THE Wind Power Thread pt 1 (merged) Archived

[PenultimateManStanding]

I hated them

Dang, even the weather gets folks steamed up. I'd try Baseball but frankly, I don't give a rat's ass about the Phillies or the Dodgers beyond a vague desire to see the Dodgers lose.

[RedStateGreen]

The weather is beautiful here today, PMS.

[PenultimateManStanding]

The weather is beautiful here today, PMS.

This is a nice time of year pretty much everywhere. Early Autumn, how delightful.

[RedStateGreen]

The weather is beautiful here today, PMS.

This is a nice time of year pretty much everywhere. Early Autumn, how delightful.

Fall is my favorite time of the year.

[katkinkate]

It's spring here in Australia and the jacarandas are in full bloom.

[PenultimateManStanding]

It's spring here in Australia and the jacarandas are in full bloom.

We could take a poll, what's better, Spring or Fall?

[mercurygirl]

Autumn in America. It may be a long time until Spring.

[PenultimateManStanding]

I hope my attempt to give Kate some attention wasn't too transparent. She's down there in the forgotten hemisphere and who cares what Aussies think? Sure they had a band that sang "From the land down under" and that Crocodile guy with the big knife. Just kidding Kate, love ya.

[Pops]

I'm from 300 or so miles north of PMS but those winds off the desert are pretty nice.

Out here in MO we had a enough rain this last week to make the leaves of the hardwood trees turn color instead of just die and fall, a little more coming in the next coupe of days so we might get some really pretty views.

I also like fall, I guess I'm like a squirrel - it gets me out.


Strangely enough, coming storms are somewhat exhilarating ...

[Narz]

Nice weather today in New Jersey. Sunny, mid-60's I think. I'm up here visiting my kid & her mother.

I discovered some cantaloupe seeds I threw outside the backdoor of our apartment actually sprouted & one actually produced an edible c antelope. Pretty inspiring. I really want to be able to grow a full scale garden next year. I want my kid to grow up on a farm. It will be easier to explain the world to her. The world I live in now (mainstream society) doesn't make much sense. Farming makes sense, provides lessons & morals, is beautiful.

[eastbay]

It was a wonderful mostly clear 60 degrees today. I spent part of the afternoon trimming the roses at our little temple.

Then went to the gym. Spotted some guy performing a lifetime max on the bench. 31 years old and he was hopping up and down celebrating ... and I was the only one who knew why he was jumping. It was really neat.

[Narz]

Nice.

[PenultimateManStanding]

Nice, Ebay. I went to the church fall festival today. A kid who was a laughing stock for his bowel problems when he was younger was on stage rocking and singing like a pro. Made me glad to see and hear it. I haven't seen him in years. I gave him a high five. My kids, I'm not proud to say, mocked him back then. I said he looked like a young Elvis. Maybe they told him, because he was definitely there today, front and center, strong and playing that guitar fine and singing like Morrison. They did an acoustic number and my son played the violin, that was nice too.

[frankthetank]

Good news for us up here in the north. North Dakota has a ton of wind energy potential.

Nov. 1--More wind power is on the way for Xcel Energy in Minnesota and North Dakota, the Minneapolis-based utility says.

Xcel and Enxco, a division of EDG Energies Nouvelles Co., a French renewable energy developer, on Friday said they plan to develop 351 megawatts of wind power in the two states by the end of 2011, which would power about 110,000 homes.

Xcel and Enxco will seek to develop a 201-megawatt wind farm in Nobles County in southwest Minnesota and a 150-megawatt project in Dickey and McIntosh counties in southeastern North Dakota. The wind farms are expected to be operational by the end of 2010 and 2011 respectively, pending regulatory approval.

Once developed by Enxco, ownership of the projects will transfer to Xcel. The agreement with Enxco represents an investment of about $900 million over three years.

Xcel is developing a 100-megawatt wind farm with Enxco called the Grand Meadow Wind Project near Austin, Minn. It is expected to begin production by the end of the year.

U.S. wind energy development has been spurred by a federal production tax credit that has been renewed only through 2009. Xcel decided to go ahead with the two projects now and lobby Congress to renew the tax credit for several years instead of year-by-year, said Judy Poferl, the utility's regional vice president.

Minnesota utilities have a goal of generating 25 percent of their energy from renewable sources like wind by 2025, and Xcel, the country's top wind energy producer,

has been told to derive 30 percent of its energy by 2020. The utility has a ways to go. Renewable energy makes up 15 percent of its output now.

[bratticus]

I know, I know: "you just got a bad batch".

India's Suzlon Energy Encounters Headwinds at Home

CHENNAI, India -- Suzlon Energy Ltd., the world's fifth-largest wind- turbine maker by sales, is facing complaints in its home market of India over technical problems with turbines, only months after blades it sold to U.S. buyers began cracking.

Some of Suzlon Energy's largest Indian customers say their turbines fail to generate anywhere near the amount of electricity expected, suffer from excessive vibrations during high winds and have control problems costing them millions of dollars in lost power revenue.

Landmark court ruling given - WHAT DO YOU THINK?

... A landmark court ruling has ordered that Jane Davis be given a discount on her council tax because her £170,000 home has been rendered worthless by a wind turbine 1,000 yards away. ...

... In June this year a 16-foot wind turbine blade smashed through a farmhouse roof in Northern Ireland as the farmer and his family slept inside.

Also in June another smashed into the ground near the M1 in the Sheffield area. Luckily no-one was hurt in these two events, the latest of many all over the world. ...

[cephalotus]

it took Danish and German manufacturers 20 years to learn how to build large wind turbines in the MW class after the first experiments with "GROWIAN" in 1983.
http://www.ifb.uni-stuttgart.de/~doerner/eGROWIAN.html

Of course these systems also fail from time to time



That's all kind of failures, of course, not just heavy averages.




I assume that the experience generated in those years has not been worthless.

Building a 2 MW wind generator after studying what others have done seems to be manageable, building one that will last for 20 years is a different story.

[mrobert]

A bit off-topic, but last summer I drove past a huge Vestas truck transporting a large wind turbine. I got a change to look at it closely.

Those things aren't cheap electronics that can be copied in some crappy factory in Asia. There is a lot of engineering involved to make those things the right way.

[Tanada]

As one of the people on this forum who advocates building 20% grid power from Wind Turbines when I see a new article on the subject I read it. I stumbled upon a reference to the new 7.5 MWe turbine which was ordered by Queen Elizabeth II last year to encourage development of this new largest yet size WT for offshore windpower off the coast of Great Britain. While researching it I came across THIS article from a composite manufacturing trade publication. I had never given much thought to it but the fact is large WT blades are manufactured from Composit Plastics, they have to be because wood and metal, the traditional materials, are too heavy for the size blades we are talking about. Acroding to the article, which is pretty long but I found it interesting to read,

When we total the mass of the 43,777 wind turbine blades made during 2007, using the above guidelines, wind turbine manufacturers produced approximately 441 million lb or slightly more than 200,000 metric tonnes of finished blade structures last year — making wind turbine blade manufacturing one of the largest single applications of engineered composites in the world. Incredibly, 2007’s staggering volume is almost 38 percent higher than 2006 and almost double the 2005 figure.

The total breaks down, approximately, as follows:

• Glass fiber – 221 million lb (100,240 metric tonnes)
• Carbon fiber – 4.6 million lb (2,090 metric tonnes)
• Thermoset resins (primarily epoxy and vinyl ester) – 182 million lb (82,550 metric tonnes)
• Core (balsa and foam) – 18 million lb (8,160 metric tonnes)
• Metal (fittings and bolts) – 15 million lb (6,800 metric tonnes)

Discounting the Metal and Glass fiber portions of the composit blades you still get a lot of Petrochemical based Carbon fiber, Resins and foams, abut 93,000 metric tons in 2007. (latests figures availible)
2008 was larger than 2007 even with the decline late in the year for new orders, everythign that was going to be built in 2008 was already ordered long before September last year.
While these numbers are literally a drop in the barrell of overall petroleum consumption it goes to show that using Petroleum as a primary fuel is far less effective as a method of getting energy out of it. The new 7.5 MWe turbines are being marketed as 1 Mbbl/y equivelent, IOW one of these newest mega turbines produces energy equal to one million barrells of petroleum every year of operation. If that claim turns out to be true then 365*85=31,025 of them would produce as much energy as the daily oil consumption currently experienced on planet Earth. Spread over the whole Earth, or even along the coastlines of the major industrial countries that really isn't very much territory.

If I screwed up my math somewhere please point it out. Even if we decide Wind is only good for peaking electric power it should be a simple case of just building the darn things, on a per unit basis they are not excessively expensive and by building a lot of them you get economies of scale and assembly line cost reduction.

[ROCKMAN]

Tanada,

I didn't check your math but let's assume it's correct. From a very simplistic point of view: why not use wind to generate 100% of our non-transportaion energy requirements? The technology is proven so it's just a matter of building them.

But there's the rub. I don't get into the debates over the economics of wind farms. Many more smart folks around here to handle that. I make a simplistic assumtion: if the economic value were there (under current cost basis) they would be building them as fast as possible. But, in general, we're not.

Thus, assuming the economics don't support mass wind farm development, it's not a solution today. But even though it goes against my libertarian nature, this is an area where gov't intervention with mandates/subsidies could make the difference. But that's a huge issue beyond WT technology. IMO we'll experience continued energy price spikes during which times WT will look like a godsend. But then prices will drop as will interest in WT. This is where the gov't could, if designed properly, develop a method to overcome the risk of long term WT investments. But, as with so many other possible remedies, will they?

[spiritof1976]

But there's the rub. I don't get into the debates over the economics of wind farms. Many more smart folks around here to handle that. I make a simplistic assumtion: if the economic value were there (under current cost basis) they would be building them as fast as possible. But, in general, we're not.

Global wind power capacity has been increasing by 30% a year of late, effectively doubling capacity every 2 to 3 years. I don't know if that constitutes "as fast as possible", but it sounds pretty damn fast to me.

Admittedly wind capacity is projected to only grow by 15% in 2009, but that's because of the credit crunch rather than any technological obstacles.

Here's an interesting report from the Energy Watch Group:

http://www.energywatchgroup.org/Wind-Po ... 38d.0.html

Key points, for those who don't have time to read the whole thing:

- Every time the IEA has made a projection of estimated growth of wind power, that projection has subsequently turned out to be a massive underestimate.

- The IEA currently predicts that the increase in wind power capacity will slow down dramatically after 2015, but gives no reason why that should be the case (I'm guessing the IEA have Nostradamus-like psychic abilities to see what will happen in 6 years. Otherwise one might conclude that they're simply hopelessly biased in favour of the fossil fuel industry, and I'm sure they're not that.)

- Wind power continues to benefit from ongoing improvements in efficiency and economy

- If current growth rates simply continue as they are, fossil fuel-based power generation could feasibly be phased out by as soon as 2037.