I was in a conversation today at lunch with a fellow who told me that “wind power is better than anything we’ve ever done for generating electricity”. That made me wonder, how reliable (beyond the constancy of wind issues) is it?
Whenever I drive through Techachapi or Altamont passes here in California I note that there always seems to be a fair number of these three blade windmills that are out of commission. Perhaps failure is more common than one would expect. I found a couple of examples:
And this one also, though I don’t know what the ending for it was like the one above…
Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
The misleading info about wind generated power is pervasive.
One wind turbine outputs how much? 3 -4 Megawatts at peak efficiency. One small fossil fueled station will output 600 – 1000 Mega watts continuously.
We are told that wind generated power will supply so many thousand homes with power — So Watt. The Real Power is required by industry. The power consumed by just one small factory is enough to power a hundred homes.
The telling factor is that a wind powered generator will not produce enough energy to be able to manufacture itself. Same goes for solar.
Sustainable energy does not exist.
Whenever I flew over the Altamont windmill farm back in the last century, it always struck me how few were turning.
RE: Reply by John Goetz: In all seriousness, software ought to be able to deal with that.
Software can easily handle routing the juice to cover intermittent sources, but the problem is on the mechanical end. Switches connected to steady sources like steam turbines don’t operate much, but making and breaking to handle windmills wears ’em out. Part of the complexity of the windmills is the power switching circuitry, to keep them from drawing power and motoring when the wind dies.
… for now the grid, through its interconnection with other providers in Quebec and the U.S. can handle the load fluctuations. However this will no longer be the case once more wind farms are brought on stream and coal fired plants are decommissioned driven by misguided policy based decisions …
One good point about more turbine farms is that the wind is always blowing somewhere, so a loss here may be covered by a gain there, smoothing out the load spikes and giving you a reliable 20% efficiency over the whole grid.
Sure, 20% reliable doesn’t sound like much of a sales pitch, but you see it’s being paid for by the government, not you or me.
Re: yonason (19:38:08) : The design of the leading edge of those blades is based on the knobs on the leading edge of humpback whale flippers from the research of Frank Fish (yup, that’s his real name). As these whales lunge towards the surface, they bring their flippers up to “flash” the prey with the white underside of the flippers. Frank’s work found that the knobs substantially reduce drag. That’s where the company with the unusual blades got the name “whalepower.”
Re: Bill Illis (19:57:46) : There is an investment scheme making the rounds which purportedly addresses the issue of friction from the weight of a large wind turbine. The premise is to use magnetic levitation (mag-lev) to reduce friction and increase the power output. It sounded a bit scamy to me when the promoter said they intended to install a solar voltaic array to cover the power demand when the wind didn’t blow. After I pointed out the amount of real estate necessary to provide that much power and that such an array would make the wind turbine irrelevant, he said he was mistaken. They were instead to have large capacitors to store energy when the wind was blowing so the energy could be used to keep the turbine turning when the wind died down. I went down the path of a perpetual motion machine, then tired of spending time with a profoundly stupid individual.
I wish I could set one of these things up and make some money.
http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/
Screw wind!
“…you see it’s being paid for by the government, not you or me.” — Mike McMillan (21:22:41)
Uh, you’re joking, …right?
Next time you send a payment to the IRS, use this postage stamp.
yonason (19:38:08) :
Possibly one of these: http://www.pacwind.net/products.html
The Decapitater! The text says it also increases efficiency at low speed.
Maybe we should let the Europeans develop these things. If they are able to make them work in a cost effective manner then we can copy them. If not, we’ll just learn from their mistakes and save the R&D costs.
> Reply by John Goetz: OK, so we give up on wind?
Perhaps excess electricity could be used to electrolyze water, and (at least the hydrogen) be fed into a pipeline system. Hydrogen can be stored for the slow production periods and fuel cells or gas turbines running on hydrogen could be used to make the farm be essentially a baseload provider.
I think wind -> only electricity will prove too problematic.
@Mike McMillan:
The continual load concept for turbines is nice on paper, but when you factor in transmission costs, infrastructure upgrades and geographic wind distribution the concept is found to be lacking.
At present, there is no justification for commercial wind turbines economically, environmentally or socially.
I would think magnetic bearings, e.g. maglev, would be the best, but requires a lot of power…
Dee,
EUReferendum reports the same governmentally-induced corruption. The only way the wind turbines are kept spinning (minus the actual wind) is the massive public-paid subsidies which are gathered through substantially higher electricity bills. The EU, through a directive or two, is forcing the shut down of some coal plants – even if the coal plants come back, they must come back with carbon-capture and storage, which will only increase the price of electricity and decrease efficiency of generating it. The French, who have bought out the largest British electricity generator, are going to build more nuclear plants, which will help. But the time gap between when the old plants go offline (coal and nuclear) and the new stuff (natural gas or nuclear) come online could cause serious shortfalls there.
This is where, as I have said time and again, AGW “science” is used to make policies that are bad, corrupts business interests into buying into it because plenty of public money (taxes and increased prices) is there for the taking, and overall give the shaft to the little man. It is the exercise of a political agenda filled with corruption.
Even T. Boone Pickens, if you recall the commercials, is wild about wind power (and natural gas) because there is plenty of subsidies to be given out. He basically bribed the Texas legislature, and they re-wrote the law so that he could form a municipal area, which being a government can declare eminent domain. So now he can snatch the common man’s house and land, so he can make billions off of wind-power and natural gas (pipeline to be run under the wind turbine electrical lines), appearing ‘green’ and pro-American energy. Pffft! A puff of smoke. The only ‘green’ TBP knows is the color that comes on dollar bills.
Along with carbon capture-and-store, wind power is one of the most dangerous ideas in substantially raising prices for customer. And unlike other industries, you can’t stop buying because you don’t like the price. You can’t go elsewhere. And once you demolish your old reliable ‘dirty’ power sources for ‘green’ power sources, it is incredibly hard if not impossible (due to costs and laws) to get the old reliables back. It is as big an attack on the common man as there has ever been since I don’t know when.
Ah, the great Chaos Theory fallacy. The butterfly has zero effect outside it’s immediate vicinity, since the incredibly tiny amount of wind it creates is quickly swallowed up by any normal wind. I mean think about it. Just speaking causes more wind that a butterfly. And in the case of someone like the Goreacle, we’re talking major jet exhaust.
living in New Jersey I had the pleasure of traveling via the intercostal waterway last weekend and as we approached Atlantic City a friend on the boat pointed out to me that none of the windmills were turning. There was a moderate breeze, so I was surprised . My reaction was what a waste of taxpayers dollars and who is kidding who when the folks in Washington and our state capitals mandate that we survive on renewable fuels, solar, and wind power. To be fair, Later in the afternoon as we departed from Atlantic city the wind picked up so the windmills were turning.
My proposal would be that the politicians should have to live under the mandates they pass for 5 years before the public are exposed to their follies. I want to see them drive small cars, give up air travel, shut off the AC, freeze in the winter, ride on public transport, etc before they ask me to sacrifice and pay a premium for electricity, gasoline, and other fuels..
As a matter of concern to me, some of the NE states have banded together to initiate a cap and trade for carbon. See the URL below:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/theyre_launching_americas_firs.html
My home state (NJ) has passed legislation and was supposed to be part of the auction. Fortunately the current administration in NJ is so corrupt and incompetent that they did not get their act together in time to get into the cap and trade party. Unfortunately Pollicies like this along with high taxes are forcing business and people to exit NJ. The renewable energy mandate will put the nail in the coffin for NJ. Many residents are beginning to realize that while these green policies sound good, they are expensive and will send jobs and fortunes elsewhere. More exposure in the media is needed to inform the voters so we can throw the bums out.
I can’t understand why the politicians have such an illogical hate for carbon (for me) while they enjoy all the benefits themselves.
In reply to: yonason (19:38:08)
What does he mean “barrel shaped turbines?”
See “http://www.aerotecture.com/index.html” title =”Aerotecure” a Chicago startup company – very small, localized, urban wind powered turbines.
@MikeMcMillan
“One good point about more turbine farms is that the wind is always blowing somewhere, so a loss here may be covered by a gain there, smoothing out the load spikes and giving you a reliable 20% efficiency over the whole grid.
Sure, 20% reliable doesn’t sound like much of a sales pitch, but you see it’s being paid for by the government, not you or me.”
What Evan said will do for part of that second part. But seriously, it costs 6 times more to generate (at the least), which will HAVE to be passed on to consumers in higher prices. Even if the government paid for all of it, that still means more tax money. The turbines wear out, they break, they can only operate at a certain span of wind velocities, they are expensive to build and operate, and they are a terrible eyesore. The ONLY way that they can be maintained is through massive subsidies and massive prices rises. That is the only way any energy company would or will EVER be interested in them. WIND POWER = NO POWER.
Here’s another problem with wind turbines, when they DO work: Shadow flicker.
If your home is built near a wind turbine the pulsating shadow flicker on your home is enough to drive a person insane. Here’s a video of one victim:
http://gorelied.blogspot.com/2008/09/wind-turbine-shadow-flicker-and-noise.html
Whilst in the navy and operating with helicopters I know the pilots were paranoid about anything hitting the rotor blades as the smallest chip/dent/etc caused imbalance.
How do wind turbines fair when hit by birds, bats, kites, hang-gliders, etc.
I would think the time spent on blade maintenance and balancing would be high (thus costly) plus this equals downtime.
“I am growing excited about geothermal steam electricity generation. I saw where 99% of the earth is over 1500 degrees C. Let’s say that is way off. Let’s say 80% and 1000 degrees C.”
I used to be excited about it but I learned some things that have lead me to believe that it isn’t a good idea on a massive global scale. That heat inside the earth takes a long time to accumulate. It is generated by atomic decay of elements having very long half-lives which means during any given time, there are relatively few atoms decaying. So the heat builds up very slowly. You can easily take out in a decade heat that took thousands or even millions of years to accumulate. In other words, it isn’t really renewable. And it could kill us.
We need that heat to generate volcanism in order to maintain the atmosphere. If every city on the planet were to have a large geothermal operation (anyplace can produce geothermal energy, you just have to dig deeper in some places than in others) we could easily dissipate the heat inside the earth into space. Basically geothermal is taking the heat from inside the earth, converting it to electricity which we do something with and turn back into heat which is dissipated into the atmosphere and then into space. We would basically greatly speed up the cooling of the Earth’s interior by building what amounts to a huge heat exchanger system.
The first problem would be local heat depletion where you pull the heat out faster than it can be conducted back and your energy production drops. Other problems include dissolved minerals and gasses causing the hot water to be highly corrosive. Plants don’t seem to last very long. On a small scale, it is fine but as a major global energy source, it probably sucks and could change what is going on inside the earth that we rely on to keep us and everything else alive.
We really don’t want the earth to cool off because about half the stuff that generated the heat in there has decayed already. Heat is now being produced at only half the rate it was 4 billion years ago. Once the planet cools to the point where where volcanism stops or is greatly slowed, Earth becomes like Mars. The lighter gasses and water vapor outgas into space and we have a bone dry planet with a thin CO2 atmosphere. We would die long before that happened, though, because once CO2 drops much lower than it is now, photosynthesis stops and the plants die. We are still currently at about a record low for CO2 in the atmosphere of Earth on a geological timescale. If it gets much lower, the plants will begin to die and then the animals will die for lack of food.
I have no problem with a few small geothermal plants but I do have serious problems with it on a massive scale along the lines of the current global energy production of coal or nuclear. That could basically kill the planet.
Big picture time. What have the last 10 years of the complte lack of a common sense energy policy cost?? Mainly Democratic actions, in tandem with environmental activist have stopped virtually every effort to develop this nations natural resources.
Just think, about 200 million people are paying $75 to $100 more per month for gas then they did two or three years ago. That is about 15 billion each and every month!!!
Now add the increased cost of oil, natural gas, coal etc.
Now add the cost of alternative energy subsidies.
Add in exsisting and proposed carbon trade programs.
Add in energy caused inflation to virtually every product.
Now add the cost of AGW research that is primarily looking for new and creative ways to blame EVERYTHING on AGW, and never consider the benefits.
All together, I dont know, you tell me, 30 billion a month??
If we had a reasonable energy policy we would have low inflation, high employment, and be able to afford the development of clean fossile fuel energy, and fossil fuel alternatives, all at a reasonable and affordable pace.
Gee, then maybe we could afford to deal with this….
The entire Freddie Mack, Fannie Mae mortgage market collapse was primarily (as in the biggest factor) a result of democrats creating a housing bubble through a system of social welfare (housing for people that could not afford to purchase), and rewarding their constituents; Franklin Raines, Jim Johnson, Jamie Gorlick to name a few. In other words what we have here is , I get votes through social welfare and campaign contributions, my buddies get rich, and the tax payers foot the bill.
Before anyone gets upset plenty of republicans turned their backs on the problem for political expediancy, and plenty of bankers and mortgage borrowers took a very short term appoach also.
There are designs for wind turbines with vertical shafts and no blades. Some look about like the agitator in washers. They eliminate most of the structural and sound problems of the conventional turbines.
But verticals never seem to get out of the engineering labs. So there are problems somewhere.
I have little doubt that engineers can handle the grid problems of intermittent wind generation. Costs will fall and reliability will rise. But wind that isn’t will produce no power.
I’m interested to know why the dinner guest thought wind power was the best, did he elaborate.
I have a softspot myself for small scale hydroelectric power generation, hosue or village requirement sized. I’d invest in one of those, if only I had a river next to my house ..damn, always some downsides!
Regards
Andy
iceFree (21:33:15)
Hyperion sounds like a scam to me, but . . .
http://www.techrockies.com/story/0017490.html
. . . maybe not.
Dee Norris (22:13:48) :
At present, there is no justification for commercial wind turbines economically, environmentally or socially.
Oh yes there is!! – One justification. – The guilt and feel good factor. (A western society disease)
Response to ROM (18:37:34)
The British Standards (BSi) is already working on this try
http://www.profeng.com/archive/2008/2115/21150057.htm
and this may be of general interest
http://www.profeng.com/archive/2008/2116/21160007.htm
Wind is far too mechanical. Those turbines must have huge bearer problems etc.
Geothermal is interesting but still only in it’s infancy and there could be radiation and geological stability problems.
Solar thermal http://www.ausra.com/ is a serious possibility.
They are claiming 24/7 output, i.e. base load power, and at a price competitive with coal. They intend to store the steam produced and operate continuously. They say there is 10 gigawatts proposed by 8 individual companies in the Nevada desert.
They’ve just opened their first factory to manufacture the reflective panels.