Who would have thunk? Maybe it had something to do with this video of a Vestas wind turbine:
I wonder if it used “Lucas” electronic parts? I owned an Austin Healy Sprite and a Triumph TR6 at one time, and the failure above looks familiar.
Excerpts from an article in the Guardian:
Vestas is to shut down its Isle of Wight factory in the face of collapsing demand from a wind-farming industry hobbled by the recession and red tape.
The group had planned to convert the factory in Newport so it could make blades for the British market, but said this morning that the paralysis gripping the industry meant that orders had ground to a halt. Such low demand could not justify the investment, Ditlev Engel, the chief executive, told the Guardian.
The UK’s only wind turbine manufacturing plant is to close, dealing a humiliating blow to the government’s promise to support low-carbon industries.”
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/apr/28/vestas-wind-turbine-factory-close
See Vestas Wind Power Solutions here
Of course, windmills produce clean emissions free power, they don’t pollute.
Just to be fair, anyone have video or photos of a coal fired power plant exploding or uncontrollably catching fire?
h/t to David Segesta
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@hareyrenolds:
Rolls Royce, apparently, right down to the spirit of ecstasy.
E.M.Smith (13:55:44) :
On attractive things about producing hydrogen is that you could just pump it into a pipeline which is a lot easier than syncing up the the power grid. It also answers some of the energy storage problem and would help promote wind energy from an intermittent source to something that could be handled as baseload, especially if the hydrogen augmented a natural gas power station.
I don’t recall what the MIT “breakthrough” last year in electrolysis was efficiency-wise, and certainly a Carnot cycle power plant is awful compared to direct generation….
The problem with wind turbines is that little gizmo at your house called a meter. If you didn’t have to connect them to the grid and could suffice with intermittent power in isolated communities then they may be just what you need.
I think they would be useful in areas where it would be prohibitively expensive to run transmission lines long distances just to serve a few people.
“”” John Laidlaw (11:10:58) :
DaveCF (10:47:29) :
…And the Brits drink warm beer because they all have fridges made by Lucas…
I say again (for the umpteenth time), money needs to be poured into nuclear fusion research. Anything else is folly. “””
Well I posted a comment on “nuclear fusion” on another thread on this site. But you can find anice article in SCIENCE Vol 324 for 17 April 2009 (see how up to date I am) “Fusion’s Great Bright Hope” on pages 326-330
It describes the “National Ignition Facility” which is the “match” that lights up your nuclear fusion reaction. 192 lasers generate 500 TerraWatts of Ultraviolet radiation at 351 nm wavelength which travels 305 metres in 25 nanoseconds to blast a pea-sized Beryllium sphere which is cooled to 18 Kelvins so as to form a thin layer of Deuterium and Tritium ice on the inside of the spherical shell. The Beryllium shell gets blown to smithereens by the laser blast, and squishes the D&T down till it reaches 1E8 Kelvins which is quite a bit hotter than 18 K
That excess heat is then led off to no doubt run a steam engine; until the target chamber cools back down to 18 K (maybe an hour or two later, and then you can safely put another Beryllium fuel pellet in there without melting the D&Tice inside it; which would wreck the whole contraption.
Did I say that this match box is a 10 1/2 storey building; or that the 500 TerraWatts of power it requires exceeds the entire generating capacity of the entire USA; well that’s okay it probably blows the fuze everytime, since the laser shuts down before the beam even travels that 305 metres.
Charles H Townes, a somewhat knowledgable Laser person; once told a laser convention (maybe CLEO) in his Keynote address; that fi they thought laser implosion was a way to make thermonuclear energy; they were all crazy. Well they are all crazy; but that hasn’t stopped the Government from sloshing billions of taxpayer dollars into this white elephant.
Oh our present Secretary of Energy; Steven Chu, used to run this place. That’s what we have running the ship of energy in this country.
And we can only pray that these fools never succeed; because then we would really be able to destroy this planet.
I own a ’71 Volvo 1800 with Lucas electronics. The Bosch stuff on it works great. The Lucas parts, however…..
I occasionally pass the Smokey Hills Wind Farm–the one along I-70 in Kansas that was referenced above. The last 2 times, only about one half of the turbines were turning, and it was windy both times. Then last week, there were tornados nearby. If they can fly apart because of small, easy to predict problems, like impacted bugs, imagine how they could fly apart in a tornado.
Between the average capacity factors (low), the danger in a catastrophic failure, and the blight on the landscape, I am not a wind farm fan.
“”” Adolfo Giurfa (12:54:34) :
If we are to seek for alternative sources of energy, one is using hydrogen as fuel, but generated “in situ”, and in order to produce it cheap you have to have high surface area electrodes, only achievable with nanoparticles.
By the way, some time ago, I discovered a method for producing metal nanoparticles in big quantities (as much as you could need), so making them cheap enough for these applications. The process has not been patented yet, but you can see the nanoparticles at: http://www.giurfa.com/ultranano.htm “””
So explain to us again how these nano particles “generate” hydrogen. it isn’t hydrogen that we need; it is energy that we want to generate; not hydrogen.
There’s plenty of hydrogen on the sun; but getting it here is too expensive.
Here on earth we have plenty of hydrogen that has already been once through the horse, so it is sort of used up as it were, and we haven’t yet learned how to get it again without using more energy than we can get from the hydrogen; so once again; how do your nanonparticles generate hydrogen without using some other energy that we don’t have ?
The problem is dreamers, accountants and engineers keep trying to put square pegs in round holes. Each of the various forms or alternate energy has its appropriate niche.
The problem is economies of scale do not always work, bigger is not necessarily better. Wind power is ideally suited for small power demand applications where interment power is acceptable, and commercial power is very expensive. The classic example is for water pumping where the only concern is that the pump moves enough water on average to exceed the need. Farmers and ranchers in the American West have been using small windmills for 70-80 years to pump water for live stock. As long as the live stock tank has water in it when the cattle need it, it is good enough. Those small windmills also are bullet proof low tech, and include mechanical fail safes which allow them to be turned at right angles to the wind during high wind periods that would damage them or use centrifugal brakes to prevent over speed of the fan.
The Dutch of course have used them for the same sort of low time sensitive use for centuries.
Wind also has a place as a small topping generator to top up a battery pack on a solar system. When it is stormy and you have little sun, you are relatively likely to have some wind, so it can be used to fill the dead time when solar cannot get the job done and harvest power at night. In a residential application the user can manage and modulate their power needs to fit the power available. Not so easy for an industrial operation that needs reliable power to run their processes.
The problem is they are trying to push a high tech system that tries to squeeze high efficiency out of a system that becomes unreliable (and not cost competitive) when scaled up in size, capacity and land area. If they got away from super high tech airfoil wind turbines and gave away some out right efficiency for the simplicity of dirt reliable low tech Savonius turbines that put the generation unit at ground level they would have higher availability and lower construction costs and maintenance costs. They would loose significant “theoretical power” but I would be inclined to think that real world power output would the same or better, as the Savonius can produce usable power at lower wind speeds and does not care if the wind is gusty or coming from multiple directions.
Years ago I worked as a machinist in a barbed wire plant. We had two generations of barbed wire machines. Very old ones that were manufactured in the late 1800’s and new ones that were built in 1957. I was hired to help them redesign and refurbish the old machines because replacement parts were no longer available, but the were more reliable than the newer machines. They would cut barbed wire at 50 barbs a minute day in and day out, the new machines would cut barbs at 120 barbs a minute for several hours before they jammed. Seems there is a limit to how fast you can push a piece of wire through a hole without it buckling and turning into a birds nest due to some small bump on the wire.
Likewise solar power works well in grid connected home applications where the storage is moved off site, and the feeder lines already exist. It is also cost effective in out lying areas where it costs a home owner several thousand dollars a mile to bring commercial power to the home site, and a complete solar array and battery storage system is cheaper than the initial installation costs for commercial power.
I think solar is a technology that will slowly infiltrate construction but would be prohibitively expensive to force in to use en mass over a short period of time.
The real problem, is most of the alternatives suffer from intermittent availability and cost of storage or backup power if they suddenly drop off the grid.
Right now the only relatively efficient peak load storage that is actually in use is pumped water hydro where excess power is used to pump water into reservoirs and then is used to generate power at a later time via hydro generation. Even there you have pumping losses, electrical losses to power the pumps, maintained for the reservoir and dam infrastructure, and losses during generation compounded by evaporation if the water is stored for long periods of time.
In my opinion wind, solar, tidal power generation will tend to remain as supplementary power only. Base load power needs to come from systems that scale well, and can run at high availability like steam generation using biomass, coal, fossil fuels like natural gas and oil, and renewable oil from biomass thermal de-polymerization, some geothermal and nuclear.
One other possibility for a system of alternate energy that could scale well and run at high availability would be Sterling engine generation that use large heat sources and heat sinks like the temperature differential between warm surface waters and cold deep ocean water.
Larry
Now the greenies are attempting to pooh pooh the dangers of wind energy regarding the killing of birds. They list all sorts of other methods birds have been killed as if to justify using wind turbines to produce clean energy.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/04/common_misconce.php
I feel the problem of many renewable energy sources has always been energy storage. Hydrocarbon and nuclear fuels represent stored and transportable energy sources. Wind, wave, solar thermal and photovoltaic are intermittent sources of energy. At present there seems to be little interest in developing storage systems for renewable energy.
Some systems have been proposed, such as compressed air, fuel cells or hydraulic towers. Off shore wind mining rigs utilizing lower speed rotors to pump water to hydraulic storage, then running hydroelectric turbines on demand, could make wind power more viable. Placing heavily subsidized wind farms on land seems to be a dead end. The wind gradient is lower over land, the area needed is too great and large wind turbines with internal generators are mechanically too complex and difficult to maintain.
As an industrial designer I have been upset by the whole AGW hoax. The development of many useful technologies may be abandoned simply because they have been associated with the mendacity of environmentalists. In future when asking “Who killed the electric car?” the answer may be “Al Gore!”
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Joe Lucas, the Prince of Darkness?? – if his company is in charge of turbine manufacture, its back to the mud huts chaps!!
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On a more serious note, the wind is even more unreliable than Joe Lucas. As this report says, Denmark lost all wind power for 54 days in 2001 and was below 10% power for 16 weeks in 2002.
http://www.thomastelford.com/journals/DocumentLibrary/CIEN.158.2.66.pdf
In fact the wind is so unreliable Denmark HAS NEVER USED ANY OF ITS WIND POWER. It sells it to Scandinavia instead, who can integrate its unreliable performance with hydro-power.
I grew up on my Dad’s farm in what is now Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia). We relied on wind power to drive the windmills which pumped subterranean water (we were not allowed to draw from the river on our doorstep) into our six ‘dams’, each a concrete ring 60 feet in diameter and 8 feet deep (4 feet below ground level, 4 feet above). The windmills were perfect for this, pumping into storage. It didn’t matter that the wind wasn’t blowing when we needed water, the water was already in the dams for us to use.
When it came to electricity we ran a diesel-powered generator like everyone else. We were thirty miles from the nearest power line.
Almost on our doorstep we had the Kafue river which was perennial and fast flowing. We bolted two derelict fibreglass speedboat hulls to a platform, put a total of four paddle-wheels onto a car rear axle with differential gear intact. We used the prop-shaft drive to turn a generator mounted on the platform and held the whole thing in place on the Kafue with two 3/8″ steel ropes. With a week or two of tweaking we had the genny running our cold room and our deep-freezers. Free. For as long as we wanted.
Wind is good for pumping storeable water. Electricity needs a constant power supply. We proved this in the early 70’s.
Why can’t the politicians and the AGW crowd see the simple fact that wind cannot be relied upon for something which requires steady in-put?
If a farmer can figure it out, why can’t the powers that be?
Silly people. Windmills aren’t being built for power generation; they’re being built to generate subsidies. They’re a money losing proposition without the subsidies and should those ever end, so will the windmills. The owners will take a tax write-off and still win. It’s just the taxpayers who’ll be left holding the bag.
Sorry, that should be “the early 60’s”
I’m older than I recollect!
Dan Gibson (10:14:49) :
“I have a hard time understanding all the opposition to any new form of energy on this site. All the same things could have been said and probably were said about the horseless carriage (noisy, unreliable, dangerous), the cost of converting from steam and whale oil to petro, the lack of roads to support cars, the lack of gas stations. On and on. New concepts take time, trial and error. Bucks change hands, fortunes are won and lost. It’s just a new face on the same old same old.
Chill.”
Uhmmm wind energy is not new, and we did not stop using it because it was free, clean and green. We stopped grinding flour and pumping water because it was not reliable. A water wheel is much more reliable, and behold Hydro Electric Power is still the best electrical generation source.
I for one have proposed taking the major Hydro Dams and expanding them with step down Dams to double their output. ( Add three tiered reduced output Hydro step dam at 60%, 30%, 10% of capacity) that use the output of the original installation. The step down is required to allow normal river outflows to remain during shutdowns and maintenance cycling. Yet Greens have a fit saying it cannot be allowed, so who really are the opposition to solving the problem?
In todays Australian newspaper as Ministers become aware of ‘misinformation’. http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25402488-601,00.html
Adolfo Giurfa (12:54:34) said:
The electrodes you mention, I take it are part of an apparatus for the electrolysis of water?
By using an intermittent source of electricity (such as a windmill generator) to split water into hydrogen (and oxygen), the energy can be made available over a longer period of time.
Electrode materials in this role have to withstand corrosion well: have these copper particles you make been tested in such electrodes? I looked at your pictures, but was not sure of the various features they show.
My personal take on windmills is that they fit into the larger scheme of things best, when they are implemented as small & local energy-capture equipment. Trying to make them attractive as large-scale utility installations, strikes me as a case of diminishing returns on investment, and proliferating conflicts.
I am not surprised to see large windmills encountering operational problems, both on the engineering side, and the social aspect.
George E. Smith (15:06:53) : I am sure you know the response…and that´s other peoples´business, I just discovered how to produce a lot of metal nanoparticles, using comparatively easy means.
Want to know another way?…this one was an accidental finding:
http://www.giurfa.com/mass.html
Ted Clayton (16:22:42) :
Yes indeed, but as you can guess, that hydrogen is to be used to fuel, say, for example, a car , etc.
But forget those “windmills of your mind” (as the lyrics of a song reads), these are really preposterous.
Green bubble boom!
Green bubble bust!
Ludington “Pumped Storage”
Enough Electricity for 1.4 Million People
http://www.consumersenergy.com/welcome.htm?/content/hiermenugrid.aspx?id=31
Just substitute the gas turbines with Wind Turbines
Wind does work, and it works well in California. If we can figure it out in California, anybody can. This is not rocket science. If the gearboxes fail, that is just an engineering failure, not a technology killer. Somebody should hire a better engineer.
Latest figures from California Energy Commission for 2008 show that wind provided 2.5 percent of all gigawatt-hours generated. That is 7,000 GWH that did not require the burning of natural gas.
http://energyalmanac.ca.gov/electricity/total_system_power.html
The natural gas is therefore available for burning in vehicles, thus reducing demand for petroleum imports. A win-win-win, all around.
That is the T. Boone Pickens Plan in action.
Roger Sowell says:
Did CA actually switch off that much base load capacity, or some lesser amount because it is not that flexible?
Years ago I read a summary of the economics of power companies. It said that the costs to provide power can be divided into thirds. One third for the fuel, one third for the capital to build the power plants, and one third for the distribution system. Eliminating fuel only saves one third.
Assuming this is still close, one can see the cost of the capital for the plants and windmills is doubled to pay for both. There will be an increase in distribution costs to bring the power in from the distributed windmills. Perhaps another 6th? Thus that “free” power gets to be expensive.
Pity. I always kind of liked windmills. I wonder if there is anyway to use that power to produce liquid fuels for transportation. Fuel would have higher value and it would eliminate the need for more power lines and duplicate power plants. Plus we could eliminate the stupid subsidies.