Energy Dept. Wants Big Wind Energy Technology In All 50 US States 256
coondoggie writes: Bigger wind turbines and towers are just part of what the U.S. needs in order to more effectively use wind energy in all 50 states.That was the thrust of a wind energy call-to-arms report called "Enabling Wind Power nationwide" issued this week by the Department of Energy. They detail new technology that can reach higher into the sky to capture more energy and more powerful turbines to generate more gigawatts. These new turbines are 110-140 meters tall, with blades 60 meters long. The Energy Department forecasts strong, steady growth of wind power across the country, both on land and off shore.
Obligatory (Score:2)
(insert joke about needing to install wind turbines near locations where there's a lot of hot air, i.e. politicians)
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Nah, for maximum power you pay Henry Winkler [wikipedia.org] to move to the politicans and harvest energy from the delta caused by his coolness and the hot air from the politicians. We could power the world!
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Simply not true (Score:5, Informative)
Since 1978, utilities have been obligated to purchase electricity from qualified facilities (QFs) under a law called PURPA. Net Metering isn't a federal requirement, but PURPA sure as heck is.
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Note that what makes a "qualified facility" is that the price of electricity purchased from one must be LOWER than the cost to produce the electricity by the utility.
Which means that they're only required to buy the electricity if not doing so would increase the cost of electricity to their customers.
So, no, net mete
"CALL TO ARMS" (Score:2, Interesting)
.. should alert the alert reader to the DOE's approach on things. Unfortunately the US public hasn't yet been hammered with sticker shock yet unlike the UK and German ratepayers. (Well, Maine rates jumped 19.6 percent last year due to "upgrades" "required" to ease a transmission choke near a wind facility whose power gets shipped to Massachusetts- Maine doesn't need the excess power by they pay for it nonetheless.) The US public as a whole doesn't yet understand that wind turbines GUARANTEE simple-cycle gas
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Wow, you managed to get just about every fact wrong there.
UK, electricity price - not much change over the last decade - renewables are helping to the price down.
Modern wind turbines are at about 40-50% capacity factor. If a wind turbine is getting 6% capacity factor then someone made a mistake in placing that turbine.
"scamming well-meaning environmentalists into thinking these things are going to save the planet." Yeah, because the better option is to do nothing, allow temperature to rise up to 10deg C and
Which one of you is lying? (Score:2)
SolStats shows a chart from UK Department of Energy and Climate Change, that says UK electricity prices have jumped 50% higher than five years ago [solstats.com]
Just curious which one of you is lying - the UK trying to scare people into buying more alternative energy as ,energy prices rise (though of course they don'y say WHY they have risen...) or you trying to avoid scaring people from realizing wind power is quite a lot more expensive?
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http://www.ukpower.co.uk/home_... [ukpower.co.uk]
Note the chart you linked is 5 years out of date, 2010 vs 2015, it looks like prices have fallen back.
If you look at the prices on the page I linked you'll see that you can purchase electricity for about 10p per kwh now - very similar to ten years ago.
Onshore wind costs about 3-4p per kwh - the same as coal if you ignore the massive external costs of coal. Nuclear is being offered 9.25p per kwh and they are still not sure if they want to build. Offshore wind is now closer to
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Likely Solstats.
Like the parent my energy bill is dropping every year, but the news claim the price per kw/h would increase.
For me it did not increase since ten years or more.
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Question on EROEI (Score:4, Interesting)
Can someone help me understand EROEI ("Energy Return on Energy Input").
All the research on future sources of energy (that I can find) say that we're doomed as a civilization [collapseof...zation.com] because the EROEI for renewables isn't as large as that of fossil fuels.
Okay, EROEI is the energy you get out minus (or divided by) the energy you put in, I get that. Fossil fuels take relatively little energy to gather, and generate lots of energy so their EROEI is rather large.
Wind and solar require a larger energy input per energy out, so it's EROEI is smaller but still greater than 1, even after accounting for mining the raw materials.
I'm not clear how the economic conclusion is reached that solar and wind cannot power our civilization. If we have enough rooftop solar and wind farms to generate all the energy we need as a civilization, and if there's enough left over to make *more* solar and wind installations over time (to replace the warn out bits), then why does EROEI matter?
Assuming that EROEI is a net energy positive (with a reasonable margin of error), why does it even matter at all?
(Also note: world population growth is slowing [google.com], and is steady or decreasing in all industrialized nations (including the US if you deduct immigration). The standard economic model assumes infinite consumption, but is that assumption correct? Is there be an upper limit to personal comfort in terms of energy use? Or at least diminishing returns? Would finite population and finite consumption invalidate the standard economic model?)
Re:Question on EROEI (Score:5, Insightful)
EROI still matters as that basically tells energy investors where they will get the biggest return for their money.
The trick is that the EROI for fossil fuels is decreasing as all the easy reserves have been tapped. We're mucking around with high tech dynamically positioned rigs for deep water drilling, oil sands, etc... that require more energy and effort to obtain. The EROI for coal has been depressed artificially due to environmental regulations and CO2 rules, but there are still ample reserves. The EROI for wind and solar should be relatively flat, even rising slightly if the technologies improve.
At some point the fossil fuel EROIs will fall below the EROIs for renewables. It's just a matter of when. Whether you invest in renewables now or later really depends on your perception of the outlook for these energy sources.
The thing to keep in mind is, low EROIs mean low net power production. An EROI of 1.01 is energetically feasible, but it means you are only getting a net surplus of 0.01 units of energy for your 1 unit of effort. That 0.01 is what you get to power your society with. If you are using a technology with an EROI of 1.01, it means you will need a LOT of that technology to power society. You will actually need nearly 2X a LOT of that technology as you need nearly the same amount of power to simply make the technology.
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This is now completely untrue by a large amount, it may have been true many years ago but it certainly isn't now. Solar's energy payback time [thenextturn.com] is now as little as 6 months for a panel that lasts 30-100 years*, that's a EROEI of 60-200 not less than 1!!!
Because the manufacturing of solar panels has evolved hugely:
Price history of silicon PV cells si [wikipedia.org]
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Perhaps you should google?
And use different terms, no one actually says: EROEI
But rest assured, for solar panels the time needed to regenerate the energy used to build them is about 6 months, for big wind turbines not more than a year.
So: we are not doomed :D
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So, in a world where the best EROEI available is 20, only 4% of all that societies efforts need to be devoted to obtaining energy. In a world where the best EROEI is 5, 20% of all the work is devoted to getting the energy to power civilization. At EROEI of 2, fully half of all our efforts as a civilization are devoted to energy extraction/production and everything else (agriculture, industry, medicine, art) has to fit into the remaining half of our time and resources.
So as EROEI drops, sometime before you hit 1, you're left with a nation of nothing but farmers and people working in solar panel factories, and any further decrease in EROEI means choosing between food on the table and power when you hit a light switch. At that point (if not before) civilization collapses.
That's an insightful answer, and is probably what people are talking about when they describe EROEI issues.
But there's a logical flaw in that argument, which is that it assumes that the energy needs of civilization must exactly fit the leftover energy. It does not take into account the magnitudes involved, it does not count leftover "unused" energy, and it compares a linear system with an exponential.
Take a concrete example from your numbers. Suppose EROEI is 2 as described. One half of our energy goes into
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Or to put it another way, suppose a solar panel will produce the energy equivalent of 4x it's energy investment over 20 years (which is about right with today's technology).
No it is not right.
a) Solar panels repay their energy production "bill" after 6 month
b) Solar panels degrade over time, so that after 30 years they produce only 75% of what they did before.
So in 30 years they produce like 120 times the mount of energy they costed to produce. And they easy last a century or longer, depending on the "inst
Biggest problem... (Score:2)
...is not the wind, is not the turbines, and not really the way the grid works, it's the fact that the grid doesn't run to where the turbines are likely to be built, where the wind energy is most available. Boon Pickens had a similar idea about 10 or so years ago, and his ideas got shot down for this reason.
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> Otherwise most of it is lost.
PFFT. The entire US electrical grid loses 7% of the energy fed into it. Most of those losses are in the last mile.
HVDC lines lose about 2.5% per 800 km and 0.6% in the end-point stations.
Read something before posting next time. Here:
http://www.siemens.com/press/pool/de/events/2012/energy/2012-07-wismar/factsheet-hvdc-e.pdf
Charts tell the story (Score:3)
Follow the money (Score:3, Interesting)
As someone who spent some years in county government where various wind projects have taken place, one thing is true... Without a shell game of tax dollars shuttling in and out with many transfers of project ownership, there would be NO turbines standing. You do realize that even when those monsters are turning in the wind, they usually are just lubricating internals and not generating?
Re:Follow the money (Score:4, Informative)
Without a shell game of tax dollars shuttling in and out with many transfers of project ownership, there would be NO turbines standing.
Do you really expect us to believe that power plants burning coal or gas don't involve any political shenanigans and don't benefit from any subsidy?
You do realize that even when those monsters are turning in the wind, they usually are just lubricating internals and not generating?
Wrong: The EROI for wind energy is between 20 [sciencedirect.com] and 25, meaning they produce 20 to 25 times more energy than has been used for their construction, operation and decommission.
Re:Won't someone think of the birds. (Score:5, Insightful)
That energy has to come from somewhere and blocking the surface wind reduces the air velocity and increases the amount of heat at ground level.
Trees also block the wind. So a simple solution is to require anyone erecting a windmill to cut down a tree to compensate.
A more complicated solution would be to improve math and physics education, so even dimwitted people can figure out that the amount of energy windmills extract from the atmosphere is utterly inconsequential.
Re:Won't someone think of the birds. (Score:5, Funny)
Oh don't give me your logic and facts, everyone knows wind turbines have a huge impact on the atmosphere but billions of tons of carbon dioxide doesn't affect the atmosphere at all
Re:Won't someone think of the birds. (Score:5, Informative)
Plus it kills a lot of birds.
Incorrect. [stateofthebirds.org]
But it was in Mary Poppins! (Score:2)
The movie had an old lady on the church steps singing:
"Feed them birds. Turbines. Turbines.
Feed them birds. Turbines go slash."
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We throw you in first, to stop the whining.
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Small songbirds, yes. Bald eagles, not really.
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Want to save 70 million birds a year? Build more wind farms : Renew Economy [reneweconomy.com.au]
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harness it at 30,000 ft and run a giant power cable
Here are some of the issues;
1. How heavy is a 30,000 ft cable that can carry the electricity? Probably tons
2. How strong must the cable be to be able to support itself? As the cable get stronger it also gets heavier and the baloon gets bigger which requires a heaver cable to hold it. It is an infinite circle.
3. How much tension will the supporting balloon place on the cable and turbines? As the balloon gets bigger there is more surface area and therefore more tension on the cable.
I doubt very much that one
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As the cable get stronger it also gets heavier
not always true. carbon fibre is less weight than steel, but if layed out correctly can be stronger
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Also no one has ever made a cable anywhere near that long. An electrical conductor can weigh upwards of 3/4 of a ton per 1000 feet [wesco.com]. The conductor alone could be 20,000 tons. Stronger yes, strong enough to support the weight of 30,000 feet plus the weight of the conductor plus the pull of the huge balloon? Doubtful.
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If it's 30,000 ft at 3/4 ton per 1000 ft, don't you mean 22.5 tons? Not 20,000 tons?
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That is why you use a kite and not a balloon.
Also you don't let the turbine fly but use the tension on the cable to run a generator on the ground.
But well, there are flying turbine concepts, too.
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That is why you use a kite and not a balloon.
Do you have any idea how big a kite that can hold 30,000 feet of electrical cable would be? We are talking about 20 tons for the conductor alone.
Also you don't let the turbine fly but use the tension on the cable to run a generator on the ground.
Tension generators work by letting the kite pull a cord which is attached to a generator. The kite is the partially furled and reeled part way back in, and the process repeated. The prototypes I have seen have many issues and none use tethers anywhere near 330,000 feet long.
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You brought the 30,000 feet issue :D which is actually only 10km, so not very long.
20 tons? You did the math? sounds not much to me.
An airplane weights like 130 tons.
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Sorry, already been done. Although not at 30,000 feet.
There are 10 companies listed in this article from a few years ago
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energ... [ieee.org]
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LOL You're saying there was no wind before the industrial revolution ?
You should be keelhauled
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... [wikipedia.org]
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... vast quantities of wind power destablizes grid ... quantities of wind power are generated at the wrong time of the day for utilization.
This can be fixed with flexible pricing of electricity. Charge more when electricity is scarce, and less when it is plentiful. Many people already have smart meters that can handle this, and some appliances, and many electric cars can already adapt to flexible pricing.
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This can be fixed with flexible pricing of electricity. Charge more when electricity is scarce, and less when it is plentiful
People use electricity when they need to no matter what the price. We turn on lights when it is dark. We cook dinner at dinner time. We have showers in the morning or evening. We wash cloths when we have time. Little of this will be re-scheduled based on the cost of electricity. Are you really going to get up at 3AM to do laundry? I doubt it. Even if you have a timer are you going to leave your wet cloths in the washer till you get up? You might not remember and those cloths will sit for another ten hours.
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Interesting)
Are you really going to get up at 3AM to do laundry? I doubt it.
People on Kauai, HI do this all the time - by setting a timer on a washing machine (electricity prices 8x the national average are a good motivator) . You can also pre-heat water during the nighttime or use solar water heaters during the day.
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I am sure a few people do. I doubt it is common though. Do you have an references to numbers of people who do this? You missed the rest of the statement. Leaving wet laundry around in a hot environment equals mold.
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So you get up at 5AM to put your laundry in the drier? You would be surprised how fast mold grows.
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For the up to 8 hours you wet cloths sit in the washer what happens? How many people do you know get up early enough to hang cloths to dry? What if it is raining? What if one lives in an apartment building?
By the evening your clothes are dry.
Or covered in bird crap.
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For the up to 8 hours you wet cloths sit in the washer what happens? :D
It gets a bit more crumbled
What if one lives in an apartment building?
Erm, what? What is the problem? I have my lines in my bath and a laundry rack.
Or covered in bird crap.
They usually don't come into my flat.
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I live in an apartment and I dry my clothes in the air. My apartment is well ventilated (with a heat exchanger) and thus the moisture won't build up inside.
When I lived in a place where I could dry my clothes outside I did so in the summer. It requires a little more planning and you need to check the weather forecast before you wash. If it's gonna rain you either do not wash or you dry the clothes inside.
Bird poop wasn't an issue, even though we had gorgeous flocks of sparrows over our garden. I can remembe
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For a couple of hours after being washed with a detergent? No, it doesn't.
I know science is hard and all, so you might be surprised that detergent doesnt kill any molds.
Detergent is not a disinfectant.
Now explain to us why you are acting like an expert when both we and you know that you arent one? You don't get to claim that you mistakenly thought you were an expert... you knew you weren't...
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"good motivator"
No, that is a bad motivator. It is like, the slave owner motivating the slave with a beating. Yeah, we are all "motivated" to survive.
Making life harder for people is not "good" motivation, that's just called "survival".
Hey, if you make the electricity even more expensive, maybe the women will be "motivated" to going back to spending all day washing the clothes by hand.
You're welcome to try doing that yourself.
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There's still a lot that can be done. My grandparents had their pool on a system that allowed the power company to turn it off for periods of time. They got a discount for this. My parents had a timer on their water heater - it was big enough that they could still have a hot shower even with it off, again, only for limited periods, but they got a cut in their bill. Same with AC systems and many other big power suckers that aren't precisely 'on demand'.
Increase the discount by a touch and more people wil
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Some will many won't. If the house is hot, people will use the AC.
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An intelligent AC would already have cooled the house. As a house needs to be well insulated and ventilated with a heat exchanger anyway the heat will not take over too soon.
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> The other issue with wind power is that it can vary uncontrollably minute by minute. This is the kind of instability that needs to be leveled out by more storage.
You are wrong.
While wind power in any individual turbine can do that, the total power generated across a reasonably large grid, cannot. The power variations average out.
What happens is that the weather systems move across the grid, and this massively smooths out the changes at the short time scales (minutes). At the longer time scales, like ho
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You are using a very bad model to think of the electrical grid. It is not a huge pool where electricity injected anywhere on the grid is instantly available anywhere else on the grid. I call that the lake analogy. It is much more like a canal system with specific capacities between specific points and each canal has to be keeps full but not overflowing. Even though the grid may theoretically be balancing input and output there will be local shortages/oversupply because electricity takes time to move.
Here [caiso.com] i
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The problem with the lake analogy is that with a lake you can insert as much energy as you want anywhere you want and take as much as you want anywhere you want.. Electricity goes through cables with finite capacity. If you try to send too much power down the cables they heat, stretch and break. Substations have capacities as well. Try to switch too much power and the station trips.
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Well, the problem with analogies is: they break sooner or later.
No one ever will be able to put more power into a cable than it can transport. The heating and breaking is a no issue. So much power you simply can not produce.
What you mean with "substation" is beyond me, perhaps a transformer?
Bottom line you can not put more power into the grid than you consume ... that is a no brainer if you know how grids work.
So your analogies make no sense as your argumentation is wrong on fundamental principles.
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What you mean with "substation" is beyond me, perhaps a transformer?
I am tired of talking to you is you don't even understand the basics of the grid. You can't eve do a Google search.
Bottom line you can not put more power into the grid than you consume
LMGTFY [lmgtfy.com]
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The other issue with wind power is that it can vary uncontrollably minute by minute. This is the kind of instability that needs to be leveled out by more storage.
No it doesn't. Just broadcast the minute-by-minute price fluctuations over the internet. Intelligent appliances, and intelligent car chargers, can automatically adapt. A refrigerator doesn't have to run its compressor all the time, and it can pre-chill when spot prices drop. Same for the heating element in a clothes dryer. Intelligent car chargers can not only adapt to fluctuations in supply, but they can even feed energy back into the grid when the price spikes.
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"Which no one has and no one is buying." - they are but they are still quite new to the market (in relative terms)
"Most of which is lost when the door is opened" - yes, but the likleyhood is that you'll be in bed asleep during the price drop
you seem to have an obsession about drying clothes in a dryer, the biggest waste of electri
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It is weird, you know, if this was about specifying some IT gadget, people would be all over the hard numbers and data and adding stuff up.
But as soon as it gets onto energy and climate, it becomes this, oh, we can just consume less, and keep building green energy, and it'll all work out.
It'll be fun when you're getting up in the middle of the night to bathe and shower the family, because that's when the hot water is affordable.
People who talk like this have never, I would guess, lived in a 3rd world countr
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Except in practice it turns out that these measures _do_ influence power consumption. And the largest power consumers aren't homes anyway. They're large industries, which go through an entirely different system (the wholesale electricity market).
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Google "demand response". Too lazy? Ok, google in particular the FERC's "Assessment of Demand Response & Advanced Metering staff report", it's a yearly report on demand response and how it affects consumer demand. Too lazy to do that? Ok, here's the 2006 report: http://www.ferc.gov/legal/staf... [ferc.gov] Too lazy to read the table of contents? Ok, the stuff you're looking for is in pages 114-117.
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Wow you found a report that is nine years out of date. Lets look a little further into the first entry, the LIPA Edge [newsday.com] system. One interesting point is that the program cost almost $45 million.
The sign-up fee cost ratepayers some $900,000, the thermostats cost upward of $10 million, and LIPA paid millions to install and maintain the thermostats and market the program. In all, between 2001 and 2008, LIPA spent $33 million to fully fund the program, which is considered among the most effective energy-efficiency programs in LIPA's arsenal, according to a report.
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You can find similar information in every year's report, the 2006 report is by no means special. $45 million is a drop in the bucket, and a large part of that would not be needed today since smart meters are widely deployed.
Also, stop changing your argument. Your initial argument was that price doesn't influence demand. You asked for evidence and I provided solid, verifiable evidence of that.
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You're completely ignoring the evidence and choosing to hold to your ideology-driven viewpoint. It's worthless continuing this argument.
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If there is a similar report every year then why don't you quote them? Evidence that is out of date is useless.
It's worthless continuing this argument.
Because you do not have any real life current evidence that actually shows ant real life current effect of pricing on demand.
By the way the report you cited talks about controlled demand. That is demand that can be cut off from a central control if supply gets short. That is very different than price controlled demand which is the original topic.
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Little of this will be re-scheduled based on the cost of electricity. Are you really going to get up at 3AM to do laundry?
The washing machine does that automatically for you.
If you look at those two graphs you will see that price has little or no effect on demand.
You are interpreting it wrong. If there was no peak price, the peak would be even higher.
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The washing machine does that automatically for you.
And they sit wet in the washer until you put them in the drier. That may be quite a while if you forget or do not have time in the morning. Wet cloths left for hours equals mold.
If there was no peak price, the peak would be even higher.
That is speculation and there is still a huge peak when the prices are high. Peak pricing helps a bit but is not a complete solution.
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Wet cloths left for hours equals mold.
No it does not.
Peak pricing helps a bit but is not a complete solution
A solution to what?
You actually don't know what you are talking about. Bringing peak and off peak into your talks does not help your point of view.
And they sit wet in the washer until you put them in the drier. No one in his sane mind uses a drier anyway. No idea why you base your arguments around that.
And: there exist washing machine / drier combinations. If you need a drier so desperately why do
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No one in his sane mind uses a drier anyway.
So how do you dry your cloths? Sorry some of us would rather not have wet cloths hanging all over our apartment.
If you need a drier so desperately why don't you by a combo?
Because I live in an apartment and we are not allowed to have launder machines in our apartments.
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Are you really going to get up at 3AM to do laundry? I doubt it.
No of course you are not going to get up at 3AM to do laundry. You would fill the washer at night and it would keep tabs on the electricity rates, running when it gets below a certain price (or when it's getting late and the wash needs to start to get it done before you want to take it out).
Even if you have a timer are you going to leave your wet cloths in the washer till you get up?
Yes. I do that often. I am not sitting there waiting till the washer is finally done. I do something else, like working or sleeping.
You might not remember and those cloths will sit for another ten hours.
That rarely happens and does not harm the clothes. If it would happen often or would ha
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That's fine, if you want to live in a third-world nation where you can't rely on having power. You know, the kind of place where you can't run a modern, high-tech economy that depends on reliable supplies of electricity.
But then it's pointless, because we do what other third worlders do, and buy a diesel generator.
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That's fine, if you want to live in a third-world nation where you can't rely on having power. You know, the kind of place where you can't run a modern, high-tech economy that depends on reliable supplies of electricity.
Like Denmark.
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Denmark, Germany and Scotland must love having destablized grids because the have plenty of wind power and are building more. Or maybe they understand the situation a bit better than you do.
What is your solution for cutting CO2 worldwide?
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Unfortunately for my country (Germany) the surrounding countries are getting a bit pissed over having to take our power fluctuations every time the wind picks up/slows down and a cloud moves in front of our freakin' solar panels.,
Even the Green party here which originally championed the Energiewende is slowly retreating on its statements
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because endless resource extraction is not a solution
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"Everyone seems to be on this bandwagon of reducing resources extraction, all the while not realizing its the building block of our modern societies." would you prefer to have just coal burning as a means of power generation or do you like to take advantage of more modern ways. Burning fossil fue
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By all means ignore the media and politicians when it comes to matters of science, but don't ignore the scientists. They seem to think CO2 is not that great a thing to be releasing into the atmosphere, and they have all kinds of evidence to show how and why.
Eventually those resources will run out, so would you rather start finding alternatives then or now?
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Acid Test: Rising CO2 Levels Killing Ocean Life | Conservation Climate [livescience.com]
The Last Time Oceans Got This Acidic This Fast, 96% of Marine Life Went Extinct | Motherboard [vice.com]
WHO | 7 million premature deaths annually linked to air pollution [who.int]
Air pollution costs Europe $1.6tn a year in early deaths and disease, say WHO | Environment | The Guardian [theguardian.com]
Abrupt Climate Change: Past, Present, and Future - YouTube [youtube.com]
Worst Case Climate Change (2008 TED Talk) - YouTube [youtube.com]
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Same source and you know it, Fossil fuels cause air pollution, fossil fuels cause CO2.
Are you kidding, just reject science completely why not.
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You hear the fossil fuel crowd say this a lot... except in practice it turns out that wind power is actually pretty suited to the long-timescale needs of the grid (more power in winter, etc.) and solar, pumped hydro, and batteries can pretty much cover short-term fluctuations. Yes, you do usually need to install a lot of spare capacity with wind but even so it winds up being cheaper than a lot of other forms of power.
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What is your alternative? Carry on polluting because it's cheaper, any you probably won't be around to deal with the really serious consequences so...
Or maybe build more nuclear, throw vast amounts of subsidy at that instead and hope they figure out what to do with the waste and employ competent people for the next 50+ years and don't decide profit is more important than safety.
At some point things will have to change. The only question is what the nature of the change will be. I'd rather it was towards a c
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BULLSHIT
My parents live about a kilometre from a wind turbine, and you can NEVER hear it.
I'll tell you what does travel far though: lies about infrasonic noise supposedly generated by wind turbines in significant quantities.
Re: (Score:3)
A wind turbine with 100m blades has fundamental frequency of about 6Hz. You don't hear that.
Re: (Score:3)
the thump/thump/thump of the blades (like a whirleybird *old ref* overhead for days) during the prevalent low wind conditions doomed this project even though it lasted long enough to depress property values within 15 miles. low frequencies travels far.
I have family that lives about 700m from a 105m high wind turbine (height at the axle) and you cannot hear it. What you can clearly hear however is the wind in the trees and the cows of the nearby farm when they are here.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, wind turbines do indeed raise power costs.
By about 0.3-0.6c per kWh.
Onshore wind power just isn't very expensive.
Denmark is currently running 40% wind power, and their wind is pretty shitty. And they're going for 85% wind power.
Re: (Score:2)
Denmark [...] and their wind is pretty shitty
What is that supposed to mean?
Re:Tornados? (Score:4, Insightful)
Too right, we should also make sure there are no lamp posts, telegraph poles or trees because someday they may be thrown about by a tornado.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, stuff like that can happen. That's partly why they don't put wind turbines close to residential areas; also they are somewhat noisy in high winds at close range.
But if you mean, the tornado could carry the blades for miles, well yeah, but a tornado that big is going to fuck up so much other shit than the wind turbines that that's the least of your troubles.
Re: (Score:3)
I don't see how it's any more dangerous than ripping off roofs or picking up cars or other random structures and debris and throwing them around. Tornadoes tend to have a relatively small footprint as well. The damage they do is severe, but limited in scale in most cases. It makes news only when a very large one happens to plow through a densely populated area, but keep in mind that there are hundreds of tornadoes each year, and most don't do widespread damage.
Wind farms also tend to be located in low-po
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly, it can't happen.
If there is a wind strong enough to destroy a wind turbine, you have far worse problems than worrying about the blades/turbine.
E.g. you lose all over land transmission lines, regardless of power plant technology connected to it.
Your roads, houses etc. will be gone too. Actually I doubt you have any survivours in such an event in the area covered by such a storm.