Wind Power Is Cheaper Than Coal, Leaked Report Shows 610
merbs writes: A leaked report shows wind is the cheapest energy source in Europe, beating the presumably dirt-cheap coal and gas by a mile. Conventional wisdom holds that clean energy is more expensive than its fossil-fueled counterparts. Yet cost comparisons show that renewable energy sources are often cheaper than their carbon-heavy competition. The report (PDF) demonstrates that if you were to take into account mining, pollution, and adverse health impacts of coal and gas, wind power would be the cheapest source of energy.
Too bad... (Score:5, Insightful)
Too bad the operators of coal plants don't have to take all that into account.
Re:Too bad... (Score:5, Insightful)
We could change that - it's just a pollution tax away.
Re:Too bad... (Score:5, Insightful)
"This project was carried out and authored by Ecofys. "
"Ecofys is a leading knowledge and innovation company in the field of renewable energy, energy efficiency and climate change."
How surprising that a report written by a renewable energy company found out that renewable energy is best energy.
Re:Too bad... (Score:5, Interesting)
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The Earth's water vapour content has risen by roughly 5% since 1980 due the the warmer climate
I missed that bit of bullshit. A 1 C rise in water temperature results in about a 4% increase in maximum water vapor pressure. At best, atmospheric mean global temperatures have increased a bit shy of 1 C since the beginning of the industrial age. The claim is nonsense.
Re:Too bad... (Score:5, Informative)
we'll be looking at a full on runaway greenhouse effect such as devastated Venus.
Nope. The Kombayashi-Ingersoll limit says that a Venus-style runaway greenouse is not possible on earth because the sun isn't bright enough unless you brought the albedo down below about 7%.
Re:Too bad... (Score:5, Informative)
We're losing polar ice and there are other changes too. How much will that affect the albedo?
Albedo is currently 30%. Losing ice cuts the albedo (this is known as the "ice-albedo feedback"), but not anywhere like from 30% to 7%. Clouds provide a lot of albedo and they're not going anywhere.
55 million years ago, during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal maximum, the sun was almost as bright as today, there was about 4 times as much CO2 in the atmosphere as today (basically, there was a carbon infusion into the atmosphere roughly equivalent to us burning all known coal reserves), and there was no permanent ice on Antarctica or Greenland, but there was no runaway greenhouse effect. We can also calibrate the strength of the ice-albedo feedback from its contribution to Pleistocene ice age cycles, during which as much as 30% of the earth's land mass was covered with ice and snow.
Don't get me wrong: Global warming is a very real and serious threat. But there is no plausible way it could possibly produce a boil-the-oceans-dry runaway greenhouse effect like we see on Venus. If you're looking for a good scientific treatment, see David Archer's textbook "Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast [amazon.com]" for an introductory-level treatment or Raymond Pierrehumbert's book, "Principles of Planetary Climate [amazon.com]" for a very rigorous calculus-based Ph.D. level treatment. Also, Andrew Ingersoll, who discovered the runaway greenhouse effect, has a good primer, "Planetary Climates. [amazon.com]" Realclimate.org also has a good short and clear treatment [realclimate.org].
Runaway Greenhouse (Score:3)
Please don't talk about runaway greenhouse effects here on Earth. It really isn't possible. [skepticalscience.com]
Quick summary: for a runaway greenhouse effect, you need a big surface reservoir of some greenhouse gas (on Earth, water vapor). Theoretically, you increase the temperature a little, this vaporizes more of the gas, trapping more heat, which vaporizes more gas, and so on until the planet no longer has a radiative balance. Then things get a bit warm.
On Earth, the tropopause generally keeps water vapor near the surface;
Re:Too bad... (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, and since we're not planning to stop spewing CO2 any time soon, it's possible that we'll get its concentration as high as during the period when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and trees were growing near the poles. Are you sure that such sudden change won't overwhelm natural feedback mechanisms?
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Yes there were times in the distant past when CO2 was ten times what it is now but there was also zero oxygen in the atmosphere for about 3.5 billion years
Re:Too bad... (Score:4, Interesting)
They do take that into account. Its called operating expenses. No one mines the coal or natural gas and transports it for free.
Of course the report- at least as far as the sumery is concerned placed an arbitrary value on some objects like enviromental damage and health that you really cannot quantify. Especially health- their taxes go into the same pool as everyone elses and that is just how socialized medicine works- you all share the cost. So there really isn't a health cost that can be figured outside the costs of actual treatment but thats already paid by taxes.
Now they can do something about this if they want. They can pick arbitrary amounts to recover and increase taxes on those power plants. Of course that cost will just get passed to the consumers and even if they did use more wind, they will more than likely keep the excess. If joe blow charges $50 and i make the same product for $10, i'm still charging $49 or $50 dollars because there is no real competition. You just pay more and i profit more. That's how life works.
Re:Too bad... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not only that, but they actually stack the deck from the other side as well by assigning penalties to "old investments made under non-liberalized investment regime" (i.e. if you had a plant built in the 70s, they add huge costs because they can't accurately evaluate the values of government support). Finally they count the plants that are nearing end of life as a huge cost burden on things like coal because of the sheer number of the plants.
Re:Too bad... (Score:4, Interesting)
You mean cheaper for the supplier. It won't get passed to the consumer. Modt existing coal plants will be used until their end of life. The peasants would revolt if they were taxed enough to make the savings from wind strong enough to abandon functional coal or gas plants with all the sunk costs.
Another problem, some quick math showrs the scale we are looking at. I saw where a modern wind turbin can poeer the eqivilant of 500 homes. Germany has somethong like 40.076 million homes/households. Thats about 80,000 windmills needed for germany's residential power alone. Witha blade radius avraging 65 meters or ~213 feet, we can see the space needed is going to be huge before we even get to powering busyness and industry
Re:Too bad... (Score:4, Informative)
See what you do to calculate the area of a square is you take the square of the length of one side. So 11 x 11, IIRC, is 121 square miles. 121 square miles * 640 = 77,440 windmills. So, you're right, it is a bit more than a square 11 miles on a side, but it's pretty close.
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There's an easier way to think of it: consider how much space 500 houses take up. Now consider how much space one windmill takes up. The windmill isn't very big compared to the houses, is it?
Also, consider how much farmland it takes to feed the people in those 500 houses. Then consider that you can stick a windmill in the middle of a field and it only displaces crops in the area occupied by its tower's base (plus some room for maintenance and maneuvering), not the width of the blades.
If you take the example
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I never argued capitalism was a failure. And i would hardly call artificially raising the costs of something through government action in order to push something else capitalism. Especially when government regulation has limited probably the most important aspect of capitalism which would be competition.
Re:Too bad... (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet your energy costs have not gone down. A quick look shows yhe cost per kilowatt in germany is three times as much as the US and almost twice as expensive as france.
But hey, as long as they increase your rates at a slower pace it means i'm wrong right? Here is a hint, 25 years ago, germany's eletrical costs were on par with the US. Rates have not gone down in the US. You suppliers are not passing all the savings down. They are banking most of it. BTW wind energy raw costs in the US is about 7-9 cents per kwh(adapted from Mwh). Or course there will be about 4 cents more by the time it reaches a house which is still a fraction of the average cost of electricity in Germany.
You actually proved my point while feeling good about being raked over.
Re:Too bad... (Score:4, Interesting)
I have a problem with that way of thinking.
You see, you didn't build that. Other people did. What i mean is you are benifiting from cheaper costs passed along over the years so if you recover anything, you would be responsible for the excess costs. Or in other words, it all that costs had been built in from the start, the costs would have been somewhat prohibitive to have the advancements in life that we do today.
So those costs are accounted for in cheaper energy and a better life that had they always been accounted for. And we know it would have restricted use in the past specifically because the intention in the present is to restric usage. Alternative forms of energy in the past simply wouldn't hold a candle to the capabilities of today so it would just be a rich mans domain. That is likely yhe outcome of trying to impose it now anyways.
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And too bad they include completely made up additional costs to nuclear (like a cost of heat production - complete BS, and cost of using up uranium resources, when in fact reprocessing reduces that to almost zero very quickly ).
In other words this is a fluff piece written by some pro-wind political pressure group with the intention of getting some good headlines and hoping no one actually looks at the numbers.
Put another way, propaganda.
Enjoy the lies. Pity that environmentalists so often have to resort to
Re:Too bad... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm actually reading the report right now and my jaw is literally lying on the floor. They openly admit that they have no clue how much Nuclear actually cost, but they estimate, and I kid you not, that "total investment support for coal, nuclear and hydropower capacity in 2012 is estimated between 3 and 15 billion in 2013 euros.
Then they "weight the nuclear" because "average historic support for nuclear generation capacity is higher than that of coal and hydro".
Basically, they have an error margin of half a fucking order of magnitude and then they weight it against nuclear just to be on the safe side.
No wonder they got the conclusions stated, and no wonder that this report isn't released. It's utterly absurd in its current state. I suspect that this is interim because this is what pro-wind lobby came up with, and next there'll be a sanity check to get rid of the biggest points of idiocy to make it look at least remotely feasible.
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They list all the things they don't like and arbitrarily assign some value to it and claim it as a cost.
If you have to make shit up in order to justify your cost benefit, there must be no real benefit.
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As I note below, they go beyond that. They even weight R&D costs in a way that ensures that nuclear is over an order of magnitude more costly in terms of those as well, because they count the research that was done long ago, long before the age of computers as very expensive.
It's utterly batshit insane in its current state.
Re:Too bad... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Tell that to the UK who's facing having to pay $30 billion for 3.2 GW at Hinkley Point AND a 35 year per-MW subsidy at twice the current rate.
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Re:Too bad... (Score:5, Insightful)
This.
Nuclear is safe and cheap - it has killed far less people than ANY other form of power generation per output (including wind and solar, due to the high incidence of installation fatalities).
It has been politically buried in a mountain of oversight and penalty 'costs' for political reasons - basically a cost created by the cold war 'fear the enemies radiation!' propaganda that was brainwashed in to everyone.
the REAL negative things about nuclear power these days are:
The NRC, an organisation that has for far too long held back sensible improvements in this critical part of infrastructure.
The old, outdated, and unnecessarily less safe reactors being kept live due to the political impossibility of replacing them with modern ones (and even THEN their safety history is pretty damn good compared to alternatives).
Any TRUE environmentalist should be screaming at the top of their lungs, protesting in the streets, to have more nuclear power built and shut down the damn coal plants that ARE spreading radiation everywhere!
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How can you possibly say nuclear is cheap when the UK has to guarantee double the going rate for nuclear energy just to get a foreign company interesting in building a new plant, after all the others pulled out due to lack of profitability? Maybe it's a necessary cost for the UK National Grid, but it's in no way possible to describe it as "cheap".
And no, none of that cost is due to NIMBYs or lawsuits. It's the build and operating cost of the plant that is the problem.
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And too bad they include completely made up additional costs to nuclear (like a cost of heat production - complete BS, and cost of using up uranium resources, when in fact reprocessing reduces that to almost zero very quickly )
Actually the peer reviewed science [stormsmith.nl] shows that nuclear energy has no net energy return. What this means is every dollar spent on nuclear energy is wasted. The study uses industrial standards for process measurement as a basis.
Enjoy the lies. Pity that environmentalists so often have to resort to them - not many ideals on those idealists.
I don't think this is a matter of 'environmentalists' anymore, our society has some severe structural issues. If we don't solve them the future of the human race will become very bleak indeed.
Re:Too bad... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's actually not a lie to say that the total cost of nuclear production in unknown, as the number will only be known in about 1 million years scale in the future when the last isotope will finally be in range with the natural toxicity level. Most of the dangerous nuclear mass wast on the planet is not even close to be stocked in a final facility and most of the plans to do it are still uncertain in time, reliability, and total cost. Add to this that the deconstruction in good condition of a nuclear reactor has never be in range of what was planned. Finally add to this the over scale cost of a few major catastrophic nuclear events per century...
I don't know how people think about nuclear production in the USA, but in EU it's clear that more and more people are aware that nuclear production is a very complex subject that deal with very high amount of money up to the point that something more simpler to manage in might be preferable.
I'm waiting for the doomsayers (Score:2, Funny)
To decry wind energy, saying we're slowing the rotation of the earth down or something.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Barton#Position_on_wind_energy [wikipedia.org]
In June 2010, Barton questioned the wisdom of deficit spending to fund an extensive national wind turbine energy generation grid. He said, "Wind is God’s way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas where it’s hotter to areas where it’s cooler. That’s what wind is. Wouldn’t it be ironic if in the interest of global warming we mandated massive switches to wind energy, which is a finite resource, which slows the winds down, which causes the temperature to go up? Now, I’m not saying that’s going to happen, Mr. Chairman, but that is definitely something on the massive scale. I mean, it does make some sense. You stop something, you can’t transfer that heat, and the heat goes up. It’s just something to think about."
Re:I'm waiting for the doomsayers (Score:5, Insightful)
Skyscrapers also interfere with wind. On the other hand, we've removed many a tree that used to interfere with the wind
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Did you even try looking?? Took all of 15 seconds with Teh Googleh.
Go to page 91 on linked PDF
https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]
Now, wind is God's way of balancing
heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas where it is
hotter to areas where it is cooler. That is what wind is.
Wouldn't it be ironic if in the interest of global warming we
mandated massive switches to energy, which is a finite
resource, which slows the winds down, which causes the
temperature to go up? Now, I am not saying that is going to
happen
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If you were correct, you wouldn't be typing this, because your cells would have no energy source to do so.
Welcome to basic chemistry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Article ignores variability (Score:5, Insightful)
The article discusses wind power vs. coal and other types of power purely on the basis of cost, with absolutely no discussion of reliability.
If wind power is as cheap as he claims, then with a reliable storage technology wind would be a total no-brainer. But as it is, wind can only be part of a strategy. You can't count on wind for base load, and when wind varies you need to have other types of power (such as natural gas) ready to pick up the slack.
I'm hoping that the Ambri liquid metal batteries [greentechmedia.com] will do everything that Professor Sadoway claims. If so, they will change everything, and I will be cheering for more wind and solar. Until then, wind power only can serve as a niche producer.
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If wind power is as cheap as he claims, then with a reliable storage technology wind would be a total no-brainer. But as it is, wind can only be part of a strategy.
Germany, for example, went into agreements with Norway to build links between the two countries to allow them to use German wind when it's available, and Norwegian hydro when it isn't.
Re:Article ignores variability (Score:5, Informative)
There is a Norwegian-Danish link up though, and Denmark are currently running on more than a third wind power; actually the first 6 months of this year, they were over 40% wind power.
Re:Article ignores variability (Score:5, Interesting)
Partly, but it's not enough.
When the wind blows very strongly, Denmark already, even now, generates more than 100% of their national electricity demand. That's because wind can vary by a factor of 3 or so above the average; so once you get to 30% or so, when there's strong winds over the whole country, it completely dominates.
Meanwhile, Norway has a lot of hydroelectricity. So when the wind blows hard they export the excess to Norway, and Norway shuts down their hydroelectricity- it holds back its water temporarily. When the wind drops they turn the hydroelectricity back on more and power Denmark off the hydro with the water they've saved. The overall result is a very even power supply, and no carbon produced.
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Not really. DC is actually better for transmission - especially under water which I guess a link between Norway and Germany would be. Also I think Norway is not part of the synchronized continental European grid, and HVDC might also be advantageous when connecting different AC grids.
Read the Report (Score:5, Insightful)
The study was performed by Ecofys [ecofys.com], a renewable energy consultancy, and the cover sheet comes with disclaimers about its accuracy.
The actual report [europa.eu] is more interesting than the articles that hype its findings. The core results are seen on page 36 (PDF Sheet 53).
You will find that there are a lot of assumptions. In particular, they place a great cost factor on "depletion of energy resources". That single adder more than doubles their cost for nuclear. The explanation is that this is the cost of using up our uranium supplies. This is on top of the cost of uranium, already included elsewhere. If you read enough youll find that they just made a big assumption and don't yet really have a basis for it. Its quite convenient for them to make an assumption that magically brings nuclear up to their derived cost for solar. Of course, even as assumed, that cost could be mostly eliminated by reprocessing. They also place a cost on "heat production".
There are no cost considerations included for reliability, intermittancy and variablility. Nor direct infrastructure costs associated by technology, such as the need to add new transmission lines to accommodate wind. In fact, that is probably the biggest cost factor left out of the wind result. Section 3.4 talks about trasmission infrastructure. I'll paraphrase.. "we ignored it because it was too hard to figure out". Another nice convenience for them.
Taken at face value, if I'm a renewables guy looking at this report, I'd have to question why more money goes in to solar than wind.
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And, you must also consider that this report
Re:Read the Report (Score:4, Insightful)
Sooner or later, a transmission infrastructure upgrade will be cheaper than dealing with the rising fuel prices and external costs. I don't see how this could be possibly a matter of "if" rather than "when".
If this happens, the transition will happen pretty naturally following the prices of energy/fuel.
Trying to pre-emptively optimize for the "right" outcome ignores the risk of guessing the wrong new future energy tech.
Re:Read the Report (Score:5, Insightful)
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Wind it cheaper for everyone, once you factor in all sorts of things that utility companies don't directly pay for, like pollution and radiation from coal.
In kWh per dollar, almighty coal reigns supreme, and corporations have no soul, only ledger sheets.
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Three mistakes.
Wind is reliable. It just does not blow where you 'want it'. Distribute your plants, and you always have enough plants producing power.
You don't need storage unless you are close to 100% load coverage of the grid, Storage is only interesting for home owners that want to live "off grid" ... for the grid itself it makes no sense. Instead of SORING you rather feed it into the grid, that uses it.
Finally: base load is not what you think it is. Base load is the MINIMUM amount of power (hence the na
Re:Article ignores variability (Score:4, Informative)
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http://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/e... [fraunhofer.de]
Slide 28 shows the wind variability by week, and slide 40 shows the variability by day.
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The previous idiot was claiming that a wind turbine can produce 200% of its nameplate capacity; but by definition the most it can produce is the nameplate capacity.
Now, you, you're claiming that wind power requires a large spinning reserve. The information I have is that this is false. The reality is that there's very little spinning reserve used for that purpose; wind forecasts are used to predict wind power generation several days in advance, and generation is bought in and out as needed in the normal way
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We're also sitting on a vast number of gas turbines for peaking power that take almost no time to spin up. Power networks are designed for days of maximum usage plus a bit more, plus often some wriggle room in case one of the largest units on the grid at such a time.
So much fuss about one of many things in the energy mix. I'm sick of this bullshit of cowards just using an item of technology as a proxy to attack a political viewpoint instead of going a
Diseconomies (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately our system of economics doesn't capture these diseconomies.
Imported oil is another one. If you factored in the cost of political and military involvement in the middle east the price of oil would look very different.
Re:Diseconomies (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately our system of economics doesn't capture these diseconomies.
Europe (the subject of this report) has a system of carbon credits specifically designed to capture these externalities. Unfortunately, the European carbon credit market was corrupted and diluted by politicians.
Re:Diseconomies (Score:5, Interesting)
Economics has the concept of "externalities" - basically effects of an activity that are not captured in its production costs. These can be negative (like pollution) or positive (like increasing productivity from a transit system).
One of the primary jobs of governments is to help correct the effects of externalities through regulation and taxes. The particular problem here is that the externalities (for CO2) are global, but the governments are local. This makes proper taxation / regulation difficult. If a government taxes industry to account for global pollution, but if other governments do not, that will tend to drive industry to non-regulated and likely dirtier locations (resulting in MORE pollution not less). It may be possible to fix this with import taxes on these goods, but that gets into the very difficult and political world of international trade regulations.
Not saying it can't be done, but its tricky.
What about... (Score:2)
Yeah but we all know that coal is so 19th century. What about clean coal?
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Clean coal still releases lots of CO2, and you still have to do something with all of the heavy metals and sulfur compounds that are captured. It's good that they're not going into the air, but is going into a landfill that much better?
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Clean(er) coal is still mostly an idea, not yet commercially implemented (at least when talking about carbon sequestration in the US). A pretty good article is at National Geographic [nationalgeographic.com]. It mentions that there is a plant under construction in Kemper County, Mississippi, that should capture more than half of its CO2 emissions and redirect them to an oil field. The project has suffered from cost overruns and delays (new tech, not horribly surprising). Besides sequestration, there is work being done on "gassi
take into account (Score:2)
"if you were to take into account mining, pollution, and adverse health impacts of coal and gas ..."
What are the chances that those costs can be "taken into account" (imagined) differently by different people?
Conventional Wisdom (Score:2)
I'm not so sure about the assertion that alternative energy sources like wind and solar are considered more expensive than fossil fuels. I always thought that they were considered cheaper but not a serious contender to replace fossil fuel plants as the number of places on the planet that they are reliable enough for baseload generation are limited. And even though they don't contribute to air pollution, they aren't necessarily a magic bullet as they have other environmental impacts in more subversive ways (
Getting better at it too (Score:5, Insightful)
This would be on top of the fact that the turbines themselves are becoming cheaper and better with their nearly continuous improvements. So for anyone making decisions on future projects these numbers would not only be getting more reliable but could end up not being optimistic enough. Whereas with more mature technologies like coal the numbers are going to simply be the numbers.
shocked (Score:3, Interesting)
wow I am shocked, a report written by a renewable energy consultancy group and surprise surprise it says renewable energy is cheaper by including a whole raft of external costs.
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I just checked my electric bill for last month. I paid around 10 cents per kwh for electricity last month. I checked what the price of electricity is in Germany and it's around 36 cents per kwh in May of 2013. If that's what wind power has done for y'all then keep it.
Study summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Interestingly, they also included ozone depletion as an external cost. I didn't realize the ozone layer was affected by coal plants, but apparently it is.
To calculate the damage caused by Global Warming, they relied on some other papers published on the topic. I wasn't able to access those papers, so that is where my summary will end.
Conventional wisdom (Score:3)
Since when did that 'wisdom' imply that wind is more expensive than coal?
Wind was more expensive when wind plants ware scarce and 'expensive' to set up and had a relatively low yield.
Setting up a 25MW plant (what se build now) is cheaper then setting up 5 5MW plants.
It was a no brainer 25 years ago that wind will be in the end cheaper than coal.
Why is everyone 'playing surprised?'
Cheaper? Cheaper means only one thing. (Score:4, Insightful)
Cheaper means only one thing. How much is my electricity bill at the end of the month.
What? You want me the end user to be responsible for the carbon emissions of my energy use? I'm perfectly fine with that ... as long as it's as cheap as it can possibly be.
Ok I may sound like a troll, but the reality is that is exactly how people think. Our local energy utilities have often provided split bills. For a little extra money you can fund a separate unit that is monitored by the government as not for profit, and that fund offsets the cost differences between dirty and clean energy. I bet you can imagine how much of a voluntary uptake there is on people being charged 5c/kWh more.
What an absurd argument (Score:3)
... the Key dodge here is "when health impacts are considered"... but the thing is you can't know what the health impacts are of the coal industry. You can ASSUME those impacts. But you can't say that because there are 5 coal plants there are 522 incidents of lung infection. You can't know that. You could shut down all those coal plants and have the same number of lung infections or quadruple them and have no significant change.
The issue is complicated and people are going to get "emotional" or "political" about this ... I really don't care.
Here is where I am on this issue...
1. I am all in favor of renewables IF they are themselves produced renewably. That is, build your solar and wind power generators using solar and wind power. Ever note that a great many of these technologies are built using nuclear or coal power? I'm not asking that they locate their factories next to the production. If your industrial sector is by some coal power plants and you really have to use coal power... Fine. Buy energy credits from the renewable energy plants or something. I just find the hypocrisy of building solar on coal power to be a little odd when people keep telling me how great solar is and how terrible coal is... If solar is so great, no one has cheaper solar power then a solar panel factory. NO ONE has cheaper panels then them. Which means no one is in a better position to self generate using solar power then a solar panel factory. No one. And if they're not doing that... then I wonder if people are lying to me when they say solar is cheap. Because I'll tell you this... factories that produce coal generators are very happy to power themselves with coal power. Oil refineries are very happy to power themselves with oil. Nuclear reactor factories are very happy to power themselves with nuclear reactors. So why are not solar panel factories powering themselves with solar panels?
2. Any estimation of cost and subsidy has to take all the subsidies and costs into consideration. It is very common for people to cherry pick numbers that make their desired conclusion look more likely.
3. Solar and wind power are by their natures more defuse energy sources that are not as inclined to be centralized. To be truly useful both of these power generation methods needs to be decentralized... ideally to the consumer level. You might consider for example giving every resident a few solar panels to put on their roof along with the associated electrical hardware. Have them be owned by the power utility and let residents put the panels where they want so long as they get sun. Giant centralized plants are sensible with high density energy generation systems. Solar and wind are neither.
4. In respects to wind especially, you need to make these things more aesthetic. Unlike nuclear or coal you need thousands and thousands of these things over many miles. That means rather then one ugly building we're treated to thousands. And because of that you need to have some design flexibility. Now the way they're designed now mostly is to maximize efficiency and cost. Which is fine but it looks like what it is. If you instead put out some generalized design requirements and instead let home owners, towns, local communities decide how they want it to look then you might get wider adoption. Consider for example the windmills of Holland. Not only are they not an eye sore... they're a tourist attraction. Consider further the Hoover dam... tourist attraction... because its art decto stylings make for an attractive photo op.
5. Keep in mind that regardless of everything we need power. So if the renewables aren't up to the job right now... do not screw with power that is at this moment able to meet demand. Doing so will just drive up energy costs which mostly hurts poor people.
Comment removed (Score:3)
Re:as the birds go (Score:5, Insightful)
It's true that they kill birds. But so do cars and skyscrapers. And I'd wager that coal - between the waste disposal, emitted mercury, and mining - kills birds, too.
Re:as the birds go (Score:5, Insightful)
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certain based on what facts?
Half of all birds in the world die each year, that's a fact. Coal is not even on the list of what kills birds in this world, even if you imagine some avian cancer or mercury poisoning is caused by coal.
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Just a sec. Are you counting chickens raised strictly for slaughter?
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Re:as the birds go (Score:5, Funny)
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Pretty certain that Coal kills more birds than wind power
Is that better or worse?
Killing more birds sounds worse, unless wind turbines kill more endangered (or otherwise valuable) species.
Re:as the birds go (Score:4, Interesting)
just to put this in context:
People eat 8 billion chickens in the US per year.
Number of birds estimated killed by windfarms is well under 1 million.
So I guess if they 'don't go to waste' then society doesn't care much.
Re: as the birds go (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:as the birds go (Score:5, Funny)
And I'd wager that coal - - kills birds, too.
Coal doesn't kill birds. People with coal kill birds . . .
. . . or should that be birds with coal kill birds . . . or people . . . ?
Re:as the birds go (Score:5, Funny)
Re:as the birds go (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
In the past year, three birds have been killed by colliding with my office window. And that is only while I was in my office. In the long run, Darwinian evolution will solve this problem.
Re:as the birds go (Score:4, Funny)
Man, you have to stay out of your office. You are apparently drawing these creatures to you.
Go sit in the forest for a while, and let them settle on the tree branches around you.
Re:as the birds go (Score:4, Interesting)
Architecture is also starting to consider the problem. Turns out it isn't that hard to make windows that aren't as attractive to birds and some jurisdictions are now mandating more bird friendly design.
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With harder birds that can break thru windows of course.
Re: as the birds go (Score:3)
Maybe we should use Linux.
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At least in Germany buildings and structures with large glass panels have stickers depicting predatory birds on them so other bird would stay away.
OK, as long as they *selectively* kill birds. (Score:3)
It's true that they kill birds. But so do cars and skyscrapers. And I'd wager that coal - between the waste disposal, emitted mercury, and mining - kills birds, too.
OK, as long as they *selectively* kill birds.
I mean, if all they killed were pigeons, that'd be fine, right? We might even build more of them, even without the subsidies...
Re:as the birds go (Score:5, Insightful)
And it really pisses me off when such "whatever it takes" political losers pollute this site and attempt to blame their end justifies the means bullshit on others. Pretending to be far too stupid to have any sense of scale (giant, spinning blades; stretching as far as the eye can see) is an added touch that makes me despair that we've wasted a generation and not protected them from weasels with propaganda.
When did this place turn into an anti-technology site for idiots who wallowed in student politics and never grew up?
Why do "conservative" losers who make fun of others interest in wildlife conservation suddenly pretend to get worried about a trivial number of birds running into a couple of thousand windmills spread over a vast continent? Fuck the tendency to treat various bits of technology as proxies for political parties - stop being cowards and address the politics directly on sites dedicated to such a thing and please leave this place as somewhere to discuss the technology on it's own merits.
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It's pointless and they are just making themselves look like slimy weasels.
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as the birds go (Score:3, Informative)
Stop repeating this crap. Wind turbines are not a significant impact on bird populations compared to many other sources, and are not a serious concern except in areas where they are specifically likely to impact an endangered species. There are people out there with a significant financial incentive to convince you that wind power is bad for the environment, and it's a lie.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_wind_power#mediaviewer/File:Bird_mortality.svg
Note that that's a log scale.
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It is not that wind turbines aren't more dangerous than other sources, it is that they are dangerous to certain species such as bald eagles. Conservationists have even sued the government [dailycaller.com] over it.
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Power Companies Don't Have Real Costs (Score:5, Insightful)
If this author were correct, the power companies would already be rushing to build wind-driven turbines. They already have people carefully weighing the costs and benefits of each power-generation method. When I see wind-driven turbines appearing on the windy parts of my horizon, then I'll believe that wind is cheaper than coal.
You are forgetting the major factor of externalized costs. Processes have costs that are internal so they have to be paid for by the owner, and external so they get paid by someone else. Pollution is a major source of externalized cost in conventional power generation.
The power company doesn't have to pay for those costs, but society as a whole does, for example in asthma treatments and deaths, or likely in certain kinds of cancers. So the power company will do the thing which is cheaper for *them* but more expensive as a *whole*.
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That's pure foolishness. The owners of the power companies do not care where their power derives from socially. They care about making a profit for their shareholders. They do that either by charging their customers more, or by reducing their costs. Their rates are usually regulated by the government where they are located; that leaves reducing costs as the only realistic way to produce profits.
The power companies do not operate in your hypothetical "free market". They are restricted by the demands of their
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When you drive the price of energy up so high it causes real pain.....then you'll learn what hate is. I'm all for solar and wind if they're competitive. I'm not for tripling my electric bill for some green religious jihad.