Re: Tilting At Windmills

From: Eunometic (eunometic_at_yahoo.com.au)
Date: 11/24/04 

Date: 23 Nov 2004 21:03:42 -0800

"Tim O'Flaherty" <pinwheelsfudge@gwi.net> wrote in message news:<tNydnXx-bJEc3j7cRVn-tA@gwi.net>...
> "Eunometic" <eunometic@yahoo.com.au> wrote in message
> news:e935396a.0411222028.71c03e4e@posting.google.com...
> > "wly1017" <wly1017@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:<9MidncXZf7-WuzzcRVn-3A@centurytel.net>...
> > > Tilting At Windmills
> > > Germany is the world's top producer of energy from wind power......
> > >
> > > http://www.wenmarcorp.com/windmills/
> >
> > Germany is almost certainly NOT the biggest producer of windpower per
> > capita.
>
> You are right, Denmark is in first place in that catagory, Germany is second
> but growing rapidly.
>
> >
> > Wind power is bit of a sad joke. Windmills typically produce power at
> > 38% or less of their peak capacity. IE it take a 2.4MW windmill to
> > produce the same power as a 1MW power station.
>
> You are comparing apples and oranges.

No I am not.

>
> 1. For windturbines the fuel is free and though intermitant, widespread and
> abundant. The fuel does not require transport to the generating facility
> nor does it require a separate facility such as a refinery, nuke fuel plant,
> or coal mine and the pollution and environmental degradation, capital cost
> and O&M costs associated with those facilities and the associated fuel
> transportation resources.

Maufaturing cost of conventional power plants are around $0.6/Watt and
includes all major handling and storage facilities.

Windmills coast $1/rated peak watt or about $2.5/average watt plus
some installation costs.

>
> 2. Windturbine do not release significant waste as part of the generating
> process, no CO2, no CO, no SO2, no mercury or other heavy metals, and no
> piles (2k tons/yr US currently) of spent nuclear fuel. They do not require
> scrubbers or smokestacks nor do they require reprocessing plants or Yucca Mt
> style storage for waste.

Yucca Mountains would not be required but for the absence of
reprocessing and/or transmulation burn up of wastes in only slightly
more advanced reactors. Both developments have been curtailed by
political issues rather than serious economic or technical ones.

>
> 3. Windturbines can be (and have been mind you) placed in locations not
> suitable for other uses such as off shore or in the midst of working farms.

Of shore turbines must be massively super sized so that they can be
placed in deep enough water. This increase the amount of material
required with the square of power or rotor disk area and becomes self
limiting.

>
> 4. A windfarm being made up of smaller generating units begins to pay off
> investment faster since individual units can begin generating before the
> entire installation is complete, not so half a fossil fuel or nuclear plant.

These small windfarms are also excedingly noisy and ugly and have
fallen out of favour compared to larger units that can more easily be
isolated in a far away field especially in Europe where ugly
california style windfarms have generally been unacceptable.

>
>
>
>
> > If they ever had to
> > opperate without conventional power and needed energy storage systems
> > the cost of power would quadrouple or more likely increase by a factor
> > of 10 at least. All the wind turbines in the world have never
> > supplanted or replaced one nuclear or fossile power station.
>
> 40+ GW of wind online today and still growing rapidly.

Almost all of which is subsidised unless you count old style windmills
that pump water.

>
> >This is
> > becuase they have to be backed up by power stations that are
> > underutalised.
>
> Windpower below 20% of total power on a grid does not require dedicated
> backup.

Sure wind power doesn't but that effectively works out as wind energy
of 8% becuase the wind doesn't blow all of the time. The factor comes
from the fact that conventional power stations and networks are
oversized by 20% for purposes of power factor correction and network
stabillity anyway.

>
> Who's backing up Davis Besse's missing 900MW? That's the risk of having all
> your eggs, or watts, in one basket. That's a big chunk of power taken
> offline but somehow the system has compensated.

Diversity of power stations supplies it. If there are 20 large power
stations the loss of one is insignificant. Windmills can not
practicably energise an network on their own nor backup a conventional
power station they must be backed up by at least 5 times as much
conventional power generating capacity.

Those conventinal power stations all cost money and interest payments
to build and that is money and interest that can not be paid back when
such power stations do not earn money when wind power stations are
supplying power and forcing them to be idle. They meet their payback
requirements the only way they can: by increasing charges: another
hidden subsidy to the wind turbine industry.

>
>
> >Windmills in the kind of numbers needed are ugly and
> > noisy.
>
> I've stood under a 50kW machine while it was operating, just a faint whoosh
> when near it. Certainly not what I would call noisy. Not like a train or a
> freeway or even one diesel tractor-trailer rig.

You can hear 1MW manchines quite a few hundred meteres away and if you
should be unforuntate the blades will reflect pulsing light into your
bedroom window.

>
>
> Ugly? Like a belching smokestack or an oilfield or a nuke cooling tower?
> You can see one of those big boys for miles around.

There are very few power stations and they are isolated in small
pockets. Windmills to have any serios impact will need to be placed
everywhere and so densely that they will be unavoidable. Many will go
in some of our most pristine and natural environments.

Windmills in anycase do not relace oil fields.

>
> > Even the paltry amount of power provided in Germany has come
> > at considerable aesthetic cost and noise pollution.
> >
> > The wind associations have become however substantial entities and
> > agressive lobbiests and propagandists in their own profiteering
> > interest.
>
> Unlike the nuclear or fossil fuel industries who operate for something other
> than profit, just big public interest groups ;-)

The nuclear industry has few public friends. Left wing groups have
hijacked the environment for political gain while trumpeting
immaginary 'wind power' in the same way they used to trumpet their
immaginary and impossble socialist utopias. They can always blame
the failure of windpower on some capitalist conspiracy rather than
physical and reality. Nuclear power has been quite a quiet success:
supply some 20% or more of the worlds electricity.

>
> >(they have to be as they are dependent on public subsidies)
>
> Every energy source is subsidised to a greater or lesser extent. You want
> to claim that nukes haven't been subsidised? Of course that's crap. I know
> coal has been subsidised by all the fresh water fish here in Maine which are
> loaded with mercury and all but inedible. Windpower is attracting lots of
> private investment, stating that they are dependant upon subsidies without
> considering the subsidies given to the competition is misleading.

Nuclear energy has been subsidiesed mainly as a side effect of its
abillity to power nuclear military vessels and create atomic bombs.
Civilian muclear power is a different matter. Civilian nuclear power
has unavoidably benefited though I would say it has been more of a
curse then an advantage as military technology adopted to civilian
purposes has distorted greatly the direction of the technology.

While nuclear power if developed properly can supply clean, nuclear
waste free energy night and day season in and season out irrespective
of lattitude wind power can not.

Wind power can supply at most 20% and realistically at most 8% of a
nations power without even more serious subsidies. If wind power can
not realistically do more than that why waste time and effort upon it
at all? To feel good?

As far as merucury contamination is concerned:-it is possible to
recapure mercury in flues and to opperate coal washeries in such a way
that heavy metals are not released into the environment. Most of the
problem I blame on the unbelievable immigration driven population
growth seen in the west. The environment can sustain a certain amount
of abuse but as the population is increased the weight of the burdens
means that higher and higher standards are needed.

This growing population incidently is also what makes wind power
ultimetly futile and inadaquete. 50 or 100 years ago the landscape
could have been dotted with windmills in isolated or localised areas
that would have been out of eyeshot of the most pristine of natual
environments and population centers. Now they would have to be
everywhere.

>
> Here's a subsidy for you.....
>
> http://costofwar.com/
>
> There should be another counter there for lives lost. How many wars you
> figure we'll need to secure our supply of wind and sun?

Potentially quite a few wars could be started as people start seeking
wind capacity, ocean rights, wind shadow effect or sunny landscapes
etc to provide the electricity to synthesise hydrogen or whatever.

The recent Iran/Iraq business is about the US Israel first lobby as
much as anything else.

>
> > and look like ongoinly promoting their self interests come hell or
> > high water.
>
> Unlike nuclear and fossil fuel interest eh?
> That's capitalism.

I am merely saying that the wind industy agressively lobby their
product and propagandise in favour of it while prending they are
greener than the rest.

>
> >
> > The Green-Left in Germany are ugly Marxists full of ignorance,sound,
> > fury, malice and pumped up self righteousness.
>
> Unlike you who, so obviously fair and open-minded.

The description of the Green-Left holds. They are not sincere
environmentalists but marxist swine that have hijacked the
environmental movement. I have supported my points with some basic
data. Wind power has not replaced one conventional power station and
it can only at cosiderable cost supply more than 10% of a nations
power.

>
> Regards,
> Tim O

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