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Wind Power Falls Under $0.01/kwh
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Sep 14, 2004 08:40 PM
from the hey-it's-breezy-in-here dept.
from the hey-it's-breezy-in-here dept.
js7a writes "Colorado State University's Rocky Mountain Collegian reports that, "as of June [the price of wind power] dropped to 1 cent per kWh." Even without further expected improvements in turbine technology, the U.S. would now need to use less than 3% of its farmland to get 95% of its electricity demand satisfied by wind power. Plus, wind power is the only mitigation of global warming, because if the whole world converted to wind power in 15 years, the amount of power being extracted from the atmosphere would be more than the increase in greenhouse gas atmospheric energy forcing since 1600. Don't say goodbye to coal and oil, yet, though; unless cell technology increases substantially, when we run out of oil we will convert coal to synthetic fuel." Update: 09/15 13:40 GMT by T : Note: the "1 cent" figure refers to the premium paid for the power over conventionally supplied electricity, rather than the final per-kWh price.
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Power Company Web Worth a Visit (Score:5, Informative)
The wind energy is not exactly bought directly, though:
Platte River is a community-owned, wholesale power supplier to the cities of Fort Collins, Loveland, Longmont, and the Town of Estes Park. You can sign up for the wind program in any of these communities, and the wind energy you receive will come from Platte River's Medicine Bow Wind Project.
As regarding fulfilling a great deal of energy needs from wind their website has this to say:
While it is theoretically possible to produce enough energy from wind turbines to supply all our needs, it's not technically feasible at present. This is because wind is an "intermittent" resource, i.e., the wind doesn't blow all the time. Since electricity can't be stored in large amounts, we still need other resources to ensure that energy is available when people need to use it. Research continues on the effect of wind generation on electric system reliability. A recent study of California wind farms found that wind can make up as much as 10% of total electricity capacity without significantly impacting the reliability of the electric grid.
I found the web site for the energy company to be a pretty interesting place to get a fair amount of detail about how an energy company harnesses energy from the wind and blends into their grid.
Cheers,
Erick
Re:Power Company Web Worth a Visit (Score:5, Interesting)
Could hydrogen fuel cells potentially change this?
Parent
Re:Not right now... (Score:5, Informative)
Fuel cells have the problem that they wear out and are expensive to produce. If you want to store energy using hydrogen you're better off disassociating water to produce hydrogen gas, then burning that later in a generator. This is of course all best done at some central location, as opposed to on-site, unless on-site is all there is. If you have sun, water, and wind, you have quite a bit of energy available to you for not much cost. The hydrogen will be a little "dirty" unless you're distilling water and separating it, but since all you're doing is burning it, that won't really affect much.
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Re:Not right now... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, that has to be traded off against the lifetime of fuel cells vs turbomachinery and generators, although the former have essentially no moving parts and hydrogen (vs natural gas or other fuels) doesn't poison a fuel cell catalyst or electrodes very quickly.
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Re:Not right now... (Score:5, Informative)
If we are really thinking of doing this on a large scale I don't think the expense of the fuel cell will be as important as the *potential* increase in efficency. However, whether we can really get the higher efficency is another matter.
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Re:Not right now... (Score:5, Informative)
Fuel cells need to be larger to produce more, and making them larger means using more materials, and those materials are usually expensive things like platinum. The larger the scale, the larger the cost - I don't think fuel cells are ever going to be all that scalable. They'll be most desirable in smaller applications.
Internal combustion engines, on the other hand, are highly scalable. In fact the most efficient ICE is some diesel engine that's the size of a house and is over 50% efficient, if I properly recall. If you have a use for the heat you can make the process of combustion highly efficient. For example, you could use the heat to distill water or something. Thermoelectric generation of electricity is even less cost-effective than fuel cells from what I can tell so that wouldn't be much help.
I do believe that fuel cells will eventually reach a higher level of efficiency, but what we really need is a way to make them last orders of magnitude longer.
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Re:Not right now...Storing Electricity (Score:5, Informative)
This is not true, and hasn't been true for decades. Many hydro systems that have a forebay (pond) above the plant and empty out into another lake, have the ability to reverse their turbines when power is plentiful at night and pump the water back uphill. The same water is then run through the turbines again when power is needed.
And how efficient is this? Efficient enough that it's done a lot of places!
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Re:Not right now... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Not right now... (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I'd love a few more nuclear fission powerplants. I live in PA, near one (Limerick). Those suckers are great. Scares the tourists (always worth a chuckle), but its redeeming value is that those clouds hovering over the powerplant are white, not black.
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That's the problem with wind power. (Score:5, Informative)
Coal is good for the first choice. It's relatively cheap, relatively safe but takes a couple of days to get going.
Gas is good for the second choice as you can start up a turbine and having it running at full efficiency quickly.
Wind is good for neither of these. It can't be relied upon to provide baseline or peak output because the wind is always blowing. So it requires some way of storing the energy produced to really be a serious part of energy grid without other things to back it up.
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4) Go back to your hut in the woods (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Wrong. We cannot, at this point, build a mechinacly perfect device. Nanotechnology at least will be required to do that. We can build very good devices, and we DO. Perhaps (likely) you are too young to remember cars from the 40s, 50s, 60s, etc. They required an amount of matenence just unheard of today. You realise that for well made cars liek Accords, they frequently go 100,000-150,000 miles and require NO major service, just oil changes and the like? Try that with a 60s muscle car, not happening.
Further, as with most things, the cost of precision in parts (which is what leads to less wear) is linear for a bit, then steeply exponental. There is a certian point at which it just isn't worth it to make things better. For X dollars you can have a car that lasts on average 100,000 miles whereas it would take 4X dollars to make it average 120,000 miles.
2) You think companies make money off of flouride? I think my friend that YOU have been giving the chemical companies money, albeit of the small, illegal, methlab variety. Flouride isn't patented, is cheap as hell to produce and is added in very, very, very small quantities to the water. There is fuck all money to be made in it. The money is made in perscriptrion drugs that are patented.
3) Please don't. You are worse than most. You don't even start with a reasonable argument and then take it to absurdity, you just start off in lala land and get worse from there. There are arguments that we have an overly capatalistic society but flouride in the water is sure as hell NOT one of them.
Get a grip.
Parent
Re:Power Company Web Worth a Visit (Score:5, Informative)
Really? this [fuelcellstore.com] must be a figment of my imagination then. How silly of me.
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Re:Power Company Web Worth a Visit (Score:5, Interesting)
Use the power to pump water uphill and store it in a reservoir or heat a large amount of water. There are plenty of ways to store large amounts of electricity.
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Re:Power Company Web Worth a Visit (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is dandy if you've got someplace to store the water (for starters).
There are plenty of ways to store electricity, sure. The problem is finding cost-effective ways of storing electricity.
-jcr
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Re:Power Company Web Worth a Visit (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Power Company Web Worth a Visit (Score:5, Interesting)
????
Profit!!
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Re:Power Company Web Worth a Visit (Score:5, Informative)
I regularly keep commercial compressed gas cylinders filled with about 2500 PSI of pure hydrogen in my lab. I have stored such tanks for two years without significant loss of pressure.
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Re:There's a downside to everything.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Nope.
The atmosphere is DEEP. Aircraft routinely fly at 40K feet. Depending on where you want to say space begins, the earth's atmosphere is around 100KM deep.
The tallest building in the world is only about 1400 feet high, so if all our wind turbines were as tall as the Petronas towers, their penetration into the atmosphere is still miniscule.
Now, if you want to talk about a real evironmental impact of wind power, you could discuss birds flying into turbine blades, which happens quite a bit in California, I hear.
-jcr
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Re:There's a downside to everything.... (Score:5, Informative)
The windfarm in question was in a migration path of a particular species, and only affected local predater hawks because they were preying on the resting, tired,fat, birds. Until the obsolete windmills were replaced. a simple sollution was worked out, in which the windfarm was shutdown during a few weeks in the fall for migration of the food. Oddly enough, the few hawk deaths were worth it for the hawks, who found the resting birds to be plentiful and Yummy.
Still, windmill caused bird deaths are a fraction of a fraction of the bird deaths caused by 1.) big clear glass windows, 2) Pollution, 3) Automobiles, 4) Powerlines and transformers, 6) air pollution (yes tweety gets lung illness too) 6) invasive species, and 7) Cheney and Scalia on duck huntin' trips. And 8) 8? I forgot what 8 is for......
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Misleading title (Score:5, Insightful)
-AD
Re:Misleading title (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Misleading title (Score:5, Informative)
Page 5 gives the cost of producing power, including capital costs, at Eur 0.051/kWh (~5.5 US cents/kWhr). This gives a payback of about 7-8 years. So, NO, the power doesn't cost USD0.01/kWh.
-AD
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Oil is subsidised by the Govt. (Score:5, Insightful)
Oil has hidden costs that is never taken into consideration, because it's borne by the govt & not the oil company.
I am talking about the cost of fighting wars for
oil.
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Re:Oil is subsidised by the Govt. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Misleading title (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Misleading title (Score:5, Insightful)
The US dedicates so much of its military budget to that region (ignoring for now the additional costs of Iraq) because that region is the most likely to become unstable and it has a big fraction of global oil output.
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Re:Misleading title (Score:5, Informative)
Iraq is now producing about 1.5 Mbbls/day of crude. Let's assume that the $85B is a capital cost to keep this oil moving (which is nonsense, but you insist in including these costs in the oil capex. So be it). This means that the capex to develop a 1500k bbl/day plant should cost $65B. So, yes, the cost is a little bit higher than developing oil in a safe place like Alberta or Alaska [savearcticrefuge.org] but it is not orders of magnitude higher.
-AD
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Re:Misleading title (Score:5, Insightful)
(And the $85B, which I assume is your estimate for the Iraq war costs, isn't really the issue. The big factor is how much larger the US military needs to be to stabilize oil supplies worldwide, year in and year out. Over the decades, this has added up to hundreds of $Billions.)
Remember, the original poster was all upset because he suspected that wind power might be getting some kind of subsidy, therefore concluding that wind power is a total sham.
Parent
Re:Misleading title (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, this isn't a back up link. It does, however, contradict you (which is so much more fun for me). The feds spend vastly more maounts on defense than they do on education.
According to the President's Office of Management and Budget [whitehouse.gov] , the President of the United States has requested approximately $57 Billion [whitehouse.gov] for the Deparment of Education. He has also requested approximately $401 Billion [whitehouse.gov] for the Department of Defense. That does not include any money that has been appropriated for the War in Iraq. That appropriation is considered "off budget" and is not part of the main budget request.
A few notes: a) This is not what Congress has appropriated for the past 30 years, this is just what the President has requested for 2005. b) I am not making any political statement on whether or not this is a correct policy. I'm just wondering if the AC above has ever actually looked at the federal budget? Or, does he define Education and Defense differently than the rest of us?
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Re:Misleading title (Score:5, Informative)
It has been about 8 years since I lived in Ft. Collings, but the power was not subsidized. We paid extra for it initially (about 12 years ago), and about the time that I left Ft. Collins, the price was plummeting.
The real problem is not the price / KwH, but the fact that it is intermittant. In Colorado, we are one of the better states for energy/power esp with wind, but it still is intermittant. Until we create low cost energy storage this will not be truely viable
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My 2 kwh (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the absolute least you could do is nothing - which most of the Colorado residents are doing it seems. While it doesn't surprise me that initial takeup is going slow, it is a little disappointing. Giving uni students the choice is a good start, but Mr. Citizen would probably be more likely to spend the extra money on a bigger TV - than cleaner electricity.
Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Does that take into account the amount of energy lost when transporting electricity from the point of generation (farmland) to the point of use (everywhere except farmland)? Also what would the monetary cost of doing this be?
The drag could slow the Earths Rotation!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Before you jump onto the Wind Powered Band Wagon.. (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/extremeoil/
I wathced this last night..
Oil is going to be arround a lot longer then you think...
Re:Before you jump onto the Wind Powered Band Wago (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Before you jump onto the Wind Powered Band Wago (Score:5, Insightful)
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Is that the full cost or the extra cost? (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, and for the millionth time, would the proponents of wind power factor in the cost of energy storage into their ridiculous claims that it's possible to affordably replace fossil fuel and nuclear generators with wind right now?
That's a fair-sized wind farm (Score:5, Informative)
From the CIA World Factbook, USA:
Land Area: 9,161,923 sq km
Arable Land: 19.3%
So that's 1,768,251 sq km of farmland, 3% of which is 53048 sq km.
Don't want to be down on wind power or anything, but there's still quite the engineering challenge here.
3%? (Score:5, Funny)
The main problem with wind power (Score:5, Informative)
In MA, http://www.capewind.org/ is trying to build a wind farm, and is running into all kinds of opposition from "environmentalists."
Basically, the problem is NIMBY.
If you're going to build wind farms, you're going to have to put them far, far away from the upper-middle class, preferably among the poor.
Of course, capewind is far, far away from everyone. But nobody even likes the idea of these big fans out there, spoiling the ocean view for those who might be sailing around in the area. Heavens, the horror!
Wind power MUST be moderated. (Score:5, Interesting)
The issue with wind power is that it is, in effect, a run-away generator. To balance the system, another generator must be able to move to keep the grid stable (anyone remember First Power?) The _kicker_ is that a generator with 80%-90% is necessary to regulate the wind farm. The bigger the farm, the bigger the generator (and higher percentage) necessary to control the grid. So, in a perfect situation, if you've got 500 MW of potential wind power, you'll need 350-500 MW of conventional generation. Furthermore, most generators don't work very efficiently unless they're 70%-100% of their capacity.
Okay, I suck but these are the facts, if we're going to connect every control area together, we need a stable grid, for a stable grid, we must have the abilty to control, and do without, the "green" power. Utilities are for profit businesses and only the government can get away with running at a loss, even for idealistic reasons.
whole world? (Score:5, Interesting)
Amazing how the whole world lives in areas where there is strong enough and steady enough wind to run reasonably local wind power generator farms.
As someone who lives in Colorado and has visited the wind farm in question, I can tell you that the northern Colorado / southern Wyoming areas where they have those generators are seriously windswept. Nonstop, hard wind. Not everywhere has such an area nearby, which shoots an unfortunate hole in the proposed worldwide plan.
As a side note, that area has one of the nation's highest suicide rates that is often blamed on the nonstop wind making people lose their minds.
That's 1 cent _MORE_ than regular electricity! (Score:5, Informative)
This just in... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The Problem Is... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:The Problem Is... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:The Problem Is... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Aye... (Score:5, Informative)
I put an anemometer up for a summer at my house that got a pretty constant light breeze, and captured data for a summer. I figure a wind generator (at maybe 80 feet up) would have given me on average 3% of its rated power.
Have a look at (United States) this map [energy.gov] before you put up a generator.
Parent
Re:Just for the record... (Score:5, Insightful)
What WILL happen is that eventually oil because more expensive to pull out of the ground as the reserves get lower. At that point, other sources of energy get more economical, and we inevitably switch over.
That is what they mean when they say "run out of ouil". Oil that is too expensive to obtain might as well not exist. As for "switching over", look around you and notice how many of the goods you own are made out of plastic. When oil becomes very expensive, you will have to either pay a lot of money for those items, or find a way to make them out of some other material. Given that there is no obvious substitute for oil as a manufacturing ingredient, it would be best if we stopped burning it for electricity and saved it for uses where there is no substitute.
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Re:Just for the record... (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps environmentalists should instead say "when oil becomes extremely scare", but that doesn't have quite the same emotional effect.
In either case we need to start thinking about ways to deal with the inevitable loss of cheap oil before it actually comes to pass. Otherwise we will be stuck in the position of having increasingly expensive oil and yet haven't put the time/money/research into alternative energy infrastructure. It is better for the economy to attempt a smooth transition over a long period of time.
-Spyky
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