81–90 of 182 posts
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Yes. Land based ones are often on plains or ridges. Steady and unimpeded wind is why aerial and offshore have better EROI.
Do land-based ones compete with agricultural usage?
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For comparison, cats kill between 1.4 billion and 3.7 billion birds a year ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/outdo... )
Right, and wind constitutes less than 5% of total energy production. I'm not anti-wind, but we can't pretend massive growth in wind production will have no impact.
This is nuts. I wonder what the effect of spending $1T on nuclear would be in comparison. I bet it's enough money to get to practical nuclear fusion in a decade, which would largely obviate the need in most other energy generation methods.
Looks like a single fission plant costs around 6 to 9 billion and construction costs tend to go up. There's not a lot of room for iteration and learning from experience; you have to get it right the first time. Compare that with a competitive industry that's manufacturing in bulk and improving every year. Where do the lines cross?
Let's assume that a single fission plant costs $5B (if you're building hundreds of them, you can take advantage of some economies of scale). For $1T, you can build 200 of them. New fission plants have something like 2 GW capacity on average. 2 GW times 200 is 400 GW.
Now, US uses 13 quads of BTU worth of electricity annually.[1]. 13 quads a year is 434 GW of power on average. So, we could basically cover our energy needs with $1T worth of nuclear plants, if you average things out and ignore peaking needs. Most certainly, however, if you add $1T worth of nuclear to our current system, as opposed to adding $1T worth of wind energy, we'll pretty much be able to go off fossil fuels in electricity generation altogether, with already existing water and renewable generation. The resulting system will be much better for environment (less land used for nuclear plants than for equivalent $1T worth of wind turbines), safer (wind turbines are more dangerous per kWh produced than nuclear, people die installing those every year), and more stable (the supply will be extremely steady, and will not depend on weather fluctuations).
how "stupid" would it be to turn all building roofs as solar surfaces and wind tunnels ?
What others said, plus the fact that most municipalities don't allow it. As a rule of thumb, the distance from a turbine to a permanent structure must be larger than the height of the turbine.
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You've got to be incredibly concerned about feral domesticated cats and window collisions, which kill 1,000-10,000 times more birds annually (on the upper end between the two orders of magnitude) between them.
A common argument; Michael Schellenberger addresses it here: https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_why_renewabl... Basically, cats kills sparrows and other small and extremely prolific urban birds. Those birds aren't what wind turbines threaten. Wind turbines threaten larger prey birds like owls, eagles, falcons, etc.
Will wind turbines accelerate climate change? edit: during its exploitation I was involved in design of Wind Farms and they affect wind directions at least locally. Naturally, they change climate locally. The question is how local is not global enough.
Interesting question, seems it's still open but has been found worthy of study. There are probably research groups working on it right now. Review paper (2015): 'Impact of wind-energy generation on climate: A rising spectre' https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403211... 'Potential climatic impacts and reliability of very large-scale windfarms' https://www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16115.short#sec-2 'P…
This is nuts. I wonder what the effect of spending $1T on nuclear would be in comparison. I bet it's enough money to get to practical nuclear fusion in a decade, which would largely obviate the need in most other energy generation methods.
It's going to take a lot more than $1T and a decade for fusion to be cost-competitive with wind and solar.
Look at the new windfarm called "Wikinger" that Germany built near the island of Ruegen: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore-Windpark_Wikinger
Cost: 1.4 billion Euros Lifetime: 20 years Power: 350 MW Max. capacity: 0.4 (40%) Price at the electricity stock exchange Leipzig: 36 Euro/MWh
Thus: 3500.42436520*36 = 883 million Euros
Result: 517 million Euros loss
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Here you go[1]. 12-15 years [1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/energy/windpower/9770...
Trouble is, the "Renewable Energy Foundation" is really an anti-wind farm lobbying group set up by Noel Edmonds. Presumably a NIMBY reaction to some plan for a wind farm near wherever he lives. I'll need some validation of any "study" from them. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2011/may/18/ren...
And that with capacity factors ranging between 10% to maximal 50%.
Modern nuclear power plants (VVER-1200) reach 60 years of lifetime and have a capacity factor of 90%.
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Looks like a single fission plant costs around 6 to 9 billion and construction costs tend to go up. There's not a lot of room for iteration and learning from experience; you have to get it right the first time. Compare that with a competitive industry that's manufacturing in bulk and improving every year. Where do the lines cross?
When you spend $1T on building nuclear plants, you will be manufacturing in bulk and improving every year. Let's assume that a single fission plant costs $5B (if you're building hundreds of them, you can take advantage of some economies of scale). For $1T, you can build 200 of them. New fission plants have something like 2 GW capacity on average. 2 GW times 200 is 400 GW. Now, US uses 13 quads of BTU worth of electri…
On a separate note, I have two questions: why don't wind turbinea have more than one "wheel"? And does anyone know if ground tethered floating turbines (like airships) will be commercially viable?