Would generating more electricity from wind really help poor families or the environment?
By Pastor Jay Dennis From CanadaFreePress.com
We Americans are often told we must end our “addiction” to oil and coal, because they harm the environment and Earth’s climate. “Ecologically friendly” wind energy, some say, will generate 20% of America’s energy in another decade, greatly reducing carbon dioxide emissions and land use impacts from mining and drilling.
These claims are a driving force behind the cap-tax-and-trade and renewable energy bills that Congress may try to ram through during a “lame duck” session – as well as the Environmental Protection Agency’s economy-threatening regulations under its ruling that carbon dioxide “endangers human health and welfare.”
It is true that we are commanded to be good stewards of the Earth and resources God gave us. We should conserve energy, use it wisely, and minimize harmful impacts on lands and wildlife. But we also need to safeguard our health and that of our neighbors, preserve jobs, and help poor families build wealth and improve their standard of living. I want all children, not just mine, to have a better future.
Heaven knows I’m not an engineer. But Robert Bryce’s readable book, “Power Hungry,” has opened my eyes and helped me appreciate what it really means to be good stewards – and why we depend on hydrocarbons for 85% of the energy that keeps our homes, businesses and communities running smoothly.
Bryce points out that we are no more “addicted” to fossil fuels than we are to food, housing and clothing. It’s simply that fossil fuels give us more abundant, reliable and affordable energy, from less land, than any alternatives we have today. They enable us to have jobs, hospitals, cars, schools, factories, offices, stores – and living standards better than royalty enjoyed a mere century ago. As fossil fuel consumption increases, so does agriculture, commerce, mobility, comfort, convenience, health and prosperity.
Oil, natural gas, coal and gasoline also give us huge amounts of energy from small tracts of land. One oil well producing just ten barrels a day provides the energy equivalent of electricity from wind turbines on half of Delaware, according to Bryce.
Wind-based electricity is unreliable. It’s available only when the wind is blowing enough but not too hard. It can add to our electrical grid, but can’t be depended on to power a business or operating room. And no factory or city can get by just on wind power – not in my lifetime, anyway. Wind as a primary or dominant energy source is simply a mirage.
Wind turbines actually generate electricity only seven hours a day on average – and 2 hours a day on sweltering Texas summer days and frigid Minnesota winter nights. That means every watt of wind power must be backed up by gas-fired generators that kick in every time the turbine blades stop turning.
And that’s just the beginning.
Wind turbine farms need ten times more steel and concrete than a nuclear, coal or gas power plant for the same amount of electricity. You also need thousands of tons of raw materials for the backup generators and the thousands of miles of new transmission lines to get the electricity to cities hundreds of miles from the wind farms. All these materials have to be dug out of the ground someplace.
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RE: Bart October 21, 2010 at 6:10 pm;
I agree about the subsidies, though they aren’t all that major. About 5% of purchase cost, and (for TeslaMotors) a factory-capital loan which is expected to be paid back early, with interest.
As for the source of the power, I linked at the end of the post to an up-to-the-minute update at this site: http://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/article/lpp_webinar_online/
Within about 6 mo. proof-of-concept should happen, followed within 3-5 yrs by global offers of licenses for manufacturing of prefab ~5MW generators, shipping-container-sized, to all comers. The power is waste-free, and probably about 1/20 of best current North American pricing.
If it works, the entire “renewables” push and market drops dead. Economic roadkill. Wind and solar first to go, I’m betting.
John from CA:
You ask me:
“So in theory, a clean coal power plant / refinery built at or near high sulfur coal fields could use the LSE process to not only eliminate sulfur dioxide emissions, without the need for a flue gas scrubber since there aren’t any in the syncrude cake, but also reduce the cost of fuel for the plant while acting as a refinery and selling various grades of LSE syncrude fuels.
This seems too obvious to ask by why isn’t at least one of these in each of the US states that have huge concentrations of high sulfur coal?”
I answered that when I explained that the process is owned by UK government. The details of the process are confidential. At present – as I said – the UK gains great benefit from the high value of Brent crude. Adoption of the LSE process would dramatically reduce that economic benefit to the UK. And the UK has destroyed its indigenous coal industry so could only lose, not gain, from adoption of LSE.
Hence, US companies cannot conduct LSE because they do not know how to and (being a British Subject) I hope the UK government is not sufficiently stupid as to tell them how to.
Richard
Richard S Courtney says:
October 22, 2010 at 3:55 am
Adoption of the LSE process would dramatically reduce that economic benefit to the UK. And the UK has destroyed its indigenous coal industry so could only lose, not gain, from adoption of LSE.
=======
Come again?
How does the UK benefit from mucking up the landscape with windmills that will ultimately self-destruct when they can corner the market with LSE syncrude fuels that will bring down the cost of energy and thus give UK business an advantage in the marketplace?
BP is likely to jump at the chance to subsidize the process and leverage it all over the world if the giga-Joules of syncrude are close to a barrel of oil.
We have massive coal reserves in the USA but EPA regulations inhibit the use of a significant portion of it because of the Sulfur content. If the object of this energy exercise is to address solutions both short and long term, why is this de-sulfurization process not in the best interest of all countries and thus a significant benefit to the UK?
I’m probably missing something obvious.
I’d love to know how many of the wind defenders on here are just gullible and how many are actually on the BigWind payroll.
But I should remind mathematically challenged people that two times zero equals zero. And a thousand times zero is still zero.
Over the last three months, measured in periods of half an hour, there have been:-
212 periods when wind supplied less than 0.1% of total UK electricity demand.
511 periods when wind supplied less than 0.2% of total UK electricity demand.
815 periods when wind supplied less than 0.3% of total UK electricity demand.
1135 periods when wind supplied less than 0.4% of total UK electricity demand.
1480 periods when wind supplied less than 0.5% of total UK electricity demand.
Allowing for transmission losses, the 3000+ turbines thus essentially contributed zero for 740 hours or one month out of three. (And the last three months have been better for wind than January & February were.)
Question, just how many turbines should we build?
Question, will the 6,000 extra turbines the Government has committed to build this decade at a cost of £100 Billion help?
I ignore the fact that they save no CO2 because dedicated gas plants have to be kept on spinning standby. I pass over the fact that the high variability of output constantly necessitates current frequency adjustment at huge cost. Forget about the costs of maintaining and operating old oil fired installations, pumped storage, imported electricity (nuclear) from France, running coal plants at highly variable load unstead of base load.
These toys are worse than useless. Get real!
Interresting!
Let me illustrate this by an example:
My lawnmower has a single cylinder engine. The engine stops (providing energy) when it runs out of fuel. You solution basically says I need to add more cylinders (3-4 cylinders total) to prevent that from happening. And of course pay 3-4 times as much for the engine.
My logic says that a 4-cylinder engine also stops when it runs out of fuel (or wind in case of wind turbines). But in my lawnmower a 4- cylinder engine, when it does have fuel, would produce way more power than I need and would be uncontrollable.
Weather systems are often continent wide. Even of you distribute 3-4 (or 8 to 12) times as much wind turbines, you multiply the cost for a given amount of power, and you have to transport the power for the entire continent also across that continent.
Neither financable nor practical.
I must admit that farmers like wind generators on their land. Essentially the turbines generate electricity and the land can still be used for farming. Difficult with power stations and coal mines. This obviously ignores the financial side of things, but does anything come cheap these days?
Sort of a new adage: “If a little is no good, lots more will be much better!”
John from CA:
At you ask me:
“How does the UK benefit from mucking up the landscape with windmills that will ultimately self-destruct when they can corner the market with LSE syncrude fuels that will bring down the cost of energy and thus give UK business an advantage in the marketplace?”
Sorry, but you are confusing two completely different things.
Firstly, the UK does NOT benefit from mucking up the landscape with expensive and pointless windmills. And the adoption of the wind turbines adds substantially to UK energy costs. This demonstrates that energy costs are not a concern for UK government; indeed, fuel poverty is increasing in the UK. This drive to build wind turbines is a severe error, and I fully explain this in an item at
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/courtney_2006_lecture.pdf
Although that paper is from 2006, it is not dated.
Secondly, and as I explained, the UK produces Brent crude and sells it at premium price because of its blending properties. Adoption of LSE technology would collapse the price for Brent crude. And, as I also explained, the UK does not have significant indigenous coal production so would have to import feed stock for use of the LSE process. Clearly, maintaining the present situation gives most benefit to the UK’s ballance of payments. If and when Brent crude were to exhaust then the situation would change.
So, the UK government values protection of the ballance of payments but is not concerned at energy costs. In my opinion, UK government should be concerned about both. But they are different issues.
We gave the US the jet engine technology for nothing, and look what that did to our aero industry. Giving away the LSE technology would be ‘a gift too far’.
Richard
Brian H@ur momisugly October 21, 2010 at 11:29 pm
Sounds great. Maybe, this time, it will be different from all the other times in my life that it was announced a fusion breakthrough was imminent.
Richard S Courtney says:
October 22, 2010 at 4:18 pm
Firstly, the UK does NOT benefit from mucking up the landscape with expensive and pointless windmills. [Note: I was being sarcastic but meant no disrespect]
Your 2006 lecture was great, tidal coffer dams and the tidal bladder approach are very cleaver. But the ting that bothers me the most is the tendency to reduce the energy topic to one “magic bullet” vs another instead of a holistic view.
I see your point about the economic implications of LSE related to UK Brent crude pricing but eventually the demand for crude is likely to fall to the point where the supply controls are unlikely to maintain higher cost/bbl.
The idea of rendering coal to obtain a variety of desired results is very cleaver as long as the ROEI makes sense.
IMO, the solution requires decentralized power generation. Get rid of the need for commercial power plants and the problem is essentially solved with modular power generation. At least in the US, the power grid only needs to be maintained for large scale urban centers that contain sky-scrapers like NYC, Chicago, etc.
I’m not sure this approach will work but it frames the issues very well and thanks for taking the time to discuss LSE.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTtmU2lD97o&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3]
Kum Dollison says:
October 20, 2010 at 5:44 pm
“Why not do a little wind, and a little solar, and “see” what happens?”
Not sure how old you are? But out here in Southern California we’ve had a romance with both for a long time-over 40+ years and have yet to solve our energy problems. Although Governor Schwarzenegger (what a loser), who pushed through our own localized cap-n-tax bill(AB32) knows that this technology is the answer for California. We keep throwing taxpayers money at these technologies and have yet to reap a return(we still have brown-outs here). Without these subsidies, which are considerable, these energy forms would not see the light of day. I just can’t understand why we are not building thousands of nuclear plants. China will beat us at that also.
Build one windmill to generate one unit of power on windy days
Build one pumping unit to generate power on quiet days
Build another extra windmill to provide for consumption while pumping for storage
Scale up all three units to make up for transmission loss
Approximate sum: 4 windmills.
One windmill alone provides power at non-competitive price.
Do the math.