America's First Offshore Wind Farm In Pictures (businessinsider.com) 222
Last week, an anonymous Slashdot reader submitted a story from the Associated Press, detailing the United States' first offshore wind farm that is set to open off the cost of Rhode Island this fall. Business Insider issued a report today with some additional specifications and stunning pictures of the Block Island Wind Farm: "GE and Deepwater Wind, a developer of offshore turbines, are installing five massive wind turbines in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. They will make up the first offshore wind farm in North America, called the Block Island Wind Farm. Over the past several weeks, the teams have worked to install the turbines 30 miles off the cost of Rhode Island, and are expected to finish by the end of August 2016. The farm will be fully operational by November 2016." Fun fact: GE's offshore wind farm has turbines that are twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty. You can view the slideshow of images here.
6 megawatts of energy (Score:5, Funny)
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A megawatt is a unit of POWER, not ENERGY. 30 MW is about 3% the power output of a typical nuclear or fossil-fuel power plant.
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So what the hell is a BTU - "British Thermal Unit" ? I asked a British friend, but he had no idea.
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A megawatt is a unit of POWER, not ENERGY. 30 MW is about 3% the power output of a typical nuclear or fossil-fuel power plant.
Yes.
Since demand is not a square wave we need tiny little generators like these to fill in the gaps. Even though they cost more per MW/h they cost a lot less than building more huge units a cover a fraction of the demand those huge units can supply.
Windmills compete against other tiny generators like gas turbines not against a a typical nuclear or fossil-fuel power plant.
I used to work for a power utility with almost nothing other than coal fired units. We burned a shitload of coal we didn't need to becau
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I don't think I understand. Why would you "bring online" some wind turbines in a period of high demand? If you already have them, why wouldn't you be running them all the time and use less coal? You're not paying for the wind. Then you still have the problem of spooling something up and down to match demand, but your baseline coal use is lower.
I'm not trying to disagree with you, I just don't get it. Your logic would make sense to me in any other case where there was a fuel cost to the "little generators."
Cross over point (Score:2)
Because that's when you need that little bit more of extra capacity.
Because demand is not a square wave and those coal units are huge. It takes many hours to bring a thermal unit online, even the tiny ones (eg. 120MW for something really old).
Running costs are not zero compared with idle/reserve costs. Spinning a heavy generator instead of
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are installing five massive wind turbines in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean
This wasn't exactly very impressive to read, either...
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This wasn't exactly very impressive to read, either...
No, but what a feat of engineering if they had actually done it! Pay-off time must be long on such an installation, but you'd have to admire the guts to bring such a project to fruition, all the same. :-)
Re: 6 megawatts of energy (Score:5, Insightful)
This was another good one:
The potential for offshore wind energy in the US is massive. If we build in all of the available ocean space, the winds above coastal waters could provide more than 4,000 gigawatts a year. That's more than four times the nation’s current annual electricity production.
So, gosh, all we have to do is use all the available coastal ocean space, and we'll get four times the annual electrical output. That's a bit like saying "If we covered every square foot of the contiguous US in solar panels, we'd have about 1300x the current electrical output." Technically true, but somewhat misleading in its sheer improbability.
Yeah, a good thing to start diversifying our energy needs, but let's not get carried away with over-optimistic nonsense like that.
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The sentence you quote makes not much sense. 4000 GW is a power unit, bot energy. So perhaps he meant 4000GWh, but that is an absurd low number for americas energy need per year.
Then again, to power all of America with wind power you need not even a third of Floridas and Oregons coast.
If you plastered the whole cost you had power for the whole earth multiple times.
And then again, why do you care about how much coast is 'used' you wont see the wind mills from land anyway!
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The 4000GW would supposedly be the generating capacity at any given point in time, so it doesn't have a time component. The EIA as of a few years ago put the generating needs of the country [eia.gov] at just under 1000GW during peak summer consumption.
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Ah,
my bad. I had assumed the USA need more than 1000GW power. So the 4000 looked weird to me.
If you meant ugly when you said stunning (Score:2, Informative)
I'll agree. Those pictures are about as pleasing as a triptych of oil refineries in NJ.
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No, the oIL platform next to them is significantly uglier, imho.
And neither is quite as ugly as your mentioned oil refineries in NJ.
For comparison, here is an authentic NJ refinery.
http://media.nj.com/business_i... [nj.com]
Re:If you meant ugly when you said stunning (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll agree. Those pictures are about as pleasing as a triptych of oil refineries in NJ.
If anyone wants to judge for themselves, just how foolish this particular statement is, check out:
New Jersey Oil Refinery [google.com] vs Off Shore Wind Farms [google.com].
Sure, beauty is totally subjective, but few honest people rate an oil refinery as more beautiful than a windfarm.
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As someone who photographs industrial equipment as a hobby, no. Oil refineries are far more beautiful especially at dusk.
As for which I would want to live near, wind farm all the way. Refineries are smelly polluting things especially at night when they blow soot from furnaces
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New Jersey Oil Refinery vs Off Shore Wind Farms
To judge the comparison fairly, one must consider the setting... tell me: which would you find less beautiful: a booger on a tea coaster or a turd in the toilet bowl? ;)
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To judge the comparison fairly, one must consider the setting
Finally! An intelligent response.
Consider tho', that most oil refineries are built on rivers or oceanfront (for shipping access & water for cooling). Most refineries are in spots of great natural beauty - you just don't think of them like that, because the refinery has made the area hideous for decades.
And if we're considering the setting, lets also consider the smell, the polluting smoke, the respiratory problems nearby residents will suffer
Re:If you meant ugly when you said stunning (Score:5, Insightful)
Hold on, I linked to two google images searches - both of which had hundreds of images of oil refineries or offshore wind farms.
You cherry picked two wind farms (and not off-shore ones at that), both of which are against a fairly unattractive landscape, but are still more attractive to me than any oil refinery I've seen.
Sure, beauty is totally subjective, but few honest people rate an oil refinery as beautiful as a wind farm.
How about you post side-by-side pictures of an oil refinery you consider as attractive as a wind farm?
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Those of you who don't live near one let this Tulsan tell you, the unsightly looks of an oil refinery having nothing on the nasty smell. There's a whole quarter of our city that most folks don't want to live in if they can avoid it because the typical prevailing winds blow air from the Tulsa oil refineries that way.
I've never smelled a wind farm, but I'm guessing it isn't nearly as bad.
But hey, our gas is $1.78 a gallon here today because of those refineries. Vroom vroom!
Re:If you meant ugly when you said stunning (Score:4, Insightful)
Allrightee, how about we just cut the bullshit & go back to your original statement - the one I'm calling out as dishonest:
If you meant ugly when you said stunning, I'll agree. Those pictures are about as pleasing as a triptych of oil refineries in NJ.
Sure, beauty is totally subjective, but few honest people rate an oil refinery as pleasing to the eye as a wind farm. Do you? How about you link to a picture (or three) of NJ oil refineries that you find of equal (or greater) pleasantness than one of the pictures in the article.
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Allrightee, how about we just cut the bullshit & go back to your original statement - the one I'm calling out as dishonest:
Says they guy who started the bullshit with.
Sure, beauty is totally subjective
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Yes, I acknowledge beauty is subjective, this gives you a chance to show a picture of a NJ oil refinery that you subjectively find as attractive as one of the pics in the linked article.
Your failure to back up your statement with something substantive shows that you're a bullshit artist.
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beauty is subjective
But anyone who disagrees with you is a liar.
Gtocha chief.
Poor migratory birds... (Score:2, Insightful)
Just make a search on "birds killed by wind generators" and see images.
Can we use led lamps and live in modest homes; like not heating or air-conditioning ten thousand of square feet just to look prestigious? Or eat a bit less and drive normal size cars? Perhaps then there would be no need to make this wonderful planet's surface ugly with so many power-lines, wind turbines towers, and chimneys.
Re:Poor migratory birds... (Score:4, Informative)
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Now do a search on birds killed by people, and birds killed by pets and make sure you're sitting down. I wouldn't want you to injure yourself in all the outrage.
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http://www.nbcnews.com/id/4544... [nbcnews.com]
but wind turbines quickly catching up:
https://abcbirds.org/threat/bi... [abcbirds.org]
It is true, cats are killing a lot too. A stray pet cat is a formidable predator, - that is why in some countries stray cats are illegal. Birds are different from humans, and some loss of younglings is inevitable. However power-lines, and now more and more wind turbines, decimate the strongest ones, who survived, grew up, a
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Bird collisions kill millions of migratory birds.
And human beings kill billions. But yes CO2, global warming and acid rain have no effect on birds at all. None what so ever. They'll all live through the apocalypse, except for the ones that hit a windfarm.
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That's true. But the newer, much larger turbines don't kill as many birds as the smaller ones.
Offshore wind is very uncompetitive (Score:2)
Offshore wind is one of the most hideously expensive methods of power generation. Here is a comparison [wikipedia.org] of the levelized cost of generated electricity, in US cents per kWh, for various generating methods, projected for 2020:
Natural gas combustion: 6.9-15.6
Coal combustion: 8.7-16.0
"Advanced nuclear": 9.2-10.1
Hydro: 6.9-11.9
Geothermal: 4.4-5.2
Photovoltaic: 9.8-19.3
Concentrated solar heating: 17.4-38.3
Onshore wind: 6.6-8.2
Offshore wind: 17.0-27.0
These cost figures from the Energy Information Administration incl
Re:Offshore wind is very uncompetitive (Score:5, Insightful)
Now is not the time to invest billions into large scale offshore wind farms. But an energy strategy aiming at replacing fossil fuels with renewables should, at this time, include subsidies for smaller offshore wind farms. See them as an investment into R&D to improve offshore wind farms and drive own costs, same as happened with onshore wind. This kind of R&D is not done in front of a blackboard or in a lab, it's practical engineering, making incremental improvements based on past experience.
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The main costs in onshore wind are the grid connection and the cost of steel & fabrication of the tower sections. Between them, over 50% of the cost of the resulting energy. There is progress being made still in lighter, more flexible towers, but I'm not sure how much further there is to go; these days a 1% gain is a big win, while ten years ago a 10% gain was perfectly feasible (eg individual pitch control reduced tower loads by ~ 10-15%). The cost of the grid connection is largely out of the contro
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Is the cost of the extinction of the human race included in the cost analysis?
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Did you read at least this wikipedia page you quote? I.e.:
"AEE points out that the average power purchase agreement (PPA) for wind power was already at $24/MWh in 2013.".
How can it come to 6.6-8.2 cnt/kWh when it was 2.4 cnt/kWh in 2013? This "projected for 2020" report is hopelessly out of date.
Check energy.gov for more current data:
http://energy.gov/eere/article... [energy.gov]
In particular this report lists 2.35 cnt/kWh average PPA in 2014 (page 56):
http://energy.gov/sites/prod/f... [energy.gov]
Fishing (Score:2)
No effect on greenhouse gases. (Score:2)
From the article:
"It will emit about 40,000 fewer tons of greenhouse gases per year than fossil fuels would to generate the same amount of energy. That's the equivalent of taking 150,000 cars off the road."
According to economists, about 80,000 - 150,000 people come of age each month in America. (This is the number used to see how many minimum jobs need to be created in a month to have an effect on unemployment.) How many of those people do you think have a car? Statistically, in America, 63,760 - 119,550
Was there Last week... (Score:2)
Now if the cranky bastards who mandate that every house looks like Amnity out of Jaws and would let people put Solar Panels
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30 miles off the coast of Rhode Island
Hardly the middle of the Atlantic, which as you point out would be stupid.
Re: Bad Choice of Location (Score:2, Funny)
In the typical American view of the world you would fall off the edge another 30km or so beyond that, so in that respect it is the middle.
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...And what of the safety issues with failed lines?
Good question. We could end up with a world record batch of Bouillabaisse!
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You are aware this is about 200 miles from NYC, right? NYC, one of, if not the single largest source of electricity consumption on the East Coast. This isn't actually "in the middle of the Atlantic"... it's a few miles off the coast.
NIMBY (Score:2)
Fewer people to complain.
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I live in western Michigan. We now have 56 windmills in my county. There is also a very large pumped storage plant. It pumps water from Lake Michigan up into a man made lake when there is low demand for electricity and allows the water to flow back generating electricity when the demand is high. Someone wanted to put some windmills in Lake Michigan. Some people stated that the windmills would spoil their view of the lake and since they would not generate many jobs it was unanimously defeated. Lake Mic
Re:Bad Choice of Location (Score:5, Insightful)
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They're also very old and only interested in profit today. They have no interest in anything that requires real investment. Every serious energy projection shows renewables including wind and solar beating out coal and grid storage coming online. But the fact is, these old farts won't be around for another decade and could care less.
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No, they're capitalists. They just manipulate Libertarians, who tend to be rather useful idiots.
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Blah blah blah. Libertarianism is an idealized model like anarchism and communism. You don't need Libertarianism to defend against tyranny, you just need liberal democracy with a division of powers to make sure no one ever gets the whole pie.
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30 miles off shore is international waters, correct? (Though still in the exclusive economic zone.)
Re: They look like horrible eyesores to me (Score:2)
Don't worry, it's far enough offshore that no one can see the birds getting whacked.
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Though, if you care about birds, you should be calling for restrictions on the cat population. Less birds smack into wind turbines even than buildings. It is a non issue that is only used as a bludgeon for NIMBYs.
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They are 4 miles off shore; who gives a shit.
Location doesn't matter, but if anyone cares about cost;
Yet when Deepwater proposed to sell its wind energy to National Grid, the cost was more than twice the going rate for electricity.
https://www.wind-watch.org/new... [wind-watch.org]
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You really don't get this idea of selling things above cost to make a profit do you? It's called capitalism. You may not be used to it from where you are from "Comrade" but it's the way the world is working now.
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I get that you hate the "reality based community" and just keep on pushing whatever the current party line defined by donors is. You are as fucking annoying and clueless as a cold war commie but just do not seem to get that you have fallen into exactly the same trap as those losers.
Machines don't have politics you tool.
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How much did the first steam generators cost compared to how much energy they made? Horses were cheaper.
How much did the first cell phones cost compared to how much they cost now? How capable were they?
How much did the first computer cost? How many people had access to it? How capable was it?
Jesus, it's like no one on Slashdot has never had to build prototypes or v1 of anything.
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Yet when Deepwater proposed to sell its wind energy to National Grid, the cost was more than twice the going rate for electricity.
My understanding is that this was built where it was because it is replacing local diesel generation on Block Island, and so the barrier to entry was lower since the costs locally were much higher than in the national grid.
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What's hilarious is that I /distinctly/ remember a fucking egg-beater windmill ON THE ISLAND ITSELF IN THE SEVENTIES.
The stupid. It burns.
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BMO
Re: Not quite... (Score:2)
The point being that windmills have been a fixture on the island itself for going on 40 years /at a minimum./
It doesn't matter if the eggbeater type sucks or not. Windmills have been in use and we have a so-called resident of Adrian Block's island who has his frilly panties and his delicate sensibilities in a twist about them.
He should GTFO the island if that's the case.
BTW, the island makes its money exclusively on tourism and it's likely that he thinks that this is going to affect the tourism negatively.
Re:Not quite... (Score:5, Insightful)
Take a dump? Srsly? If not four miles off shore, where exactly would you put them?
Fucking NIMBYs. Fucking billionaire NIMBYs that think they can afford to keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere.
Because they actually can afford it, and to hell with everyone else.
If it was 150 years ago they'd probably be whining about all the damn ships. With sails. Sailing through their view.
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You ignore that there are actually more days of usable wind per year at sea than there is on land.
Well done to the USA for catching up with many other parts of the world.
Denmark, Germany, Holland and the UK all have significant offshore Generating capacity already operating. Thousands of generators are dotted all over the North Sea and beyond.
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Yes, and they all increased significantly the cost of energy in the EU to the point of it being a major political problem.
With the Brexit and the uncertainties regarding EU subsidies for "green" energy projects, Siemens has decided to halt all wind projects in the UK.
Because the reality is, those projects are just NOT viable without heavy taxpayer subsidies.
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While some Islanders are definitely unhappy, plenty more welcome this. Honestly, I'd be annoyed if this were my view and am surprised they weren't built further out as it's not only possible but already planned for a larger installation 15-20 miles out. ....."
But the dispute is far more nuanced than your claim that "this project was rammed down the throats
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If they were in my view, I'd be pleased. They're magnificent, certainly better than a flat empty horizon of only water.
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30 miles from Rhode Island, 4 miles from Block Island.
An AC above linked this picture.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/me... [bostonglobe.com]
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You're bitching that you can fucking see the windmills?
As a former resident of RI who still loves the damn state for all its political and economic faults and the goddamned provincial attitudes and is a former member of the 294/295 telephone exchange:
You, and everyone like you in RI is everything that is wrong with Rhode Island.
Go. Fuck. Yourself. From. Point. Judith. All. The. Way. Across. The. Sound. To. New. Shoreham. And. Then. Fuck. Off. Some. More. Hopefully. Out. To. Sea. Forever.
tl;dr:
Fuck You.
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B
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Without government subsidy, they are unaffordable
The subsidies needed to make clean energies (wind, solar, geothermal) affordable are just a small amount compared to the subsidies of the other technologies (nuclear is heavily subsidized) plus the hidden costs of these "dirty" ways to generate electricity.
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The subsidies needed to make clean energies (wind, solar, geothermal) affordable are just a small amount compared to the subsidies of the other technologies (nuclear is heavily subsidized) plus the hidden costs of these "dirty" ways to generate electricity.
So you think we should do something stupid because we are already doing other things that are even stupider?
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In general, doing things that are less stupid than the things we did before would be an improvement.
But the less stupid things are in addition to the more stupid things, not a replacement. Each project should be evaluated on its own merits, not on a relative scale of stupidity.
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Go to page 5:
http://www.energy.siemens.com/... [siemens.com]
Re:14,000 ABANDONED WIND TURBINES LITTER THE USA (Score:5, Informative)
You are wrong. It worked. The subsidies have brought down the costs of installing wind power to the point that it is becoming competitive with (and perhaps cheaper than) other forms of generation.
These 6MW turbines are actually small. 8MW turbines are being installed now. The effective cost will be higher because only a small number of turbines are being installed.
This is a recent article from someone who has been very skeptical about alternative energy [telegraph.co.uk]
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Not incorrect, you are simply not informed.
First of all: that turbines have no gearbox.
Secondly: they wind speed when they stop is high, indeed.
So, it is a GE wind turbine and GE is traditionally a bit thin on giving out specs.
So what we can intelligently guess is:
cut in wind speed: about 3 - 3.5 m/s
rated wind speed for 6MW power production: about 10 - 11 m/s
cut of wind speed: exceeding 25 m/s average over a span of more than 10 minutes
emergency cut off wind speed: 75 m/s
So: at wind speeds of 24 m/s (to laz
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whoosh. hint if they require massive subsidies to be viable then they are NOT competitive. anything can be claimed as competitive if you ignore the costs of generation.
There are an impressive amount of issues with this statement, considering its only 3 short sentences. In rough order of importance...
Re:14,000 ABANDONED WIND TURBINES LITTER THE USA (Score:5, Informative)
Spreading FUD? Got an agenda? David Koch, is that you?
http://www.aweablog.org/fact-check-about-those-abandoned-turbines/ (Yeah, yeah, it's on the Internet, so it must be true.)
One failed wind farm is hardly a reason why wind farms are necessarily a bad thing.
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The core of the argument is sound though. It costs ~$500k to put up a 100kW wind turbine. With energy at about 12c/kWh, each hour at full power would generate only $12 and would thus break even after 5 years of full-time, full-power wind however the largest turbines catch wind only 20% of the time and are only 30-45% efficient, smaller ones even less. So you're looking at 50 years before they break even. That is off course if they never needed maintenance, these turbines are specced for 20-30years of servic
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No, it's not sound. It's historical.
Turbines being installed now are much larger: 6 - 8MW. The economics of these much larger, offshore turbines are very different to those of the old, small turbines. The largest offshore wind farms that are being installed now are close to the cheapest sources of electricity.
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Oil is less than 1% of the electric generation in the USA.
So come again?
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How dumb it can go? Nobody generates electricity from diesel in mainland US, only in few islands.
Natural gas cost defines low electricity prices in the US and isn't related to oil price. Natural gas cost has nowhere to go but up, as bottom is supported by natural gas liquidification and export terminals that are going into production now. Natural gas is much more expensive in the rest of the world.
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Why don't you read the GE prospects of those wind turbines?
They are specced fro 50 years of service, like any installation that big.
but most of them last only half that long. That is nonsense.
and are only 30-45% efficient there is not much you can do about that. And I doubt your numbers are right anyway. The only improvement in efficiency I expect is in low wind speeds.
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Offshore wind may be still too expensive, but onshore wind PPAs in mid US are 2-2.5 cnt/kWh and it is BELOW wholesale electricity price. What more self-sufficiency do you want?
There still is 2.3 cnt/kWh subsidy for grid connected wind power, but it ONLY applies if you do not take 30% tax subsidy when building it. Both are going to expire in few years. Even if resulting cost will go up to 4-5 cnt/kWh, it would still be typical wholesale PPA price. More likely it would not raise that much, as cost of wind tur
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Europe in the lead this time.
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Give me a 500 kph wind and I'll design you a small-diameter turbine to use it, Professor.
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He runs a solar power business in Maryland. Therefore, this is a competitor, he wouldn't even think of giving them a mention unless it was to talk about the negative aspects of this technology.