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?
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Karl Heuer
Look at thorium, the original nuclear fuel
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/is-thorium-the-answer-to-our-energy-crisis-428279.html
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf62.html
I too have been struck by the small number of turbines actually turning when I’ve gone over Altamont or down near Palm Springs. Strange and a bit disappointing. However, I do have one positive story about wind power.
Last month I spent a week at Top of the World lodge in the high country of northern Wyoming. It is located at 9,400 feet and the terrain goes up from there — truly impressive country. The store/lodge uses a conventional generator to generate most of its electricity, but also has a single, medium-sized wind turbine that is turning quite regularly, due to the pervasive winds at that altitude and location.
I made it a point to ask the proprietor about the turbine and whether he got much energy from it. He indicated that the turbine produced about 25% of his total electricity and that he was quite happy with it for the most part.
So this is a successful wind-energy story, but it comes with a some caveats: (i) the wind energy is used to supplement an always-available conventional generator, (ii) there is no distribution challenge, as the energy is being used right on site, (iii) the location has a good wind profile, (iv) the turbine is small enough to not have a large visual or wildlife impact (the turbine was not particularly noisy, but there was an audible swish-swish all the time that would have been nice to do without (although not as noisy as the conventional generator)).
I leave it to others to decide whether this success story is something that could be widely replicated for larger-scale wind energy production, or whether successful wind energy generation ultimately is limited to small, site-specific situations like Top of the World.
REPLY: “I too have been struck by the small number of turbines actually turning when I’ve gone over Altamont or down near Palm Springs.” But you’re OK now, right? No permanent injuires? 😉 Anthony
Someone may have already mentioned this, but take a good look at the photo. You’ll see the fire dept. standing on the road instead of fighting the fire. A good reason is that these turbines are so tall today that many fire depts. can’t do anything but watch them burn. The nacelle (main body) can easily be 25+ stories tall, and fire hoses have an obviously difficult time with that height. Each can also hold 200 gallons of lubricant, which makes for a great bonfire. Check out the lawsuit threats in Calif. over the bird kills at Altamont Pass, that averaged 5000 bird kills per year there for 20 years.
As far as electricity production as a percentage of rated capacity:
Denmark 2006
Wind Turbine Capacity 3135MW
http://www.power-technology.com/projects/hornsreefwind/
Wind Electricity Production 6.11Twh (6,108 GWh)
http://www.ens.dk/sw46975.asp
GWh capacity of 3135MW = 3.135GW*8760 hours/yr =27,463GWh
Production = 6,108 GWH
6108/27463 = .2224
Overall production as % of rated capacity 22.24%
That makes 1KW effective production capacity for wind = ~$5000 — much less than wind
plus you can dual use the land wind turbines sit on — cows don’t care,
farmers/landowners can earn royalties
I have never heard of terrorists targeting a wind farm
you can’t make a dirty bomb from the downwind leftover breeze
you can dismantle a wind turbine and tower, and re-assemble it pretty much anywhere
The turbine in the graphic caught fire and burned a field
Chernobyl caught fire and burned the world
I haven’t read all the comments but I went through quite a few; and it always amazes me that people spend so much time evaluating and talking about the economics of wind (write in your own pet alternative energy). This inevitably leads to discussions of subsidies; and then “economies of scale” keeps cropping up.
This naturally leads one to conclude that the problem with “alternative” energies is simply an economic problem. Hell! sell 700 billion dollars worth of those suckers to the Feds. That means you put economists to work on that economic problem. When Oil was $2 a barrel, oil shale was going to get competitive if oil went to $6, and when oil was $6, oil shale was looking like a good bet at $11 a barrel. Well no matter how high oil got, the oil shale was “just around the corner.”
Well it is easy to solve the economic problem of say Solar cells. When oil was $25 a barrel, you could make about 6 Watts of solar cells using the energy in that barrel of oil. So lets just put a BIG tax on oil and give the money to people to buy solar cells. Why not $1,000,000 tax on a barrel of oil; that should fix the problem of using fossil fuels.
So you take your subsidy dollars down to your favorite silicon emporium to load up on solar cells.
Dang ! says the proprietor; you should have come in yesterday. Yesterday I was making 6 Watts of cells out of a barrel of oil and I could break even with you at $4 a watt; but some jackass just upped the cost of oil to $1,000,000 a barrel, and today I can still make 6 Watts of cells, but now I have to charge you $166, 666 per Watt for my cells.
You see the problem of “Alternative energy sources” has absolutely nothing to do with economics; they are all constrained by TECHNOLOGICAL PROBLEMS; mostly the energy CAPITAL it takes to get at that alternative energy; and those problems will NEVER be solved by economists working on the problem.
Face it; energy is either already here on earth; and stored; mostly as either Nuclear fission energy, or hydrocarbon chemical energy; or else it has to come here from somewhere else; and the only real somewhere else is the sun; and we know exactly the rate at which it comes here; and it simply is too damn slow to be viable. At around 1 kW per m^2 maximum, solar energy is simply too diffuse to be very practical. Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use it where we can; but it is never going to be mainstream.
Now bio-mass is a sort of natural conversion of solar energy; but it is also about the worst mechanism for gathering solar energy because its conversion efficiency is so low.
Solar cell engineers waste their time and efforts trying to make paint on solar cells that cost almost nothing; but that translates into MORE AREA. And it is almost impossible to build any massive area covering system; that can survive a “100 year storm”, that does absolutely nothing, for the price that is needed to build a functional solar energy farm from actual solar cells.
Clearly the whole game for solar energy is !!! EFFICIENCY !!!
I liked Fred Singer;s comment on the proposed large scale American South West Desert solar farm described in Jan 2008 Scientific American.
“Who is going to clean the dust off 30,000 square miles of solar cells. ” Which just incidently, is exactly the size of ANWR.
Why do we have the “standard” 3-blade design? Is it because one manufacturer produced the cheapest model and captured the market? Why isn’t there a huge variety of turbine types? Compare the situation of wind turbines now (1) with the beginnings of just about any other form of technical device, when in most cases seemingly every option under the sun was experimented with, before a consensus was arrived at?
Is the 3-bladed design the most efficient? This is dependent upon wind speed and direction. Could there not be explorations made of designs which may avoid these limitations?
Why isn’t more interest taken in wind chimneys, which are basically tall black funnels? All of (at least the first hundred years) of our industrial civilisation powered by boilers using natural chimneys. So why not put the propellers on vertical axes in long black funnels?
(1) How did they become called “Turbines” which they are not? Why was this description seemingly instantly accepted?
I see I moved Moab from Utah to Southern California’s desert. Let’s try Mojave instead.
George
M White:
Thorium sounds good — in principle
However, you are talking about total replacement of all current reactors with Thorium based Reactors, with a technology that the proponent scientist in the article says will take 15 years:
“He estimates the cost of a prototype reactor at 550m euros and believes it will take around 15 years to develop: ”
1. Need for a Thorium mining refinement and fuel production system (not easy – pebble bed fuel took decades to develop, and there is still no commercially viable pebble bed reactor )
2. 15 years to develop, if we started today, with unproven technology
3. there are significant daughter products with Thorium including Thorium 228, Thallium, U-233 and U232
Peter-
The three blade design probably provides the best stability for the least cost. The number of blades has nothing to do with the amount of energy the blade can take from the wind,
that is determined by the swept area, which is calculated as the area of a circle described by the radius of any blade.
In Scheveningen, NL (if I remember correctly) there is a 2 bladed turbine, US farmers used many bladed turbines, but for structural integrity vs. weight (the tower has to support the turbine, nacelle, hub, and blades) and cost of materials, the three blades have won out.
Karl Heuer:
“Chernobyl caught fire and burned the world.”
Um, no, Karl, it didn’t.
I can’t understand why you’re so anti-nuclear power. Forbes magazine had a great article on the costs to the consumer for energy from various sources. That information shows that a new nuclear plant — brought on-line by 2016 — would provide clean energy at about the same cost as coal: click
Who do you work for, Karl?
Karl- The progress energy price-tag of $17B includes $2B for a new transmission line and substations to get the energy to the load centers. That comes to $6520/kW. That is actually quite a bargain compared with wind or solar. I track this pretty closely because I will start paying for the nukes starting next January, to the tune of 4 cents/kWhr price jump on my electric bill. We shall see where the prices finally land. I suspect they will be higher still.
I used to think this was outrageous until I priced out a wind or solar PV/thermal farm that can replace ALL of the power from the nuclear plant.
The total project time for this nuke is actually closer to 10 years. Much of that time is gobbled up by permits and lawsuits. Japan, for example, just completed a big nuclear reactor in 3.5 years.
The Uranium reserves issue is a red herring. Uranium surpluses on the world market halted any exploration or development of known reserves for several decades. That has now changed. I expect Uranium reserves worldwide to easily keep pace with demand for the next 100 years.
Of course, recycling spent fuel rods would extend the fuel life by a factor of five or more. Then, as a poster above mentioned, there’s the Thorium fuel cycle.
Your wind tower prices are out of date. Prices have skyrocketed recently due to high demand (why do we charge so much? because we can!), increased raw materials costs and a shortage of skilled labor for installation and commissioning. May 08 pricing for equipment alone (exclusive of transportation, installation and commissioning) was $3450/kW for off-shore, and $2170/kW for land-based wind towers.
The price of wind (and solar) has not come down over the past 6 years. The cost of solar PV has not budged since 2002, even though production worldwide is up more than a factor of ten. GE just announced a $12B backlog of orders for wind towers. In this kind of market, there is no incentive to reduce prices, but there is a strong incentive to jack them up until customers start crying. By the way, why do we need a production tax credit for wind towers when they are in such demand? Why does the wind lobby group scream that wind installations will plummet if the tax credits and other wind goodies (accelerated depreciation, for example) go away?
Karl Heuer “I have never heard of terrorists targeting a wind farm”
I’ve heard of environmentalists opposing wind farms and Ed Abbey postulated about the “grenade point” on dams.
Karl Heuer “you can’t make a dirty bomb from the downwind leftover breeze”
I have never heard of terrorists making a dirty bomb from spent nuclear fuel or any other nuclear material. When was this done?
Karl Heuer “you can dismantle a wind turbine and tower, and re-assemble it pretty much anywhere”
How long of a lifetime does it have? If you re-assemble it “pretty much anywhere” what is the probability that the the wind will suitable, that it won’t affect RADAR, that it won’t affect other electronic transmisions, that it won’t kill bats and raptors like hawks or eagles, that it won’t violate someone’s esthetic values, and that it will be able to be linked to a grid?
Karl Heuer “Chernobyl caught fire and burned the world”
Amazingly enough, the world is still here.
George Smith:
Solar Cell Engineers are not wasting time with paint-on pv
My roof has an effective area incident to solar radiation of ~2500 square feet, advanced buiding integrated solar photo-voltaic shingles (currently silicon) provide 10-13 watts/square foot.
If they could be made of a coated polymer (much like regular shingles for half the price and get half the power:
My shingled roof would generate 15KW during every hour of solar irradiance — even if we say only 6 hours/day (its alot more than that in the desert SW, and SoCal
Thats 90KWh/day or 2700KWh/month — more than double what the average homeowner uses, plus, I am insulated from grid instability
all that with no need to put an array in my yard
on another related — polymer PV as the lining for your pool, or as a polymer coating on your vinyl siding (in development actually)
Karl- Also, Exelon published in its 2007 annual report that, among its fleet of electric generation assets, nuclear was the cheapest source of electricity, at 1.68 cents per kWhr.
Smokey:
Tell that to people from the Ukraine and Scandinavia
As far as the estimates, in 2006 they were estimating $3 billion for 1 reactor, I like using current numbers instead of old news
As we know ( from the link I posted above) Progress Energy informed regulators in 2008 that a 2 reactor plant would cost at least $17 Billion
Why am I against nuclear?
1. It is cost and timeline prohibitive, at current construction costs and timelines, to double electricity production using nuclear would cost ~$ 850 Billion, and would take 625 construction years
2. The Uranium production capacity of the US and the World cannot support significant expansion of nuclear energy
3. If we did embark on this path it would be Uranium based because Thorium won’t be technically feasible until atleast 2025
4. It will make the US dependent on foreign Uranium
5. It requires centralized energy production which is inherently susceptible to large scale transmission failures, terrorist attacks, and monopolization by a small oligarch of producers
The cost and timeline of $850 Billion and 625 construction years are for the US only
A study analyzing the output of all 2300 operating British wind mills shows that their yield is the same as the output from one mid-sized coal powered generation plant.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/2910741/Windfarms-One-of-the-great-deceptions-of-our-time.html
Wind/Solar.. How about the most reliable and predictable source of “green” energy. The tide happens twice a day every day and can be tapped 4 times (coming and going) .
Serrations on blades are used to reduce the drag bubble and increase the efficiency of the wing. Turbulators have been on sailplanes for years exactly for that purpose.
In Texas, at least, wind power isn’t so reliable. The Electric Reliability
Council of Texas (ERCOT) manages the power grid in Texas, and they
say:
“Using 2006 data, ERCOT has determined that 8.7% of the installed wind
capability can be counted as dependable capacity during the peak demand
period for the next year.”
http://www.ercot.com/news/press_releases/2007/ERCOT_Response_to_Rep._Barton
Citing the 8.7% of capacity figure to wind power enthusiasts is almost
as fun as telling small children there is no Santa Claus.
There is also the inconvenient truth that the windiest parts of Texas are
far from the major cities, so there’s an additional multi-billion $$$
cost of transmission lines:
http://www.ercot.com/news/press_releases/2008/nr04-02-08
As someone mentioned, going all nuke is not a good idea because of its inability to load follow. The same is true of gas fired plant, at least the design in the UK. If they are varied by even a few % the thermal stresses on the plant reduce the life dramatically.
In the UK we have for a very long time gone for a mix of plant:
Nuclear for 24/7 baseload + High efficiency coal plant for 24/7 baseload
Older, more flexible, coal fired plant for 2-shifting – on around 7 a.m., off in the evening as demand requires.
Gas turbines for peaking – almost instantaneous (~1 minute) power to meet peak demands e.g. end-of-popular TV programmes with the assistance of:
Pumped storage where coal plant are pumping water to an upper reservoir at, say, 1000MW. The pumps are turned off (1000MW to the grid) and water runs down hill to generate power (another 1000MW to the grid).
A tiny amount of hydropower.
Gas plants challenged on cost but did nothibg to improve flexibility (and were able to break the rules on flexibility for reasons I could never understand).
Concerning 2-shifting, I worked briefly on a power station with 3×120 MW units that started every morning and the turbines went from 0-120 MW in one block load. This went on for at least 10 years (probably a lot longer) without any serious issues other than planned maintainence.
Instead of planned replacement of ageing nuclear and coal-fired plant, the govenment has believed the EU requirements and our great Prime Minister is now suggesting we should reduce our CO2 emissions by 80% instead of 60% (which is madness in its own right).
Windpower, of course, comes in here but we will need flexible capacity to cover the loss of windpower which is not planned. The worst time is a regular feature of the British climate – long periods (1 week or more) when we have high pressure over the mainland, below freezing temperatures (I know, warm by Vermont standards …) and dead calm.
Even now we are being told we could have power cuts this winter. There will be major blackouts in a few years before we can get the plant built that we need because the nukes will close and we will have to shut down perfectly good coal plant to meet EU rules. Insanity.
In 2007 Denmark had 3125MW installed wind
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Denmark
Wind produced 7173GWh a 1065GWh increase from 2006
http://www.ens.dk/sw67789.asp
That is an actual production rate of 26.2% of rated capacity
Robert said:
“Citing the 8.7% of capacity figure to wind power enthusiasts is almost
as fun as telling small children there is no Santa Claus.”
Except you have conflated peak demand reserve and production capacity:
“In Texas, the average capacity factor of wind farms
installed in 2004 through 2005 is 39 percent,
compared to 32 percent for projects installed between
2000 and 2001 and 19.6 percent for those installed before 1998.”
“The West Texas wind
farms that generate power for the city of Austin’s
utility company, Austin Energy, have capacity factors
ranging from 35 percent to 40 percent.”
http://www.window.state.tx.us/specialrpt/energy/pdf/11-WindEnergy.pdf pages 166-167
“Chernobyl caught fire and burned the world”
What have you been told? And by whom?
Let me tell a true, but little known story …
There was a moment of sanity in the middle of the Cold War (remember – the time when the dead bodies of the Soviet leadership were wheeled out for the October Revolution parades – I exagerate, but not by much).
The Soviets were so desparate for foreign exchange that they thought they might be able to sell their nuclear power plants to the UK so they invited a team from the (then) CEGB to talk about buying into their RBMK – the Chernobyl system but before Chernobyl got its bad name. The RBMK was, I believe, the system built primarily for plutonium bomb production and then modified for electricity generation. Cheap. low technology and dirty.
Our experts went over there and had a careful look at the RBMK. It had the great advantage that high quality steel and welding was hardly needed. It was described to me as little more than good quality blacksmithing! Cheap to build but inherently unsafe to the point of dangerous. Unlike the PWR it had a positive power feedback i.e. if the reactor started to overheat it made the core even more reactive and even hotter – exactly as the Chernobyl core behaved. The feedback ended by a chemical engineering-type explosion. Not, of course, a nuclear explosion which is impossible by the laws of physics.
We told them what we thought (politely and firmly) and explained that the CEGB would not even consider the RBMK and the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate – out watchdog with real teeth – would probably close down all our plant if we suggested it because it was so obviously stupid that we must have gone totally mad and couldn’t even be trusted with inherently stable plant! (All right, we didn’t quite say that to the Russians but it was true and we did point out the risk of a Chernobyl-type fault.)
Our engineers left. The Iron Curtain then descended again.
After Chernobyl, a number of CEGB engineers were able to say, “We told you so”, although with great sadness at the (limitted) loss of life.
Chernobyl was a disaster waiting to happen and dwarfed into total insignificance what happened at Three Mile Island.
It bears no relationship to the US, UK, Canadian or French style of nuclear plant.
Ah Clean Energy FAIL. I posted that to FAIL Blog a few days ago. Glad you enjoyed it! Keep up your good work.
Crispytoast,
Interesting, but good luck with that. As an avid kite enthusiast and builder of several “man lifter” kites, I can guarantee that kites do pretty much what the wind wants them to do. You can ask my friend’s son who shoved his hip’s ball socket down through his femur, splitting it like a banana. He fell from 25 feet from a tethered parafoil when a 60mph gust caused the knots in the 500 lb dacron “stringers” to literally melt.
The first time one of those wraps around the ships propeller, will be the last time it is used. That is only one of the reasons that American warships no longer tow Cody kites behind them with a man in a basket for surveillance.