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Google Makani – Wind Energy Kites

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41–50 of 165 posts

Re: Google Makani – Wind Energy Kites

#41

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that wind turbines were effectively unsustainable due to the materials they are made of and their actual lifespan not offsetting the initial financial and environmental costs. Now, I understand that this project is supposed to provide greater versatility and efficiency using cheaper materials, but it seems to me (by no means an expert on the subject) that…

EROEI of wind turbines is about 20:1. That is, you recover 20x the energy that goes into constructing and maintaining the turbines over their lifespan.

The argument that some of the materials used in turbine manufacture presently rely on fossil fuels (e.g., coal used for coking steel) doesn't mean that other options for such processes aren't possible. Though shortages of fuelwood were among the key reasons for switching from fuelwood to coal in the first place in the 1600s-1700s.

Re: Google Makani – Wind Energy Kites

#43

I think this is pretty cool, but several questions spring to mind which I haven't found good answers for. The first is what sort of density can you get out of these? How many per acre/hectare? 1? 3? California has a number of wind installations and some of them are pretty dense [1]. The second is what sort of radar signature does this thing have? Probably not a navigation hazard but should be interesting on the weath…

I would imagine if they were timed properly and coordinated using software they could be extremely dense.

Re: Google Makani – Wind Energy Kites

#44
post #37
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but I'm starting to get sick of every Hacker News discussion talking about this rather than the actual content of the page.

It's always worth complaining about this sort of crap, even if it doesn't have any impact on the ardent followers of web design fashion....

Is it? What does it achieve? I think anyone browsing HN knows the opinion of the average HN user on scrolljacking. If they're still doing it it's because either they don't read HN or they have data that proves it works.

Re: Google Makani – Wind Energy Kites

#45

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that wind turbines were effectively unsustainable due to the materials they are made of and their actual lifespan not offsetting the initial financial and environmental costs. Now, I understand that this project is supposed to provide greater versatility and efficiency using cheaper materials, but it seems to me (by no means an expert on the subject) that…

I've never heard the argument that current wind turbine are unsustainable before. I don't see why that would be so. The base is concrete, the tower is steel, neither of which is exotic. The generator is pretty standard. All of that is industrial tech we invented a century ago, and we know how to maintain it for the long haul. The blades themselves are composite, that may have some longevity issues (you typically need…

Motor assemblies and the hub likely take the brunt of the stress and would require the most maintenance. Servicing them in the long term is a problem in that there simply not enough qualified people to do that job. Figure part electrician, part mechanic, and more, just to be able to work on one. Then throw in that candidates for this work must be very physically fit and mentally agile to be able to do the two hundred foot or more climbs.

So besides the material costs of building and maintaining we may run up against one that isn't fixable as quickly, getting the people to do the work.

Re: Google Makani – Wind Energy Kites

#46
post #13

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that wind turbines were effectively unsustainable due to the materials they are made of and their actual lifespan not offsetting the initial financial and environmental costs. Now, I understand that this project is supposed to provide greater versatility and efficiency using cheaper materials, but it seems to me (by no means an expert on the subject) that…

I'm fairly certain you're wrong about that. A quick googling suggests that a commercial wind turbine produces about 1M kWh/year, more or less. That's a great deal more energy than it would require to manufacture and install. By comparison, it takes about a pound of coal to produce 1 kWh of electricity, more or less. So a single wind turbine produces the equivalent energy of a MILLION pounds of coal every year! How mu…

A MILLION pounds (which really should be said in a "Dr Evil" voice :-)) is 500 tons.

A rail car carries 120 tons of coal.

A typical 2 GWe thermal plant burns a rail car of coal every ~20 minutes (coal has ~30 MJ/kg, and there are ~1000 kg/ton, so 120100030E6 = 3.6E12 J/rail car, and 2 GWe ~ 4 GWth, which over 1000 seconds = 4E12 J)

So by your figures, a windmill's yearly output is equivalent to a little over an hour's operation of a typical coal-fired plant.

EDIT: 1 kWhr = 3.6 MJ, so a pound of coal produces closer to 10 kWhr than 1 (~20 kWhr thermal => 10 kWhr electric after efficiency correction), but the argument still stands. 9000 changed to 900 below.

Windmills are great, and tech like this that increases load factor, lowers costs and extends their reach into more marginal areas is good, but it'll take almost 900 windmills to replace one coal plant, plus oodles of energy storage for when the wind isn't blowing.

One coal plant, on the other hand, can be replaced by one nuclear plant, or a dozen-odd small nuclear plants of modern, modular, passively-safe design.

People who believe anthropogenic climate change has a very significant chance of ending civilization should be pushing as hard as they possibly can in favour of nuclear power for this reason. If we had invested heavily in nuclear in the 70's and 80's we wouldn't be in this mess now.

Nuclear is not without its costs, of course, but all industrial-scale power sources have costs, and no one is seriously proposing we end industrial civilization, so we need to decide which tradeoffs are acceptable. Solar capacity and wind both have roles to play, but it is very hard to escape a role for nuclear in replacing base-load coal.

Re: Google Makani – Wind Energy Kites

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for your reply. I used to live in Scotland where there are a lot of wind turbines and I remember controversy in the news about the fact that while the expected lifespan of a wind turbine should be around 20 years, the actual lifespan ended up being in the region of 12 years, and the long-term maintenance costs ended up being higher than expected. There was also controversy about the environmental damage don…

Well if you are talking about damage done to forests & noise pollution, then you are trying to capture the externalities of power production into its "true cost". I'm all for that, but if you decide to do that you also have to use the same methodology for coal, oil, nuclear, etc. Sorry birds, but I feel like the cost of every bird killed by a wind turbine pales in comparison to what a few mountain top removal coal mi…

FYI: bird deaths via wind turbines are trivial.

Collisions with wind turbines account for about one-tenth of one percent of all "unnatural" bird deaths in the United States each year.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science...

Re: Google Makani – Wind Energy Kites

#49

Good, could people just stop messing with how scrolling works.

I agree, the scrolling experience made me exit that page quicker than I should have. This is also a good time to remind folks of Mike Bostock's excellent writeup on scrolling: http://bost.ocks.org/mike/scroll/

Re: Google Makani – Wind Energy Kites

#50

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that wind turbines were effectively unsustainable due to the materials they are made of and their actual lifespan not offsetting the initial financial and environmental costs. Now, I understand that this project is supposed to provide greater versatility and efficiency using cheaper materials, but it seems to me (by no means an expert on the subject) that…

For the USA, the energy returned on energy invested for wind mostly beats oil and is more than twice a good as current photovoltaics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_inves...

I followed the sources there and cherry picked one actual study (in the sense that I didn't even try to look at more than 1).

The wikipedia citation cites this meta analysis for the number:

http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/GG/FACULTY/ITO/GG410/Wind/Kubisz...

I then only looked at the first study from there that I found, linked here:

https://www.google.com/search?q=energy+performance+and+life+...

They estimated the lifetime of the farm they studied, and estimated the maintenance and decommissioning costs. Those estimates are probably going to be reasonable, but they are estimates.

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