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THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Discussions of conventional and alternative energy production technologies.

Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Tanada » Mon 13 Nov 2017, 08:49:00

vtsnowedin wrote:Why would you use oil if it has a lower heat capacity then water? The whole point is to store as many BTUs as possible and then use them when needed. For a house using wood heat such a system lets the owner leave for a few days without the fossil fuel backup turning on and lets him decide when during each day he loads the wood fire. The systems work for both baseboard hot water heaters or the modern in/under floor radiant heat tubes and can use tap water or non toxic anti freeze solution interchangeably.
I won't name company names but there is at least one international company that supplies these as complete systems. If they thought their customers would be better served with oil in the storage tank I'm sure they would offer it.


Clearly we are talking at cross purposes. Buffering tanks are one thing, heating tanks are a separate thing and this conversation has become a tangle with some talking about one, others talking about the opposite and a few conflating the two as being the same thing.
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby GHung » Mon 13 Nov 2017, 09:59:14

Tanada wrote:
vtsnowedin wrote:Why would you use oil if it has a lower heat capacity then water? The whole point is to store as many BTUs as possible and then use them when needed. For a house using wood heat such a system lets the owner leave for a few days without the fossil fuel backup turning on and lets him decide when during each day he loads the wood fire. The systems work for both baseboard hot water heaters or the modern in/under floor radiant heat tubes and can use tap water or non toxic anti freeze solution interchangeably.
I won't name company names but there is at least one international company that supplies these as complete systems. If they thought their customers would be better served with oil in the storage tank I'm sure they would offer it.


Clearly we are talking at cross purposes. Buffering tanks are one thing, heating tanks are a separate thing and this conversation has become a tangle with some talking about one, others talking about the opposite and a few conflating the two as being the same thing.


Both store surplus energy production as heat to be used for some purpose when that surplus production isn't available. Seems like a distinction without much difference.

As for water having a higher heat storage capacity, for my uses (and it seems I'm the only person here with experience in this), low and slow is fine for domestic heating purposes.

My tank is plastic guaranteed by the manufacturer to safely store hot liquid up to 165 F. It is in an insulated enclosure in my utility room which has two floor drains in case of failure of the tank. The tank also has 4 layers of 1" foam board wrapped around it, secured by steel straps which will help prevent catastrophic failure. Temps at the top of the tank rarely get above 160. Any hotter than that and a simple temp switch turns on the radiant floor pump to dump heat into the floor of the house. Bringing the temp above 140 prevents the formation pf Legionella. In the summer, without the woodstove burning, the temp cycles from around 120-145. On a great solar day in winter, with the woodstove burning, temps can get up to max at which point the radiant floor kicks in and heats the floor in non-passive-solar spaces (bathrooms, etc.) We keep the floor in the master bath quite warm; very nice in winter.

All of these functions are performed by inexpensive controllers and pumps which only use a few watts. I found this DIY approach preferable to commercially available high temp stainless tanks with complex control systems, built-in heat exchangers,, all that. It was also cheaper because I collected the various parts from off-the-shelf sources. The heat exchanger for our domestic hot water is 3/4" copper coil pipe hung in the top of the tank and can easily be removed for replacement. The solar hot water system is closed loop and heats the tank through a similar coil of copper placed in the bottom of the tank. Radiant floor heat draws hot water directly from the tank which returns to the bottom after passing through the floor zone being heated. This cooler water at the bottom creates a greater temperature difference for the solar water heater system. All of the temperature sensors are standard 10K sensors, about $8 each. The tank looks like this.......

Image

..... Which stores water for the greenhouse now. This may seem a bit complex to you non-engineers, but is really a case of KISS; a grouping if simple systems I used to sacrifice a bit of efficiency for more resiliency and ease of repair. I expect the tank to last decades. All of the components are inexpensive and easy to replace. After 17 years in service, I've had no failures, and have changed out the water/anti-corrosive solution once as recommended by the manufacturer. No glycol in this solution because the tank water is never exposed to freezing or boiling temps.
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Newfie » Mon 13 Nov 2017, 20:00:46

Woo Hoo! :-D

I found a set of blades!!!!

There MAY be a new source of supply opening in France. But my emails bounced.

Close one that was. I just hope the blades are correct.
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby GHung » Mon 13 Nov 2017, 20:05:37

Newfie wrote:Woo Hoo! :-D

I found a set of blades!!!!

There MAY be a new source of supply opening in France. But my emails bounced.

Close one that was. I just hope the blades are correct.


Kudos! Do they have two sets?
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Newfie » Sun 27 Oct 2019, 18:51:06

8.2% savings. Not clear if that is net or gross or what the conversion cost.

https://gcaptain.com/norsepower-confirm ... l-savings/
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Subjectivist » Thu 09 Jul 2020, 22:40:51

Farmers say MidAmerican reneging on promise to pay for wind turbine construction damage

About two-dozen farmers and landowners in western Iowa say MidAmerican Energy is failing to fully pay them for damage caused when building an 81-turbine wind farm in Ida County.

It's another point of tension in the relationship between rural residents and the Des Moines company, which has made Iowa a national leader in wind generation, building about 3,000 turbines across the state.

The group filed a complaint with the utility, owned by billionaire Warren Buffett, saying the company has failed to keep its promise to pay farmers and landowners four times the crop damage they experienced when MidAmerican built its 202-megawatt wind farm.

"After a contract was signed, MidAmerican decided, no, that's too much, and unilaterally cut it," said Colin McCullough, a Sac City attorney who's representing the farmers and landowners in negotiations.

Utilities pay farmland owners annually to lease the acreage the wind turbines sit on, but they also pay for damage such as soil compaction caused when a wind farm is constructed.

Construction crews build temporary roads and paths across fields that are used to move massive cranes, trucks and other equipment needed to construct the wind turbines. The work compacts the soil and makes it difficult to grow corn, soybeans and other crops, potentially cutting future revenue.

MidAmerican's Geoff Greenwood said settlement offers sent to the Ida County landowners included a miscalculation "far exceeding payments required under the easement agreements."

"Soon after learning of the error, we sent follow-up letters correcting our mistake and issuing revised settlement offers," Greenwood wrote the Register.

MidAmerican will pay four times the crop damage, the company said, if significant soil compaction is demonstrated. That hasn't happened yet, although the utility has asked the farmers' attorney to provide more information.

► MORE: Iowa's betting big on wind energy, but it's creating a problem: What happens to the blades once they're no longer useful?

Farmer Dan Kluver said the settlement letter MidAmerican initially sent to landowners represented the contract that landowners had signed and was not an error.

MidAmerican proposes paying him, his parents and uncle $25,000 instead of the $200,000 promised in their initial contract with the utility, said Kluver, who agreed to host two turbines on his family's farmland.

The increased compaction will hurt crop yields for several years, he said. "We depend on that crop every year, and with prices the way they are, we need everything we can get," Kluver said.

MidAmerican says it restores soil fertility after construction, returning topsoil that might have been removed and deep-tilling fields. "We value our relationships with our participating landowners and commit to reimbursing them for any and all actual crop losses," Greenwood said.

MidAmerican has reached new agreements with about half the landowners, Greenwood said, and is working with the remaining property owners "to find a solution and meet the commitments we made with them in our easement agreements."

McCullough and Kluver said the landowners who signed the new agreements didn't read their original contracts.

► MORE: Is wind power saving rural Iowa or wrecking it?

Farmer Richard Younglove said he agreed to let MidAmerican build a turbine on his farm. His land wasn't chosen, but he found out later that the company had cut down a large portion of his corn crop — a 100-foot-wide swath a half mile long — to build a path across his land.

MidAmerican says it had permission to build the path under its initial agreement with Younglove. He disagrees, and said MidAmerican wouldn't initially acknowledge that it caused damage.

"I said, 'You're the only ones out there doing work,' and finally they admitted it," Younglove said. "I asked how they would compensate me, and they said they would only pay me for one year's corn, instead of four."

Younglove said MidAmerican denied he experienced significant soil compaction. But he and other farmers in the area have worked with an Iowa State University expert to assess the damage.

"Compaction is a real factor," Kluver said, and "it can really cut your yields."

"It's like trying to get your crop roots through bricks," he said. "There will be significant yield damage. It could take four or five years of remediation to get this damage resolved."

McCullough said he believes that MidAmerican will want to resolve its dispute with western Iowa farmers. The utility has invested nearly $12 billion in wind energy. Iowa ranks third nationally for wind generation and gets the highest percentage of its power from the renewable energy source than any other state.

MidAmerican wants to generate enough renewable energy annually to equal 100% of the power consumed by homes and businesses in Iowa. MidAmerican said in May it had reached 61.3% of its goal.

MidAmerican said it's helping farmers, paying rural landowners $30.9 million in lease payments last year.

As wind turbines have proliferated, some rural Iowa residents have raised concerns about noise, the flickering effect of the spinning blades and other issues.

Madison County, where MidAmerican has an installation, last fall placed a temporary moratorium on new wind energy development, and Adair County, home of another MidAmerican site, capped the number of turbines it would allow, effectively stopping new construction.

The American Wind Energy Association reported in April that wind had become the largest single source of electricity in Iowa. It is second only to Texas in its wind energy generation capacity.

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Farmers say MidAmerican reneging on promise to pay for wind turbine construction damage

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/farme ... r-BB16rLQ4
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Tanada » Wed 15 Jun 2022, 22:30:55

Long detailed report from Australian Broadcast Corporation with pictures and many more details at link below quote.
The wind farms angering renewable energy fans

On the day the Mount Emerald wind farm was officially declared open, Steve Nowakowski felt a heady optimism.

It was winter 2019, the sky was clear and a slight breeze ruffled Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s hair as she spruiked Queensland’s clean, green energy future.

Steve, a renowned wilderness photographer and veteran environmental campaigner, listened in fierce agreement.

“We know we need a very quick transition to renewables and this was a part of a solution,” he says.

Steve had photographed the gigantic blades as they wound their way up the Palmerston range to a high elevation plateau, less than 100km south-west of Cairns.

His images were so striking, he had been commissioned by the energy company building the wind farm to photograph the completed project.

So after the opening ceremony, he walked to the top of Mt Emerald to get aerial shots of the site.

Steve had bushwalked through Mt Emerald’s native scrub years earlier and knew the landscape well.

Back then, it was an untouched wilderness of scraggly trees, open grasslands and rocky ridges.

Now, as he looked down, he was shocked at what he saw.

Broad roads carved snaking pathways through the scrub, connecting large circular clearings at the base of over 50 towering wind turbines.

“I thought, ‘Geez, there’s a lot of destruction here. They’ve transformed what was a really great, pristine area … into a really industrial area’.”

For a time, Steve ignored those misgivings.

The Mt Emerald Wind Farm would power 80,000 homes with renewable energy, and he was proud of that.

“I thought, well, Mt Emerald, that’s the price we had to pay. That landscape will never come back. It’s now basically a quarry site.

“But, you know, we’re punching above our weight in terms of renewable energy in North Queensland.”

He had no idea at the time that Mt Emerald would become just one of many wind and solar projects proposed, or already under construction, in this part of Queensland, some on significant tracts of unspoilt wilderness.

“It’s really out of control,” Steve says. “And no one knows about it.”

While environmental campaigners like Steve Nowakowski remain committed to renewable energy, a Background Briefing investigation has found growing community backlash over the locations chosen for projects in North Queensland.

Local conservation groups and peak climate bodies are sounding the alarm over plans to build green energy projects in forests that predate white settlement, along corridors bordering World Heritage Areas, and on properties previously targeted for conservation protection, rather than on cleared and degraded land.

If all current proposals were to be approved, an estimated 13,332 hectares of remnant vegetation would be cleared statewide. Around 90 per cent of the land clearing will be in North Queensland.

There are currently 48, large-scale renewable energy projects that have been completed, commenced or slated for Queensland, with some of the largest facilities to be built along the electricity transmission networks that traverse the Coral Sea coast.

These transmission lines provide convenient access to the national energy grid but sometimes cut through ecologically valuable land.

“We’ve got this big wall of steel coming through along the transmission line along the western side of the Great Dividing Range, hugging the western side of the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area,” Steve says.

According to James Cook University adjunct professor and evolutionary biologist, Dr Tim Nevard, Far North Queensland is one of Australia’s most biodiverse regions and many of the sites chosen for wind farms are “wholly inappropriate”.

“Biodiversity is the buffer at the end of the tracks that stops the runaway train of climate change from bursting through,” Dr Nevard says.

“Destroying biodiversity in order to have greater amounts of wind energy is a complete oxymoron. It’s ridiculous. So we shouldn’t be doing it.”
‘This is massive’

www.abc.net.au/news/
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Tanada » Tue 26 Jul 2022, 16:23:55

This One ERCOT Chart Explains Why Texas Is Having Electricity Shortages

The chart shows that when power demand in Texas surges (the black line), wind generation (green line) often goes to Cancun with Ted Cruz. Indeed, when power demand zigs, wind production usually zags. That’s what happened during the middle of the day on July 13. As demand in the state was soaring, the output from the 35,391 megawatts of installed wind capacity on the ERCOT grid fell to less than 1,000 megawatts. That’s a capacity factor of less than 3%.
Image

It’s been stupidly hot here in Texas lately and as you’ve likely heard, the state’s power grid is straining to meet record-high electricity demand.

Twice in mid-July, ERCOT, the state’s grid operator, was forced to ask the state’s consumers to reduce their power use. On the afternoon of July 13, the system had less than 3,000 megawatts of spare capacity as demand hit nearly 80,000 megawatts. That’s not nearly enough reserve capacity.

Since February 2021, when the Texas grid nearly collapsed during Winter Storm Uri, scads of reports and opinion pieces have been written to explain why the electric grid in America’s biggest energy-producing state is so shaky. But there’s no need for complex reports or in-depth analysis to understand why Texans don’t have enough juice.

Instead, Texas’ power woes can be understood by looking at a single chart published last week by ERCOT.

Of course, the wind-energy claque will attempt to dismiss the chart above with some hand waving and shoe shuffling that is usually accompanied by excuses that sound something like this: “yes, but we weren’t expecting wind energy to perform.”

Right. That “we didn’t expect wind to perform” excuse is akin to a sports-team owner paying a star athlete tens of millions of dollars per year (think LeBron James or Tom Brady) and yet saying after the star athlete failed to perform during a championship game, that no one expected to make a game-winning play.

The chart shows that wind energy production is out of phase with times of peak demand. That means the ERCOT grid must have enough dispatchable capacity (usually from natural gas-fired power plants) to meet peak demand. That’s a problem. Why? Despite ongoing population growth and increasing demand for electricity, power producers in the state aren’t building more gas, coal, or nuclear plants. And why is that? The short answer is that investors can’t make enough money on those plants.

In fact, the state has been losing thermal generation capacity. You won’t read about this in the state’s big media outlets, or in the New York Times, but the decline in thermal generation is a huge problem. Between 2014 and 2020, about 6,200 megawatts of coal-fired capacity in Texas was retired. Furthermore, as I explained back in February, over the past two decades, despite rising demand, Texas has not added any new gas-fired generation capacity. Investors aren’t building those types of plants in Texas because the state’s electricity market is being distorted by the lavish federal subsidies for solar and wind energy.

Of course, this ERCOT chart (and others like it, which are available here) never gets mentioned by the tenured academics and climate activists who love to promote the myth that renewables are the answer to our energy needs. Instead, renewable boosters have been claiming that renewables are now “bailing out” the Texas grid. While it’s true that the increasing amount of solar energy production in the state is helping meet demand during times of high demand, the reality is that like wind, solar cannot be dispatched. Yes, more battery capacity could help with that problem. But Texas doesn’t have enough battery capacity.

It’s clear that the Texas grid has become too reliant on weather-dependent renewables at the very moment when the state is being hammered (once again) by extreme weather. In a recent interview, Madi Hilly, the executive director of the Campaign for a Green Nuclear Deal, told me that policymakers should have been prepared for this result. “It’s no surprise that wind energy goes missing when demand is high,” she said. “Texas spent $60 billion on wind, but the grid has to be ready at any time for the output of all those wind turbines to go to zero.”

Hilly’s remarks echo the conclusions of a report by the Texas Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers which explained why the ERCOT grid came so close to collapse on February 15, 2021. The report says that “ERCOT’s energy-only market model, influenced by federal and state subsidization of intermittent resources, fails to adequately pay for reliable dispatchable generation and, 2) that these market model deficiencies are the leading contributor to making the ERCOT system less reliable.”

These problems have been known for more than a decade. Eleven years ago, in National Review, I pointed out that during an August heat wave “when the state set new records for electricity demand, the state’s vast herd of turbines proved incapable of producing any serious amount of power.”

Making matters worse: electricity prices in Texas are soaring. As was recently reported by Ben Russell of NBCDFW, the average cost of electricity in deregulated markets in the state has jumped to about 18.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. That’s roughly double the rate from a year ago. Those soaring rates are due, in part, to the state’s over-reliance on gas-fired electricity at the same time that natural gas prices are soaring.

The punchline here is obvious: at the very moment that the Lone Star State desperately needs a resilient electric grid -- one that can deliver reliable and affordable juice during the hottest and coldest days -- consumers and the grid operators at ERCOT have been left to hope that the wind starts blowing.


LINK
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Doly » Wed 27 Jul 2022, 14:44:29

Oil has a lower heat capacity that water, 1.67 J/g vs 4.18 J/g for water. That means you can heat up your oil tank with about one third the energy to heat an equal volume of water. Effectively that means your system is able to respond more rapidly by reaching full temperature and then delivering those Joules of energy directly to the heating pipes you are using.


I'm probably missing something here. Why wouldn't you just use a smaller tank of water and thinner pipes for the same purpose?
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Tanada » Thu 28 Jul 2022, 12:44:30

Doly wrote:
Oil has a lower heat capacity that water, 1.67 J/g vs 4.18 J/g for water. That means you can heat up your oil tank with about one third the energy to heat an equal volume of water. Effectively that means your system is able to respond more rapidly by reaching full temperature and then delivering those Joules of energy directly to the heating pipes you are using.


I'm probably missing something here. Why wouldn't you just use a smaller tank of water and thinner pipes for the same purpose?


It is all about dispatching the heat to where you want it as rapidly as possible. You can in effect eliminate the tank entirely by wrapping your heating coil around the pipe at the start of the circulation system. One of my teachers way back in high school lived in an old farm house with a semi-passive hot water heating system that worked like that. The hot water in the section of the pipe being heated is less dense than that in the rest of the system and by using a vertical section as the hot spot the heated liquid flows upward. This natural flow forces the cold liquid higher up down the return line without the use of a pump. The way it was described to me was the heated section was essentially in the chimney and a small wood or oil fire at the base was enough to create the passive heating and flow of the liquid in the pipe.

Anyhow, if your goal is to distribute heat through conduction of a hot liquid using oil means the fluid will heat up to its max temperature in about 30% of the time it takes for an equal volume of water to heat up. On the other hand the choice of oil as the fluid means it only carries 30% as much energy with it at the same temperature as water, but on the gripping hand oil has a much higher boiling point so you can at least in theory get the same total heat by raising the temperature of the oil much higher.

Another way to think about it, one liter of oil at 100 C carries X quantity of heat while one liter of water at 100 C carries 2.5X quantity of heat, but this is the safe heating limit for water. By switching to oil and increasing the temperature of the oil to 250 C you can transport the same 2.5X of heat and with oil you can even raise the temperature to 300 C by choosing the right kind of oil without risk of boiling the fluid and transfer 3.0 X heat per liter of fluid. Unfortunately using oil also has cons like most oils when at high heat become increasingly flammable, so even a minor leak can result in a serious fire. Also if you heat oil beyond its characteristic safety limit then you can have a "coking" problem where the oil will deposit carbon on the interior surface of the heating section releasing hydrogen gas into the liquid and causing two linked problems. First the coke on the interior pipe wall reduces the heat transfer efficiency causing a feedback loop where the more coke that is deposited the hotter the section has to be to work and the more coke that gets deposited. The linked problem is the released hydrogen will react with the remaining very hot oil changing its chemistry and depending on the result altering its temperature coefficient (heat capacity) and changing its viscosity and other properties in the process. Bonus problem, if enough hydrogen is released quickly enough it will form a pocket at the highest point in the system disrupting fluid flow and potentially seeping out through the pipe wall even if the seals are as good as humanly possible because Hydrogen is a slipper molecule and penetrates most materials under pressure over time.
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Doly » Thu 28 Jul 2022, 14:58:10

Another way to think about it, one liter of oil at 100 C carries X quantity of heat while one liter of water at 100 C carries 2.5X quantity of heat, but this is the safe heating limit for water. By switching to oil and increasing the temperature of the oil to 250 C you can transport the same 2.5X of heat and with oil you can even raise the temperature to 300 C by choosing the right kind of oil without risk of boiling the fluid and transfer 3.0 X heat per liter of fluid.


The difference between 2.5 and 3 isn't that big, is it?
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Tanada » Thu 28 Jul 2022, 15:31:45

Doly wrote:
Another way to think about it, one liter of oil at 100 C carries X quantity of heat while one liter of water at 100 C carries 2.5X quantity of heat, but this is the safe heating limit for water. By switching to oil and increasing the temperature of the oil to 250 C you can transport the same 2.5X of heat and with oil you can even raise the temperature to 300 C by choosing the right kind of oil without risk of boiling the fluid and transfer 3.0 X heat per liter of fluid.


The difference between 2.5 and 3 isn't that big, is it?


That is a question of what you are trying to accomplish with the heat ;) For common purposes like household heating it is a difference that makes no distinction. On the other hand if you are using the heat to flash cook food you are running through your food processing plant then faster is better with potentially higher profit margins.
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Doly » Fri 29 Jul 2022, 12:54:59

On the other hand if you are using the heat to flash cook food you are running through your food processing plant then faster is better with potentially higher profit margins.


If you insist on looking at it that way, my "food processing plant" tells me that most of the world isn't very energy efficient, for any meaning of "energy" that I'm aware of.
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Tanada » Fri 29 Jul 2022, 13:43:01

Doly wrote:
On the other hand if you are using the heat to flash cook food you are running through your food processing plant then faster is better with potentially higher profit margins.


If you insist on looking at it that way, my "food processing plant" tells me that most of the world isn't very energy efficient, for any meaning of "energy" that I'm aware of.


That is a very true statement, most of the world is extremely energy inefficient. We like ICE engines because they send mechanical power to where we want it very quickly, but burning the same fuel in a Cheng cycle power plant would convert over 3 times as much energy into useful work from the same quantity of fuel and the waste heat could also be used for warming a greenhouse or district heating if we really wanted to make the system efficient. However efficiency comes from complexity and extra processing steps and most people want quick and simple.
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby JuanP » Fri 29 Jul 2022, 17:14:41

Doly wrote:
On the other hand if you are using the heat to flash cook food you are running through your food processing plant then faster is better with potentially higher profit margins.


If you insist on looking at it that way, my "food processing plant" tells me that most of the world isn't very energy efficient, for any meaning of "energy" that I'm aware of.


I consider more than 99% of energy used in the world today wasted. All of human civilization is built upon waste, and we have never been most wasteful as a species than we are now.
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby vtsnowedin » Sat 30 Jul 2022, 05:21:27

JuanP wrote:
Doly wrote:
I consider more than 99% of energy used in the world today wasted. All of human civilization is built upon waste, and we have never been most wasteful as a species than we are now.

99%wasted? Hardly. The energy to heat a home in a northern winter .. Wasted? No. The energy used to plant and harvest a crop wasted? No, The energy to transport that crop in it's final form to your store wasted? NO. The energy to turn wheat into flour and then into bread or bagels wasted? NO. ETC.ETC.
Now a ICE car is about 30% efficient with 35% going out the radiator as waste heat and the other 35% going out the tailpipe as hot exhaust gasses. But you can't get the 30% that propels the car without releasing that other 70% so while you can label it wasted energy it really is just the cost of doing what you want to do.
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby Newfie » Mon 13 Feb 2023, 12:55:05

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... wing-pains

I have been reading a out this topic a bit. It seems hard to get any reliable failure data.

Crom working on a goofy mass transit sytem based on ski left technology (yes, there are numerous working examples) I was struck with how much instrumentation was on the motors and support structures. They had numerous strain gauges on the massive frames holding the 200HP electric motors. The strain was constantly monitored and any movemet outside set parameters set off an alarm and stopped the system. They also monitored thr bearing temps and other parameters.

There is a lot of similarity to these wind turbines. One would think the blades would have strain gauges to alert of pending failures and bearing temp gauges to alert of bearing failure. An alarm m should fewther the unit and call for maintenance. And maybe tbey do but they are still failing so something is not right. These kind of failures just should not occur. That they do is a sign of an immature industry being rolled out too quickly. For one thing these failures are just damn expensive to the operator. Many European fields were let on reverse auctions, lowest cost producer wins. Frequently those “winning bids” were significantly below historic operating costs, the explanation was “new technology” and “scale”. These failure rates can easily bankrupt those operators, leaving the governments holding the wind farms.

Chicken Little? Maybe. We shojld have a much better idea in 10 years.
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby theluckycountry » Mon 13 Feb 2023, 14:40:43

Traditionally windmills using the mechanical power generated on-site to grind grain etc were very efficient, but as we know electricity has high losses when transmitted long distances and more losses when converted back to mechanical energy. Plug that into a battery and you have even more losses due to battery inefficiencies. The windmills would have to be very efficient in themselves or very cheap to overcome all this and still provide a decent EROEI.

They are certainly no money tree, I remember a few pilot projects back in the 1980's over in Perth WA. Decent towers, grid connected. They never got traction though and it was only the "Green" actions of governments that lead to their mass uptake in recent years. Government doesn't worry about whether something is practical or not, all they care about is getting a slice of the pie for themselves and looking good to their constituents.

At the end of the day the average end-user can only afford to pay so much for their electricity and even at today's cheap coal and gas fired prices many are struggling to keep the air-conditioners running. Call me a doomsayer but we have plenty of evidence of past broken promises in this arena. Nuclear was supposed to be so cheap they wouldn't meter it so what's to say these alternatives to coal and gas won't turn out to be the same in 10 years?
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby AdamB » Mon 13 Feb 2023, 14:43:13

theluckycountry wrote: The windmills would have to be very efficient in themselves or very cheap to overcome all this and still provide a decent EROEI.


Good thing EROEI is no more important with windmills than it is with oil and gas development then.
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Re: THE Wind Power Thread pt 3 (merged)

Unread postby theluckycountry » Mon 13 Feb 2023, 15:16:37

Thanks for whatever drivel you wrote Adam, it makes a separator between my posts. It looks obsessive when you write back to back posts.

Here is an interesting article on the matter of alternatives.

The Fatal Flaw Of The Renewable Revolution

Many people believe that installing more wind turbines and solar panels and manufacturing more electric vehicles can solve our energy problem, but I don’t agree with them. These devices, plus the batteries, charging stations, transmission lines and many other structures necessary to make them work represent a high level of complexity.

A relatively low level of complexity, such as the complexity embodied in a new hydroelectric dam, can sometimes be used to solve energy problems, but we cannot expect ever-higher levels of complexity to always be achievable.

According to the anthropologist Joseph Tainter, in his well-known book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, there are diminishing returns to added complexity. In other words, the most beneficial innovations tend to be found first. Later innovations tend to be less helpful. Eventually the energy cost of added complexity becomes too high, relative to the benefit provided.

In this post, I will discuss complexity further. I will also present evidence that the world economy may already have hit complexity limits. Furthermore, the popular measure, “Energy Return on Energy Investment” (EROEI) pertains to direct use of energy, rather than energy embodied in added complexity. As a result, EROEI indications tend to suggest that innovations such as wind turbines, solar panels and EVs are more helpful than they really are. Other measures similar to EROEI make a similar mistake.
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/fatal- ... revolution
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