| Author | Message | ||
     Sifo |
From http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240529702047 81804577267114294838328.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
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| Sifo |
The quick view of things...  Or the more detailed article... http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/10/saturday-sil liness-joshs-wind-energy-fact-sheet-global-wind-po wer-to-the-nearest-whole-number/ With all the wind farms built so far (there are some huge ones not far from me) they only produce about 0.32% of the worlds electricity. I honestly would have expected better, even with my skeptical view of wind farms. All we need is about 30,000% more wind mills and we will be in pretty good shape. Of course we still need a way to even out the fluctuations in production. Do I have that figure right? We would need over 30,000% more wind mills than we have now to meet our current energy needs! I know the plan isn't to go all wind, but this kind of points out the magnitude of the real problem we face. | ||
| Chauly |
"Gathering diffuse energy and making it useful takes very large capital investment. ( It costs a lot, up FRONT to do )... ... 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... ...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. " Check out a real-life example of unintended consequences vis-a-vis "encouraging" investment in alt energy in competition with conventional energy: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-29/utilities -giving-away-power-as-wind-sun-flood-european-grid .html | ||
| Blake |
Wind and solar need a huge distribution grid, a global one really. It will happen. When is the question. | ||
| Chauly |
NIMBY! I can hear it now... (Message edited by Chauly on March 12, 2012) | ||
| Sifo |
Chauly, That article adds even more reasons why this is such a fiasco. So the law says they MUST buy from renewable sources when available, but they expect the coal plant to keep the boiler hot for when supply drops for a couple of hours. What happens when the coal fired plant finally says f*** this and shuts down because they can't make a buck? The consumer will get screwed. | ||
| Hootowl |
"What happens when the coal fired plant finally says f*** this and shuts down because they can't make a buck?" Simple. The president can say he made good on his campaign promise to make it too expensive for coal fired plants to operate. Then he'll blame the greedy owners of the coal fired plant for leaving thousands without power. | ||
| Panhead_dan |
I would love to come up with a profitable use for the parts of these wind generators as they become obsolete. Lots of them around here and their projected life span is growing shorter every day. Anybody wanna buy a hunnert foot prop blade? | ||
| Reindog |
Who is John Galt? | ||
| Glitch |
Then he'll blame the greedy owners of the coal fired plant for leaving thousands without power. and laying off workers. Who is John Galt? | ||
| Davegess |
Every form of energy has costs, both the direct easily quantifiable and indirect ones like black lung for coal miners. The wind and solar folks (and I support both) tend to try to ignore the indirect costs they incur and amplify those of the coal and nuclear plants. I think we need a good mix of sources; this will improve our ability to meet our ongoing needs. We also need conservation, more efficient use is simply a good idea. How we encourage this is a difficult political question. I luck some sort of taxing system that enforces a minimum price, cost drops below a certain number and the tax is raised, it goes above tax drops. A stable long term price would make a whole lot of things work better in this market. The ups and downs we see in oil really make it hard to bring a new power plant on line or design a neat fuel efficient car. No sooner do you get it done and the demand goes away because energy is being priced cheaply for some reason. I am also a big fan of nuclear, I think we need to stop building and operating coal plants and move some of that to nuclear; coal is just horrible in many ways. | ||
| Reepicheep |
I agree with most of that Dave. I would even agree with the tax part, except I believe the "losses" associated with that kind of government program are just inevitably too high. It will always be a repeat of social security... for it to work, the money has to go in a "lock box", but come back out of it intact later. The government with a lock box is like a crack addict with a $100 bill. It will always end the same way and there will always be a good excuse. But I'm OK with agreeing to disagree with you on that part of it. I'd love opportunistic solar and maybe wind. Seems silly that my house has this great big roof that is just absorbing heat. I'd love for it to be generating electricity to charge my electric motorcycle. It won't solve the whole problem, but it might get me back and forth to work 5 days a week. Safer nuclear seems like the only real option in front of us. Leaving the Russians out of it for the moment (because, no offense, they were crazy when they designed Chernobyl)... even the disaster like Fukishima shows that we should be able to make a plant with manageable risks. First, given the magnitude of the disaster, with 20,000+ killed, how many were actually killed as a result of the destruction of the nuclear facility? One heart attack during cleanup, some hard to quantify increased chance of cancer among a few isolated populations, and 12 square miles off limits for 30 years. And the context of that was another design that was (no offense) insane. They designed the plant so that they knew it could not withstand something that had happened in the last 150 years. Sorry, that was just crazy. They should have built it somewhere else, or not built it. As bad as all the legacy designs were, they have for the most part worked safely and effectively, and we have learned a LOT. Seems like we could do even better with modern knowledge and techniques and risk modeling strategies. | ||
| Davegess |
But I'm OK with agreeing to disagree with you on that part of it. I actually agree with you, I don't know how we would make it work, the taxes get collected and not spent; seems impossible  But some sort of price floor would really help us all out. If gasoline was $4 a gallon ALL the time we could deal with it. Going up and 25 to 50 percent a short time is just unworkable. | ||
| Buellkowski |
+1 Dave. Don't hate the technology because you hate how it's paid for. Wind does have a place on our grid. Here in WA state, about 5% of our power is coming from wind, and CA is buying much of it, too. Both states have laws on the books requiring a min. amount of alternate energy generation on the grid. WA voters approved this initiative. Voters in many other U.S. states approved similar laws. | ||
| Aesquire |
Chernobyl, as a design, is so old.... it's like building a gas hot air furnace out of pine. You can do it, they make metal foils.... ( the ORIGINAL atomic pile was graphite, for neutron cross section reasons. It never made power, it was just to see if a self sustaining chain reaction could be controlled... or take place at all. I've been to the old squash courts. Back in the day..... now there's just a sculpture. ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1 Safe power is doable. Japan has had a few incidents in the past. In one, the guys on the night shift at the reprocessing plant were using a stainless milk pail to transfer a Uranium solution from one vessel to another... violating the rules on how much you can have in one place. ( and those are not "law" rules, or "safety" rules, those are "glow" rules. ) So they made it glow. ( cherenkov radiation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation ) and boiled some liquid, contaminating the area and dosing the crew. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_acc ident Now let's compare these rare cases of dumb--s with the average years coal mine numbers...... And remember, that clinker pile at the coal plant is probably the most radioactive place in your county........ by a lot. | ||
| F22raptor |
For years, as we traveled up-north on Hwy. 41 in Wisconsin, I had my kids convinced that the wind-farm was actually a bunch of fans! They where there to bring the cold air down from Canada in the winter and blow the warm air from the south in the summer! They sill are completely useless (the wind-farm, not my kids!) | ||
| Kenm123t |
Who Ever approved the GE reactors they sold Japan Should be in Prison The direct loop radioactive steam and turbine deck is criminally dangerous! They really had to hate the Japanese to sell them those reactors. The japanese had to be desparate to buy them | ||
| Nobuell |
Kenm123t You know not of what you speak. | ||
| Just_ziptab |
My buddy on the rail road sez coal train run non stop to power plants.Man,that's a lot of coal that gets torched everyday for electricity............. | ||
| Chauly |
The Cumberland Steam Plant on the KY-TN line run by TVA burns 6 tons of coal per minute, producing 2400 mW of electricity. | ||
| Just_ziptab |
burns 6 tons of coal per minute That's a semi truck load every 4 minutes......DAYUM Need to convert those coal plants to ETHANOL.....so they don't have enuf of it to ruin our gasoline...........  | ||
| Aesquire |
All those coal plants use the fuel to boil water. Better would be a magnetohydrodynamic generator with the boiled water as the secondary power.... Think of it as a hybrid power plant. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MHD_generator ( the disk generator designs look like the Vrill gravity generators from the WW2 German saucers... one of my favorite conspiracy myths, with submarines, flying saucers, secret Antarctic bases.... Hitlers brain in a robot..... ) In essence, if you replace the coal boilers with modular pebble bed nuclear with helium primary coolant...... you then make coal so cheap..... that it makes sense to use the coal for gasoline. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_fuel That does require that we actually build the recycling structure, already mandated by law, which in turn means you have to fire Sen. Harry Reid since he won't let us store waste in his district. ( and, based on the fact that it's a massive expensive government project, Harry is probably right that we shouldn't store waste in Yucca Mt. I'd store it at Ft Hood, ( they got tanks ) or Ft. Irwin. ( they got tanks too ) Perhaps someday we need to establish an atomic priesthood to guard nuclear waste facilities...... just to be sure that in 500 years they are still protected.... but I'm inclined to guard against theft for a while and just arrange things so that you die in the attempt to steal the waste. Better yet, put all the worlds waste into ceramic/concrete tiles and make a prayer center in Afghanistan dedicated to Osama Bin Laden. But I think I'm cross threading with that one....... | ||
| Aesquire |
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/293086/trut h-about-fracking-kevin-d-williamson http://naturalhighs.net/waterfalls/falls/burning.h tm Been there, years ago. Stinky, but cool. Also there are occasional gas explosions in the hills in the Fingerlakes. Not often talked about, or admitted, there is a series of caves that connect some of the lakes underwater, and above. I've cave dived ( never again...spelunkers are crazier than I am, and I've skydived ) into one of them. From time to time a pocket builds up and there is a massive rumble. No one really notices any more. | ||
| Aesquire |
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/293022/colo rado-s-own-green-loan-sinkhole-michelle-malkin | ||
| Cityxslicker |
so they produce 'too much' electricity that it causes hydro rates to drop..... so they shut them down.... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/14/wind-farm s-in-pacific-nor_n_861997.html and now we have to pay them because of the loss of revenue when they were forced to shut down...... http://tdn.com/news/local/bpa-releases-plan-to-rei mburse-wind-energy-producers/article_50852a0c-52b9 -11e1-9b82-0019bb2963f4.html freakin Green Energy Tether Ball | ||
| Hootowl |
Perhaps if the government simply got out of the energy production business and let the market determine what got built and where, we'd all be a lot better off. | ||
| Aesquire |
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/293634/dr-s cience-vs-market-nash-keune | ||
| Cityxslicker |
cruising the youtuble for some random shiate - who doesnt?..... and lo and behold, a back yard wind generator made from hardware store parts, and no government interventions..... multible part series, this will get you there http://youtu.be/vf923InYeH8 ..... funny, no Al Gore, No Van Jones, no bailout.... just damn sensible backyard personal solutions to a personal concern. | ||
| 46champ |
City the expensive part isn't the wind mill it's buying enough batteries to store the juice when the winds not blowing. We've been pumping water out on the prairie for 100 plus years for cattle, but it didn't need to be pumped all the time because we could store the water in a watering trough. The biggest problem with electricity is when it gets made it has to be used. | ||
| Cityxslicker |
of course there is the Gilligans Island solution - everything is powered by ped cycle, or eliptical The prision in Monroe does that, if you want to watch TV - you have to pedal, or stride, or row - the power you generate operates the display .... slow down - and it goes off. might work well with the obseity thing too..... FAT TAX is a comin ! |
