Study Suggests Generating Capacity of Wind Farms At Large Scales Overestimated 209
First time accepted submitter AchilleTalon writes "Research by Harvard professor David Keith suggests that the global capacity for energy generation from wind power has been overestimated, and that geophysical / climate effects of turbines will reduce the benefits of large-scale power installations. 'People have often thought there's no upper bound for wind power—that it's one of the most scalable power sources," he says. After all, gusts and breezes don't seem likely to 'run out' on a global scale in the way oil wells might run dry. Yet the latest research suggests that the generating capacity has been overestimated."
Re:Cue the "Keith's owned by big oil!!" accusation (Score:5, Informative)
You should try reading the whole article next time. All the way down to the last sentence:
"Wind power is in a middle ground," he says. "It is still one of the most scalable renewables, but our research suggests that we will need to pay attention to its limits and climatic impacts if we try to scale it beyond a few terawatts."
Sounds like Keith is recommending we invest a few terawatts worth into wind and that it's still one of the best renewable options out there. But your knee jerk response didn't give you the time to read the article much less his actual research.
Dare to stand up an any environmental impact meeting and point out that the physics of many of these technologies just aren't there and that you have to factor in manufacturing costs and impacts, and pretty soon you've got some trust-fund asshole in dreadlocks screaming that you must be a plant from Big Oil.
[citation needed] Seriously, tell me where this happens. Your ad hominems and strawmen are really getting old around here, crazyjj.
Use Citations! (Score:5, Informative)
There is an environmental impact of wind turbines.
Of course, there is an environmental impact with anything you do. I'm sure there's an environmental impact from LENR in some form or fashion.
First, they are ferocious bird-killers.
"Ferocious"? Well, I can see this is going to be a rational quantitative discussion. They do surveys underneath windmills to try to estimate how many birds they kill. I hate to break it to you but the numbers are pretty darn small [wikipedia.org]. Yes, it is a concern. No, it is not "ferocious."
Second, they are noisy 24/7, so much that it has been to stress animals who can't get away from the noise.
What? [citation needed] Modern windmills are not noisy [wikipedia.org] and I've stood underneath the ones my dad erected and I couldn't hear a damn thing over the wind.
Instead, how about some R&D on something which actually will be useful in densely populated areas? LENR fusion looks promising. If we get that going, especially with carbon atoms as fuel, that would be more important to the world's economy than the Industrial Revolution or the invention of electricity combined.
Look, dude, I'm all for spreading our funding around. And I think we do. I'm really sad that ITER has had so many funding problems but the big difference between wind and LENR is that your if on LENR could turn up nothing. And then where did all your money go? At least wind has something returned as you scale. LENR is just a big output at the very end if it works. That's why their funding is always problematic. Nothing to show until the very end is a huge gamble.
1-2 watts per square meter of land? (Score:5, Informative)
I had no idea wind power produced that little power.
Biggest single wind farm in the world: Alta-Oak Creek Mojave Project, 320 wind turbines, 36 km^2 area, 800 MW. That's 800MW for 36 million square meters, or 22W/m^2. That's peak power, though; yearly average for most wind sites runs about a quarter of peak.
A real problem with wind power is that it's like water power - there are a limited number of good sites. There are four really good wind power sites on shore in California, and there are big wind farms on all of them. Anywhere else is less cost-effective. There's good wind from the Texas panhandle north to the Canadian border, but not much there to use the power. (Basic truth: if it's a good wind power site, it's too windy for most people to live there.)
And, of course, there's the intermittency problem. Here's California's wind power graph for today. [caiso.com] Note that total statewide wind output went up by a factor of 7 in 2 hours, after dropping by a factor of 4 in 5 hours. California buffers some of this by using the dams and pumps of the California Water Project as energy storage, but still, that's a huge variation. Extra generating plants have to be on standby for when the wind dies down. Up to about 15% wind, there's enough slack in the system to handle that. Beyond that, somebody has to build extra plants or energy storage.
Solar is more predictable. Solar energy and peak air conditioning load track closely. A reasonable goal is to get most of the world's air conditioning load onto solar power.
Re:Cue the "Keith's owned by big oil!!" accusation (Score:5, Informative)
large upfront costs ... takes 20 years ... half-way cancelled project
Bullshit.
That phenomena is unique to Western nations that indulge pressure groups and their abuse of the legal system, coupled with a leadership vacuum. China builds a reactor in under 24 months. The completed cost of an AP-1000 reactor in China is $2 billion as of 2009.
other forms of energy such as solar will have since grown cheaper
Even if that ancient promise were to one day come true it won't matter. Building will not be permitted [renewableenergyworld.com]. Period.
Re:Cue the "Keith's owned by big oil!!" accusation (Score:2, Informative)
other forms of energy such as solar will have since grown cheaper
has already happened. http://about.bnef.com/press-releases/renewable-energy-now-cheaper-than-new-fossil-fuels-in-australia/
Re:Ah, Let's Read the Whole Article, Shall We? (Score:5, Informative)
There's a nice little summary table towards the right here [wikipedia.org].
Cheap Solar (Score:5, Informative)
The cheap clean energy is here, and it's getting cheaper. The price of solar is falling fast.
http://www.dmsolar.com/solar-module-1141.html [dmsolar.com]
If you're looking to invest more than $50 on LED light bulbs then today's solar is very cheap these days. Here is a retailer that sells some residential panels for only 0.79 per watt. Solar will only continue from here to become even cheaper
Re:Boundary effect (Score:4, Informative)
Your conception of large wind-farms is out of whack. Modern turbines are pushing 200 meters tall now, with rotor diameters of up to 150 meters. Turbine farms are limited by the area of land they're placed on, and the wake of other turbines greatly affect placement. On small farms they can get them as close to each other as 4 to 10 rotor diameters, but on bigger farms the minimum is 15x the size of the rotors. So if we're talking about real industrial scale wind farms where the turbines are in the 200 meter tall range... then they have to be placed over a mile apart!
A single one of these modern giant turbines produces about 7MW of power and costs about $14 million to build. The smallest reactor in the US (not counting test reactors and such) is in Fort Calhoun, Nebraska and produces 478MW. It would cost close to a Billion dollars and take up nearly 70 square miles of land to use wind to produce the equivalent amount of power as the smallest nuclear reactor in the country.
We have absolutely no idea what affect a windfarm of that size would have on the environment. If we had enough farms to power the entire country? Again, we have no idea, but the effect would likely be dramatic. You can't take that kind of energy out of our weather systems and expect mother nature to roll over and take it.
Re:Ah, Let's Read the Whole Article, Shall We? (Score:5, Informative)
The costs for a utility scale wind turbine in 2012 range from about $1.3 million to $2.2 million per MW of nameplate capacity installed.
http://www.windustry.org/resources/how-much-do-wind-turbines-cost [windustry.org]
Say, a dollar per watt (nameplate).
An installed nameplate terawatt would cost about $1,000,000,000,000. That's a pretty expensive experiment. And wind turbines' real world average output is a fraction of their nameplate rating.
The total levelized cost of an advanced combined cycle natural gas fired plant is about one third less than onshore wind and 80% less than offshore wind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source [wikipedia.org]
Re:Old news (Score:4, Informative)
Are you telling me that a free market does not work
The "free market" is not involved. UK government policy to reduce carbon drives both the adoption of wind, which we learn does not produce expected output, and deliberately inflates gas cost while lowering heating benefits to reduce demand, producing fuel poverty.
Adopting wind [telegraph.co.uk] and its false promises is government policy. Fuel poverty [thepeoplespower.co.uk] is government policy. Connection complete.
Re:Cue the "Keith's owned by big oil!!" accusation (Score:2, Informative)
People have been predicting cheap energy for longer than I can remember. Energy is going to get more expensive, not less.
You can go further on $1 energy (gas, horse feed, etc) today than you could 10, 20, 30, 500 years ago.
Re:A planet full of windfarms could power half the (Score:4, Informative)
Huh? The article says 'If we were to cover the entire Earth with wind farms, he notes, "the system could potentially generate enormous amounts of power, well in excess of 100 terawatts"'.
Re:Cue the "Keith's owned by big oil!!" accusation (Score:4, Informative)
Actually natural gas is the cheapest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source [wikipedia.org] and probably will remain so with all the new sources available due to fracking. It is ~30% more expensive to generate from either oil or coal. But generally your right. It will be a long time before generating something from incoming energy (the sun) will be cheaper than getting something that was stored from the same energy source but combined over millions of years essentially with a straw and a pump similar to how the quickest way to get rich is to rob a bank. Doesn't make it a good idea but ...
Re:Boundary effect (Score:4, Informative)
It would cost close to a Billion dollars and take up nearly 70 square miles of land to use wind to produce the equivalent amount of power as the smallest nuclear reactor in the country.
We have absolutely no idea what affect a windfarm of that size would have on the environment. If we had enough farms to power the entire country? Again, we have no idea, but the effect would likely be dramatic. You can't take that kind of energy out of our weather systems and expect mother nature to roll over and take it.
We've deforested far larger chunks of land without causing blood to rain down from the sky,
and there are multiple countries that have re-forested areas larger than 70 square miles.
China is aggressively planting trees everywhere it can. Since Y2k, they've added ~11,500 square miles of forest per year.
Part of those 11,500 square miles of forests are an attempt to stop the Gobi desert's southern and eastward creep.
China's been doing a shitty job with their foresting efforts, but 70 square miles is childs play compared to what's happening around the globe.
Re:Cue the "Keith's owned by big oil!!" accusation (Score:4, Informative)
China builds a reactor in under 24 months. The completed cost of an AP-1000 reactor in China is $2 billion as of 2009.
According to this [china.org.cn] construction on China's first AP-1000 reactor started in 2009 and is expected to be completed in October of 2014.
Re:Use Citations! (Score:2, Informative)
Second, they are noisy 24/7, so much that it has been to stress animals who can't get away from the noise.
What? [citation needed] Modern windmills are not noisy [wikipedia.org] and I've stood underneath the ones my dad erected and I couldn't hear a damn thing over the wind.
Actually, the problem with the new huge wind turbines is not the sound in the normal range, but the low frequency noise. This have been known to cause health problems if you live too near to a big wind turbine with long blades (like on the >4MW turbines). There is a lot of research going into fixing this problem, but many companies are looking into offshore wind turbines because this removes the turbines from people.
Disclaimer: I work for one of the biggest wind turbine companies in the world, so I will remain AC. At my work place im constantly within 100 meter of an older 1MW turbine without noise problems, but again the problems only show themselves with bigger blades.