| Author | Message | ||
     Sifo |
Interesting report on the state of the UK's wind power program. To me this paragraph kind of sums things up...
http://thegwpf.org/images/stories/gwpf-reports/hug hes-windpower.pdf Comments? | ||
| Court |
I suspect, based on my budgeting and pre-construction planning work in wind power, that the £120 is way low. There are a couple dirty secrets "in the wind" that proponents would rather not discuss. This is the one I'm familiar with. http://www.linycoffshorewind.com/ | ||
| Aesquire |
Gathering diffuse energy and making it useful takes very large capital investment. ( It costs a lot, up FRONT to do ) If the wind generators are sized for a certain wind speed, they have to shut down at higher speeds, and produce little at lower wind speeds. In the U.S. the time the windmill is shut down to prevent it's destruction, the guy's who paid to install the windmill, and count on it to make them money, don't get paid for power they cannot make...... So...... they get paid by the government, ( or the local power grid operator... in either case, by you ) to compensate them for their lost revenue. Usually, depending on the contract, and the government incentive program they are ( almost always ) taking advantage of to actually make money with something as "iffy" as commercial wind power. It's a different matter for a private guy who has a windmill on his property in an effort to..... cut electric bills/hope to sell power back to the grid/feel greener than thou/save the planet/have a tech toy to enjoy/brag about. In that case, IF you take 10 years to pay back the investment in power savings/sales, that's the deal you end up with. You went for a gamble, and it pays off, or not, in whatever time frame it does. Tough. Or. Success. Commercial operations are different. Lots more money is involved, and a profit must be made, or no one with a clue would invest. That's why all the incentives. No one I know has the answer to the OTHER issue with wind power. What is the effect of pulling many megawatts out of the local and planetary weather system? Before you snap answer, "nothing", consider that you can defecate in a river, and that in days and miles, that is absorbed and processed by nature, and there is no measurable effect. If a million people do so, it is noticeable. If several million do so, you have a disaster of biblical proportions. Ask anyone who has experience in the old Soviet, China, India, or other high population density/low technology locations. We need several Terawatts. You want electric cars, right? No one knows what will happen when we suck several Terrawatts out of the system. It's solar powered after all. You CAN predict that the quality of life will be altered for those who live in the shadows of the energy collectors, solar or wind. You can also be certain that people like the late Senator T. Kennedy will make sure their views and summer homes will not have windmills, but make it mandatory that you have little say in one in your view. ( that's not speculation, that's historical fact. ) | ||
| Moxnix |
The market never lies. We rubes have to cough up tax money to underwrite green tech that will never have a sufficient rate of return to attract private capital. | ||
| Buellerxt |
Wind energy is an oxymoron, in spades. The HUGE financial drain for America will be stopped, it has to be, but WAY, way too many billions will, and have, been thrown away and added to the HUGE debt our kids and grand kids will have to pay off before that happens. It is a SICKENING mistake but it plays well for people who don't pay attention and like to hear 'replaceable' energy and think it is viable. IT ISN"T!!!!! What a pathetic, and HUGELY costly charade. | ||
| Court |
>>> will make sure their views and summer homes will not have windmills Here are some simulations of what our's would look like viewed from shore. http://www.edrcompanies.com/li-nyc_offshore/ It wasn't so much Kennedy as it was the Indian who claimed the existence of some ceremony that required and unobstructed view of the rising sun. (Message edited by court on March 10, 2012) | ||
| Two_seasons |
this is one of the reasons why America is in decline these last couple of years...  | ||
| Mikexlr650 |
Having seen what wave power does to the steel plates of a ship how do those wind turbines survive storms? Is replacement after storms just part of the "maintenance" cost? While many different forms of energy production can be included in the overall mix there is no free lunch, seems many in the country have been taught otherwise. Wonder where did these views originate from? Seriously, in a world where if you didn't take care of yourself you perished, who fostered the idea that others should be responsible for you? FDR? | ||
| Glitch |
They're just doing it wrong IMHO In my personal experience, I've found that solar, wind, and hydro, work very well. What the government doesn't get, is that it works best on an individual basis. But that wouldn't be good government now would it, if they can't regulate it, tax it, distribute it, they'll spend until doomsday trying. Solar (passive solar as well as panels) can power enough for Ann and I to damn near not need outside energy. Once you've gone to solar, (or any alternative source) you get keen on how much and where your power is going, so automatically you quit using as much. That little meter on your 12 volt battery bank gets paid much more attention than the electric meter outside your house. So not only are you using home made energy, you're using less energy. We'll be major solar after we get moved, and hopefully a micro-hydro-generator, along with wind. Hydro and wind are going to depend on the obvious. BOT Solar on a large scale IMHO is a waste, as is the Cuisinart in the sky (wind turbines munch up lots and lots of birds). Until battery technology, and solar panel technology make some huge steps forward, it'll not be practical on a large enough scale to distribute as we can with alternating current generator powered by water, coal, gas, etc... This of course is only my opinion, although I believe I have enough practical experience to know a little bit | ||
| Slaughter |
[sarcasm]I can't wait for the price of fuel to double again so all the "green energy" scams such as wind and solar will be attractive. If we tax diesel and gas fuel at 100% as is often done elsewhere, then the alternate energy technologies like wind, solar, tidal, and others ALL look much more attractive. [/sarcasm] | ||
| Buellerxt |
Good post, Glitch. | ||
| Pwnzor |
Windmills break. I know what it costs just to transport a single blade. I know what the trailer costs to transport that blade. I know that trailer is next to useless for any other type of load. Et cetera. I'm with Glitch on this, wind seems to make sense on the smaller scale. | ||
| Slaughter |
Yeah - my snide comments above were made about the gynormous wind and solar plants. Energy isn't expensive enough yet to justify so we tax "conventional" energy and incentivise "green." Our machinist at work is running 3 homes and a small machine and weld shop with two wind turbines. He's not off the grid but connected - he can sell back power occasionally so averaging out in a year, he about breaks even on electricity. He said his biggest reason for going "on the grid" was the costs of energy storage (batteries) and all the additional energy losses that came with further power conversion. | ||
| Brumbear |
cause beans aint cheap!!!!!!! | ||
| Sifo |
Glitch, Thanks for the real world input. Could I ask what you have invested in your setup to generate electricity? How big is your house? I just checked and I spent $844 on electricity over the past 12 months. That heats and cools my 2,400 SF house plus basement. Heat is gas forced air. I've also got light that are on all the time when dark out. I never have to worry about maintenance or repair of the system. I don't consider this to be too bad. If that suddenly jumped to around $8,440 per year, that becomes a major issue. I've got a lot of shade on the house during the summer months. Helps keep the place cool. It would suck for solar power. Plans for my future home would be far more solar friendly except for the fact that it's just a few miles south of the 45th parallel. | ||
| Cityxslicker |
IF wind power is so great a bargain (and I don't believe it is ) then WHY has the wind farm that has been operating in Washington for TEN Years failed to make quota, failed to make market share input 'needs' and failed to ROI to a break even point - IN the WINDIEST region of the state ( it is where kite boarding was invented!) smoke and mirrors It didn't work when Don Quixote went out to tip windmills thinking they were dragons to be slain and it doesnt work now. (PS Don't forget to add the cost of security for monitoring, patrol, prevention, and redundancy ) # did a little consulting gig for the wind farm off the coast of Ukraine - they have been there three years.... still no profit | ||
| Fb1 |
still no profit 'Slicker, I know you already know this, but somebody profited... | ||
| Cityxslicker |
but of course - the golden fleecing continues. pity Back in the 20's those that perpetuated the stock crash had the decency to jump out of a building instead of bilking us for bonuses ! | ||
| Mr_grumpy |
Brumbear, ya beat me to it!  | ||
| Reindog |
Dude, just slap on some fake palm trees like we do in SoCal and no one will notice. Or better yet, Brooklyn can then boast a SoCal lifestyle, bri. | ||
| Buellkowski |
Here is a recent IEA report on the relative costs of various types of energy production: http://www.iea.org/textbase/npsum/ElecCostSUM.pdf Coal construction costs: $1000-1500/kWe generation costs: $25-50/MWh investment/O&M/fuel breakdown: ~33%/20%/45% Gas construction costs: $400-800/kWe generation costs: $37-60/MWh investment/O&M/fuel breakdown: ~15%/10%/80% Nuclear construction costs: $1000-2000/kWe generation costs: $21-31/MWh investment/O&M/fuel breakdown: ~50%/30%/20% Wind construction costs: $1000-2000/kWe generation costs: $35-95/MWh investment/O&M/fuel breakdown: "investment" not explicitly stated/13-40%/0% (wind is free) So gas is cheap to build, nuclear is cheap to produce, and wind doesn't pollute. Ye pays yer money an' ye takes yer choice. | ||
| Aesquire |
There is no doubt that personal alt-energy stuff works. There is incentive to use less power, and you are in touch with your own situation. It's a ways down the road for me, but the next house I get/build will have much passive/semi-passive solar in the design.... While the current house is just laid out wrong. It's all in the angles. ( though sensor equipped vertical blinds would be nigh perfect for me....) http://www.hunterdouglascontract.com/solarcontrol/ internalrollershades/venetian/index.jsp In winter, IF enough sun to be worthwhile, let it in. When not enough close it off. Reverse in Summer, and you have a semi-passive setup that can pay for itself, and make your life nicer. Depending. A house designed from scratch for high efficiency, and solar can produce most of it's heat from the Sun. It's pretty simple. You can get up to 85% or so efficiency pretty easy ( in new smart build homes ) going to 95% is usually not worth the extra... but can be. and to go total off grid 100% energy independent is just too expensive to be practical outside of hobby/enthusiast folk. That last 5% is where all the money is. makes sense. Home built airplane guys like to say the last 10% is 50% of the work. I'ts true. Lining up mega Cuisinarts makes perfect sense, in a very few locations. Putting a small vertical axis "Windspire" type setup on a lot of power line towers makes sense, in more locations, like the Dakotas. But that's a massive capital outlay for a small return. nuclear, if done right, with fail safe reactors and reprocessing/breeding, CAN get us through to Fusion and other realistic alt energy sources, but, there has been a major propaganda campaign against that for decades. ( guess the ideology of the campaigners ) so far, what works for one guy may not work for all. Like processing fry oil for your diesel. Bob may have it down, you may be able to buy a kit that doesn't burn down the shed ( and house ) but the Town just doesn't have enough KFC's to make it work. All for alt energy. Not for dumb & corrupt energy. | ||
| Buellerxt |
You 'forgot' Buelkowski, and I'm being kind here,  , to include this addendum that was included in the wind cost portion of the write-up, "This approach does not reflect specific costs associated with wind or other intermittent renewable energy source for power generation and in particular it ignores the need for backup power to compensate for the low average availability factor as compared to base-load plants". Wind power CANNOT, repeat CANNOT stand alone and needs a 100% back-up from a reliable energy source like coal or natural gas. There are no economics for large scale wind projects. They are DISASTEROUS!!! They require 100% back-up and are therefore 100% redundant! They make greenies feel good but at HUGE taxation and 100% government support for the mirage. Wind energy is a HUGE FINANCIAL CALAMITY for America that must be stopped! | ||
| Mr_grumpy |
Wave power? Tidal power? Wind power? They all need backup at present because they're not reliable enough due to the weather, but if there's enough of it everywhere (& I admit the things are bloody eyesores) then the backup will be unnecessary as it's always blowing somewhere. Satellite generation is the future but how it'll work I've no idea. | ||
| Aesquire |
Solar sats have been in the works for decades. Economies of scale get better as the size goes up, and the best ideas in distributed collectors, ( mirrors in high, translunar orbit boosting geosync input ) would give us that 5+ Terawatts without the problems of surface collectors. But. You have to have massive power lines to carry electricity from the ground stations ( no matter if they collect sun directly or microwaves from space ) to where people live. Preferably superconducting, which means liquid nitrogen plants spaced along the trunk lines. Then there are the issues that you actually need a commercial launch capacity for megatons of sats, and you have to be able to ignore the inevitable Greenie reaction to sats so big you can see them with the naked eye, eventually running in a ring around the planet. Big shiny ring. Big. No, bigger. At that point you can supply all domestic gasoline and diesel with Domestic available coal conversion, all home heating with electric or domestic nat gas, and shut down all the coal and nat gas plants, convert all the pre-21st century nuclear to fail safe & Neptunium breeder designs and have full power independence. ( the conversion of old to new nukes is actually simpler than you'd think, since the steam turbines, etc stay. The old steel cans get decommissioned as time goes by, and you add modular pebble bed as you go to replace old teakettle reactors. ) In fact for the money spent in the last 3 years on economic stimulus, you could already be using sat solar to replace a substantial fraction of today's coal plants, have reduced CO2 emissions enough to offset some of China's growth ( not that that actually means anything realistic ) and be able to tell Iran, Iraq, and the Saud's to kiss off, at least by 2015 or so. But I doubt the Chinese Communist government would be as willing to help us improve planetary economies and have cheap, clean power as they are to help us be a dying, entitlement failure. the first is good for the planet, the second leaves them in charge...... ( and they are smart enough to know that the Global Warming Scam is fake, and plan accordingly. Suck if it wasn't.... but China also has no problem if a few billion people die. ( leaves more for the rest of them... ) Even a few billion Chinese. After all, They hold the current record for most murdered by their own government. Never, ever forget the sex ratio issue in China. After decades of infanticide with the "one child" policy, there are millions of young men with little hope of getting laid..... unless they leave China, or go conquer someone. | ||
| Glitch |
Sifo, it's not built into our home in GA. We don't own the house here, so there's little we can do, except experiment. The "hunting cabin" on the mountain is completely off grid. Passive starts off with the cabin (14X14) being on the south side of the mountain. Hot water is a very simple solar affair (think big black storage tank that gets hot in the sun),and gravity fed to the cabin. Also, a back up hot-on-demand propane deal works when more hot water is needed. The refrigerator is propane powered for now, looking for a 12 volt one now. Heat is a wood stove. The oven and cook top are propane too right now, looking into alternatives. In the dead of winter if we stay all week, we use around 5 gallons LPG, we just get the small tanks and carry them up with us when we go. All lighting, small appliances, computers etc are all powered by the 12 volt battery bank that gets charged by solar panels on the roof of the cabin. I have to use a pure sine-wave inverter because of the computer and a few other sensitive devises. I've made a wind generator out of an old ceiling fan with added magnets to generate electricity. I found out how from some videos on youtube. It works, but it's here, I haven't taken it to the cabin yet to see just how well. There's a spring and a well on the property, the well has a solar pump, that does fairly well. I'm experimenting with a micro-hydro-generator for the spring. Not sure how that's gonna work out though. There's a lot more to it than I thought when I started, just like everything in life. We can't live on the mountain full time until I can figure out how to link to the grid. There's some stupid housing code that requires being tied in, if it's being lived in full time. I'm trying to figure a way around that or just simply use the minimal allowed. Not really worried about this unless I end up with the land and cabin. It's on family land at least. | ||
| Sifo |
Thanks for the info Glitch. My brother and I have a hunting cabin off line too. I may have to try some experiments there. It's all pretty rustic a the moment. It does have a manual pump for water. Heat via wood stove. Propane stove. Lighting tends to be any camping lantern. I've been thinking about trying some solar heat collectors both for air and water. Water would be more complicated because we would have to add a tank. The house I plan on retiring too would be great to get closer to off grid. It's got a ground loop heating/cooling system which is great, but still needs electricity. Heats the water off that system too. It was off the electric grid most of last week though due to 25 inches of wet snow last weekend. Stuff like that happens. | ||
| Ft_bstrd |
It MUST be that expensive in order to pay off Progressive political operates. (See Solyndra) | ||
| Sifo |
but if there's enough of it everywhere (& I admit the things are bloody eyesores) then the backup will be unnecessary as it's always blowing somewhere. Just another way of saying you need way more generating power than you need. I've read where the actual output from wind farms is in reality just a fraction of what they claimed capacity is. You could have 400% - 500% capacity and still be at risk of not being able to meet demand. Then you get into the issues of noise and the effects of shadows on neighbors. The noise is a very low frequency whoomp, whoomp, whoomp sound. Probably won't bother you until you live with it daily. When you house is in the light shadow you will get a strobe effect from the light coming in the windows. You eyes can never adjust to the ambient light making any sort of detail work or reading impossible. Both of these issues can happen at surprising long range. This problem is only going to get worse as we try to find more and more sites to build wind farms. Then you get into environmental problems that would normally stop other forms of power in it's tracks, such as the number of birds killed off on a daily basis. I also have a friend who works in Elgin, IL rebuilding transmissions for wind mills. Currently the mechanics just aren't up to the task and they are working 6 day weeks and unable to keep up with repairs. Sure this can be fixed with more expensive transmissions or bigger labor force on the repair side. Both drive up the cost significantly though. He says everyone in his shop knows that wind power is a loser in the real world. There's also great amounts of money being poured into the field though, so they just rake in the cash regardless of the feasibility. | ||
| Kenm123t |
Distilling the facts on large wind farms down to a single point. Windfarms = A tax payer funded Blow Job. It blows when it wants too never when you do and it doesnt work over 60% of the time |
