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The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

washingtonpost.com

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Re: The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

#241

Post by cheeko1234 »

_ph_ wrote: post #95
kumarski wrote: post #63

Vaclav Smil has written extensively on the embodied chemistry of Wind-turbines, I figure it's worth sharing here because it seems relevant to the conversation. Chemical, petroleum, and nuclear engineers are scarce in Silicon Valley..... "Wind turbines are the most visible symbols of the quest for renewable electricity generation. And yet, although they exploit the wind, which is as free and as green as energy can be,…

What a long row of impressive numbers. But what counts, is only one single number: how long does it take for the wind turbine to produce more power than it took to produce. And as far as I know, it is a rather small amount of its life time. After that it starts to improve our carbon balance. And all of this does not take into respect, that with the raising ratio of our energy being produced by wind or solar, the prod…

Yup. A lot of good answers on this quora page:

https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-the-carbon-released-fr...

"US researchers have carried out an environmental lifecycle assessment of 2-megawatt wind turbines mooted for a large wind farm in the US Pacific Northwest. Writing in the International Journal of Sustainable Manufacturing, they conclude that in terms of cumulative energy payback, or the time to produce the amount of energy required of production and installation, a wind turbine with a working life of 20 years will offer a net benefit within five to eight months of being brought online."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/06/140616093317.h...

Re: The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

#242

Post by tgjsrkghruksd »

CydeWeys wrote: post #227
_ph_ wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a long row of impressive numbers. But what counts, is only one single number: how long does it take for the wind turbine to produce more power than it took to produce. And as far as I know, it is a rather small amount of its life time. After that it starts to improve our carbon balance. And all of this does not take into respect, that with the raising ratio of our energy being produced by wind or solar, the prod…

Exactly. This litany of numbers without meaningful comparison is just an attempt at obfuscation. Of course wind turbines require resources to construct; no one ever claimed otherwise. But they create a lot more energy over their lifetime than they cost to create, which is the whole reason they're built at all. And as impressive as those figures sound, they pale in comparison to how much fossil fuels are being burnt s…

Actually, the little point that undermines this litany is buried right in the middle: "Undoubtedly, a well-sited and well-built wind turbine would generate as much energy as it embodies in less than a year."

So, do turbines last more than a year? Much more than a year? Ok then!

Re: The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

#243

Post by mikestew »

Normal_gaussian wrote: post #56
noonespecial wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think wind turbines are absolutely beautiful They are. Like living sculptures. There's just something extremely dignified about them. Like finally growing up after the childishness of strip-mining. The adults are here.

I couldn't disagree more. They popped up as I was growing up - littering the coastline and countryside. They can be seen from great distances and serve to make the place seem an awful lot smaller. I for one can't wait until we develop a way to live without them - the only condolence is that they move us away from the coal and gas industries. I do hope that solar leaves them in its wake and we can be done with the mon…

They popped up as I was growing up - littering the coastline and countryside.

I guess you've never seen them blow the top off a West Virginia mountain to get the coal out. Windmills can be replaced by solar, but that mountain isn't coming back. (Caveat: don't know if that's still done or not, but it was done plenty in the past.) If feel ya on the aesthetics (though I personally like them), but if you're complaining about windmills "littering the coastline", then maybe blowing the tops off mountains doesn't happen in your backyard. Instead you got windmills. Consider it your aesthetic tax for having reliable, inexpensive electricity.

Re: The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

#244

Post by philipkglass »

lkbm wrote: post #240
altcognito wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact it wouldn't be surprising if much of the savings is actually due to efficiencies in transportation

This thread got me curious, and while I didn't find a lot of sources talking about it, this one[0] gives some likely possibilities: urbanization means less transport energy costs and less domestic manufacturing means less industrial energy usage. It doesn't talk much about why residential energy usage has dropped. I'm guessing it's people moving from their giant houses into smaller homes or apartments following the r…

I believe it's mostly efficiency measures. Americans are collectively driving more now than in 2007:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M12MTVUSM227NFWA

Note that petroleum consumption by transportation is nonetheless lower now than circa 2005 (eyeballing the graph):

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=30652

Coal-to-gas switching in electrical generation (and increased renewables generation, to a smaller extent) also reduces the primary energy consumption for a given level of generation. You might need 3 megajoules of primary (thermal) energy to produce 1 megajoule of electricity using coal-fired generation. It's more like 2 megajoules of primary energy using gas-fired generation in a modern combined cycle plant. And it's just 1 megajoule of primary energy to deliver 1 megajoule of electricity with wind power or PV (they're not heat engines; the electricity is the whole of the energy). Someone can consume exactly the same amount of electricity now as in 2007 but the changing generation mix would still reduce the primary energy input required to generate that electricity.

Re: The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

#245

Post by kumarski »

_ph_ wrote: post #95
kumarski wrote: post #63

Vaclav Smil has written extensively on the embodied chemistry of Wind-turbines, I figure it's worth sharing here because it seems relevant to the conversation. Chemical, petroleum, and nuclear engineers are scarce in Silicon Valley..... "Wind turbines are the most visible symbols of the quest for renewable electricity generation. And yet, although they exploit the wind, which is as free and as green as energy can be,…

What a long row of impressive numbers. But what counts, is only one single number: how long does it take for the wind turbine to produce more power than it took to produce. And as far as I know, it is a rather small amount of its life time. After that it starts to improve our carbon balance. And all of this does not take into respect, that with the raising ratio of our energy being produced by wind or solar, the prod…

He takes into account what you're saying.

"Undoubtedly, a well-sited and well-built wind turbine would generate as much energy as it embodies in less than a year. However, all of it will be in the form of intermittent electricity—while its production, installation, and maintenance remain critically dependent on specific fossil energies."

As an Indian engineer, I'm waiting for westerners to pony up and let us have Nuclear energy instead of toying around with Solar and Wind hype for the developing world. It just doesn't cut it and uranium and nuclear blocking IP keep us in the stone ages, so does western hype around solar/wind.

We needed Uranium yesterday.

300M Indians went to sleep last night without electricity and we have a similar number of farmers b/c wind and solar don't provide us with escape velocity baseload to build out nitrogen and steel feedstock electricity.

Ahemm.... I feel somewhat extremely alone in Silicon Valley and hackernews in my views on this.

Not sure if anyone else in here grew up around farmer suicides and high infant mortality, but it'd make you feel a little bit of angst toward all the solar/wind hype as your lithosphere crumbles.....to lignite 50% ash coal burning through your soil chemistry and ravaging your air to make up the difference of energy shortages.

Re: The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

#246

Post by stevenwoo »

jMyles wrote: post #6

I live in a school bus, traveling the country. I think wind turbines are absolutely beautiful; I always marvel at them when we drive by. Does anybody here know how to break into this industry, working on a mobile, on-site basis? Maybe with embedded tech?

Unrelated to wind turbines, but related to living on the road - do you have no permanent address? What were the most difficult adaptions to make from living in a static location to living a vehicle like that?

Re: The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

#247

Post by froindt »

tormeh wrote: post #239
maxerickson wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The towers are just lots and lots of steel. A lot of them are made in facilities that were built to make railcars (including big tank cars).

Sure, the towers may not be that advanced, though I bet they're optimized extensively for cost. It is the blades that I'm thinking of. They have to be light and strong, which aren't particularly new requirements, but I bet the scale adds challenges of its own relative to aircraft wings. Also, I hear wear on the gearboxes for these things are a major pain, so I bet they are pretty advanced as well.

I'm an industrial engineer who deals with manufacturing. There's a ton that goes into the blades. Going higher up yields more energy, but the width of the blades are at the limit for transportation under highway bridges. With every rotation, the blade flexes know force at the bottom, high at the top. The materials are really advancing and the efficiency is improving.

Cost is the killer of so many renewable energy sources. There is tons of optimization going on for cost.

Re: The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

#248

Post by amalcon »

nawitus wrote: post #120
toomuchtodo wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wind and solar are competitive with coal and natural gas without subsidies.

Regardless, there are subsidies for wind power, which may even be the cause for the "wind boom": https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/12/21/subsidies-drive-us...

Since there are also subsidies for fossil fuels, renewable subsidies are necessary just to bring the market back in line.

Re: The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

#249

Post by rsynnott »

tinco wrote: post #17

The article does not respond to the claim of the president that windmills kill birds. Do they really in a significant way? Is it worthy of being called an environmental disaster?

I assume because Trump was just making up nonsense, as per normal.

> About 599 million birds are killed annually in the U.S. when they fly into windows, trailing only loss of habitat and cats as the top causes of bird deaths, according to the National Audubon Society. Wind turbines account for about 234,000.

Re: The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

#250

Post by mappu »

adsfqwop wrote: post #206
Bjartr wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised you can be out of shadow distance of a turbine and still hear it. If you're inside the shadow distance, you have bigger problems.

Just in Holland and Germany alone there are over 1000 separate citizen groups trying to get compensation for those suffering from the noise. You could start to suspect that the problems seem to be more serious than just something inside the shadow distance. Just out of curiosity here's the noise profile (spectrogram) of a turbine at 1,37 km (0.85 miles), measured inside a home, where we can see the base frequency and…

The charts extend only up to ~5Hz and the intensity already decreased a lot. Human hearing range commonly doesn't start until 20Hz. Do you have charts including higher frequencies?
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