By Steven Goddard
In Wednesday’s Guardian, their lead environmental story made this bold claim about The Whitelee Wind Farm:
Europe’s largest onshore wind farm, which is already powerful enough to meet Glasgow’s electricity needs
There was no discussion in the article about how Glasgow would handle extended periods of cold and calm winds, such as was often seen this past winter.
If the wind isn’t blowing, the turbines aren’t spinning and no electricity is being generated. This tends to happen on the coldest days, when the electricity is needed the most.
The flaw in The Guardian’s logic is a failure to acknowledge that Glasgow needs a consistent power supply 24x7x365. The fact that Whitelee has a lot of windy days and a high annual energy potential, does no good on the cold, calm days. I’m going to try to help The Guardian out with their logic using a few analogies they should understand.
- On average, there is lots of ice in the Arctic during the year – but that doesn’t stop The Guardian from being concerned about the possibility of a few ice-free days.
- Penguin chicks may get plenty to eat most of the year, but during the times when they don’t, many of them starve to death.
- Getting a pay check nine months a year would not pay the bills for the other three.
- Having toilets available only five days a week would not be satisfactory to most people.
- Having only five days a week without being in an automobile crash would not be satisfactory to most people.
- The rainy season in Australia may produce floods, but that doesn’t stop animals from dying of dehydration during the dry season.
- Having your watch functional 90% of the time would not be adequate.
- The fact that a restaurant is not responsible for food poisoning on most nights, may not make you want to eat there.
- Being careful on the edge of the Grand Canyon 90% of the time may not be enough.
- Practicing safe sex 90% of the time is not recommended.
It would be disastrous for Glasgow if they did not have the ability to obtain 100% of their energy from conventional sources on any given day of the year, when the wind isn’t blowing. If The Guardian is attempting to propose that Glasgow could cut off their supply of conventional electricity sources, they should just come out and say that. The implication is both clear and incorrect. “already powerful enough to meet Glasgow’s electricity needs”
Is The Guardian part of the Climate Industrial Complex?
Stephen Brown;-)
Drat it!
John Boy (10:04:05) :
Oil and coal will eventually run out.
Yes, in about 100+ and 300-400+ years respectively. Uranium from mines in about 10,000. Thorium (usable today in reactors) from mines in about 30,000 years. Uranium from sea water (usable today) in about 2,000,000,000 years (due to sun evaporating ocean as it turns into a redder and larger star).
Sun and wind will not, not in any time frame that will matter.
Nor do “non-renewable” sources run out in any time frame that will matter.
See:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/there-is-no-energy-shortage/
and there never will be.
The Boy of John
John Boy (12:47:46) : But we need to take steps in that direction – even steps that are not as efficient (as we’d like)or convienent (and cheap) as coal and oil.
Why?
We are not in danger of running out of fossil fuels for at least a few hundred years. (Recently we figured out how to crack the “tight shale” problem. Natural Gas is now in glut in N. America and will be for a very very long time…)
AGW is just wrong. CO2 is not a problem at all.
There is simply no need what so ever to move away from oil, coal, and natural gas until such time as their price is too high. Say about 300+ years.
The only issue I see is the need to burn them cleanly, and we already do that under existing law.
Kum Dollison (12:51:54) : Good Lord; You people sound like a bunch of old oil, and coal men. What are you all afraid of?
The Dark.
Oh, and the cold and heat. And no TV, fridge, radio, computer, fan, washer, dryer, dishwasher, oven, stove, power tools, water pumps, freezer, …
I’ve been through the rolling blackouts caused by the California Loony Left scheme that had us buying all our electricity from power brokers at mini-bar prices on the spot market because somebody had a theory that said it would be good for us. Keep the theories, give me a decent power company with decisions made by power engineers. No “social engineering” or other oxymoronic things need apply.
If the stuff works as badly as you say people will figure it out pretty quick, and quit building it.
Nope. Maybe in a free market, but once something is a political decision with subsidies and such, it can be funded for a lifetime no matter how daft.
Example? Start a peanut farm in the USA. Just grow 2 acres to feed your own livestock. Nothing to sell. Nothing ever leaving your dirt. You will be shut down by the peanut police… It’s a hereditary right now. No hereditary peanut license, no peanut farm. Why? Because a herd of decades ago someone thought it would be a good idea. ( This happened to a farmer in Texas not that many years ago, per family who were friends of his.)
Now play that forward to “hereditary fossil fuel license”. That’s what we’re looking at.
In the meantime, it’s not costing much; and, we’ll probably learn a little bit. Chill.
It’s only costing $MILLIONS…
BTW, since we’ve had windmills in California for at least 30 years that I know of, ought we not to have pretty much learned it by now? If we’re learning that slowly it isn’t good to depend on it much…
FWIW, I’m not “anti-wind”. More times than I care to think about I’ve done the exercise of figuring out the alternative energy system I’d like to have when I finally get to live out in the boonies (“off the grid”). But I am anti-stupid. I know full well that wind is workable — up to about 20% MAX of your capacity and then only if part of a very large continental scale grid (or you have your own batteries off grid). Otherwise it is too destabilizing.
I’m also not keen at all on the birds they kill. That folks who call themselves “green” tolerate this speaks volumes about their duplicity…
“Chill”? I think that’s what folks are trying to avoid…
They might be using it so that others won’t be able to google it. Maybe “WWUT” needs to be added to the search terms here so WUWT comes up first on google searches…
Mike
There’s a thought. Do you think George Monbiot would get more hits if he had ‘Moonbat’ in his meta-tags… 🙂
Breeders
Fifty years of intensive research in seven countries (USA, UK, France, Germany, former USSR now Russia, Japan and India), with investments of many of tens of billions of dollars so far have failed to demonstrate that the breeder cycle is technically feasible (see Appendix A). Even if the breeder cycle starts working flawlessly next year, the share of breeder power could become significant only at the end of this century. The high fissionable fraction of natural uranium theoretically achievable by the breeder is the source of the old nuclear dreams from the 1950s: the ‘all nuclear society’ using energy ‘too cheap to meter’. Today these unproven figures still give rise to the technical dreams of untold quantities of cheap, clean nuclear energy for all mankind for the coming
In 2005 the world nuclear fleet consumed about 68000 Mg of natural uranium. Of this amount about 40000 Mg has been actually mined. The remaining 30000 Mg comprised depleted uranium and HEU (highly enriched uranium) from military inventories. Within a few years reserves of HEU will be depleted and from then on all needed uranium has to be mined. When the very rich ores in Canada will get depleted within a decade, the uranium has to be recovered from leaner ores. Likely the uranium prices will rise sharply in the near future.
An example may clarify the consequences of the dilution factor. Assume that common granite, with an average content of 4 grams of uranium per Mg granite, were to be used as uranium ore. The amounts of granite on earth are immeasurable and so the amounts of uranium. What’s the problem?
To fuel one reference reactor with a nominal capacity of 1 GW(e) each year about 162 tonnes natural uranium have to be extracted from earth’s crust. The mass of 162 tonnes uranium is in 40 million tonnes of granite. The rock has to be crushed, transported, ground to fine powder and chemically treated with sulfuric acid and other chemicals to extract the uranium compound from the mass. Assumed an overall extraction yield of Y = 0.50, a very optimistic assumption, 80 million tonnes granite have to be processed. This is a block of 100 meters width, 100 meters height and three kilometers length. Each year, for one reactor. For comparison: a coal-fired power station of 1 GW(e) consumes about 2 million tonnes of coal each year.
How much energy (fossil fuels) and chemicals would be needed for processing 80 million tonnes granite?
To fuel the current world nuclear power plant fleet of 400 GW – supplying 2.5% of the world energy demand –, each year 12 cubic km of granite would have to be processed each year. That would be a mountain with a base of 4×4 km and a height of 2.3 km
As it turns out, the grade at which the energy consumption of the full nuclear fuel chain equals the gross energy production and the net energy production falls off the cliff and plunges into the sea of zero, little depends on the size of the energy debt. Between ore grades of 0.02 and 0.01 the nuclear system meets its zero net energy limit.
Consumption and supply of uranium
The current world nuclear fleet of 367 GW has an annual natural uranium consumption of about 68000 Mg/a. How long will the currently known uranium resources last?
The largest known resources have ore grades below 0.05% U3O8 and are more or less near the verge of the energy cliff. The sum of the resources of Olympic Dam, South Africa, Namibia and Kazakhstan is about 2.6 Tg uranium. These resources are marginal is respect to their net energy content and would cause a significantly higher specific CO2 emission than the currently mined ores.
The remaining higher-grade resources have a mass of 1.9 Tg and will be sufficient to feed the current nuclear capacity for 28 years. Then the specific CO2 emission will rapidly rise and may approach the value of a gas-fired station in about 65 years, when the poorest ores will get exploited. However, the net energy production of the nuclear system will approach zero in the same time.
Thorium breeder
The thorium breeder is based on the conversion by neutron capture of non-fissile thorium-232 into fissile uranium-233, by a similar system as the uranium-plutonium breeder. The feasibility of the thorium breeder is even more remote than that of the U-Pu breeder. Besides, only minute quantities of U233 exist in the world at this moment. It would take decades to obtain sufficient U233 from special reactors to start up the first operating Th232–U233 breeder system. It would take 9 doubling times to attain a thorium breeder capacity equalling the current nuclear capacity. Even with an unrealistically assumed short doubling time of 20 years that would mean two centuries.
A directory to read
http://www.stormsmith.nl/report20071013/
Kum Dollison (14:16:47) : Wind turbines work mostly at night. Solar is good during the day.
Uh Huh… sure…
Kum, you need to learn to apply numbers to that kind of statement and you need to get better basic data. The wind varies greatly by where you are on the planet. Many places do not have much of a day night cycle to the wind. In many places it dies down at night. Hot air balloonists are up at dawn for the simple reason that the winds are least and turbulence is least just before sun up. As the sun rises, the wind kicks up a bit more and the turbulence starts. (Admittedly a special case, what happens near zero wind, but that’s when you have a problem with wind turbines…)
So, unless you don’t particularly need power between 4 am and 9 am, I think you need to rethink that statement about wind “at night”.
Similarly, solar doesn’t do you much good during an overcast and rainy day and it falls off dramatically in northern latitudes in winter. So as long as you don’t need power in winter, it’s great…
Now the two do tend to be a little complementary, but not enough to matter a whole lot to a grid. Enough for an off the grid system with a few days of batteries, but not enough for a country without storage. That is just a technical fact. In very small amounts, the nat gas and coal plants can cover this deficit, but with more than 10% it’s a problem and with over 20% you are looking at system failures. Often.
The Germans are working on biomass/biogas for buffering.
Fine, as soon as it’s proven to work on an industrial scale then you can proceed to plan it into a system. AFTER that, you can build out the wind system…
BTW, if you have biomass/ biogas, you might as well just run it directly into the burners of your coal plant and be done with the problem. All biomass is in this context is expensive coal with a green label. There are plenty of places in the world today running biomass into generators (as total fuel or as a diluent in coal). It’s been done in sugar refining for many many decades. The problem isn’t doing it, the problem is getting enough of it. (HINT: It would take a tree farm roughly 1000 miles x 200 miles to come close for the USA in the best possible theoretical case). Britain has more people / sq.km and less available sq.km for biomass. Germany is worse…
Honestly, some of you speak, reverently, of “decades” of fossil fuel availability as if it were Eons.
No, we speak clearly of “centuries” of fossil fuels because that’s what the numbers run out to. For “Eons” we need to use Uranium.
Kum Dollison (14:42:39) : They have plenty of biomass, there, I believe.
Do The Math. BEST case is we can grow 50 tons / acre of trees. (Theoretically more from algae, but not shown to work). That’s 50 WET tons. About 25 dry tons. That has to be down rated to get coal equivalent based on all the OH in the COH units that make up the carbohydrate that is cellulose / lignin. So just take the national coal usage and work out the acres. Then ask: What will you STOP growing to grow this fuel? Food? Wild forests? What?
It’s theoretically possible in places like Brazil (tropical, lots of “empty”), but not in places like Scotland and Germany.
Look, Steve, if this post is “all about” Wind in Glasgow, fine. There are, probably, better places for Wind Turbines.
West Texas is about as good as it gets. Sustained winds most of the time. Grid connected for the USA, it’s a decent idea. The problem is that as you move away from that “wind corridor” and especially onto a group of small islands with limited “grid” and vastly more variable wind; you lose ever more value to a wind farm. That’s just the way the technology works out. Nothing political. No agenda. Just turbines, wind charts, and grid capacity.
And THAT is why it is legitimate for the UK folks to complain about the silliness of wind farms there, yet for T.Boone Pickens to advocate for a large farm of them in West Texas. A different set of technical numbers…
I think poll after poll tell us that the “People” mostly think AGW is bunk, but “alternatives” to coal, and petroleum are something that are of interest to the everyday Joe.
“Of interest” – until they find out the cost of the bill.
You can’t just be “Agin” Everything. You’ve got to be For “Something.”
I’m not sure what “Agin” is, but presuming you mean “against”:
I’m against bad decisions based on flawed reasoning and lacking the numbers essential to proper engineering. I’m for market driven reliable power systems uncontaminated by politics, graft, and government weenee grandstanding.
Otherwise, regular people just tune you out as a “Collection of Cranks.”
Odd. I “tune out” the radical greens who don’t do decent engineering as a “Collection of Cranks”…
@Ralph ellis (14:55:46)
Ralph, while I agree with much of your posting, please see the “no energy shortage” link I posted. We don’t need oil for “petro”chemicals.
The major step in most synthesis starts with “synthesis gas” – a mix of CO and H2 that can be made from coal, trash, lawn clippings, tree farms, algae ponds, etc. etc. … We use oil because it is convenient. We used coal originally (Eastman chemical EMN never converted away from coal and still uses it today). Rentech RTK makes fertilizers and synthetic chemicals using trash as feedstock.
The notion that we need to “save the oil for petrochemicals” is broken.
Also, on nuclear, we have a functionally infinite lifetime for Uranium. A clever Japanese fellow worked out a plastic that absorbs it from sea water. Price is a small percentage higher than from mines on land, but not significant (other than making it not competitive in a free market – about $150 / lb vs $120 / lb or so; but prices vary). The amount needed to run the whole planet for a year erodes into the ocean each year; so we run out of U when we run out of planet. Literally.
The notion of running out of energy is also broken.
Pragmatic (15:10:13) : The trick would appear to be how to bring these projects into mainstream R&D funding so the most promising can be put on a fast track. Obama’s Admin would do well to build a blue-ribbon panel to investigate these areas and report back within 12 months on which should receive a significant boost in funding.
You had me right up to this paragraph. Now just WHY ought the government be picking winners and losers? They’ve backed GM and Chrysler so far. Not exactly stellar choices… The government chose MTBE – that didn’t work out so well; then corn based ethanol, that they are now turning against.
IMHO, the best thing the government can do is get out of the way and let markets decide with no interference. No quotas, subsidies, panels, commissions, tax breaks, tax penalties, etc. etc. ad nauseam
The notion of government as decider of what R&D to back is also broken…
Their decision to mandate System V then POSIX didn’t exactly work out so good… So now we have BSD, Linux, SysV, POSIX and a few dozen other variants, and the government kind of lost interest in the whole issue… Anyone remember ADA? Boy, that sure set the standard for programming languages…
As soon as the government starts being significantly involved in an industry, I dump any stocks in that industry and use them as trade vehicles only. It’s bad enough if they are a major customer (like defense companies) but when they are “deciding” things for an industry, dump stocks and run away. Fast. The industry will never be better than it is at that moment and it will get progressively worse from that point forward.
What your interesting tech stuff needs to do is make a ‘pitch’ at a venture capital firm. They fund things with tons of money and have all the technical chops needed to make sound decisions (and with their money on the line, they don’t make stupid political decisions that are going to suck cash and die if they can at all avoid it.) Government makes a very crummy venture capital firm.
bill (20:53:59) : Not all uranium is available with a net energy production:
http://img398.imageshack.us/img398/4262/energycliffij9.jpg
i.e. seawater uranium is NOT viably extracted
Bill, that is not a valid conclusion from your graph. That graph is for ore bodies, not adsorption via polymer mats from seawater. That path (adsorption) has already been demonstrated at very viable energies and coss. Sea water extraction is real, energy rich, and viable (at price over about $150 in US dollars (but needs adjustment for time, Yen, etc.) and dropping.
The BBC while in Europe made a big deal of this. When the announcer asked the builder of these wind turbines how efficient they would be the CEO of the company which built the system said it would operate at a maximum of 35 percent efficiency. That was an answer that I did not expect. The CEO added that they could have never built the system without government help. (Apparently Shell pull out of the project based on pure economics) Personally as someone who relies on electricity, 35 percent efficiency is not reassuring. As an investor, betting on 35 percent efficiency, when there are more efficient ways of producing electricity at a much cheaper cost is a tough sale. Now you know why governments have to “assist” in their construction.
As for the Guardian, this newspaper is publishing an entire train of articles that don’t tell the truth about AGW and contain a high percentage of ‘hyped’ content in regard to climate and renewable energy. We know that for years now.
They are not the only ones.
The chore of the message is that we must reduce CO2 emissions as soon as possible in order to prevent runaway Global Warming and that we can do this because there are alternative energy sources like wind.
Today, a large chunk of the General Public believes wind is a direct replacement of fossil fuels. The fact is that they are not.
Therefore any legislation to reduce and control the distribution of fossil fuels without a viable alternative represents nothing more but economic suicide.
People are made to belief that if wind power is mass produced, the costs will come down.
The production process of a windmill however can’t be reduced by mass production.
The raw materials of the blades are based on composites (glass cloth and two component resins) which are applied in a mould. A blade is build from the outside to the inside. This means that the first step in the process is to spary the coating into the mould. This is a gell coat or a polyetiurin based coating.
The next step is to apply the glass cloth according to fixed patterns and drensh the cloth with the two component resin. This is a job made by hand and the only automated processes are the mixing of the resins and the cutting of the cloth. All the other work is made by hand. A single blade consits of two molds and after the the laminating proces the mould is put into an autoclave to bake the material and get rid of airbubles and air pockets that could reduce the structural strength of the blade.
After the autoclave the two arts are glued togeteher and taken out of the moulds which are than ready for the net production run.
The moulds are made from aluminum and last a series of maximum of about 100 units before they have to be replaced.
It must be clear that a major chunk of the manufacturing costs are labour costs, the costs of the raw materials (based on the oil price) and the costs of the autoclaves.
In case of mass production, the production speed depend on the availability of moulds and autoclaves, both capital intensive tools.
The manufacturers of energy plants that make use of Natuaral Gas and the energy companies love the boom in wind energy.
They recieve huge Government subsidies and calculate the true costs to bill the end user.
In Great Britain ever more people can’t afford to pay for their energy bills anymore. Energy poverty already has become a fact and last winter showed that it kills people.
We can thank the Guardian, the ignorant politicians and all the collaborators of the AGW scam outside and inside the industry for that.
And this is only the beginning!
bill (03:11:56) :Breeders Fifty years of intensive research in seven countries (USA, UK, France, Germany, former USSR now Russia, Japan and India), with investments of many of tens of billions of dollars so far have failed to demonstrate that the breeder cycle is technically feasible
Bill, I don’t know if you have an agenda in all this or if you are ‘just wrong’ but even a 30 second google turns up a lot of history of built, run, and functioning today breeder reactors.
The major issue has never been technical feasibility, it has always been weapons fears. BY DEFINITION weapons grade production reactors are a kind of specialized breeder where your goal is to fast cook some U into specific isotopes of Pu. BY DEFINITION the extraction of that Pu from the fuel bundle demonstrates the technical ability to extract fuel for power reactor use should you wish.
The problem is that this demonstration also states the other truth:
A breeder program is capable of making bombs.
I won’t bother citing all the pages that turned up on the history of working breeders. Anyone interested can do a google of “breeder reactor production” and stand back.
I’m going to focus in on Thorium, because it’s just odd enough to be interesting and probably not too many folks have looked into it. First off, we have an existing company running fuel bundles today in Russian reactors as part of their qualification for licensing:
http://www.thoriumpower.com/default2.asp?nav=technology_solutions&subnav=thorium101
http://www.thoriumpower.com/default2.asp?nav=technology_solutions&subnav=fuel
In the second of those pages you will notice they talk about “seed” and “blanket” parts of the fuel bundle. That “blanket” is where the Thorium is “bred” into U233 …
FWIW, I held stock in these folks for a while, but have sold out of it for now. I will likely buy back in at some point. It’s a penny stock, so not for anything but your “play money”.
I notice also that you ignored the CANDU reactor and its ability to run on very unenriched fuels… The Indians have made a variation on the CANDU that can burn Thorium. The US tried to talk Canada into not shipping the CANDU because it’s very easy to run, and once running easy to breed fuels… including bomb grade.
Thorium breeder
The thorium breeder is based on the conversion by neutron capture of non-fissile thorium-232 into fissile uranium-233, by a similar system as the uranium-plutonium breeder. The feasibility of the thorium breeder is even more remote than that of the U-Pu breeder. Besides, only minute quantities of U233 exist in the world at this moment. It would take decades to obtain sufficient U233 from special reactors to start up the first operating Th232–U233 breeder system.
This is just flat out wrong. You can breed U233 from thorium in any reactor you want to use. Just stick (a properly engineered) fuel bundle in. AND IT HAS BEEN DONE. In fact, many fuel bundles are in reactors today in Russia and India among others.
Both the USA (I think it was “teapot”) and India have set off nuclear bombs that used U233 during their development programs. I can dig out the links if forced to, but frankly don’t think this is an appropriate place for a long diatribe on nukes. A google of “U233 nuclear bomb” will get you there.
That means, BY DEFINITION, that Thorium breeding was done. Decades ago.
It would take 9 doubling times to attain a thorium breeder capacity equalling the current nuclear capacity. Even with an unrealistically assumed short doubling time of 20 years that would mean two centuries.
Wildly speculative and flat out wrong. Since the mixed fuel bundles can go into present reactors today and the fuel cycle is faster than 20 years. Again, see the Thorium Inc pages. Drop fuel bundles in existing reactors. Done. No 20 years needed.
Even the wiki pages cite working breeders:
India has an active development programme featuring both fast and thermal breeder reactors.
India’s first 40 MWt Fast Breeder Test Reactor (FBTR) attained criticality on 18 October 1985. Thus, India became the sixth nation to have the technology to build and operate an FBTR after US, UK, France, Japan and the former USSR. India has developed the technology to produce the plutonium rich U-Pu mixed carbide fuel. This can be used in the Fast Breeder Reactor.
At present the scientists of the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR), one of the nuclear R & D institutions of India, are engaged in the construction of another FBR – the 500 MWe prototype fast breeder reactor – at Kalpakkam, near Chennai.
India has the capability to use thorium cycle based processes to extract nuclear fuel. This is of special significance to the Indian nuclear power generation strategy as India has large reserves of thorium — about 360,000 tonnes — that can fuel nuclear projects for an estimated 2,500 years. The higher construction expense of the Fast Breeder Reactor in comparison with the Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors (PHWR) in use is one of the main reasons why India is looking at the cheaper option – uranium fuel.
And here we catch clue as to why breeders have not taken over the world. CHEAP uranium fuel. We just don’t need them yet since we have so darned much cheap Uranium that the “one and done” cycle is, well, cheap!
That does not mean it can’t be done, that just means folks do the cheapest thing first. Just like they don’t bother using Thorium unless they have darned near no Uranium, like India…
The USA ran all over the world talking folks into going with ‘one and done’ as an attempt to stop bomb technology from spreading. Well, those days are behind us now, so expect to see lots more breeders. Especially if Uranium prices rise much.
BTW, the numbers you quote for fuel resource quantity seem to indicate about $40 / lb price assumptions. Prices are much higher now (about $120 / lb last I looked, but that was a while ago and the price has been moving). At about $150 sea water extraction is economically competitive (it is already net energy positive competitive).
Be aware that as the price rises, what is an “economic resource” increases. Part of the way it is defined. You really need to look at “ultimately recoverable reserves” and that’s a lot higher.
Given the Japanese adsorption technique, functionally infinite.
A fuel pellet about the size of 1/2 your little finger is the same energy as a barrel of oil, so you can see that a pound of Uranium is quite a bargain, even at $150.
You should also be advised that mineral extraction techniques improve as price rises. Gold is now recovered via a “heap leach” process that was not done when I was a kid. That lets us use vastly poorer ore than before, at the same cost to recover and with much less energy. So I would suggest that your speculation about the recovery costs for U are at best speculation.
I, personally, have heard folks trot out the “U is scarce and going to run out in 10 years and it’s being hushed up” story line for about 30 years, maybe longer, it’s hard to remember that long ago… It has never been true, and it isn’t now.
Last big time was when U hit about $100+ in the ’80s? IIRC… Then U dropped back all the way to the $30s/lb. Somehow I’m not surprised that the story is coming around again now that U has finally gotten out of the $40-$50 trap it was in for so long.
So, bottom line, you need better information sources. There is no shortage of nuclear fuel, and there never will be. Thorium works fine too.
I am looking into virtual wind turbines as a sure-fire buiness opportunity.
The advantages would be;
– zero pollution/carbon emissions
– no carbon emitted during manufacture
– no environmental impact whatsoever
– 24/7 power
– zero maintenance
– massively profitable
Well, it seems that all wind turbine sites need a grid supply to operate the lights and the administrator’s PC, etc. when the wind does not blow. This supply is fitted with an electricity meter which provides the reading for the bill.
On these sites there is also another meter, which clocks up the power exported to the grid, and the reading is used to calculate the payment due for the wind-power supplied. The price per windpower unit is higher than the price of grid electricity.
So, by using a simple cable link to connect the output of the grid meter to the input of the export meter, both meters ought to whizz away at the same rate. At the end of the month, of course there will be an enormous electricity bill, but an even more enormous cheque!. The difference between the two is of course the profit.
Why bother with those great ugly whirling devices at all? A couple of bits of wire is all that is necessary … and so discreet!
There! A really non-polluting industry, providing unlimited righteousness to the AGWers 24/7 at a decent profit!
Makes me feel virtuous just thinking about it! You could install one anywhere … even in your utility cupboard at home.
Do you suppose George Monbiot or Al Gore would help with the product lunch?
bill (21:01:36) :
Wind power is already storing useable power for the future –
each kWh generated displaces an amount of energy being generated by oil/gas (at 30-60% efficiency) thus saving this for use in the future.
———————-
This is why Greens cannot do math and had to invent Green Math to validate their pie ( or giant rotor ) in the sky energy poicies. Wind energy displaces nothing, ZERO, fossil fuel load generation must be maintained to be available on demand, that is the simple fact the supply is unreliable and it is not feasible to man and maintain generation plants and “spin them up” on NatGas or other as needed because the delay, demand spikes are commom.
Wind is an energy company’s best tradable production but is kind of like selling ice cream from a moving truck, right place right time and you may get a cold treat on a stick (or some elctrons made by wind power) diverted to your grid when a spike in demand occurs. Then there is the price…
In Texas there has been documented periods where the cost of Mw\h of production has spiked to $4,000 per unit due to demand requests and a lull in generation and Texas has been forced to create a Conservation Alert to warn people when supply is unavailable.
This is why the National Smart Grid is so important to the Administration, they think they can produce just the electrical demand and no more and shunt it around the country at will, sending wind power from the middle to the coasts as needed. The logic is demand moves across the country in waves and we can just move the capicitty with it. Problem is that is not a very secure Energy Grid, not a very efficent energy grid when addressing regional demand issues and transmission distances, and poses the potential for service intrerruptions impairing the entire National Grid.
Mike McMillan – thank you .
Most of Glasgow’s electricity comes from Hunterston nuclear power station. Nuclear is the least flexible system so if it gets “switched down” by a fewe hundred mw (actually only its electricity production & transmission will be cut off since nuclear reactions don’t do such fine tuning) it will not save a penny or a gram of the scarce material (a mere 4.6 billion tons of it remaining in seawater.
Steve Goddard (10:51:09) :
“We already know how to generate enough energy from fusion to power the entire world. The problem is that the spatial and temporal distribution of energy from thermonuclear explosions might not be ideal for generating a safe, consistent supply of energy. ”
That’s it! Put a huge ring of wind turbines around ground zero and drop a nuke every few minutes. Huge power generation from the wind blast. Maintenance could be a small problem, along with fallout.
Breeders: The Russians build a bunch of them. Chernoble for example. Make lots of Pu. (enough for upwards of 70,000 nukes) I don’t think anyone has made a power plant that runs off of Plutonium.
As for the Smart Grid: You can’t ship electricity all that far, line losses kill you, as does phase shift. 60 Hz has a long wavelength, but after 1000 miles, a major problem. You can phase correct it, with a pile of money. Really high voltage DC takes care of some of this, but is very expensive and the ecos strongly object.
“Nothing is impossible for those who don’t have to do it themselves.”
This is the level of intellect that is guiding America’s energy future: http://michellemalkin.com/2009/05/21/waxman-clueless-about-his-captrade-bill-youre-asking-me/
Apologies for misinterpreting the x as a multipication symbol. Clearly the sentence in The Guardian was meant to be taken literally rather than as journalistic shorthand for an expression of capactity. Clearly the Guardian is unaware of such issues as capacity factors, the need for base load backup and wants its readers to believe that the intermittent nature of Wind Energy is no barrier to it prowering a whole city 100% of the time. The odd thing is their Q&A says the opposite ….
The major problem with wind power is that it is intermittent, so it can only be used to generate electricity when the wind is blowing strongly enough
So inconsistent, these Greenies. Clearly the answer is a European HVDC supergrid linking Icelandic geothermal, Scottich Wind, Scandanavian hydro, North African Concentrated Solar etc.
http://claverton.wikispaces.com/European+supergrid
>>Can I suppose you are volunteering for election?
I couldn’t do worse than the current bunch of cerebrally-challenged morons.
Ralph
>>Do we master hydrogen production and storage: Yes we have,
>>but not at a competative level.
Question:
What would you like to live next to, a hydrogen storage facility or a nuclear power station? I’ll go for the latter, thanks!
.
>>But, when they see Wind working in Texas, and Iowa
>>you’re going to lose their interest when you start telling
>>them that Wind is Stupid, Period.
I’ve just flown over the 2,000 windelecs** of Denmark, and not a single one was turning. Now I hope all those renewable proponents across Europe turned off all their electrical supply today and did not use any third-party electricity (trains, traffic lights, shops etc:)
Or are they all hypocrites?
.
** A wind-mill is a device for grinding flour (a mill powered by wind). Thus an electrical generator powered by wind should be a wind-elec.
Can we standardise on ‘windelec’, or something similarly simple?
.
Philip Johns,
Thanks for pointing out the poor editing in the Guardian. If they know that wind intermittency is a problem, how could they possibly put out a lead story which starts with this incorrect sentence?
Whitelee clearly can not “meet Glasgow’s electricity needs.” Having a disclaimer somewhere else on their web site is no excuse.
>>I seem to remember reading books about and seeing
>>old fotos of ships that carried cargo. These ships had
>>large masts and sails – and no engines.
And I also remember when ships were bottled up in port for weeks or months, waiting for a favourable wind – or mercilessly dashed to pieces on a lee-shore, because of no other means of power.
Will you happily wait six weeks for the next delivery of flour and thus the baking of your morning loaf? No, I thought not.
Stop trying to take us back to the Stone Age.
.
Try going to court and telling the judge that you meet your children’s “food needs” four days a week.
Try telling your mortgage company that you meet their “payment needs” nine months a year.
Try telling your wife that you meet her needs eight years out of ten. I’m sure you will get a very polite response.