New study on wind energy

Warning: It's not pretty. Summary of a report based on power usage by about

1/3rd of the nation's consumers (110 million) over three years.

"For years, it's been an article of faith among advocates of renewables that increased use of wind energy can provide a cost-effective method of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The reality: wind energy's carbon dioxide-cutting benefits are vastly overstated. Furthermore, if wind energy does help reduce carbon emissions, those reductions are too expensive to be used on any kind of scale. "

And in conclusion:

"The wind energy business is the electric sector's equivalent of the corn ethanol scam: it's an over-subsidized industry that depends wholly on taxpayer dollars to remain solvent while providing an inferior product to consumers that does little, if anything, to reduce our need for hydrocarbons or cut carbon dioxide emissions. The latest Bentek study should be required reading for policymakers. It's a much-needed reminder of how the pesky facts about wind energy have been obscured by the tsunami of hype about green energy."

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The report overlooks the fact that wind energy is for the children.

Reply to
HeyBub
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Nice, clean windmill sound nice but energy consumed in building them and the need for back-up diesel generators are not considered. They may or may not be putting them offshore here in Delaware and you can imagine the compounding cost of installation and effect of salt water on them, They don't use above ground transmission lines either and cables have to be run under the sea surface.

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Reply to
Frank

do you think that the energy consumed in building any power plant is considered?

It's just a guess, but if we actually did that I would imagine the balance point would shift considerably towards all renewables

Reply to
Malcom "Mal" Reynolds

All power plants have maintenance costs.

Reply to
jamesgangnc

Of course. You have to do complete studies of all of the factors involved.

The green energy projects all depend on subsidies. Lot of them are being sucked into Delaware and I strongly suspect when subsidies dry up, so will the companies. The government is being snookered by them.

There is a new one with direct conversion of natural gas to electricity with fuel cells. Opponents have pointed out that there are gas burning turbines with the same efficiency that put out the same amount of carbon dioxide but cost far less.

Who do you trust more, engineers or politicians?

Reply to
Frank

If that's a "fact" I guess there's no point, but what the hell...

The link provided refers to a "Bentek" report but if there is a link to the report, I must have missed it.

Here's the Bentek web site:

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"We are a recognized leader in natural gas, oil and NGL market fundamental analysis."

On the link provided, there's this odd bit:

The Global Wind Energy Council, one of the industry's main lobby groups, claims that reducing the amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere "is the most important environmental benefit from wind power generation."

I suppose CO2 emissions could be important, but it seems to me, having a power source that doesn't run out seems pretty strategic to me. The rest of the page deals with CO2.

I don't know about you, but I LIKE power sources that don't pollute. I'm willing to pay a little more just for that benefit.

But the real issue is being prepared for the future.

We're hearing all this crazy deficit talk as if we're creating a problem for our children. I think using up resources on the only planet we have is much more important.

Reply to
despen

You're presuming that CO2 is a pollutant.

Were it not for CO2, there wouldn't be any plants. With no plants, there would be no cattle. With no cattle, there'd be no food. We'd starve.

We're NOT using up resources. More precisely, we're using resources but we're accessing more than we're using. Today, there is five times the known reserves of natural gas than there was just five years ago.

Look up the Simon-Ehrlich wager in which a doom-sayer* wagered $10,000 with a more pragmatic scientist over whether the scarcity of ten commodities (picked by Ehrlich) would cost more (and therefore be harder to find) in ten years. Ehrlich lost.

--------

  • Paul R. Ehrlich's works include:

- The Population Bomb

- The Race Bomb

- Politics, Consumption, and the Human Future

- Healing the Planet

- How the Anti-Environmental Rhetoric Threatens Our Future

- The End of Affluence And so on. And on. And on.

Reply to
HeyBub

Me too. While solar and wind may never fully replace oil and coal, they can put a serious dent in our need for either. We seem to have entered a binary world where things are either black or white. No gray allowed. "If taxing the rich like they used to be taxed doesn't *immediately* solve the money crisis, then there's no sense in doing it at all" seems to be the mantra of many who forgot we got in this mess one day at a time and it's going to take time to get out of it.

A similarly nonsensical position is to believe solar, wind, tidal and other sources of power shouldn't be explored because they are not going to replace oil and coal instantly. Even if the Feds have to pony up some seed money, it's better to have the idle machinists in Detroit building *something* useful instead of sitting home doing nothing.

Finally!!! A person who gets it!!! Why is it OK to steal resources from our children's future but not OK to put them into debt? The answer is, of course, that neither thing is good to do. It's just that the national debt situation makes for good political theater. Maybe if we got smart and didn't hand over billions of dollars to a country that gave safe-haven to Osama bin Laden we could save our way back to prosperity.

I don't seem to recall anyone clamoring over how much it cost to start the two wars we have no chance of winning. I don't even recall anyone clearly elucidating what we stood to gain from these wars. What have we gained? So far it seems to me the only thing we have to show for those wars is a large group of horribly wounded soldiers that the CBO estimates might cost ANOTHER trillion dollars to care for duing their (often) miserable lifetimes. I don't know about you, but if I spend two or three trillion on something, I'd like to get at least some value.

Obama and Bush were equally stupid about these wars, thinking they could deny Al-Qaeda "training camps." Someone should have told them it's an awfully big world out there and we don't have enough troops to keep it all terrorist free. We weren't able to stop McVeigh on our own home turf. What does that say about the sanity of thinking we can lock terrorism down worldwide? The terrorists are laughing themselves silly at us because we've spent ourselves into near bankruptcy chasing down ghosts and goat herders. That's just what they wanted - to terrorize us into not thinking clearly - and it just BURNS me that we've allowed them to succeed to the point where we're near broke and openly fighting amongst ourselves.

Both parties have people in them with good ideas but they're getting drowned out and run over by leaders who believe that winning is the ONLY thing. It's more important than getting the country back to prosperity. If there's a SINGLE economist who thinks the plan to default on the US debt is a *good* idea, I haven't come across them. Universally they seem to be saying that going into default has the potential to double our trouble by raising the cost to borrow money and paying the added costs of dealing with the chaos a government shutdown would cause.

Ironic, considering it was two wars, the TSA and a pro-business Medicare drug plan that have helped drive us so deeply into debt. All that happened under someone else's watch. We've reached the uneviable situation where political leaders are saying, in reality, "we would rather see the baby cut in TWO rather than have those devils in the OTHER party get it all!"

-- Bobby G.

Reply to
Robert Green

Hi, Every coin has two sides. Been to Denmark? They have hundreds of wind turbines along their coast line. Denmark is not a country of children, is it?

Reply to
Tony Hwang

I mis-remembered. There were five (picked by Ehrlich). The wager was $1,000 each. Whatever the differential in price after a decade would go to the winner.

chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten

"Between 1980 and 1990, the world's population grew by more than 800 million, the largest increase in one decade in all of history. But by September 1990, without a single exception, the price of each of Ehrlich's selected metals had fallen, and in some cases had dropped significantly. Chromium, which had sold for $3.90 a pound in 1980, was down to $3.70 in

1990. Tin, which was $8.72 a pound in 1980, was down to $3.88 a decade later."

It doesn't. Being harder to find makes them cost more. Price is a convenient metric for scarcity.

Reply to
HeyBub

Limited life span then the cells have to be replaced. Supports, controls, etc all require maintenance.

Nothing wrong with the government subsidizing renewable. Economies of scale will reduce the costs and at the same time the costs of non- renewable fuels will continue to rise. At some point the scale tips and the renewables become cheaper. Until then the government accelerates the growth with subsidies. Just makes the inevitable happen a few years sooner.

Reply to
jamesgangnc

Actually it wouldn't be. Taxing the rich like they used to be would actually make it worse. According to IRS figures, 1980 the top 1% (and you can't get any richer than that) paid 19.05% oF fed income taxes. By

1987 (I toss this in since the tax changes in '86 include some in the definition of Adjusted Gross Income so prior to this is not exactly comparable) it was 24.81% and by 2008 (the last I could find) it was 38.02%. So, in order to tax the rich like we did in the 80s, we would have to cut their taxes in half. >

Not from an economical standpoint. If the only reason something is "successful" is because of the tax impacts, when they go away so will the jobs. Better to get the person in something that is going to last than to put him into make work jobs. The second wave of S&L failures, for instance, were largely related to a change in the tax laws that (retroactively) took away some artificial incentives to build. These were largely built as a tax dodge (which made at least some econ sense until the advantages went away).

Reply to
Kurt Ullman

When you look at an ordinary fan, it has large blades that occupy a significant portion of the cross-sectional swept area.

When you look at a wind turbine, the blades are very thin, occupying a very minimal amount of swept area, allowing much of the wind energy to flow right through or between the blades.

If a fan has fan blades that are designed to *efficiently move air*, then why won't that same basic blade design also be *efficiently moved by air* ?

Reply to
Home Guy

That's not true. Look at a propeller airplane. It's blades move air and they are long and thin.

Reply to
jamesgangnc

You're pulling the typical conservative stunt. Cherry pick statistics to support your point. What about the percenatges of wealth held by the rich. And the increased difference between the wealthy, the middle class, and the poor. You can't take one stat in isolation and use it to prove a point. You have to look at the whole picture. Besides it's not just the rich, what about tax breaks for oil companies that post record profits? What kind of sense does that make. How do you defend that?

Reply to
jamesgangnc

I feel an aerodynamics lesson coming.

Jim

Reply to
Jim Elbrecht

On 7/20/2011 8:03 AM, Home Guy wrote: ...

Size has a lot to do with the design limitations.

Interestingly enough, the efficiency of adding blades is relatively small; a one-blade rotor is nearly as efficient as two and the third is even less of an increase.

While it doesn't go into a lot of technical detail, the wiki article outlines some of the basics of the various competing factors that go into modern generator blade design.

Limiting is more the physical characteristics required for survival and control and related cost and the efficiency obtainable within those restrictions as opposed to only the efficiency (altho modern designs run probably nearly 80% of theoretical Betz limit of kinetic energy extraction which is roughly 60% of input field KE.

I've not read the article for a while to see what, if anything has been added/updated, but had the link bookmarked--

--

Reply to
dpb

The trick is balancing the one blade model. Interestingly the same things apply to boat propellers. It also occurred to me there is another example of powered thin blades, helicopters.

Reply to
jamesgangnc

Seems like we do this over and over again.

-snip-

Lets just say for the sake of argument that the whole enchilada is $100.

That top 1% made 8 1/2% of the money in 1980. Their rate was 34%. [data from

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] The gov't collects $2.89 from those boys/girls.

In 2008 they were making 20% of the money. And their rate was 23%. the gov't collects $4.46.

So the gov't would make out pretty well if they started paying what us peons pay [if we include FICA]

Jim

Reply to
Jim Elbrecht

No.

If you know of a combustion process that produces only CO2 I'd like to know about it. I didn't say CO2, I said pollution.

It's ridiculous to think we can take tungsten, helium, iron, copper, tin, lithium, etc out of the ground and scatter them through landfills without using them up.

Yes, with advances in technology we can dig deeper and extract more. To think that this can go on forever is wishful thinking.

Mining landfills is in our future. It won't be pretty.

Reply to
despen

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