Just when the green energy movement thinks they have it all worked out, along comes a snail-darteresque moment that throws a monkey wrench in green plans. These are the big fanboys in the panhandle, which I snapped a photo of near the Oklahoma- Texas border when I was doing USHCN site surveys in December. – Anthony
(From Bloomberg) — Iberdrola SA and E.ON AG’s turbine dreams for the windswept Texas Panhandle may be stymied by the mating rituals of the Lesser Prairie Chicken, a bird whose future could slow the pace of U.S. renewable energy growth.
Developers are scouring the sagebrush and grasslands of potential turbine sites for the ground-dwelling chickens, E.ON chief development officer Patrick Woodson said. Once plentiful in the southern high plains, the bird now has a high priority for listing under the Endangered Species Act, a move that will affect where as much as $11 billion in turbines can be built.
Federal protection for the chickens will hamper Texas’s plan to add 5,500 megawatts of wind power in the region by 2013, a 60 percent increase for the state. President Barack Obama wants to double all U.S. energy from renewable sources such as the wind and sun in three years to reduce dependence on imported oil and the greenhouse-gas emissions blamed for global warming.
“The windiest parts of some of these states seem to be the areas that still have bigger concentrations of prairie chickens,” Woodson said in an Aug. 13 interview. “We need to plan for a worst-case scenario, which would be a listing.”
There may be as few as 10,000 Lesser Prairie Chickens left in the U.S. from an estimated 3 million in the 18th century. Many are still found in the panhandle, Texas’s northern tip that also boasts the best prospects for wind power, said Heather Whitlaw, a biologist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
Electric-generating wind turbines inhibit the bird’s spring mating rituals, Whitlaw said on Aug. 11. Males jump, fight and show off bright yellow eye combs and reddish esophageal air sacks as they court females in an elaborate dance. The chickens have learned to avoid such mating displays around structures like turbine towers or utility poles where predators may perch.
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Ouch, listing under the ESA? That’s gonna hurt. Read the complete article here
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According to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Dept., the hunt is on for Lesser Prarie Chicken habitat.
The Texas Panhandle area supports a large proportion of the remaining populations of Lesser Prairie-Chickens, so we all have an important opportunity to ensure conservation of the grasslands that support this icon of the Southern High Plains. It is important that we all work together to conserve and manage this unique grassland species. One of the challenges facing biologists and managers is the need to collect accurate census data in order to address the questions and concerns of whether Lesser Prairie-Chickens should be listed as a threatened species across their range. With your help and reports of observations, we will be able to determine how many prairie-chickens we have in Texas.
If you see this bird please contact any of the following:
Texas Parks and Wildlife Dept.
(http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/landwater/land/habitats/)
Heather Whitlaw
Box 42125, TTU
Lubbock, TX 79409-2125
Please provide details of the date, location and number of individuals seen. If possible include GPS coordinates. Did you happen to get a photograph or digital image? Your information is valuable and will help ensure the continued survival of this unique
grassland bird.
I’m sure WUWT readers would be glad to help.
h/t to Jeez
Steve Schaper (12:12:49) :
Mmmmmm…
One of the limits on these monsters is the tip speed approaching the speed of sound!
DaveE.
Steve Schaper (12:12:49) :
As for “nearly always in motion”
I have passed
subsidywind farms in motion on totally windless days with the blade angles set to reduce the drag from being driven.DaveE.
Nogw
If I understand you correctly, your point is well worth taking. I’ve been on the platform overlooking the 8 to 10 generators in one room producing power from hoover damn. The 8 to 10 generators produce more electricity in one year than the proposed T. Boone Pickens giganic wind farm (4000 wind turbines) in the Texas Panhandle which cover hundred of square miles.
Douglas Taylor (13:49:57) :
There is no technical substitute (electronic/electrical) for the mechanical gearbox, since they must be the main component of transferring the extremely high torque, slow rotation speed of the spinning wind turbine to the 60 hertz grid requirements.
Actually yes, there is. There are gearbox-less wind turbines. In geared turbines the field in the generator is produced by rare-earth permanent magnets. Neodymium shortages in the near future will create problems for those though.
Gearless turbines use electromagnetically generated fields like in a dynamo. That field can be electronically rotated so the output is 60 Hz, independent of rotor speed. However, this field generation requires quite a bit of electrical power. At low wind speeds such a turbine requires more electricity than it produces, hence the wind speed where they start to produce power is higher. But all wind turbines are electricity consumers at below start wind speeds. The controllers, blade angle mechanics and axis steering mechanisms do still need power even when the wind does not blow.
Not something the wind industry likes to talk about.
Neither do they like to talk about the additional fuel required in fossil backup plants because of the variable nature of wind.
Just like a car requires much less fuel when running at steady speed compared to stop-and-go, so do (gas) power plants require more fuel when they constantly have to throttle up and down.
A car in 30 mph average stop-and-go traffic burns more fuel per mile than on the freeway at 60 mph.
And they also don’t like to talk about that the variable nature of wind requires fast reacting peaker type gas turbines that are much less efficient than combined cycle plants.
When one compares the bird or bat kill from wind turbines with other structures, you should keep in mind the significant aerodynamic differences.
The flow streamlines in wind turbines go through the wind turbine, which has the tendency to suck the birds into the blades, whereas the flow streamlines for stuctures point away from the structure which pushes the birds away from the structure.
ROM (03:05:58) Re: the cleanup of wind power when sanity finally prevails won’t be too difficult. The worst of the visual pollution will be easily removed with relatively small amounts of C4.
I find the green acceptance of wind power amazing. In Germany people have complained about the noise generated by the odd circling sailplane(a ghostly whispering sound which soon becomes inaudible as the sailplane climbs away in the thermal) and also complained that while hiking in the Alps their view of the pristine natural environment is ruined by passing sailplanes (some of the most beautiful functional machinery invented by man – but I’m biased). To return the favor, I’d complain about my view of the natural Alps being ruined by hikers in bright clothing.
Pamela Gray (06:55:24) :
Bats can fly outside all night long and I will not bother them. Sneak into my bedroom and their ass is mine. You knock um down with hornet spray than broom them to death
Years ago I had this insane yellow maine coon mix-Hobbes, one night my wife was
sitting in the living room of our old place in Port Orford,Or, and noticed Hobbes gnashing his teeth and looking up at the ceiling,then something large and dark flew
across her line of sight.It was one of the large,local, south coast bats,Boone and Crockett candidate bats.Hobbes leaped up, and nailed the Bat, and proceeded to
drop the still quite living and irritated bat at my wife’s feet.Now my wife, being
the product of Kentucky hill people, didn’t freak, but grabbed the broom.The bat
now is back in the exposed rafters, and is not about to co-operate with wife or
cat.At this point I arrived.Taking a step ladder and armed with a smaller broom,I
extricate said bat. that promptly does a nice immelmann,and flies out the door,
cat and wife in hot pursuit.Never had that happen again.However, Hobbes was searched every time he came in to make sure he wasn’t carrying his evening’s entertainment…
OK , for those of you who missed some of the earlier posts , prarie chickens are not barnyard fowl . In fact , they are a species of grouse . Grouse which live open country – as opposed to forest grouse – fly fast and as far as necessary to avoid percieved threats . Ask anyone who has ever hunted them . Or look them up .
Douglas Taylor (13:49:57) :
The main weakpoint with the operational life of a wind turbine is the gear-box. Gear Boxes fail after about 5 years. They are like the transmisson of a semi. There is no technical substitute
Just so Wrong! Electronics can convert the output of a variable speed rotor into sychronous AC that can be fed to the grid via a transformer. This enables wind turbines to equal or better the performance of a standard generator under fault conditions. Resynchronization can be instantaneous.
Total moving high power parts 1 plus feathering and pointing control.
http://www.enercon.de/www/en/broschueren.nsf/vwwebAnzeige/A1F46D4783166914C125747B002DD858/$FILE/Netzintegration_Windpark_eng.pdf
check the rest of the site for other detail.
Actually , I CAN spell prairie – sorry .
Henry chance (11:41:39) :
One of the two secret expenses are the cost of a gathering grid and loss of power.
Wrong. (unless the US grid is far inferior to UK)
Wiki
Uk gid power losses total:
[edit] Losses
Figures are again from the 2005 SYS.
Joule heating in cables: 857.8 MW
Fixed losses: 266 MW (consists of corona and iron losses; can be 100 MW higher in adverse weather)
Substation transformer heating losses: 142.4 MW
Generator transformer heating losses: 157.3 MW
Total losses: 1423.5 MW (2.29% of peak demand)
Although losses in the national grid are low, there are significant further losses in onward electricity distribution to the consumer, causing a total distribution loss of about 7.7%.[6] However losses differ significantly for customers connected at different voltages; connected at high voltage the total losses are about 2.6%, at medium voltage 6.4% and at low voltage 12.2%.[7
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Grid_(UK)
“The main environmental problem we are watching out for with telecommunication towers are the deaths of birds and bats.”6
You have to wonder how many birds are killed by trees.
One of the two secret expenses are the cost of a gathering grid and loss of power. A generator creates all it’s power in a single plant and is tied to a distribution grid. A wind farm is about gathering from a string of a hundred generators and shipping the electric elsewhere. The power loss of resistance is 10% per 60 miles. So if the farm is 200 miles from a city, we loose 2/3rds of the electricity.
.9^3.3333 ~= .7
Gear Box
Basic Physics: Large Modern 3 blade wind turbines for efficiency reasons require that the speed of the tip blade is about 4 times that of the wind velocity.
Because of this factor, and the size of the wind turbine, the rotational speed is about 10 revolutions per minute(?), or about 1/6 Hz.
The basic reason for the gearbox is newton’s Third law of motion applied to a rotational body. The TORQUE applied to the drive shaft of the by the wind turbine is extremely large, and that MUST be balanced by the electromechanical induced, inverse TORQUE from the generator. You either have a gigantic generator with many poles, or a reasonable sized generator with a small electromagnetic torque, which can transfer its small torque through the gearbox to balance out the torque of the turbine.
Why many of you first world people have lost your reason?, you have made big advancements in science and technology, but this…, come on!, you just can´t imagine what the rest of the world think of you, with all these stupid ideas.
Of course nobody will say you that. The cultural phenomena you are in is reflected in those silly movies made in hollywood, for mentally retarded!. All that nut´s “discovery channel” science, all those end of the world theories, which reflect not other thing but your own subconcious recognition that you are near the end…and now you want to plant all these “fans”, those mounstrous “transformers” kind of things all over the landscape….Believe me: You are about to kill the rest of the world, just by laughing at you!.
Two Secret Expenses in Wind Farm Generation–
Actual there is a third secret expense. Any Transmission Corridor has to be “sized” to the maximum power generated by the generators. Because of the supply size variability of wind generation, the average power delivered is at MOST 30% of the of the peak generation, this means that 70% of the time the transmission line is not being utilized.
For a case study, one only has to look at Texas, which has the largest penetration of wind generation of any state in the US (3.5%). I’m speaking mostly about West Texas windfarms, around Abilene, and the T. Boone Pickens proposed ‘boondoggle’ near Amarillo Tex. Because the grid was not capable of integrating the maximum power generated during the spring and fall, the attempted grid integration caused grid congestion. They are now talking about spending about 5 Billion to upgrade the West Texas Farms, so that they can move the juice to the population centers in Texas. Pickens has had to slip the development of his monster wind farms for three reasons. One of these reasons is transmission costs.
Here is some data about distances in Texas. Abilene is about 150 miles from the population centers in Texas, and Amarillo is about 300 mile from population ceters. This is in contrast to Comanche Peak Nuke Power Station (Within 35 miles of the population center), and the South Texas Nuke Project (50 mile). In addition, both Nuke stations are baseload so they are very efficient in using there transmission line
Chuck near Houston (10:47:56) :
“I’m coining a new word here: “Environy””
Nice one, Chuck!
P Walker, I have hunted prairie chickens. They sit tight till you nearly step on their tail feathers then rise in a flurry towards the next good hiding place not very far away and just out of sight. They are prey for raptors. Why? Cause they are easier to catch than rabbits. You will not ever see a prairie chicken take to wing to the heights of wind tower blades. Not unless you stuck a rocket up their hoo hah and set it afire.
GEAR BOXES AGAIN: I copied this from the Web, from WindPower Magazine.
Thursday, November 03, 2005
THE GEARBOX: WINDPOWER’S ACHILLES’ HEEL
This month’s Windpower Monthly examines a little-known twist in the “mature technology” of large-scale wind turbines:
Gearboxes have been failing in wind turbines since the early 1990s. Barely a turbine make has escaped. Six years ago the problem reached epidemic proportions, culminating in a massive series failure of gearboxes in NEG Micon machines. At the time, the NEG Micon brand was the most sold wind turbine in the world. The disaster brought the company to its knees as it struggled to retrofit well over one thousand machines. It has since been taken over by Vestas, the world’s largest wind turbine manufacturer. Vestas is still grappling with the aftermath of the gearbox catastrophe.
The wind power industry and its component suppliers now believe that such major series failure of gearboxes is a thing of the past. Today’s far larger and more sophisticated turbines, they say, are safe from mistakes encountered in early phases of technology development.
Bigger turbines, however, are proving to be far from immune to gearbox failure, as Windpower Monthly reports in its November issue. …
The wind industry’s gearbox problem has for years been shrouded in secrecy. While blame for the failures has been spread far and wide, questions outnumber the answers by far. At Windpower Monthly we set ourselves the task of finding out the true scale of the problem. Why is it that gearboxes in wind turbines have so massively failed? What is the solution? …
The good news is that understanding of the highly complex loads that gearboxes — and particularly their bearings — are subject to is being helped by a new industry willingness to co-operate and face up to the challenges of wind power’s rapid technological evolution. But only time will tell whether a definitive solution has been found — and whether it will stay the course as wind turbines get ever bigger and more demanding of engineering ingenuity.
Here in Australia we have not been permitted to go nuclear, so the following economic analysis by Peter Lang is country specific. However, it provides a framework for analysis that the serious minded can apply to their own Countries or States.
http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/wind-power.pdf
There is a companion paper on solar at
http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/solar-realities.pdf
Peter has had long hands-on experience with power generation methods and costs. These are not ideological papers, they are real-world figures.
Note in particular the cost of avoiding release of a tonne of CO2 into the air. It’s $22 if you use nuclear and $1150 for windmills. In Australia. For the difference, you could have quite a few takeout KFCs from millkills of prairie chickens.
kim (06:43:06) : “The real damage is the weakened winds distal to the windmills; they create regional climate change and damage directly proportional to the amount of energy stolen from the wind, and worth far more.”
Could you let me have more detail, perhaps a link, kim, so that I may gain an understanding of this? (My email is RogerCarr AT datacodsl.com)
Nogw, I like your dark humor. And you are probably onto unconscious meanings (or wishes) in the marxists who have been proliferating among us (see Glen Beck). The rest are after whatever handout they can swindle, like Boone Pickens. If the latter were financially responsible for cleaning up their messes when they fail, there would not be so many grand bandwagon projects.
Nogw (11:48:09) : “I am proud that recently my government, the peruvian government, has rejected offered investments for the installation of this “1st.world” non-sense…”
Clever Peru, Nogw! You have every reason to be proud… and relieved.
>>>Personally I wait with anticipation at the first good Columbia
>>>Basin ice event that will coat the Windmills with Ice-having
>>>experienced this over the years in aircraft from Piper Senecas
>>>to DC7’s,it will happen, and at the point where the power
>>>is most needed.
.
Tip Speeds.
Ok. Based upon a Vestas V44 windelec.
http://www.windturbines.ca/vestas_v44.htm
The 44m (1700inch) diameter blades at max 28rpm give a tip speed of 144mph.
(Tip speed calculator)
http://www.hoverhawk.com/propspd.html
Ice.
One problem with ice is the danger – flying ice is quite a hazard.
http://web1.msue.msu.edu/cdnr/icethrowseifertb.pdf
Then there is the loss of power, which can be quite significant.
http://www.esc.gov.yk.ca/pdf/overcoming_icing_effects_wind_turbines.pdf
Another is damage and failure.
Ice build up can cause unbalanced loads/vibration. Although this is unlikely to cause failure, it may well worsen the gearbox problem discussed earlier. Another failure mode is the icing up of sensor equipment, which could lead to the blades wrongly spinning beyond their design speed, leading to complete failure.
.
bill (15:49:37) :
Douglas Taylor (13:49:57) :
The main weakpoint with the operational life of a wind turbine is the gear-box. Gear Boxes fail after about 5 years. They are like the transmisson of a semi. There is no technical substitute
Just so Wrong!
Apparently, the Department of Energy thinks you’re “just so wrong”.
Current Obama money pit:
A new U.S. large dynamometer facility is needed for the following reasons:
• The long-term reliability of the current generation of megawatt-scale drivetrains has not yet been fully verified through field operating experience. As a result of fleet-wide gearbox maintenance issues and related failures, it is now becoming an increasingly standard practice to perform extensive testing of new gearbox configurations on a dynamometer to prove performance, durability and reliability before they are introduced into serial production.