score:4, Insightful)
Targeting specific birds, how many top of the food chain birds do cats kill? I have doubts that cats or glass panes are killing as many eagles as windmills.
67 eagles have been verified as killed by wind turbines in the last 5 years (source [washingtontimes.com]).
That's out of a population of about 20,000 bald eagles (source [fws.gov]) and 30,000 golden eagles (source [fws.gov]).
So, are wind turbines a significant problem for eagles? Well, they do kill an estimated 0.13% of eagles, so they aren't completely harmless. On the other hand, the American Eagle Society's threats to eagle survival page [eagles.org] lists the primary threats to eagles as: DDT, Lead shot poisoning, secondary poisoning, electrocution, poaching, habitat destruction, and other predators. Wind turbines are not mentioned at all.
Therefore, we can conclude that "wind turbines kill eagles" is a not a valid criticism of wind power.
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Re:WUWT (Score:5, Funny)
Typical Slashdot. "New peer reviewed science study says something. But random guy on the internet says they're wrong!"
Re:WUWT (Score:5, Insightful)
WUWT's publisher gets Koch funding by way of the Heartland Institute... so, not "random".
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2... [mediamatters.org]
Now I get to put my first /. mod on my (rather small) enemies list and my exclusion list: Timothy.
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Let's be clear here:
A "career" of "refuting" "similar" "claims".
Getting $100,000 speaking fees from Heartland Institute shillfests(you know where they get a bunch of shills together and have them preach to the choir, and the press) in thanks for being a #1 source of purposeful misinformation about climate on the internet is like a career inasmuch as it provides his living. It's not like a career in that it involves a lifelong development of a set of skills.
Posting non-scientific "analyses" of carefully ch
Re:WUWT (Score:5, Interesting)
Does it matter what the source is, so long as it presents a testable claim?
Besides which, their argument was mischaracterized in the summary. It's not a rebuttal of the ROI period, which is what the summary seems to suggest. Rather, they took issue with the overly-broad statement that seemed to suggest that each turbine would replace the need for traditional power sources for over 500 homes, which is, as far as I can tell, an accurate claim. Obviously, there are lulls in the wind, so while it may on average provide that much power, the lulls would mean that the traditional sources will still need to be used. What was left unsaid is that they would be used in lesser quantities.
Yes, it's a "well duh" sort of thing, but it's also accurate. And if you don't think it is, feel free to disprove them. It wasn't exactly a complicated argument, nor a particular meaningful one, but that's also a bit of a "well duh" sort of thing, given the source. ;)
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Re:WUWT (Score:5, Informative)
"(How do Americans manage to consume so much electricity in their households?)"
That electricity is used because of global warming.
Air conditioners use a lot of power in the summer, when its 82F and 100% humidity
Re:WUWT (Score:4, Interesting)
Does it matter what the source is, so long as it presents a testable claim?
Yes. Stubbornly refusing to withdraw a claim when multiple independent tests have already found it to be false is the definition of a denier. It's the reason why we laugh at flat earther's and (the original) April fools.
To test Watts' claim simply calculate three trends from his data, one for his "worst" 100 stations, one for his "best" 100 stations and one for the full set of ~1100 stations, if his claim has merit there will be signifcant differences in the three trends. So go ahead, you test his claims if you doubt, I've already done so on many occasions, that's what science is about.
BTW: When you find his claims don't hold water, don't be tempted to post a video about it on youtube because he will issue a false DCMA to try and shut you up.
Re:WUWT (Score:4, Insightful)
Rather, they took issue with the overly-broad statement that seemed to suggest that each turbine would replace the need for traditional power sources for over 500 homes, which is, as far as I can tell, an accurate claim. Obviously, there are lulls in the wind, so while it may on average provide that much power, the lulls would mean that the traditional sources will still need to be used.
The same logic applies to all electricity sources because none of them can run un-interupted at full output for their entire lives. Even coal and nuclear plants need regular down time for maintenance, as well as unexpected events.
The grid is a pool, with many generation sources contributing to it. If you only had one turbine they might have a point, but when you have hundreds or thousands you can rely on them for a certain amount of "base load" power. In fact they are more reliable that traditional forms of generation, because a single failure at a coal/gas/nuclear plant can knock out hundreds or even thousands of megawatts, but a single turbine failure is insignificant.
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Germany is finishing out building coal plants that were already in construction. And they expect to run those at a loss at current energy prices, to say nothing of their costs if carbon prices go up.
Re:WUWT (Score:4, Informative)
No. You will understand the world much better if you dig deeper and rely on primary sources with hard data (I posted links elsewhere) and not just google something which already fits your opinion. Coal use in Germany is on a similar (high) level as always. This is not good, but has nothing to do with "returning to massive building of coal plants" which is a myth.
Coal has downtime as well (Score:4, Insightful)
A 4 unit coal fired power station will be lucky to have 80% availability.
Maintenance is continuous on those things, so they don't have 100% availability either.
Admitted, the downtime is handled on site (3 of 4 units still run while one is down), but that's WHY there's a power grid. So the counter argument has flaws as well.
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Funny you should mention maintenance. Presumably the smaller generators on wind turbines will last longer with less maintenance. Especially since any maintenance that is required is distributed across a larger number of remote points (some in the ocean) and many feet in the air.
We have a gas fired plant locally that used to have yearly tours (sadly suspended after 9/11). Highly efficient and large turbines, but at the expense of frequent (well once every year or two if I recall) maintenance and overhauls. B
Re:Coal has downtime as well (Score:5, Interesting)
Gas is also small and high maintenance with respect to coal (three to five years between shutdowns on well run coal fired plants), but it doesn't take very long to either build or fix the things in comparison.
The major reason wind is now a player is that the things are both a lot more reliable and easier to get going again than they used to be. Crews apparently swap things out and transport the damaged parts to be repaired in a shed instead of way up in the air.
Re:Coal has downtime as well (Score:4, Insightful)
The FF popoganda normally ignores that and talks about "base load" as if it is somehow essential. This is total bullshit since no city will ever have a flat demand curve, base load means you must fire up gas turbines during demand peaks and pump water up hill during demand troughs, exactly the same as needs to happen for any solar/wind/wave/tide farm. By definition a flat supply curve will only ever match a wavy demand curve at the points where the demand changes between under and over supply. Solar actually does a better job at maching the demand curve in specific senarios such as a hot day when air-conditioners are working overtime.
Coal assets, mines, railways, ports, have been steadily losing value recent years, they are now worth roughly 40% less than they were a decade ago and are in danger of becoming "stranded assets" (google it). The "world's largest coal port" being planned for Queensland is now looking unlikely to go ahead due to major investment funds withdrawing from the project, HSBC, Dueches Bank, Bank of Scotland, et-al. This is not because of the enviroment, it's because the current price of coal makes it uneconomical in hard dollar terms.
Add the above economic dificulty to the fact it's now cheaper for India to build solar farms than it is to import coal from Australia. The new Indian PM has declared he will use solar power to provide electricity to 400M people. The new Aussie PM is attempting to keep climate change off the agenda at the G20. Coal is Australia's #1 export and (as with Canada), it makes up a big chunk of our GDP). Wich succinctly explains why the conservative governments in both those countries are climate "skeptics".
The technological tide is turning the energy economics of the 20th century on it's head, ignoring future miricale breakthroughs such as fussion power, renewables we be ubiquitous in 20yrs because they make economic sense now and the number$ are still improving at a rapid pace. It's not that far-fetched to see an impending deflation of enrgy prices in the 2020's if the trend continues.
Of course WUWT are going to play contrarians. (Score:3, Insightful)
WUWT has a more FUD take on the calculations... (Score:2, Insightful)
What the hell was that inserted for? It was an idiotic point made on a site which clearly has a political axe to grind. It wasn't made well. Anyone claiming to engage in a scientific debate with the phrase "by my own observation" deserves to be laughed out of the room.
This is supposed to be Slashdot, not Fox. Why the hell was this included?
Re:WUWT has a more FUD take on the calculations... (Score:5, Informative)
Well, forget WUWT and you will see there is not much calculations neither in the original claim and in fact, there is a big warning sign in the text, something the cost has not been taken into account in the evaluation but mandatory for their hypothesis to hold, here it is:
"Wind turbines are frequently touted as the answer to sustainable electricity production especially if coupled to high-capacity storage for times when the wind speed is either side of their working range."
So, they presume the high-capacity storage exists and it has zero cost. Seems to me a bit optimistic.
Dumb - not snarky - responses (Score:3)
And of course the skeptical take comment section is filled with non-researched and non-constructive comments about wind energy.
Almost as if being for or against green energy were an overt political statement than a well thought out business plan and energy policy.
(I'm from Kansas, we have nowhere near enough utilization of wind energy, despite several large wind farms in the western part of the state).
Show me the money! (Score:5, Insightful)
If this wind farm expects payback in five to eight months, we should be able to find some other wind farm (anywhere) that had payback in less than a year, right? Does anybody have a pointer to that kind of success story?
Re:Show me the money! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Show me the money! (Score:4, Insightful)
That said, the GP is right, unless these wind turbines in the study have noticeable improvements compared to other turbines I would expect there to be similar installations around the country that are making profits/savings for their investors. There should either be news about those gains or news about how the investors who previously built wind turbines are investing even greater sums of money due to their success.
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How is it odd?
It's odd because it's not a particularly relevant statistic (that is, if it didn't give a payback very quickly, then wind farms would be an utter waste).
What matters is when wind becomes cheaper than coal. That's when things get interesting.
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That is what matters to YOU, not to everyone. There are a lot of people who the environment matters to....
You seem to have gotten confused, thinking this study is primarily about environmental impact. It's not. It's a budgetary study of energy: how much energy was used during creation, how much energy will be created. That's only tangentially related to environmental impact (ie: it could have low energy creation requirements, and still harm the environment through poor mining practices, etc).
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Here's a story about investors in traditional power generation plants in Texas looking at losses because of new alternative energy power production:
http://www.renewableenergyworl... [renewableenergyworld.com]
It's the only one that makes sense (Score:3)
If you do it in dollar terms the payback will be much faster in some markets due to insanely high spot prices for peak power. In others it won't. Even in the same place six months later it may have much slower financial payback. Energy payback is far easier to determine.
Re:Show me the money! (Score:5, Interesting)
It's an odd definition but it's a common one. People often complain (incorrectly) that solar cells take more electricity to manufacture than they produce in their lifetime.
This is a study saying that they "pay back" the input resources in a small fraction of their life span. It's refuting all of the FUD around green energy that it's just taking Coal and Petroleum and storing it inefficiently in a wind turbine or solar panel to be slowly released over the course of several years.
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Why does the article think it gets to define its own meaning of "payback"? If I can basically pick and choose which cost factors to consider, and have a lot of leeway to fudge (some or most of) those numbers because they are not anything that people try to objectively measure, of course I can calculate a ridiculously short payback period. You have really only said that the article is not worth the electrons it is transmitted with, and that we should treat its authors as charlatans.
Re:Show me the money! (Score:5, Insightful)
They aren't. They're using an established term "energy payback". The authors wrote an analysis which will be useful to many people but used the word "payback" in a way which does not match your preconceived notion of how it should be used. For this, you label them "charlatans".
So all the people interested in energy payback times should not be able to publish or read about it because you've claimed ownership of the word "payback" and won't license them to use it? They should use a less clear term to express their meaning because otherwise some random idiot who reads technical papers might make the leap "payback = money", despite the term "energy payback" being self explanatory?
Had you argued that because this is "energy payback" rather than financial payback, it isn't worthy of being reported on Slashdot, I could respect your argument. Instead you label people charlatans because what they discuss is not what you're interested it.
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No one is coping with varying load of a single wind turbine. We deal with wind parks, where the variation is relatively slow. ...
A gas turbine goes from cold to nearly full load in roughly 30 seconds
Doesn't everybody know that by now? (Score:2)
Slashdot has drunk the KoolAid (Score:3, Interesting)
Oddly enough both of the calculations in the OP were correct, yes, the wind turbine generates energy equivalent to its energy of manufacture quite quickly, and yes it is still a bad idea to rely on wind energy for use in a national grid except for a tiny percentage, each MW of wind turbine relies on an additional MW of conventional generators if you want 24/7 availability, or I suppose you could try energy storage, which ought to be added to the turbine operating cost and energy payback.
Interesting to see such knee jerk support for an inappropriate technology. I wonder if the posters above have ever thought through why Germany is /reducing/ its reliance on wind turbines?
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That's news to me. Have any proof for that?
Re:Slashdot has drunk the KoolAid (Score:4, Informative)
Sorry, I misread the article, they are capping the growth in new WT installation for the next 6 years to about 80% of recent growth rates, and are building several new coal plants, whether that results in a net reduction in % windpower depends on economic growth achieved, ie crystal ball.
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Well, sort of.
http://www.spiegel.de/internat... [spiegel.de]
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What do you mean by Germany is reducing its reliance on wind turbines? Germany is scaling up all kinds of renewables. They way you get reliable energy out of it by averaging over large areas, by having a mix of energy production (e.g. solar and wind complement each other fairly well in Germany) and by having additional plants which can quickly adapt to demand (i.e. not nuclear and coal, but gas or biomass). This works well.
Germany (Score:5, Informative)
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Which part of 'additional' didn't you understand?
Stupid argument (Score:5, Informative)
It's hilarious watching people argue over a topic that has already been shown to be a non-issue. The EIA (US) and German statistics show that, in aggregate, wind-energy sources produce a relatively steady amount of power. Individual turbines and even whole wind farms might not be deterministic, but all the wind farms taken together... are.
-Matt
What's your definition of skeptical? (Score:2)
Please read the "skeptical" article with a skeptical eye. The poor guy goes through all the work to get the specs and highlights the minimum wind speed rate of 4m/s for the turbines to work. He also links to an excellent page showing wind patters and letting you see wind speed across the country.
But then, he goes off the rails. He can "tell from his own experience" that the wind doesn't always blow that fast and "look at all the blue, which means low wind speed". The big problem is that he didn't go
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Nice phrasing... (Score:2, Insightful)
"the time to produce the amount of energy required of production and installation" ...but not the time to produce enough energy to pay back the actual cost of the machine, including labor and materials.
The actual study is very, very careful to NOT claim that it will pay back the total system cost. It's just the amount of energy used in production and installation, not the cost of raw materials and labor.
What's up with the plant link? (Score:5, Interesting)
"Watts Up With That? has a more skeptical take on the calculations."
And if you look at the site it's pretty much a site full of straw men and attacks on climate change friendly politicians and scientists, with little actual scientific facts (besides the grandiose endorsement of it's own content.)
Why is this link even here? Did someone just randomly Google it and stick it on there because, hey, it's on the internet? Or did someone want the site to get more page views?
C'mon editors. This is news for nerds. Not news my uncle sent me in his email about how Obama is part of the illuminati.
watts up with that? (Score:2, Interesting)
to be fair, i havent read their current analysis of this particular project. but watts up with that is well known to be well wrong about well lots :)
The Wind Does Blow (Score:3)
About 30 years ago, "wind farms" were built in several places in California where the wind seems constant, not intermittent. One is in the San Gorgonio Pass along I10 between Beaumont and Palm Springs. Another one is in the Altamont Pass in the hills near Oakland. In both places, with what was then primitive technology, the constancy of the wind still justified the construction of these "wind farms". I have seen both installations, and I have never seen them idled by a lack of wind.
Similarly, there are places where sunshine is so prevalent that solar power would have few interruptions during the day. Unlike wind power, however, storage of electricity during the day is needed for use at night.
In the meantime, Southern California Edison has outages at all times of the year. These are not the result of unreliable generation sources. Instead, these are the result of not performing any kind of scheduled preventive maintenance on local portions of the distribution system.
Crap post (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Haters gonna hate. (Score:2, Insightful)
But the citation doesn't appear to include the costs of those "large scale energy storage" facilities. Nothing about batteries, hydralic lift storage, chemical stste change, etc. So it would appear to just as "biased". Or cheerleading, if you prefer.
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Re:Haters gonna hate. (Score:4, Interesting)
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The energy storage thing is red herring. You balance with other sources.
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Yes, but they already took a capacity factor into account.
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If the analysis was in terms of "environmental resources used", how many months does it take before the wind turbine produces enough steel, rare earths, and other raw materials to let us produce an identical turbine?
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They're note disputing the energy payback period
It doesn't hurt to read both sides of the story. In this case it's pretty obvious that both sides are fudging the numbers; "energy payback" can be whatever you want it to be by including or ignoring various factors.