111–120 of 285 posts
Wind 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
As 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 for storage, shouldn't there be plenty of hydroelectric dams that could run "backwards"? Or is there an interconnection issue you mention?
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> 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 This is one reason why I'm skeptical for home production of solar and wind for the ability to "feed back" into the grid while getting a credit on your account. If the power company is also doing this, at scale, I find it really hard to believe that there's…
It's more that batteries are expensive. Especially in places where there is a law saying that the power company has to pay a nice rate for power fed back to the grid.
Though I rarely experience power outages, knowing almost all instances would be non-existent is really nice (for a battery backup program), especially as more and more heating solutions are using electricity as the main component (heat pumps; winter power failures are most of the power failures for me).
I happened to be driving through Indiana this week and saw the biggest wind farm I'd ever seen. It just went on for ages as we drove. I think it is this 600MW farm: http://meadowlakewindfarm.com/
Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that Iowa may have among the highest wind energy capacity per capita on earth, at 2.2 MW per thousand people. Denmark, which is perhaps the highest for a nation, is at half that rate (5,476 MW capacity for 5.7m people).
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If clean energy manages to get cheap enough eventually it will be easier to synthesize simple hydrocarbons out of atmospheric and water than to drill them out of the group and we can end up carbon neutral as a whole. We'll see how cheap midday solar ends up when the price finishes dropping.
The cost of solar stabilizes when the cost is determined by the cost of land, energy storage, electric grid and transfer cost and installation and maintenance. If you get the conversion efficiency to the same level as photosynthesis (30% nominally) the cost of energy could approach the cost of producing biofuels.
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Judging from all of human history.. 'those with wealth' tend to not be the conscientious type. edit: Because, they are insulated from the bad repercussions of their harmful policies. Eg. Trafigura polluting the shit out of Ivory coast and poisoning people there. The CEO doesnt live there, he drinks bottled water and lives somewhere else in a gated compound. Making those destructive choices makes things better for the…
I agree, but I find it hard to beleive that isolation alone is enough to make them so unempathetic. I can only assume it has something to do with the human capacity to lie to one self, otherwise even acknowledging the truth would just be too uncomfortable. Makes me imagine some weird distopian future where all people with power and wealth are forced to take some anti-self-deciet drug to prevent crimes against humanit…
But who would force them?
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High voltage DC. High voltage means it’s more efficient (power dissipation depends on current, not voltage, so for the same power, higher voltage means much less dissipation). DC (direct current instead of alternating) makes it easier to connect disparate grids as you don’t have to worry about phasing.
Also, I recall reading that if you run undersea cables with AC, the sea water sucks out energy from them.
The cables have water barriers so the conductors + insulation remain quite dry.