Wind Power Falls Under $0.01/kwh 1064
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.
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:The Problem Is... (Score:5, Informative)
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:I've actually... (Score:2, Informative)
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.
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.
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Re:Nice on paper (Score:3, Informative)
There are actually reasonable solutions to this. First, you can store the energy. There are already wind turbines in California that split water at night into hydrogen and oxygen and then convert that back to energy (using a fuel cell) during the day. Expensive as all get-out (in terms of capital cost, not variable cost); but it works.
Since one of the best regions for sustained winds is in the Dakotas (North Central USA, for those Americans who don't know their geography), it could be converted to hydrogen and then piped somewhere (most likely Chicago) for conversion to power. The challenge with this method is that Hydrogen (being such a small molecule) donsn't like to stay in pipelines. It may be better to steam reform carbon dioxide into Methane and then put the methane into our existing pipeline infrastructure.
In other words, stability isn't a problem, as you can use other methods. While it does decrease efficiency (going back and forth between electricity and chemical storage of energy is wasteful!) it STILL has less of an environmental impact than oil.
Re:Wind power won't reduce global warming (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The Problem Is... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Wind power won't reduce global warming (Score:3, Informative)
3-6 month payback time... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Is that the full cost or the extra cost? (Score:3, Informative)
This small over-looked fact makes this entire post (and the subsequent
Gak.
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
one cent? not really (Score:3, Informative)
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
Awesome.
when we run out of oil we will convert coal to synthetic fuel.
I doubt it. The Germans did this in the 1930's, and it was pretty expensive.
Re:Can't see this happening... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wind power won't reduce global warming (Score:2, Informative)
When you said electricity releases the heat back into the atmosphere, thats somewhat true, but heat naturally radiates from Earth at a pretty high rate. Greenhouse gasses are the important factors in global warming, not energy. When we say we're taking energy from the wind instead of coal or oil, we mean we're not producing the greenhouse gas byproducts.
Re:Power Company Web Worth a Visit (Score:2, Informative)
So yes, you can store it, but you will lose alot of it in the process.
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!
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.
Not really... (Score:3, Informative)
As the article itself points out, such prices have not historically been sustained, but I'm not so sure this time around...
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.
None of that is cost-effective yet... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not right now... (Score:2, Informative)
Oh please. I for one welcome our flouridated overlords. If you've seen the dental work of folks who did most of their tooth formation prior to 1953 ( when Australia got it in the water supply ) compared to kids today, despite all the sugary crap they consume, I believe it has had a positive effect on dental health, and therefore overall quality of life.
If you don't want it, you're welcome to drink rainwater or perform your own distilation, but I think fluoride is an example of social engineering with practically no downsides ( unless you count the endless ranting of clueless NWO conspiracy nuts as a downside ).
a great geek windpower DYI book... (Score:3, Informative)
Cost Estimate (Score:2, Informative)
Lots.
The Danish Wind Industry Association says infrastructure is just under $100K per 100Kw peak production [windpower.org]... our total peak capacity [doe.gov] is about 1 TW. At 100% efficiency, that's $1 trillion (assuming I'm not doing slashdot math). So expect the real cost to be at least 4X that (guessing?)
Re:Is that the full cost or the extra cost? (Score:1, Informative)
As of what i hear around here wind energy is considered to be a very unstable energy-source, because you need to have backup power installed with about 80% power of all the wind-generators over the year, because the wind is not always blowing. But this needed backup power is expected to decrease, when the Offshore-WindParks on the open Sea, with 150m height and 5mw per generator, get installed. The Wind is blowing more steadily in those heights.
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.
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bring on the nukes... (Score:3, Informative)
Now, we just need to throw a good marketting team at it and we're set.
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.
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.
Re:I've actually... (Score:3, Informative)
Your only real data point is a statistical anomaly due to a specific design flaw. this page [biologicaldiversity.org] which decries the altamont pass installation nonetheless says that We can have wind energy without decimating imperiled wildlife populations. The issue with the view is real, I suppose, except most of the time the windmills are where no one will see them up close, and frankly they're a break in the monotony of the landscape.
Re:Not right now... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not right now... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Power Company Web Worth a Visit (Score:3, Informative)
Besides, so what if hydrogen leaks out of *almost every* container. Just pick a container which doesn't leak. Neither is being 'very heavy'. If the idea is to use this as a fixed energy battery(for low wind times) who cares what it weighs.
Re:Just for the record... (Score:3, Informative)
This still does not solve our problem with major dependence on black gold.
Re:Global warming is not a result of waste heat (Score:3, Informative)
the amount of power being extracted from the atmosphere would be more than the increase in greenhouse gas atmospheric energy forcing since 1600
You are saying that reducing CO2 production lessens the greenhouse effect, which no one is arguing. But js7a wrote, that extracting energy from the atmosphere would reduce global warming. That is the point that deglr6328 is disagreeing with, and I'm guessing you disagree with the point as well.
Re:Just for the record... (Score:4, Informative)
We don't know how much oil there is, but we know that it cannot be an infite quantity.
Even from the view of the ecomomist, oil has run out before during wartime (demand a lot more than supply). Even if we have some infinite reserve there will come a point at which we can't get enough out of the ground.
20 yrs (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, wind turbines last forever. Only coal, fission, fusion, gas and microwave powerplants must be replaced after 20 years. Of course, this is all
- 2000
technology, so things may have changed.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!
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......
That's 1 cent _MORE_ than regular electricity! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Misleading title (Score:4, Informative)
Re:ummm (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:The Problem Is... (Score:3, Informative)
Besides which we don't actually need tritium for a fusion plant per se. We can use lithium (more abundant, but still rare enough) or abandon higher order fusion altogether and just use deuterium (which is really common). In a few decades/centuries/whenever after we get fusion power, we could even use elemental hydrogen fusion reactors, essentially giving us unlimited fuel (hydrogen is the most simple and abundant element in the entire universe). As a bonus, with D/T or D/D reactors there is still some radioactivity (reactor neutron activation, since the reactions spit out free neutrons). A H/H/H/H reactor would produce helium and no radioactive waste at all (mind you it'll take a long time to get a pure hydrogen reactor, but the first step is to get a basic fusion reactor that works).
Re:Not right now... (Score:3, Informative)
Nuclear power is normally run at 100% capacity all the time. Ideally, nuclear plants would, after ramping up to 100%, run until the next refueling outage (18-24 months).
Other power plants can scale the output, like hydro and natural gas. Although hydro is often environmentally constrained.
In California, the power usage tend to range from 22000MW to 44000 MW from night to day with the peak between 12-6pm.
They've done studies in Toronto... (Score:3, Informative)
For those who don't want to click, during heavy migratory seasons (spring and fall) for 1 year, there were a total of 2 dead birds found in the vicinity of the turbine.
See windshare.ca for more info on the project.
Whoa. Wait a minute. (Score:4, Informative)
1. Westfield was one of the only places in the northeast that did not lose power during the big blackout. Their power infrastructure doesn't need any help.
2. The company that is planning to build these things is promising to "rent" land from the locals to build the towers... What they aren't advertising is the fact that they've gone bankrupt a number of times. They collect huge grants for the project, and then bail out, leaving landowners with 400 foot towers that aren't being serviced, or paid for. Property values will drop like a rock.
3. Westfield is right smack in the middle of a whole pile of migratory bird paths... There are also a number of eagles that live in the area. There are a number of sources, including the nearby Roger Tory Peterson Institute that confirm these towers will kill birds in massive numbers.
4. I helped him organize the collected databases from the National Weather Service for almost 30 years worth of hourly wind readings from the two nearest stations. The wind speed needed to make these things worth building, even on the edge of Lake Erie, was rarely achieved for more than an hour or two, and only a few days a month.
5. Just like the propellers on airplanes, the blades of these turbines collect ice... LOTS OF IT. It will of course eventually fly off of the blade. I'm sure there are some people here who can calculate for us the distance that a few hundred pounds of ice can be thrown from one of these turbines. While I secretly think it would be kind of funny to see a 400 pound slab of ice smash through a trailer half a mile away, in reality it would not be cool.
6. Have you ever heard these things when they're operational? LOUD. My dad is currently collecting information about rates of depression and anxiety in people who live near the constant sound of these things... Not just the whooshing sound they make, but also the noise from the blades passing by the tower itself. It's somewhat like the air compresssion sound from the tail boom of a Huey.
What it boils down to, is that it's an intersting idea, but poorly implemented by shady cocksuckers. Pretty much everyone is in agreement that we need alternative power sources, but these turbines don't add enough to the output to cover the costs, let alone free us from fossil fuel dependency. Anyone who has further information, or would like copies of the information that my dad has collected, can contact me at my screen name at excite dot com.
Re:Power Company Web Worth a Visit (Score:4, Informative)
They divert river flow to a reservoir at night and that is used in the daytime, yes, so that more of the normal flow can go over the Falls in daylight (and in the evening when the Falls are illuminated) to keep the tourists happy.
(Slightly OT historical note: Sir Henry Pallet, who built the first electrical generating station at Niagara (at least on the Canadian side), became about as rich (adjusting for inflation) as Bill Gates. He built a castle (Casa Loma, complete with secret passages) in the middle of Toronto that cost (again adjusting for inflation) about $2 billion (with a B). Had to give it up when he couldn't keep up with the property taxes. It's now a tourist attraction itself, and has occasionally stood in for some wealthy guy's mansion in movies (eg Jackie Chan's "Tuxedo"). I grew up a few blocks from the place, and did the tour -- including parts not on the tour -- more than a few times.)
Depends on the type of plant... (Score:4, Informative)
This isn't a hard and fast rule for nuclear plants, rather it depends on the market and the fuel management strategies being used by the utility. For instance many French nuclear stations do use load-follow generating strategies, the operating strategies in France are sufficiently different such that load-follow there is cost effective for the way they operate their plants.
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.
Generation and distribution are unrelated. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Not right now... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.gepower.com/prod_serv/products/gas_t
Diffusion... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:MSCFB (Score:4, Informative)
would you believe 45%? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Misleading title (Score:2, Informative)
Well, we can all agree that less is spent on teaching government than national defense...
are you being facetious? (Score:2, Informative)
As to the lifetime of other types of powerplant, I'm no expert, but I do know that mechanical devices wear out eventually, and nuclear devices require a lot of maintenance because of for safety reasons you need to detect and repair potential faults before they happen.
Re:Power Company Web Worth a Visit (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Flouride is not manufactured... (Score:3, Informative)
My teeth have some discolouration that the dentist believes is a result of that (there are areas that are quite bright white whereas most of the rest is more subdued) but they are also invincible. No cavities ever and I don't take very good care of them.
However, neither of these are valid empirically speaking, personal anicdotes don't mean anything.
The real point is:
1) There seems to be evidence that flouride helps.
2) There is NO evidence it causes any harm.
3) It's cheap as hell to do.
So basically, why not?
Either way, it isn't some vast multi-national conspiracy. There is evidence to indicate (htough not prove) that it helps and it costs next to nothing. It's not added to make some company billions of dollars.
I'm not saying it is a 100% empirically sound reason to add it, just that AFDB boy is wrong.
Re:There's a downside to everything.... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Misleading title (Score:4, Informative)
In 1999-2000, k-12 spending by the US was $373 billion. Billions more are spent on post-secondary education. Since local and state governments do not spend on national military, you can see that the DoE spending of $400 billion (2004) is probably less than the $400+ billion (2000) we as a nation spend on education.
Even this analysis is incomplete. My point is that if you have a fleeting grasp of the statistics, you can paint a misleading picture, as if the U.S. is a war-hungry country.
Slashdot posted a link to a pathetically incomplete news article, so it's not surprising to see all these incomplete responses. They don't even compare the price of wind to the price of conventional power at that school except to say it's more, and they don't mention that the price is subsidized.
Re:Misleading title (Score:2, Informative)
Well, duh! The key word there is the feds. The feds shouldn't necessarily be spending anything on education... the states and localities should be the ones funding education. Last time I checked, the Constitution mentioned the federal government providing a national defense, but didn't say anything about the feds taking care of education.
Re:Not right now... (Score:2, Informative)
I suppose from a terrorist point of view that blowing up one fusion reactor is a hell of a lot easier than blowing up hundreds of wind towers in a wind mill park.
In other news today: Dutch minister is considering an end to a moratorium on off-shore windmill parks. Goal would be 20 percent dependency on wind energy in 2020.
Re:Not right now... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:That's the problem with wind power. (Score:3, Informative)
Why not link Windpower to something like the Ffestiniog Pumped Water Power Station [campusprogram.com] in Wales. Off peak, the station pumps water back into the resevoir, then lets it flow during peak times. Now with a bunch of Wind Power stations putting power into the National Grid [nationalgrid.com], you could use places like Ffestiniog to "store" that power by pumping water back into its resevoir.
Re:Not right now... (Score:2, Informative)
No, it is not.
"storing hydrogen in tanks"... see, that's a problem right there. You *can't* store hydrogen in tanks. Hydrogen atoms are small enough that they'll permeate through just about any solid walled tank. So you end up having to make massive tanks with super-thick walls. Then the tanks end up not holding very much.
RTFA: It's marginal cost, not absolute cost (Score:2, Informative)
Re:That's the problem with wind power. (Score:2, Informative)