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:Power Company Web Worth a Visit (Score:5, Interesting)
Could hydrogen fuel cells potentially change this?
Not right now... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not right now... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:Not right now... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.gepower.com/prod_serv/products/gas_t
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: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:Not right now... (Score:4, Insightful)
just mean that the planet ends up with a climate
like Venus that much sooner.
None of that is cost-effective yet... (Score:3, Informative)
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:Not right now... (Score:4, Funny)
God damn it man -- we can store electricity. All we need are a goodly number of these devices [alaska.net]
And why not resurect the dinosaurs using reminents of their DNA (just like jurasic park) -- then oil would become a renewable resource!
----
When your an idiot, anything is possible!
Re:Not right now... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:That's the problem with wind power. (Score:4, Insightful)
At 150% production you get really cheap electricity without guilt because it's completely clean. We can then sell the electricity to our neighbors or invest it in interesting projects like hydrogen etc...
Then, when 50% of the turbines aren't turning because the wind aint blowing where they are, you still have 100% requirements coming from the rest of the wind turbine 'pool'.
Large. Decentralised. Network. That is how wind power will work.
-Nano.
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.
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.
Re:Not right now... (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, I think this is a common misconception about how capital operates.
The idea here is that Foo Motor Corporation might consider creating the Omega car, but the loss of their future profits in making replacement cars automatically stops them. While it is true FMC is going to consider the loss of future revenues in its decisions, these future revenes are discounted, based on how long they take to come in and how risky they are.
It's the financial version of the bird in the hand theory. Suppose I can, with a reasonably safe investment, take a dollar and turn it into two dollars in ten years. In a sense, this means that one dollar in the hand today is worth two in the bush ten years from now, and perhaps four in the bush twenty years from now. Suppose FMC makes two billion dollars in a year then goes out of business producing the Omega, but the status quo is two billion dollars in ten years. That's a no brainer -- two billion dollars in ten years is, financially speaking, only one billion dollars in the short term. Even if they could make only half a billion in short term profits before they go out of business, they still might decide to do it, because if the Omega car is possible, one of their competitors might make one and drive them out of business with no short or long term profit.
So, what keeps the Omega car off the streets is not planned obsolescence, it's the fact that this car could not be manufactured and sold at a price that justifies the effort. If it did, then FMC would create the Omega, then take the proceeds and get into a different business. Planned obsolescence does happen -- engineers do have to have some kind of timeframe for how long something is supposed to last. However style is a bigger form of planned obsolescence than operation. Capital has no problem at all destroying long term productive assets if the short term gain is high enough; the mobility and fungibility of capital assures that it will simply seek the next source of returns. That's its greatest strength and its greatest weakness.
The problem comes when you look at assets that have value aside from pure finance (if you even believe such a thing exists). Suppose a course of action destroys a community. So what? Capital simply moves to another community. Suppose a course of action ruins an entire country? Well, capital can move to a different country. Suppose a course of action destroys most of the planet? Well, capital can buy the nicest plots of what is left. I'm not anti-capital, I'm just pointing out that if you assume that things have value aside from their measurable financial productivity, it leads you to different conclusions than if you assume that everything has a clear price.
Re:Not right now... (Score:4, Insightful)
Fluoride might not be perfectly safe, but confusing elemental fluorine with fluoride ions just makes you look like a retard. Learn some basic chemistry.
Re:Power Company Web Worth a Visit (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, hydrogen is quite difficult to store. Hydrogen is not very energy dense, meaning that it really can not store a lot of energy for the amount of volume that it takes up, even under fairly high compression. Add to this that compressed hydrogen is relatively dangerous and requires expensive tanks, this adds to the cost. Even morseo if the hydrogen is to be used for transportation.
However, some technical solutions may be found to facilitate storage, or even increase efficiency of electrolysis. The question would come down to this: is it more efficient to drive essentially the whole power grid by wind, storing it as hydrogen (or some other method) in times of excess in order to convert it in lean times, or might it be more effecient to build wind turbines so that at peak power, they provide most of the energy for the power grid, and at other times more easilly stored sources of energy (fossil fuels, bio-diesel, etc) are used to fill in the deficit.
Realistically, if we are to keep increasing our power consumption, we are going to have to utilize as many forms of energy as we can, and use them where they are the most appropriate. In places with steady winds, wind forms can be constructed. Places with very little cloud cover would be ideal for some form of solar energy. Geothermal energy where available. Biodeiesel can be made from waste organic materials, as well as fresh materials (E.G. corn oil + alchohol) grown specifically for that purpose. Nuclear power (both fusion and fission) both have the potential to produce incredible amounts of power, but they both have their drawbacks which may be overcome by technology. And then of course we have the old standby of fossil fuels, but those are a fairly limited resource, and should only be used where absolutely necessary (at least in an ideal situation,) or where the other energy sources are counterindicated for some reason.
And on top of all of this, we will have to develop more efficient ways of doing things. Design cities in a more efficient manner. Of course make vehicles and other tools more efficient through technology and consumer choices. Provide incentives for using electricity in off peak hours of power consumption (or rather penalties for using electricity during peak usage periods.)
There does not seem to be one magic bullet for our energy need problems. And I highly doubt that we will find one in our future. The real answer lies in careful evaluation of all the pieces and using every tool available to make the system work, and keep it working for as long as we want to keep society going as we know it. Now, some may question whether we _SHOULD_ keep society growing and growing, but I'll leave that to the philosophers. Or at least a different thread.
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: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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Power Company Web Worth a Visit (Score:5, Interesting)
Generation and distribution are unrelated. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Power Company Web Worth a Visit (Score:5, Interesting)
????
Profit!!
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.
Hydrogen storage isnt impossible (Score:5, Interesting)
I've done a fair bit of plumbing for hydrogen systems (for measuring properties of metal hydrides) and have been able to make quite tight systems for high pressure, high temperature H2. We were actually very carefully accounting for the H2, since we needed to know how much went into and out of the hydrides. The system was full of valves, fittings, and welds. You have to be aware of what hydrogen can do to materials, but if you pick the right materials it's fine.
Dewars for storage of any liquid cryogen generally have vents (and burst disks in case the vacuum goes bad). This isn't because the stuff is hard to contain, but because they aren't made to hold high pressure, and there is always some heat leaking in that evaporates the liquid (increasing the pressure in the dewar if it's not vented). If you were doing power production you would probably plan a way to use this H2 rather than blowing it off.
Hydrogen can also be stored in metal hydrides (quite effectively), which can be less of a pain to deal with than dewars full of liquid.
(As an aside, you can even make containers to seal superfluid helium, which is *way* harder to contain than hydrogen. Helium is a pain in gaseous form, but the superfluid state is an extra big pain.)
Diffusion... (Score:5, Informative)
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.)
There's a downside to everything.... (Score:3, Funny)
Imagine 3% of U.S. farmlands with windmills on them. All of the sudden, the wind is slowed down because it has to turn numerous giant windmills. This could cause global weather changes that we cannot even predict. All of the sudden, the East Coast of the US has no wind, and smog and heat becomes unbearable.
Of course, I am making this up, but I contend that there are sides of this issue that will appear later that we cannot imagine. Yes, worthy of further exploration, but possibly
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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......
Birds really aren't that stupid... (Score:4, Interesting)
Really they just don't want to spoil their view. Vermonters don't really care about the environment, they care about the view that they have.
I think the savings we get both monetarily and environmentally outweigh one or two birds a year. besides, the new windmills don't have nice places for birds to sit so the risk to birds is probably even less. Most "green's" are a bunch of crotchety wackos that make people that want to actually do something about the environment embarrased.
Misleading title (Score:5, Insightful)
-AD
Re:Misleading title (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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.
Re:Oil is subsidised by the Govt. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Misleading title (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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
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.
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?
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: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
Re:Misleading title (Score:4, Informative)
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.
I've actually... (Score:3, Interesting)
Nothing big mind you, but I'd like to get a cabin up north in the middle of nowhere, and I'd love to power it via wind. Sure, generators are a possibility but all the noise sort of destroys my reason to go out there - to commute with nature.
Plus, I wouldn't have to worry about bringing fuel with me at all either - just let the wind do it.
Re:I've actually... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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)
Re:Before you jump onto the Wind Powered Band Wago (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Before you jump onto the Wind Powered Band Wago (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Before you jump onto the Wind Powered Band Wago (Score:4, Insightful)
Another poster has hit it on the head though. As it is, oil is being consumed just about as quickly as it is being extracted. Most suppliers are extracting oik as quickly as they can as it is, with too few new discoveries to make up for drying fields. Estimates vary, but pretty much all of them agree that the extractible oil will be gone a few decades before year 2100.
As noted before, the production limits are getting thin, with demand increasing. The cost of oil will have to go up as more people want it but less of it can be produced, a problem that could come to a head in a decade or two.
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?
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.
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.
Isn't nuclear clean? Or any number of others? (Score:3, Insightful)
Heck, even Chernobyl only happened because they turned off all the safties; it was an inherantly safe reactor until they manually fucked it up.
Anyhow, nuclear plants don't have to be in farmland (Less power lost on transport), are clean (Perhaps a smaller effect on the environment than wind power?), are safe, and best of all, produce much more stable output.
That and hydro. Which, while it has an impact on the environment when installed, after that it seems to me to be pretty clean. Heck, Quebec serves all of it's millions of people with a few hydro dams, and we have some of the cheapest power costs in North America.
Oh, and there's also the ever increasing efficiency of solar. And heck, while we're at it, fusion will be around eventually, perfectly clean radiation-free energy, as I understand it. Yes, it's far off, but if you invest in a worldwide wind power network only to have fusion come out and be a much better option, that's a huge waste of money. In fact, take the money you would have spent on all those wind generators, and put it into fusion research
Just for the record... (Score:3, Insightful)
Statements like this just bug me, because it's such a fundamental misunderstanding of economics. And this attitude is SO pervasive among the enviro-people.
We will NEVER EVER run out of oil. Never. Ever.
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.
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.
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
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.
hot air? (Score:4, Funny)
3%? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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...
And frosty cold beverages too! (Score:3, Interesting)
New Belgium brewing, completely wind powered.
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)
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:Whoa. Wait a minute. (Score:5, Insightful)
2. Having a company in financial difficulty do *anything* can be problematic. This issue is of significant concern.
3. On what do these sources base their conclusions? Studies [nationalwind.org] of bird deaths due to wind turbines show pretty minimal numbers, even with the old CA turbines that were unusually dangerous for raptors. Estimates are around two birds per year per turbine (compared to somewhere around 10/year per mile of road with average traffic). Maybe you should dig up your roads and walk everywhere instead--but that's no good, you need to get places, but electricity comes for free from nowhere! Er, wait.
4. If there's really not enough wind, then building these towers is really stupid. Building wind farms where there is no wind is a good way to bankrupt one's company once again. However, are the NWS stations on ridge-tops? You can have huge differences in wind-speed based on local terrain. You make a good case against building a wind turbine on top of the National Weather Service stations. You need to provide more information, however, to show whether the 30 year records are relevant. The company's [ene.com]
report claims that the ridge crest is a local wind corridor. Wind corridors are real, so your objection is only valid if they are wrong that it is a wind corridor, or if they are right but that even so there is insufficient wind. (Also keep in mind the difference in wind velocity as you go from ground-level to 80m above the ground.)
5. Ice is apparently a red herring [awea.org]. There simply isn't evidence that thrown ice is a danger, despite many installed wind farms in ice-prone areas. Besides, there are good physical reasons to think that ice would not be thrown a great distance (e.g. turbines are based on airfoils, and ice coatings don't preserve the airfoil shape, which is the whole problem with plane wings icing).
6. I have heard the new large 80m-ish Danish turbines. They're not that loud, and I don't personally find the noise that annoying. It's mostly sort of whooshing as the blades go past; the new designs have very little mechanical noise (unlike some of the old eggbeater designs in CA). It's hard to even hear them from a reasonable distance away (a few hundred meters). Why do you think that they are LOUD?
Anyway, it's nice that you're helping your dad out and all, and it's good for people to be involved in their community, but are you really arguing against it for the reasons you've given? Or is it instead because you don't like the look of giant windmills on the top of your ridge crest, and figure that if you can shoot it down you won't have to see a coal-fired power plant there instead?
People do this kind of thing all the time, often without realizing it. E.g. people where I used to live wanted to cut down all the trees for "fire protection", despite the fact that the shrub and annual grass that would have replaced the trees were a bigger fire hazard than the trees. Curiously, there was an extremely strong correlation between people who wanted to cut trees for "fire protection" and those whose views stood to improve the most, but only a weak correlation between people whose houses were near trees and the same desire.
Aesthetics are important. If that's the real reason you or your dad is fighting this, best to recognize it now so you can recognize when you're prone to believe something false because it provides an excuse for your position. Then if you still want to spread misinformation to the city council, or whatever, well, that's up to you. That happens all the time. At least you can be intellectually honest with yourself (and with readers here).
This just in... (Score:5, Funny)
My suggestion is... (Score:5, Funny)
Flywheels for storage. (Score:5, Interesting)
To store more energy, electricity is applied to a motor which causes the flywheel to spin up. To get energy out, the motor is reversed as a generator and the electricity is sent off to do whatever. Flywheels can provide more energy storage per unit volume than batteries, although I don't know about hydrogen fuel cells -- but flywheels are pretty simple technology and tend to be very low in nasty chemicals (compared to, say, lead-acid batteries, or even the catalytic components found in fuel cells).
The carbon-fiber itself, even if spinning at several thousand RPM, will basically explode into sand if it happens to rupture or exceed its design limitations. There would be no chance of a high-velocity flywheel careening out of its containment chamber and killing everything in its path (as cool as that would be).
It's not a highly developed technology yet, but mostly because we have little need for large-scale energy storage (because we have enough power plants that can provide peak production when it's usually needed), but flywheels combine well with intermittent generation technologies like wind and solar.
Of course, any good energy solution should be comprised of a reasonable mix of different generation, distribution, and storage methods, to avoid a monoculture; having enough wind turbines to meet (at most) 50% of our peak generation means that we're using that much less coal, oil, and other nonrenewable resources. I personally am in favor of safe nuclear reactors (like pebble beds), but nuclear is so much harder of a sell in the U.S. these days that we might find wind, despite its costs, more feasible as an alternative to fossil fuels.
Just some ruminations on the subject, anyway.
Mexico Becomes largest supplier of energy to US... (Score:4, Interesting)
They will export both electricity to the grid, and generate huge quantites of hydrogen (which will become the new "portable" fuel). that will be transmitted to the US.
This will result in a tremendous rennisance of Latin America, and result in a generally graceful transition from fossil fuels to an electric and hydrogen economy. This will "solve" the energy problem for the US. It will move money that is currently going to small groups of people in the Middle East, to our hemisphere, and create prosperity here at home.
China will be doing the same, as well as India and Pakistan and probably South Africa and Japan.
The oil economy will come to an end, and the nuclear economy will prevail.
Moving my house to wind powered.. heat (Score:4, Interesting)
I want to move the house to a wind-powered heating solution.. I live in rural area so neighbours aren't a problem. I am usually very skeptical of alternative energy claims, but wind is attractive enough for me to invest a little money in a test. Rather than convert the power, to store the heat I am using a 1000gallon tank in my basement. I'm looking to get between 10 and 20kW of power from my windmills on a nominal basis. I may also do tests with solar collectors, but they would provide energy gains only about ~4h per day in this part of the world.
Wind is a primary motivator in how fast my house loses heat, but the windier it gets, the more power is produced.
Heat distribution will be through in floor hydronic heating distribution. It won't replace the wood, but I bet it can reduce the amount of energy used by a LARGE factor, and provide me with nearly unlimited hot water.
Where are the Power Companies? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The Problem Is... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The Problem Is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The Problem Is... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The Problem Is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Problem Is... (Score:3, Insightful)
We need fusion. There is no excuse for the minimalistic funding fusion research gets. And in the meantime, we need to seri
Re:The Problem Is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I hope (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:sorry (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:Nice on paper (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wind power won't reduce global warming (Score:3, Informative)
3-6 month payback time... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Can't see this happening... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Bull! (Score:4, Insightful)
While your argument looks good on the surface, it relies on the assumption that all of these turbines would be quite close to each other. The larger the geographic spread of these windmills, the more assured you are to be getting at least *some* power *all* of the time. It's the same reason that investors like to keep a variety of stocks in their portfolios. The probability that a single area will not have sufficient wind to generate power is relatively high, but the chance that all the air in the entire country will suddenly just decide to stop moving is basically 0. Yes, this does require building alot more windmills, and thus invest alot more money, but that dosen't stop the concept from feasible.
Re:MSCFB (Score:4, Informative)