Bishop Hill points to an essay in the Spectator Matt Ridley: The Beginning Of The End Of Wind which is a summary of the arguments against wind power. He (and I) were not aware of this point:
Putting the things offshore may avoid objections from the neighbours, but (Chancellor, beware!) it makes even less sense, because it costs you and me — the taxpayers — double.
I have it on good authority from a marine engineer that keeping wind turbines upright in the gravel, tides and storms of the North Sea for 25 years is a near hopeless quest, so the repair bill is going to be horrific and the output disappointing. Already the grouting in the foundations of hundreds of turbines off Kent, Denmark and the Dogger Bank has failed, necessitating costly repairs.
…
So even if you accept the most alarming predictions of climate change, those turbines that have ruined your favourite view are doing nothing to help. The shale gas revolution has not only shamed the wind industry by showing how to decarbonise for real, but has blown away its last feeble argument — that diminishing supplies of fossil fuels will cause their prices to rise so high that wind eventually becomes competitive even without a subsidy. Even if oil stays dear, cheap gas is now likely to last many decades.
Though they may not admit it for a while, most ministers have realised that the sums for wind power just don’t add up and never will. The discovery of shale gas near Blackpool has profound implications for the future of British energy supply, which the government has seemed sheepishly reluctant to explore. It has a massive subsidy programme in place for wind farms, which now seem obsolete both as a means of energy production and decarbonisation. It is almost impossible to see what function they serve, other than making a fortune from those who profit from the subsidy scam.
Even in a boom, wind farms would have been unaffordable — with their economic and ecological rationale blown away. In an era of austerity, the policy is doomed, though so many contracts have been signed that the expansion of wind farms may continue, for a while. But the scam has ended. And as we survey the economic and environmental damage, the obvious question is how the delusion was maintained for so long. There has been no mystery about wind’s futility as a source of affordable and abundant electricity — so how did the wind-farm scam fool so many policymakers?
From RACookPE1978 on March 6, 2012 at 5:30 am:
Yup, and down to a tenth you’re normally talking a grinding operation, although these days there are CNC lathes that are rigid enough with advanced tooling that can hold a tenth. But getting the right surface finish can be a bitch, it’ll look nice but the Surfometer says otherwise. And there is the “waviness” issue, if you’re taking your size off of sharp peaks then you’ll get fast wear. For shafts like that, they’ll be heat treated and hard, cylindrical grinding on the bearing surfaces is best. And it’s highly possible they’ll get a “thick” coating like hard chrome, so you grind under, send ’em out for coating, then grind down the coating to the spec.
For the housing that holds the outside of the bearing, if it’s a small 1-piece press-in then the inside cylindrical surface may be honed, although inside cylindrical grinding is done. But for that size on those turbines, the outer housing would be expected to be multi-piece and bolted together around the bearing, thus the tolerances would be slightly more forgiving. Regular machining could be enough.
So you simply misspoke, that thou was the machining tolerance of a part, not the clearance from tip to housing, as I surmised. Got it.
Well that’ll teach the engineers to specify tolerances better. For an assembly they could also specify a total length tolerance, and accept matched sets with that tolerance allowing individual pieces to vary more than, per example, about 1/6 total tolerance. Such problems do crop up, like four holes in a line spec’d at a common +/- 0.005″ spacing, then between the end holes you get +/- 0.015 variance and the customer squawks, but they never called out an end-to-end distance and tolerance. There are ways of calling out things on the print so those problems don’t happen, these days they also use geometric tolerances to control more things to try to eliminate those assembly time “The ******* doesn’t fit!” moments.
Oh well, the dance continues. Engineers dream up the prints, machinists shape the reality. Give a machinist a tolerance, they will take it. If the engineers don’t like it then they should have specified better, expect it to take longer and cost more. Serves them right for drafting “impossible” parts. A sharp inside corner, under a ledge up to a wall that I’ll be machining with a Woodruff cutter? They deserve what they get.
Human civilization used to rely on wind power for transportation: sailing ships. combustion propulsion systems took over in the 19th century and quickly eclipsed sailing ships in both size and speed. The simple fact is “free” wind power isn’t worth the uncertainty and necessarily smaller hull size. Today sail is only used for pleasure craft; when getting there really matters, you burn fuel.
Wind turbines suffer from the same unyielding fact: the energy density simply isn’t there. No amount of clever engineering can overcome this.
@Brian H.
Thank you for the references, but if LP Physics can’t attract more funding than they show, I suspect this is a dead end. When James Watt and his partner Matthew Boulton set up their factory to build steam engines, they put a sign over the door which read “We sell what all the world wants to buy — power”. What was true then is much more so today. If you have any reasonable promise of a way to generate economical and clean power, the world most definitely will beat a path to your door.
If LP Physics can’t get more than $2 million in funding, then either they are totally incompetent in making investor presentations, or the presentations just don’t hold together. Warren Buffet alone could triple their annual budget out of petty cash. Both he and Bill Gates would probably love to fund a promising clean energy technology. So why is LP Physics scraping along on such a tiny budget asking for donations of lab gear?
I could easily be wrong, and in this case I would love to be wrong. But I don’t think so. Back to thorium, which has been shown to work with less risk than uranium.
In any case, what you call stellar plasma fusion simply hasn’t paid off after 40+ years of research at a cost of I don’t know how many billion dollars. Even wind turbines would be a better investment. If you had to place a bet today for a reliable, scalable power technology not based on fossil fuel, what would it be?
Rational Db8 : @march 6, 4:23Am
“cwj, it sounds as if you’ve no understanding of the scale involved. See this good article, with photos”
You are mis-attributing a comment by kbray In California to me. It was kbray who commented regarding his turbocharger after quoting a comment of mine.
Someone knows how to block quotes – how is it done?
re post by: cwj says: March 6, 2012 at 8:49 pm
My apologies for the mis-attribution cwj.
To do blockquotes, immediately before the text you want to quote, type (hope this works and does print the command codes!) <blockquote> then just after the text you are quoting, be sure to close or finish the blockquote or it can mess up all the rest of the text in not only your own post, but sometimes the rest of the thread. The way you finish the blockquote is just by typing </blockquote>
The carrots (or less than/greater than symbols tell the system that what is inside isn’t text to be printed, but a command to initiate. You always have to bracket the command with the carrots. The word inside the carrots,blockquote tells it what command to carry out. Then you tell it when to stop or turn off that command by using the same syntax, just with the “/” symbol immediately following the open carrot and in front of the command.
So:
<blockquote> = “turn on blockquote”
</blockquote> = “turn off blockquote”
You can find a lot of helpful tips along these lines at: http://wattsupwiththat.com/test-2/ There are only a relatively few commands that work on wordpress, so for the most part it’s not at all difficult to remember them once you’ve used them a few times. Then you can always go check the test page, or try out your text on the test page if you’re unsure or using one you don’t regularly use or aren’t sure if it’ll work on wordpress.
I haven’t tried the firefox greasemonkey & CA assistant add ons mentioned on the test page, although I’ve been tempted. Have to admit I’ve been worried whether it might cause any conflicts or problems on firefox or not.
There is another firefox add on that I have tried that works fairly well, called bbcode if I recall correctly… I found that once you know a few basic commands however, it seems just as quick to type them in yourself, so that’s what I typically do. Easier to accidentally miss a closing code that way tho! I’m not sure if there are any comparable add ons or scripts for other browsers.
cwj said on March 6, 2012 at 8:56 pm:
A. The “helps many things” solution:
Have Firefox, get the Greasemonkey plug-in, get CA Assistant which is a script that runs on Greasemonkey. All info at link. This gives you the very-helpful Preview button, and other useful buttons above the comment text box. For many options like bold, italics, and block quotes, you can highlight the text, click the button, the html code is inserted. Click without highlighting, you get the start and stop parts of the code and just fill-in-the-blank between. Also does hypertext links, just highlight, click, then input the address. I very nearly always use this for my block quotes.
B. Go to the toolbar at the top of a WUWT page, click on Test for formatting tips, including block quotes.
Block quotes can show up with funny line spacing, especially when you have one inside of another. The preview button with option A is very helpful for getting html in your comments to look good.
RE: Stas Peterson: (March 5, 2012 at 2:01 pm)
“Many so called nuclear power boosters but want “safer” thorium reactors are are somewhat confused. They will likely get neither. …
“Commercial Fusion is probably as close, and won’t need anywhere near that amount of time to secure a license, because they are inherently safe. They can’t run away; and there is no great store of radioactive materials in a Fusion reactor to fear. If you don’t work very hard to maintain the appropriate conditions, the thermonuclear fire just goes out.”
I do not think we should rule out any approach for providing an alternative source of power for the coming post carbon era. One reason that Dr. Chris Martinson gives for dismissing any quick technological silver bullet solution for the energy crisis is that it takes about forty years to make such a modal change and no such candidate is being developed. Fusion is potentially cleaner than fission reactors, but I do seem to recall a comment that there could be an issue with the gradual release of dangerous mutated elements into the atmosphere.
The reason fusion has been so hard to develop is because extremely high pressures and temperatures are required to push two strongly-repelling positively charged nuclei close enough to join. In the case of fission, uncharged neutrons have no problem slipping into an atomic nucleus and making it unstable so that it either breaks apart or throws out an electron to move one-step higher on the periodic table. The liquid-salt thorium reactor has the potential advantage of safe, low-pressure operation and a continuous recycling operation that destroys almost all fissionable nuclei. The only radioactive materials left over are neutron-overloaded fission fragments that quickly decay, in most cases, by just throwing out electrons.
Here is a video outlining a new proposed design for a 40 Megawatt prototype unit by Charles (Rusty) Holden:
Charles Holden –
Liquid Fueled Thorium Reactor 40 Megawatt Pilot Plant Outline
@ur momisugly TEAC3
Uploaded by gordonmcdowell on Dec 30, 2011
39 likes, 0 dislikes; 2,376 Views; 18:17 min
“Charles S. Holden gives an overview of his 40 Megawatt Thorium Molten Salt Reactor design. No Plutonium Produced. No melt downs. No fuel rods. No cooling ponds. No 10,000+ year spent nuclear fuel storage.
“Presented at the 3rd Thorium Energy Alliance Conference, in Washington DC”
To keep a wind turbine solid in the north sea would take a base the size and mass of the Troll A Platform. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_A_platform
There were going to be two of them but the first one imploded during a submergence test.
RDb8;
Here’s one more wee control trick: before typing or pasting the material to be “tagged” (with blockquote or any other), create both the opening and closing tags. Then put the cursor between them and you can’t “forget” to close them!
The CA Assistant Greasemonkey script works fine, though it displays a few options that aren’t actually enabled (sub- and super-script, underline, source code, TeX, and insert image). But the Preview is Priceless!!
Oh, one or two (i.e., six) other add-ons you should explore:
Ghostery
Lazarus
No-Script
Read It Later
Readability
UnMHT
🙂
RDb8;
Oh, and carets are not carrots or carats. 😉
It seems to be too small. And Eric Lerner, the principal, will not sell voting stock, only participating shares. Not out of greed, but because he’s had a few brushes with the PTB, who find this an altogether TOO disruptive technology.
Personally, I think it would be more along Elon Musk’s line. But he has controlling interest in Solar City, which would be some of the immediate economic roadkill if this comes to market (or is even proven feasible). That could/should happen this year, on the science side. The engineering seems surmountable over another 3-4 yrs., but even the likelihood would make investing in any renewable a mug’s game.