New study on wind energy

Pretty low maintenance costs.

Bell Labs just put up a PV farm not far from me. These are in a field about 4 feet from the ground. I'm curious about how they are going to cut the grass or keep plants from growing in there.

I thought they might use mulch or a ground cover, but so far it doesn't look like it.

They used to just mow the area with a big ride on mower. Now the panels are in the way. Maybe they can be tilted out of the way.

Anyway, it mostly just sits there and pours electricity into the grid. Pretty cool, especially with this heat, you can imagine all the air conditioners it's running.

depleting them? what are they being transmogrified into?

they are simply being moved around and either aggregated or diluted to some degree.

One word.......plastics. er, no, I mean feathering.

--Vic

I agree we are depleting resources but the mining for materials and fossil fuels is two completely different categories. Mineral resources are not actually being depleted. For the most part all the elements on the planet are still on the planet. Just because we dig up some copper, use it for something, and then bury it in a landfill doesn't reduce the copper. We could dig it back out of that landfill and use it again. Or we could quit burying it in the landfill and start recycling it which is more practical than digging it back up. But who knows, maybe some day our descendants will be setting up mines where we buried stuff.

Fossil fuel is a energy resource. It is the result of plants capturing the energy in sunlight and it being turned into hydrocarbons. Which is the chemical storage of energy. Like a battery. We are converting that stored energy into heat energy for the most part. Energy like matter is never lost but after we're finished, the heat energy contributes to the gradual equilibrium of the energy state in the universe which makes it of no further use to us. The issue is that we're converting that stored energy at a tremediously faster rate than it was stored. Years of our use equals millions of years of capture. So no matter how good we get at finding the hydrocarbons we will eventually use them all up. Will that happen in 50 years or 500 years is debatable but most people would agree the practical number is somewhere between those two. Bottom line we really are using up the energy in fossil fuels.

As to the co2, we are also raising the co2 level. That's a fact. The bydrocarbons were buried in the ground. We're releasing them and breaking them up and combing the freed carbon with oxygen to produce co2. Who knows maybe we will be the start of the next cycle that produces new hydrocarbons for some other lifeform to dig up a couple hundred million yeasr from now. On the short term the consequences might not be so good for us.

As is the debt we are passing down to them. Aren't we wonderful!

So you are going to recombine all those gases emitted by cars into the original oil? Same for a lot of the other resources, one use and it is gone forever. When it comes to moronic, your post qualifies.

Harry K

Mostly true but we never recover 100% of the original elements and never will. The 'pie in the sky' types keep pointing to new discoveries as if those "new discoveries' will continue to be made for infinity.

Harry K

Nope, that is reality and it _will_ kick us in the butt somewhere down the road in the future.

If we don't stop population growth we will be reduced to subsistance level and a _greatly_ reduced world population - nature will see to that.

Harry K

We can recover enough that we don't really have to worry about running out of things like copper and iron.

As do nukes and to some extent coal

Probably the same argument was used on gas burning turbines when they were first being used.

FWIW and I'm not suggesting this is practical in all cases, but when the price comes down I could put a fuel cell in my back yard to generate my electrical needs with less hoopla than I could with even a very efficient ICE/genset

I certainly don't trust engineers with a vested interest in the outcome

Fan blades and boat propellers act more like a a screw or auger. Airplane propellers and wind turbines are airfoils acting like airplane wings. Airfoils are much more efficent.

Jimmie

Uh, there are many things wrong with a government subsidizing anything. I don't have much problem with research grants, but subsidizing production is an outrage. Poor Mexicans are almost starving because the cost of tortillas is almost prohibitive, thanks to our ethanol subsidies!

You said: "... the costs of non-renewable fuels will continue to rise." Er, no. The cost of natural gas has dropped from ~$6.50 per 1000 cu ft in 2007 to about $4.00 today. In 2008, USA bituminous coal sold for a high of $175/ton. Today it is $75/ton.

Oil, and its derivative, gasoline is still pretty high (although it gasoline is cheaper today than it was during the Carther administration), but oil is used primarily for transportation - and chemicals. "Renewables" are not involved in transportation, with the exception of corn which I've already dissed (poor Messicans).

That's what Malthus thought. He was wrong. That's what Ehrlich thought. He, too, was wrong. In fact, EVERYBODY who has EVER predicted that over-population spells our doom has been wrong.

By the principle of inductive reasoning, I suggest that you, too, are wrong.

I trust you'll permit an analogy to illustrate the CO2 in the atmosphere and its increase.

If the atmosphere could be represented by the area of a football field, including the end-zones, the amount of CO2 is roughly equal to the area occupied by a prostate official who died as a result of seven stab wounds inflicted by irate fans after he made four consecutive bad calls against the home team.

The increase in CO2, since 1900, could be represented by the stain left on the astoturf as he slowly bled out without a single person coming to his aid.

(In case you're interested, the remaining seventeen minutes of play took place without a single penalty.)

In other words, CO2 ain't much (one three-hundredths of one percent).

Nothing lasts forever. The Romans denuded all of North Africa and much of Europe and used the wood for charcoal. Just as the trees were about to run out, it became practical to mine and exploit coal. (The industrial revolution was fueled by coal).

While in some places coal is still very economical, oil proved to be more versatile and, in many instances, cheaper.

Heck, the archetype villain, John D. Rockefeller, and his example of monoply, Standard Oil, drove the price of Kerosene down from $3.00/gallon to a nickle. In less than three years. Of course the people who sold "renewable" energy (i.e., whale oil) squealed and were eventually put out of business, but for the rest of us, the night was brightened.

Point is, as with trees and whales, even renewables face the same problems as truffles. There is only so much and only so many pigs to find it.

The "tax-break" bucket is not connected to the "profit" bucket. The tax breaks were legislated to achieve some social goal (e.g., employment) with no regard by the taxing authorities as to the profitability of the recipient.

To the degree that oil companies - or others - take advantage of these "tax breaks," they should be applauded for promoting the social goals envisioned by the legislative bodies.

Maybe we should name a holiday or something in the oil companies' honor.

The cross-sectional area of a plane's propellers are a hindrance (drag) to forward motion. So while a fatter blade can provide more thrust at a lower rpm or with a lower swept area, a fatter blade will present more drag to counter a plane's forward movement. The slower a plane is designed to fly, the slower a plane's engine is designed to operate, the more sense it makes to use a fatter blade, or more blades (3 or 4 vs 2).

A helicopter develops lift because it's blades are really air foils that just like wings develop a low pressure area on their upper surface as they are moved forward (ie - as they are rotated).

When you look at the constraints of a typical house fan (low speed, inefficient motor, small design envelope or package) what you get are wide, fat blades. If wide fat blades are best at being turned by motors of low power to generate a breeze that consumers demand out of a small package size, then I'd have to assume that wide, fat blades would also be most easily and efficiently rotated by a breeze or flow of air passing through them.

If it doesn't take much motor force or motor power to turn wide/fat blades to generate an acceptible air flow, then the converse must also be true - that wide/fat blades are more easily turned by a given breeze vs long/narrow blades.

The energy potential in a wind field is measured in terms of the swept area of the blades.

So how can you capture a respectible fraction of this energy by using thin blades that "see" or experience only a small fraction of this swept area, vs using fatter blades that expose themselves to a greater percentage of this wind field?

Fat and thin. They are all airfoils. Do you think they woudn't use fat blades if they worked better? You think engineers didn't design the blades on wind turbines?

snipped-for-privacy@verizon.net wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@verizon.net:

Nor the noise and dead birds. if in a cold weather place,they may freeze up or the blades may ice over and throw big chunks of ice when they break loose.

solar uses a lot of water,gotta keep the panels clean. then there's inverter maintenance,and if storage batteries used,battery maintenance. Plus,the hazards of battery chemicals and lead,along with fire hazard.

Wind turbines need more maintenance,being rotating machinery.

"POURS" electricity? how big a plant is it? how many MW?

It probably runs THEIR AC and maybe the building lights.