Wind turbines, they are not milling anything. One would have hoped that a paper like NYT would something as basic as that right.
They're milling electricity.
Milling electromagnetic fields, and producing electricity.
How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream
21–30 of 285 posts
Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream
#22Wind turbines, they are not milling anything. One would have hoped that a paper like NYT would something as basic as that right.
Windmill is a defacto synonym for wind turbines in most english speaking countries
Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream
#23Does anyone have a datasheet so we can calculate the Energy ROI?
Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream
#24Problem is that these are political markets not market markets. Denmark spent a lot of money on getting their windmill industry up and running and windmills still aren't solving the base problem as they aren't reliable for all sorts of weather. Furthermore, windmilss don't really scale well, Nuclear on the other hand which is both safer and more scalable and greener would change that but right now only the Chinese se…
You know Europe is developing a fusion reactor.
Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream
#25As the production costs with windpower decrease due to the technological progress, the question of grid storage and grid interconnection becomes more pressing. E.g. in Germany, they frequently have days of negative energy prices, where producers need to pay to feed energy into the greed because of overproduction of energy on windy/sunny days [0](in German). Without storage and grid interconnection, there is only so m…
As turbines get larger, not only do the costs go down, but the reliability of supply goes up. It becomes more economical to place them out at sea, where winds are more reliable, and the size allows them to run more effectively off low speed winds. These turbines are claiming 60%+ capacity factor, compared to 20-30% for smaller, onshore turbines.
The UK is already up to about 15% of its electricity from wind right now, these developments will open that up significantly more. Obviously at high levels of penetration there are going to be issues, we'll just have to see how far we can go, but even 25-40% of electricity would be a huge contribution.
Combine that with the new and existing nuclear, another 15%, some biomass and tidal lagoons, with the rest from gas (which produces half as much CO2 as coal) and it will go a long way towards meeting the UK's 80% CO2 reduction target from 1990 to 2050.
Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream
#26Problem is that these are political markets not market markets. Denmark spent a lot of money on getting their windmill industry up and running and windmills still aren't solving the base problem as they aren't reliable for all sorts of weather. Furthermore, windmilss don't really scale well, Nuclear on the other hand which is both safer and more scalable and greener would change that but right now only the Chinese se…
The biggest rollout of these turbines is in the UK, which is in the middle of commissioning and building new nuclear. Also, the latest turbine installations are being built without subsidy. And, the capacity factor has gone way up.
Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream
#27Problem is that these are political markets not market markets. Denmark spent a lot of money on getting their windmill industry up and running and windmills still aren't solving the base problem as they aren't reliable for all sorts of weather. Furthermore, windmilss don't really scale well, Nuclear on the other hand which is both safer and more scalable and greener would change that but right now only the Chinese se…
You know Europe is developing a fusion reactor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Station
Sure but good luck getting a country to install it in this current political climate. The US is even worse of when it comes to getting Nuclear back in vouge.
Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
For a hydroelectric dam to be able to "run backwards", it needs a lower reservoir. Many dams have only an upper reservoir.
Simply turning them off would be running backwards since water would build up behind them.
It’s not about building up capacity alone: you want to take power off the grid at negative energy price times.
Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream
#29I wouldn't call wind turbines exactly clean energy, between the need to have thermic power plant on stand-by to pick up the slack, since wind is highly irregular, the metric cube of concrete poured in the ground in the middle of nowhere to built them, the kilometers of copper to link them back to the network and the batteries to keep the excess electricity. And it's even worse when you see a field of turbines where half of them are not turning.
Re: How Windmills as Wide as Jumbo Jets Are Making Clean Energy Mainstream
#30> Lower costs, though, have also made wind power more appealing elsewhere. Once mostly concentrated in northern Europe, Mr. Nauen is optimistic that new markets will emerge in Asia and the United States. South America too. In just the last 12 months, installed capacity in Brazil went from 10.4 GW to 12.5 GW (source: Boletim Mensal de Geração Eólica - ONS).
What kind of cost per kwh is Brazil seeing? When the US finally got consistently below ~$0.10 in the late 1990s, it began to ramp.
