I’m not sure where this is going, but the first thing I thought of was this old sci-fi movie “Them“:
Via Eurekalert: Evolutionary lessons for wind farm efficiency
Evolution is providing the inspiration for University of Adelaide computer science research to find the best placement of turbines to increase wind farm productivity.
Senior Lecturer Dr Frank Neumann, from the School of Computer Science, is using a “selection of the fittest” step-by-step approach called “evolutionary algorithms” to optimise wind turbine placement. This takes into account wake effects, the minimum amount of land needed, wind factors and the complex aerodynamics of wind turbines.
“Renewable energy is playing an increasing role in the supply of energy worldwide and will help mitigate climate change,” says Dr Neumann. “To further increase the productivity of wind farms, we need to exploit methods that help to optimise their performance.”
Dr Neumann says the question of exactly where wind turbines should be placed to gain maximum efficiency is highly complex. “An evolutionary algorithm is a mathematical process where potential solutions keep being improved a step at a time until the optimum is reached,” he says.
“You can think of it like parents producing a number of offspring, each with differing characteristics,” he says. “As with evolution, each population or ‘set of solutions’ from a new generation should get better. These solutions can be evaluated in parallel to speed up the computation.”
Other biology-inspired algorithms to solve complex problems are based on ant colonies.
“Ant colony optimisation” uses the principle of ants finding the shortest way to a source of food from their nest.
“You can observe them in nature, they do it very efficiently communicating between each other using pheromone trails,” says Dr Neumann. “After a certain amount of time, they will have found the best route to the food – problem solved. We can also solve human problems using the same principles through computer algorithms.”
Dr Neumann has come to the University of Adelaide this year from Germany where he worked at the Max Planck Institute. He is working on wind turbine placement optimisation in collaboration with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“Current approaches to solving this placement optimisation can only deal with a small number of turbines,” Dr Neumann says. “We have demonstrated an accurate and efficient algorithm for as many as 1000 turbines.”
The researchers are now looking to fine-tune the algorithms even further using different models of wake effect and complex aerodynamic factors.
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Septic Matthew:
At May 4, 2011 at 12:58 pm you assert:
” Wind turbines would probably produce a net improvement in American health, though it is hard to tell because at present the health care costs of coal consumption (that’s an intentional play on words) are hard to estimate.”
No, you are wrong on both counts.
Windfarms provide health problems both by their flicker and their subsonic noise.
And the only reason that “the health care costs of coal consumption … are hard to estimate” is because the health effects of coal consumption – if they exist – are too small for them to be detected.
Richard
“Tucci78 says:
May 4, 2011 at 9:27 am
I propose that these wind turbines should be distributed so that one of each is sited on the residential property of every legislator who votes for their creation, every government officer of the executive branch who implements the enabling legislative acts and regulations, and every judge who rules in favor of their construction.
Let’s turn “NIMBY” on its head. You want it done on the public dime, you pork-feeding bastiches?
Okay, you live with the consequences.”
Strongly Agree.
Surely there are enough wind turbines installed around the world that they can get real data from them and decide which is optimally sited, rather than sit in their air-conditioned offices (cold in Adelaide at the moment) and playing with simulations.
On the other hand, how much grant money would be needed for Dr Neumann to travel the world to get the data? Maybe he can use his al-gore-ithm to determine if applying for a grant is more effective than sitting in his office with his ant farm.
The same algorithm is used to optimize climate models.
Like ants, climate scientists try models with many different weightings of the various forcings (for example, how important is land use as compared to CO2), until they discover a model that hindcast well and delivers the future prediction they expect.
What they don’t tell you is that there are many other combinations that also hindcast well, but deliver totally different predictions for the future.
Nice Bit Of Work. Collecting energy which is mostly useless more efficiently is a big advance. Evidently storage – which is the real missing ingredient is more difficult.
D Caldwell says:
May 4, 2011 at 12:21 pm
Lipstick on a pig!
We just need the right software to get the color optimized 🙂
Algorithm away to your heart’s content.
The EROEI for wind facilities is no higher than 0.29 and is still unsustainable.
Kum Dollison says:
May 4, 2011 at 10:04 am (Edit)
You don’t understand: Why should we – the taxpayers – waste five TIMES the resources and effort and money and power and materials just to get an inefficient, ineffective, not-useable power supply?
Here and on other treads you’ve touted wind power in California, Kansas, Germany, Spain, etc. The actual real world results of wind power there have been failures – loss of the grid, loss of stability, loss of jobs, loss of reliability. Loss of money.
Why should we waste money and resources on hot air (er, wind)? In NO place has wind been effective unless subsidized artificially by government money.
— With respect to this thread, note that the “optimism” placement of a random number of wind turbines ONLY can be applied on a flat area of varying area with no interferences (an ocean wind farm actually.)
On ANY other location, hills, mountains, roads, cities, lakes, rivers, power lines, towns and the ecology underneath (forest, ravines, farms, etc.) will abort his careful optimum arrangement.
For example – most – if not almost all – current windmills in a hilly region are in a straight row on the edge of a rapidly rising cliff face perpendicular to the most common wind direction. You will never be able to “optimize” anything better in hills.
Optimising something which is 2% to 8% efficient, will gain what exactly?
Adding an umpteenth of a squirt more will a (did someone say “huge” benifit) very minor increase, of a very poor product.
Good to see a story about my Alumni – but having said that, almost everything Adelaide Uni does these days makes me embarrassed to have attained my degree there.
Betapug says:
May 4, 2011 at 1:26 pm
“They’re [cockroaches] linked together by genes, he told the audience, while we are connected by the desire, evolved over millennia, to divide labour, to co-operate, and to be together.”
Really, has anyone polled the People’s Republic of China lately to see what they are thinking of the one child per couple policy? I guess those millions of mate-less, date-less young males are so proud of their cooperative spirit that they feel no pain at all.
In a human “cockroach colony”, what role would scientists have?
I think they’ll be optimising placement for the killing of every bird and bat that goes anywhere near the murder machine.
“Ant colony optimisation” uses the principle of ants finding the shortest way to a source of food from their nest.
“You can observe them in nature, they do it very efficiently communicating between each other using pheromone trails,” says Dr Neumann. “After a certain amount of time, they will have found the best route to the food – problem solved. We can also solve human problems using the same principles through computer algorithms.”
———————————————————————-
Unless Dr Neumann has been misquoted, or poorly edited, I fear that he is on the wrong track 🙂 here.
There is nothing ‘efficient’ about how ants find food and routes between food and the nest. This link has a good explanation of how they do it:
http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/howAnts.shtml
It is quite effective, but far from efficient, either in the way they find food in the first place (large numbers of food seekers randomly wandering around), or in the way they bring it back (by following the shortest path taken by an individual ant, which can still be much longer than a straight line).
Dr Neumann’s peculiar definition of the word ‘efficient’ no doubt puts him right in tune with the gestalt of the wind power industry.
The wind farms I’ve seen look good and seem to make use of all of the wind-slow and fast.
Tucci78, I’m right with you on that one!
Roger Pielke Sr has a study of wind power generation originally from the “Earth Systems Dynamics” Journal entitled “Estimating maximum global land surface wind power extractability and associated climatic consequences”.
http://www.earth-syst-dynam-discuss.net/1/169/2010/esdd-1-169-2010.html
OK, it is just the output of models again but at least they don’t project forward 50 years with a totally unverifiable prediction.
Estimated useable wind energy across the land masses of the world is between 17 and 38 Terra Watts annually.
A check with International Energy Associations figures on annual global energy use indicates that we are approaching 17 TW’s energy consumption annually which includes every type of energy generation system , oil, gas, hydro, alternative and etc.
Global energy consumption is rising at about 1.4% per year which I assume is a compounded rise.
So if every available wind turbine location on each and every one of the Earth’s land masses had a wind turbine installed and each of those turbines operated at 100% performance for 100% of the time, they would just supply the Earth’s current annual energy needs.
But there’s more; To quote from the abstract; “Furthermore, we show with the climate model simulations that the climatic effects at maximum wind power extraction are similar in magnitude to those associated with a doubling of atmospheric CO2.”
Nice one here! Install wind turbines and increase global warming.
Their modeling indicates that the turbine’s extraction of surface levels of wind energy plus the turbulence involved from such a dense global network of turbines would raise global temperatures by about the same amount as a doubling of CO2.
When I see those great ugly health damaging wind turbines stuck in the middle of the big city’s high flying wealthy investor living suburbs then I will accept them out amongst those “country peasants” whose health, well being and lifestyle don’t count with the grossly subsidised, wealthy tax payer exploiting investors in wind turbines.
One turbine is interesting
Five turbines are a photo op.
Fifty turbines are a health impairing, tax payer exploiting blight upon the landscape.
At 1:20 PM on 4 May, TomB had written:
_
Hm. Get that up to satisfactory sample chapter length, whip together an outline, and find yourself an agent. The intellectually incestuous East Coast publishing establishment will offer you beaucoup bucks while promoting you to a Pulitzer Prize.
Maybe James Cameron will plagiarize it and get himself another megablockbuster, too.
Sometimes a discovery in one area of science can be transferred to another area. For example, the most efficient and cost effective method to exterminate migratory birds by placing large killing machines in their flight paths can probably be cross-applied to the efficient placement of windmills.
/sarc
Survival of the fittest is a mis-diagnosis.
The truth is more prosaic.
It’s just a temporary failure to become extinct that we observe.
Remember, that 99.99% of all creature types have succeeded where we have (so far) quite failed.
So keep on trying.
Abandon all efficient forms of power generation, all domestic methane breathing farm animals and so forth.
We may yet achieve the ultimate and ourselves add to that glorious list of the great extinct beings.
U.N. – Nearly all the world’s energy could be produced from Renewables by 2050.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/04/us-energy-ipcc-idUSTRE74325N20110504
This research, like much of the research in support of global warming from green house gases, is part of a conspiratorial formula for success, spreading the wealth. If one looks honestly at wind power, looking at just the issues of practicality, there are two major limitations associated with wind power, its impact on the grid and wind variability and unpredictability. If one looks at the extensive funding designated by the NREL in 2010, for example, one finds that little development is aimed at either of the above issues and that the majority of the funds are doled out to other national laboratories and major research institutions in areas that are nonesential. There is no major program to solve the energy storage problems which follow from the above issues. By spreading the wealth around in relatively minor areas of development like this research, it means that there are many people willing to support wind farms because it means continued financial support for them. So even if the researchers saw wind farms as a bad idea, they still would feast at the trough. The wealth silences objections to the idea that the world can solve its energy problems with wind turbines and at the same time reduce the use of fossil fuels. Naturally when you consider all of the people as wind power advocates; wind power companies, environmentalists, politicians, government agencies, public relation firms, and professional advocates for wind power, it becomes quite clear that the wind farm opponents are vastly outnumbered. It is sad that science takes a back seat to this sef serving bunch. One possibility is that popular concept of wind farms won’t work in the long run after we are billions poorer.
Kum Dollinson:
You have repeatedly demonstrated that you ignore each and every point put to you.
So, in response to your silly assertion (citing the UN) that
“Nearly all the world’s energy could be produced from Renewables by 2050”
I merely say; dream on.
Richard
I wrote my final year dissertation on evolutionary algorithms, it’s actually a really interesting branch of computer science, and the solutions they come up with are often completely unexpected yet elegant.
Under-employed entymologists are coming to the AGW funding banquet a bit late.
Kum Dollison says:
May 4, 2011 at 8:35 pm (Edit)
U.N. – Nearly all the world’s energy could be produced from Renewables by 2050.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/04/us-energy-ipcc-idUSTRE74325N20110504
Ya know – You’re right. We could generate all of the world’s (electric) energy from remewables even earlier than that.
Ya gonna let me burn U238 and U233 into Plutonium and Thorium? And put these new nukes in the third world dictatorships that abide everywhere but capitalist economies ….
Stanley says:
May 4, 2011 at 6:55 pm (Edit)
The wind farms I’ve seen look good and seem to make use of all of the wind-slow and fast.
The wind farms we ACTUALLY STUDIED – not just looked at turning uselessly – generate useable power 21% of the time. You need to waste money, time and energy building 5 wind turbines – just to get the nameplate output of 1 wind turbine. Until you have a storm blow through – then you get all 5 wind turbine output – until the storm winds exceed the turbine’s limit (usually 40+ mph) – then you suddenly get NO output. And you STILL need to build a 100% conventional backup generator.
Why don’t we not waste resources by not building ANY subsidized windmills. Where they can make money – let the operators make money naturally.