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."
Ah, Let's Read the Whole Article, Shall We? (Score:3, Insightful)
'People have often thought there's no upper bound for wind power—that it's one of the most scalable power sources," he says.
What?! I've been lied to! My father poured foundations for windmills in my hometown and I've been going around saying that they're a great resource for us to have and boy do I feel like I've been duped! Let's read this whole news article and find out all the other lies I've been spouting!
"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."
Okay so you write that as your last sentence in the entire article? Crawl in a hole and die. Please. Whoever wrote this news article and summary, please go die. I'm sure the professor's research is sound but the way this press release of it was laid out painted wind as a mythical source of energy so please just do us all a favor and die.
So a few terawatts is what, like 7% of our total energy needs? Okay, let's scale it up to there and then we'll have empirical evidence to support how far we should go.
I don't think anyone suggested we blanket the Earth in windmills or even that wind is the basket into which all of our apples should go but, looking at the high wind areas next to metropolises, you have to admit there's some low hanging fruit out there, yeah?
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> looking at the high wind areas next to metropolises, you have to admit there's some low hanging fruit out there, yeah?
Um, typically metropolises aren't built next to high wind areas. Usually high wind areas are where people don't want to live.
Also, what happens when there's fine weather for a week... You just get people to switch everything off? You can't just turn off and on nuclear/thermal all the time.
Wind is OK when you can balance it with hydro power, otherwise, it's crap.
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]
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Yes, but that doesn't include the cost of obtaining fuel.
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Yes, but that doesn't include the cost of obtaining fuel.
And that's why we link to sources. But rather than follow the link, some people prefer to showcase their ignorance.
Levelized Energy Cost (LEC, also known as Levelised Cost of Energy, abbreviated as LCOE) is the price at which electricity must be generated from a specific source to break even over the lifetime of the project. It is an economic assessment of the cost of the energy-generating system including all the costs over its lifetime: initial inve
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Note, "cost of fuel."
And by what means does that calculation include the external costs of burning fossil fuels such as natural gas, releasing CO2, and the hydraulic fracturing that made the gas artificially cheap to begin with?
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I know this was an oversight on your part, but you failed to include a link to an authority on those external costs, including numbers. What does "artificially cheap" mean?
While you're working on that, you might think about what raising the cost of energy will do to the world's poor -- those living on less than one US dollar per day.
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Low hanging fruit indeed, and a possible source of PRIMARY power for rural residents, there's just one downside... the financial feasibility. The problem with wind power is there's not always wind, and if there's no wind for a week and the batteries drain, you need a fallback, which means regular electricity needs to get laid out to the rural houses anyways, costing the builder of the windmill, & the electric company, who are then going to pass it on to the owners.
Would you add $50 to your electricity
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It's not that black and white. Each installation needs its own specification. You go for a mix of technology. It's not JUST wind - you can put in some PV panels, and a wind turbine, maybe even a water turbine, maybe a fuel cell. Some places have good wind, many don't. Most places in tropical/temperate zones have reasonable or good solar resources, and some don't. Some places have permanent running water, most don't. And you don't design an off-grid system without a backup generator - yes, they use fossil fu
Re:Ah, Let's Read the Whole Article, Shall We? (Score:5, Insightful)
Windmills don't kill anywhere near as many birds annually as cats or plate-glass windows do, and I don't see anyone moving to get rid of those...
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[citation needed]
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].
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That summary is utterly meaningless without a scale factor. I mean, if there are 2 wind towers and a million cats, it's pretty obvious the cats are going to kill more birds even if each cat only kills 1 bird and the turbines kill a thousand each. And there are quite a lot of cats in the US (86 million or so), but relatively few wind turbines (some rough math places a top figure of 60,000 turbines in the entire US, and it's probably closer to half that in actuality).
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Wouldn't that only be relevant if anyone were proposing to build 86 million wind turbines? What matters, if you want to reduce overall bird mortality, is to go after the biggest sources in absolute numbers. As it currently stands, reducing cat populations by even 1% would save more birds than tearing down every windmill would.
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That summary is utterly meaningless without a scale factor.
In that case you'll want to look at the far right hand column. It lists bird deaths per GWh. Now: what is your preferred source of power. Nuclear? That kills 1.5 times as many birds as wind power. Or fossil fuel? Twenty times as many.
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In 2009 a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) scientist estimated that wind turbines kill 440,000 birds per year in the U.S., with future mortality expected to increase significantly as wind power generation expands by 2030 to levels about 12 times higher than 2009 levels.
12*0.44 = 5.28.
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You can dodge a tree.
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How do you dodge falling out of a tree?
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Damn, I need more coffee!
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.
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Actually fusion is a bit worse than problematical. Most current designs for fusion reactors will generate more radioactive waste/watt-hour than do current fission reactors, even if they work out as the most optomistic proponents claim.
One reason that "cold-fusion" attracted so much attention, even with the scanty evidence provided and lack of decent theory, was that it DIDN'T have that kind of a waste problem.
The really wierd thing is that this hasn't resulted in backing for fast-breeders, which can "burn
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For another story in that vein, see Brad Torgersen's "Outbound" in Analog a couple years back (probably also available in ebook form).
(Disclaimer, Brad's a friend of mine and occasional co-author.)
If -- and it's a freaking huge if -- we can develop fusion units that can be built (or bootstrapped from) something you can carry with you in a ship, then we can (slowly) spread from star to star hopping from one Oort cloud object to the next, just like your Polynesian islanders. (Even though I write about barely
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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
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FWIW, I believe that they are more destructive of bats than of birds. This could probably be fixed with appropriately designed noisemakers, but nobody seems to have done that yet.
Re:Ah, Let's Read the Whole Article, Shall We? (Score:4, Funny)
How about we put a windmill attached to your chin. That way the hot air you spout could be used to serve all the world's energy needs for decades to come.
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The San Francisco Bay Area, a metropolis if there ever was one, has a ton of windfarms just west of the city on the Altamont Pass and thereabouts. One of the largest in the world, actually.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altamont_Pass_Wind_Farm [wikipedia.org]
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Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, Fort Worth, El Paso (#s 4,7,9,13,16,19 on the list of largest US cities).
I'm pretty sure I can find some nice open spaces in Texas.
Old news (Score:4, Interesting)
The UK already figured out that wind power claims are exaggerated [bbc.co.uk]. By a lot. "Fuel poverty" [bbc.co.uk] is now an 'issue' that appears regularly in the UK press. It's killing people [thesun.co.uk].
Don't believe any of it; they're all oil company shills. Yay saving the planet.
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The UK already figured out that wind power claims are exaggerated [bbc.co.uk].
The article you quote there says:
Statements made by the wind industry and government agencies commonly assert that wind turbines will generate on average 30% of their rated capacity over a year, it said.
But the research found wind generation was below 20% of capacity more than half the time and below 10% of capacity over one third of the time.
This seems like an exercise in how to lie with statistics. If you're below 20% half the time, you're obviously not below 20% the other half of the time, which makes your average necessarily higher than 20%. Of course, it does say "more than half the time", but how much more? Also, it doesn't actually directly contradict the 30% average figure, which you would think it would if it had actual findings that contradicted that figure. About the best this study seems to be able to
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.
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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.
The articles you linked don't support these claims.
Fuel poverty [thepeoplespower.co.uk] is government policy. Connection complete.
Jeremy Cape, investment director at 54,000-home Affinity Sutton, warns of a 'triple whammy' that will likely hit social tenants as welfare reforms begin to reduce household income, energy prices rise and available funding to combat fuel poverty drops. 'This could lead to an increase in fuel poverty with few means of getting people [social tenants] out. We need a more flexible approach to ECO so that itâ(TM)s about making the green deal work,' he says.
It sounds like rising energy price are one factor contributing to "fuel poverty" and nothing you linked spells out the direct connection between carbon taxes and the increase in prices.
This is relevant because I don't see why the total 4 billion pound sterling of carbon taxes that are raised from everyone in England should go to the fraction of households in fuel poverty.
I'm not really disputing your claims, but you haven't backed them up and you've provide
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Roommate situations are cheaper than living alone.
As recently as 80 years ago we used to have more people in the same space.
Today, in my area, mexican immigrants live 12+ per house. It saves them money.
If you are freezing to death, you might consider sharing a house together each night and spending your days in your own house.
I have a room mate now. It saves me a couple hundred bucks a month.
Are you perhaps over reacting or maybe being just a TEENY bit "entitled" here?
In other news (Score:3)
A new study confirms that coal and petroleum are in fact still finite resources.
Boundary effect (Score:3)
Given the fact that power generating wind turbines only poke up 30-50m from the surface, I fail to see how the effects are going to be as significant as Keith suggests. Surface winds are already moderated by friction and topographically generated turbulence, while the vast bulk of wind energy exists above the boundary layer. We're unlikely to deploy large wind farms in a linear sequence anyway, so atmospheric coupling means surface winds will only be affected for a finite distance downstream of a given facility.
Energy vs. Power (Score:2)
The problem you're running into is the difference between energy and power. While it's true that the moving air above the surface contains energy, what is actually useful is the power that is taken up by the air mostly from solar heating, and is ultimately dissipated to friction at the boundary layer. This is the resource that is limited.
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"Given the fact that power generating wind turbines only poke up 30-50m from the surface, I fail to see how the effects are going to be as significant as Keith suggests."
This is the guy who suggested injecting a huge cloud of ash into the atmosphere to deflect sunlight and heat.
He has many strange ideas.
http://www.ted.com/talks/david_keith_s_surprising_ideas_on_climate_change.html [ted.com]
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Given the fact that power generating wind turbines only poke up 30-50m from the surface, I fail to see how the effects are going to be as significant as Keith suggests. Surface winds are already moderated by friction and topographically generated turbulence, while the vast bulk of wind energy exists above the boundary layer. We're unlikely to deploy large wind farms in a linear sequence anyway, so atmospheric coupling means surface winds will only be affected for a finite distance downstream of a given facility.
I didn't see where he made any dire predictions about the effects, other than an out of hand comment about what might happen if you covered the entire earth with windmills. Clearly he is not suggesting we are anywhere near that.
His whole point is that these turbines are packed too densely, and the front ones are shadowing the rear ones, and this fact seems to have been missed when people were making promises about the efficiency of large wind farms. Yet it is easily measurable by reading the output power
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: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.
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Last time I checked, trees weren't 200 meters high and scientifically engineer to suck as much energy out of wind gusts as physically possible.
Also... have you ever heard of the dust bowl? That was just grass we pulled up... and that turned into the greatest ecological disaster in human history.
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So your logic is, "we cut a bunch of trees down and got away with it so it must be OK to do more of it. This effect is further mitigated by the fact that elsewhere, things are even worse"?
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So, a few questions spring to mind. How expensive was the nuclear reactor in question? Was it more or less expensive than the equivalent capacity in wind turbines? What are the fuel and operating costs of the nuclear reactor, and are they greater or less than the operating expenses for the equivalent capacity in wind turbines. What, aside from generating power, is done on the two square miles of land the Fort Calhoun plant takes up and how does that compare to the 70 square miles for the wind turbines on wh
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Which is really why as we move forward we have to have a much more diverse view of energy. Right now most countries have a majority producer, be it coal or nuclear or natural gas or whatever. This is most likely due to political pressures, rather than rational thought. In large countries like the US there is going
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.
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"Solar is more predictable. "
Indeed, half the time it's pitch black and we know the exact minute it happens, not that it helps energy-wise knowing that in advance.
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You call up the nukies and ask for a few extra megaWatts in a few hours and they just flip you the bird. They're good for the steady baseline
Why not just make that baseline high enough to handle peak load? Wastage isn't really a problem with modern nuclear since it is so clean and we have so much nuclear fuel to use.
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But if wind power becomes a large part of your generating capacity (estimates vary, but somewhere in the 10%-20% range), you are likely to start having problems when the wind dies down and you have a sudden need to turn on 5% or 10% of the power generation for your state in a hurry, and you don't actually _have_ that many fast-responding generators. Oops.
It really depends on the site. Offshore wind installations tend to have much better production characteristics, as they have much steadier wind velocities, can take much larger generators, and far fewer objections from environmentalists. (Less of the NIMBY, even if the same level of BANANA.) Yes, that doesn't help with providing power to Oklahoma, but there's a lot of the rest of the world which can take advantage. We don't need the same solution everywhere. (The UK is well-placed for wind power use, as it
Engineers Learning Daily... (Score:2)
Quote TFA:
Keith's research has shown that the generating capacity of very large wind power installations (larger than 100 square kilometers) may peak at between 0.5 and 1 watts per square meter. Previous estimates, which ignored the turbines' slowing effect on the wind, had put that figure at between 2 and 7 watts per square meter.
Seriously, you have to wonder how this effect was over-looked by the original engineers.
Yet there appears to be hope. When you look at large windfarms [google.com], you will see the older ones were built much more densely than the modern ones, which endeavor not only to place turbines in the gaps between other turbines, but also leave more room between the towers as well as using towers of varying heights.
It would appear that simply reading their meters, the engineers are realizing that densely packing turbin
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Those pictures of wind farms in California are interesting. Compare to pictures of danish wind farms [google.com]
Totally different strategy.
However I would like to believe that neither american nor danish engineers are idiots. The windmills are likely placed in the most optimal way according to the landscape and economics.
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Rubbish, a 3 MW wind turbine will take less than 25 square metres at the base. The rest you can use for farming.
That is 120.000 watts per square metre used land. In other words the land use is negligible if the turbine is placed on farm land. This is of course also true of it is place offshore.
For this reason wind turbines can be quite popular for farmers. It is extra income from their land.
Just don't place them anywhere near people. You do not want to live next to one of these things. You want at least a f
Missing the point as to why we need renewables (Score:2, Interesting)
We're not going to replace all our generating capacity with wind. Or solar. Or wave. Or hydro. Or biofuels. None of them are even close to the scale of hydrocarbon energy as we use it now, nor will they ever be.
If we manage to build about 2500 nuclear plants ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil [wikipedia.org] ) over the next 50 years, and get batteries worth a shit, we might be able to replace hydrocarbon energy in a useful way, particularly if new nuke plants run on relatively safe, common, thorium, however,
To add more - one size doesn't fit all (Score:2)
Wind etc are competing in the peak load space with things like gas turbines and even diesel instead of in the base load space with hydro, coa
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Unfortunately, even A + B + C + D F + H + N, where F, H, and N are fossil, existing hydro, and nuclear plants. Which make you wonder why you're dicking around with any of them.
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too bad we've already dammed all major rivers.
All energy sources are finite (Score:2)
Professor of Public Policy (Score:2)
There's a tendency to accept words from anyone with an important title in anything so long as i
Who cares? (Score:2)
"Research by Harvard professor..." Who cares where he does his armchair science from? The real research is being done by building windmills around the world. Has there been a documented lessening of windflow anywhere as a result?
"as wind farms grow larger, they start to interact"
So don't build them too close together?
"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, but at that point my guess,
using wind energy directly (Score:2)
The problem of esthetics could be solved by designing an esthetically acceptable outdoors drier. It means 7 billion people could daily dry clothing and linen outside
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.
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"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.
No, Keith's suggesting that serious research needs to be done to scale wind beyond that point.
"The idea is feasible" is different than "we should execute the idea".
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problem is in the article they are talking about scaling beyond a few terawatts world wide.
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Exactly and the bottom 6B people will want to live just like we do now or better roughly 2-3X more power usage globally. This is assuming the entire surface is used for a wind farm which realistically will never happen.
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Oh and since only 0.25% of sun energy becomes wind solar is better, if you can get say 30% efficiency out of 97.5% you'll do a lot better than 100% (which would never happen either) of 0.25%. You'd need a lot less land, can overlap on roofs for example (I don't want something that by definition catches wind fixed to my roof in a storm) which means your production can scale by number of dwellings vs actually being subtracted from as more land is used for housing.
A planet full of windfarms could power half the US (Score:2)
At 8,760 hours per year, that's 2.85 TW AVERAGE, about 5TW peak. So covering the entire planet with nothing but wind farms could power half of the US. The claim is that we could have windmills powering electric cars. Not on this earth, the math just doesn't work.
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"'.
2nd grade reading comprehension (Score:3)
The claim is that we could have windmills powering electric cars.
The greenies ARE wanting to replace gasoline with wind, so energy IS the right metric. Unless of course you're saying electric cars won't ever work, that cars will always have to run on gasoline?
I suppose you could say "wind could provide a fraction of our needs, as long we don't have any electric cars and factories keep running on coal and natural gas." You would be correct if you said "electric cars make renewable energy impossible", but I'm guessing that's
Re:Cue the "Keith's owned by big oil!!" accusation (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure... just like you can't use Niagra Falls to run turbines without having a major effect on the.... oh, no... wait.
You see, although you're technically right... you can't take energy out of a system without affecting it, the scale at which we could ever even *HOPE* to usefully harness power from such a system compared to the scale of actual net power available in the whole system is naught but insignificant. To be fair you might appear to some very local effects on things like temperature, wind direction, etc, but then so do things like towns or cities with any large or particularly tall buildings. Ultimately, most of the phenomena that has any real impact on climate in our atmosphere happens at *FAR* higher altitudes than any wind farm blades will reach.
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Taking energy out of what system? You aren't taking energy out of the atmosphere in any meaningful quantity. There might be local effects but that's it.
Reminder:
Sun = 174,000 terawatts. All we need is about 15 of that.
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Well supposedly (according to one of the posts in the comments on the original article) only 0.25% of that energy (250TW) gets turned into wind. So you'd be taking About 7% of the total. But relistically a lot of the wind will be effectively unusable: in the middle of the desert surrounded by people that can't afford things that need power, in the middle of the ocean etc. Think hot summer day with say 20% less breeze (you presumably live in a populated area right near where they are going to want to plop th
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Re:Cue the "Keith's owned by big oil!!" accusation (Score:5, Insightful)
We can't affect the climate by directly tapping energy from wind (or tides, or geothermal) - the scales are so vastly different that we wouldn't even be a blip on the radar.
We can affect the climate by polluting the atmosphere, though. The reason why it works is that, although the quantities we put out there are still minuscule compared to the size of the atmosphere as a whole, they stay there and accumulate - and it's that aggregated effect over decades of pollution that starts showing up, and even then quite slowly. It actually wouldn't matter even then, if it did not induce a number of positive feedback loops (water vapor increase, shrinking ice caps resulting in albedo change, methane released from permafrost and ocean clathrates, airborne fraction of CO2 increasing due to oceans warming) that magnify the initial small effect.
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...if one effect of warming is increased wind speeds and storm conditions, I'd quite like turbines to suck some of that out of the atmosphere.
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Hurricanes tend to come from the ocean, likely well away from convenient places to put wind farms. You can have some off shore but how far do you go before you can't just build supports but have to make an oil rig sized thing for a couple turbines?
Re:Cue the "Keith's owned by big oil!!" accusation (Score:5, Funny)
If you take latent heat out of the air, where does it go?
Washington, DC.
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Oh they have a solution in Washington. Not enough wind? Build giant fans with coal plants to make more.
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People have been predicting cheap energy for longer than I can remember. Energy is going to get more expensive, not less.
The renewables (solar, wind) have fundamental reliability issues. They require an energy storage system, and that energy storage system is expensive.
Nuclear is expensive too, but for different reasons.
Oil and coal will likely stay the cheapest energy storage source for a long time to come. In part, because the concrete and steel to make the nuclear plants and the chemicals to make t
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
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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:Cue the "Keith's owned by big oil!!" accusation (Score:4, Insightful)
False. If you'll recall from Econ 101, adding supply isn't the only way to eliminate a shortage.
It's unfortunate for our economy that so few people understand Supply and Demand.
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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: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.
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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/
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http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/02/03/1529651/new-mexico-utility-agrees-to-purchase-solar-power-at-a-lower-price-than-coal/
In some places solar plants are thriving and already are the cheapest form of energy
Re:Cue the "Keith's owned by big oil!!" accusation (Score:5, Interesting)
We've got to play the cards we're dealt
We've long since played cards we've dealt ourselves. That's why there is a vast cloud [nasa.gov] of pollution drifting out of China. We've feathered our environmental pressure group nest at home and shipped our industry and its energy demands out of "the environment."
new-mexico-utility-agrees-to-purchase-solar-power-at-a-lower-price-than-coal
Mexico doesn't have a Feinstein to wreck [latimes.com] their solar build outs. For purposes of this discussion Mexico isn't in "the environment" either. It's just another destination for refugee industries evacuating the US.
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new-mexico-utility-agrees-to-purchase-solar-power-at-a-lower-price-than-coal
Mexico doesn't have a Feinstein to wreck [latimes.com] their solar build outs. For purposes of this discussion Mexico isn't in "the environment" either. It's just another destination for refugee industries evacuating the US.
Mexico =/= New Mexico. NM has the exact same Feinstein as CA, given that she isn't a state legislator.
Hang on Cowboy (Score:3)
China didn't have an operating AP-1000 in mid 2012, let alone 2009, and I'm not sure if it's been finished since then.
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.
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Attempting to Build a nuclear plant has large upfront costs, takes 20 years, and often results in a half-way cancelled project.
I am pretty sure that not one of the nuclear power plants used by the US Navy took 20 years to build. The S8G reactor on board an Ohio class boomer makes 220MW of energy. I am pretty certain we could start siting small reactors, operated by former USN personnel, near cities cheaply enough to make nuclear the dominant, and cost effective, electricity source given the political will to do so.
The extreme length of start to finish is 100% related to the number of lawsuits filed by opponents of nuclear power.
Re:Cue the "Keith's owned by big oil!!" accusation (Score:5, Insightful)
the naive hippies and their allies who will not brook even the mildest criticism of their unrealistic dreams of a world where everything is powered by wind and solar alone
What about the naive businessmen and their allies who will not brook even the mildest criticism of their unrealistic dreams of a world where everything is powered by fossil fuels forever?
Re:Cue the "Keith's owned by big oil!!" accusation (Score:5, Insightful)
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... and pretty soon you've got some trust-fund asshole in dreadlocks screaming that you must be a plant from Big Oil.
I don't know if Keith is owned by big oil, but he is president of Carbon Engineering which has ties to the oil industry on the green house gas side of the equation. As to whether that makes his opinion biased or not, that is up to the reader, but he has been an outspoken climate scientist for a long time and has the respect of the scientific community.
Some lessons are just best learned the hard way. I just wish they could be learned without wasting my tax dollars on more unrealistic schemes that are going to amount to little, if anything, useful in the end. I'd rather see at least some tax money going to tested technology, like nuclear, that really DOES have great unrealized potential.
It appears that you got your wish and a lot of your tax money is going to be going towards nuclear after all: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/23/us/undergroun [nytimes.com]
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Your criticism is for something that was built 70 years ago, was the first of it type, when they had no idea what they were doing?
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Your criticism is for something that was built 70 years ago, was the first of it type, when they had no idea what they were doing?
No, my criticsm is to point out to the OP that his "tested technology like nuclear" has its own share of problems and isn't without cost, the biggest being what to do with the spent fuel rods. The OP was opining that these "new technologies" like wind farms don't pan out and just waste his tax dollars.
As for them not knowing what they were doing, well, these were the guys from the Manhattan project, the top scientists in their field. I'm pretty sure they knew what they were doing, even with the storage tank
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Maybe Keith is owned by big oil. Because this "prediction" is already way surpassed by reality.
The study claims that large installations of more than 100 square kilometres will only produce between 0.5 and 1 watt per square meter. In other words, the claim is that a 100 square kilometre wind farm will only have a generating capacity between 50 MW and 100 MW.
But how does that fit with the fact that Denmarks largest wind farm, the Anholt sea based wind farm, has a generating capacity of 400 MW and it only cov
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why don't we build a gen 4 reactor and actually decommission it when it's useful life is at an end, instead of running it for 10 more years, and ignoring all of the warning signs that it will be in trouble?
ohh and then complain that when a larger event than the facility was designed causes "minor" issues. Should we design all nuke plants to survive a direct hit from 2012DA14 without releasing any more radiation than you receive while flying across the USA in a commercial airliner? How about the moon? what a
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Pascal's wager is stupid when it comes to conventional religion, and just as stupid when it co
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