US Dept. of Energy Wants Bigger Wind Energy Ideas 252
coondoggie writes "The Department of Energy wants to kick up the research and development of offshore wind projects as it looks to achieve its goal of producing 20% of the country's electricity from wind farms by 2030. The DOE Wind Program is looking to focus on what it calls specific advanced technology, gigawatt-scale demonstration projects that can be carried out by partnerships with a wide range of eligible organizations and stimulate cost-effective offshore wind energy deployment in coastal and Great Lakes regions of the country. The agency is also looking for more research that can help address market barriers in order to facilitate deployment and reduce technical challenges facing the entire industry, as well as technology that will reduce cost of offshore wind energy through innovation and testing."
Time to play that card... (Score:5, Insightful)
And who can blame them, right? I wondered when I'd start to see fresh pleas for alternative energy sources. If you've got that card, now is the damned best time to play it with the BP disaster fresh in everyone's minds.
Re:Offshore wind farms (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm just waiting for some Calamity to hit. I mean, Offshore drilling is an entirely different ballpark, but we've put a lot of research into that and we still mess it up.
I mean, how do these platforms cope with hurricanes? I've always wondered. I have a feeling that since a windmill will have most of its machinery above water level, it'll be more susceptible to high winds (which is the idea I know, but I mean twisting metal high winds)
Washington DC (Score:4, Insightful)
Place the wind farms around the Beltway. There is plenty of hot wind coming from Washington.
Re:NIMBY (Score:5, Insightful)
Hahahahaha!
Dude, we've been trying to put up a wind farm off the shore of Massachusetts for over ten years now, and they _still_ don't have the permits.
It turns out that their site, six miles offshore, would still be very slightly visible from the Kennedy compound. So suddenly every democrat politician in the state became flamingly anti-wind-power. They've suffered through lawsuits and protests claiming that they'd kill birds, that they'd kill fish that would swim into the bases so hard that they'd die, that they'd cause hearing loss for the poor little rich kids on the shore (six miles away...), that they'd be used by drug smugglers to hide from coast guard radar (all those drug smugglers that sail up the entire atlantic seaboard hoping to sneak ashore in MA), that they'd screw up aircraft radar systems (despite the FAA saying that no, their radar can ignore stationary targets just fine)...
When Obama finally pushed through the first part of the approval earlier this year, they immediately got slapped by a lawsuit by an indian tribe, asserting that this particular piece of the Atlantic Ocean is a sacred space to their tribe, and windmills would disrupt their freedom to practice their religion there. Despite most of the tribe testifying that they've never heard of any sacred patch of ocean, and there being no written records referring to any sacred patch of ocean, one of the tribe's leaders recently recieved upwards of ten million dollars from an anonymous donor to pursue the lawsuit, and regards the suit as his holy duty, much more important than using that money to do silly things like actually help the tribe members stuck in crushing poverty. It's expected to take at least a decade to grind that one through the courts, because with that sort of funding, stall tactics become really easy.
So, no. Offshore isn't going to help with NIMBY folks. Even NIMBY folks named Kennedy and Kerry who like to lecture the rest of the world on how important the environment is, and rake in millions in donations from environmental groups.
A couple years back, the company trying to put up this wind farm decided as a publicity stunt that they'd apply for a permit for a different type of power plant. They decided on an oil fired one of a type known to dump all sorts of carcinogens into the air, to be located in the middle of a city, across the street from an elementary school. It took under 48 hours from when they filed to when they had all the permits to legally begin construction... Compared to the _ten_years_ they've been struggling to get the permits to do wind power.
Re:Offshore wind farms (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that if 20% of your electricity was generated in a green manner you wouldn't have such a dependancy on oil, so you could pull out of the middle east, and you wouldn't have such a bad political position.
Re:Hydraulic Lifts Pull Them Down Into Water (Score:3, Insightful)
You can read that as "They wouldn't pay nearly the bribes the oil companies would pay".
Re:My Opinion, More BFE Buffalo Ridge Projects (Score:3, Insightful)
Right now, the big Aluminum companies site their plants near hydro power, but could there be a wind farm with an aluminum plant in the middle of it? They might vary the rate of production as the wind rises and falls, but if that is taken into account during the design of the plant it shouldn't be a devastating problem.
No, they can't. Aluminum smelters are near hydroelectric dams for a reason: enormous amounts of consistent, inexpensive energy. Wind generators can not provide this.
You can't easily stop or slowdown a smelt in the middle of performing it, we are dealing with enormous amounts of energy and molten metal salts [aluminumsm...rocess.com]. If there are huge inconsistencies in the power then the process can be very inefficient and possibly even dangerous.
Wind power is extremely variable and can only be used to supplement the base load of a power generation system. You can do some tricks like storing over-generation in the form of air pressure, capacitors, gravity systems, or flywheels but those can be expensive and complicated.
The better answer is nuclear. There are tons of designs for small-scale nuclear power generators, they can easily be built close to the site of power consumption, many of the designs are low-maintenence, it has a very favorable power-to-price ratio, and the power output is extremely consistent. This is the reason that aluminum smelters are also often located next to nuclear power plants.
Yeah, I don't get it either. (Score:3, Insightful)