Re: Tilting At Windmills

From: Alex Terrell (alexterrell_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 11/27/04 

Date: 27 Nov 2004 06:27:13 -0800

"Tim O'Flaherty" <pinwheelsfudge@gwi.net> wrote in message news:<N-GdnVg0hokn9DrcRVn-uQ@gwi.net>...

> > Maufaturing cost of conventional power plants are around $0.6/Watt and
> > includes all major handling and storage facilities.
>
> Only in your dreams. First you need to define "conventional power plants".
> Do they burn conventions? How many conventions per kWh? I can't find
> anything specific about "conventional power plants" but I did get some data
> for new nukes ( you don't even want to mention old nuke capital costs so we
> won't go there unless you insist) .

I think he was referring to fossil fuel plants, and this seems about
right. Thanks for all the useful references. If I may sum up

TYPE CAPITAL COST FUEL COSTS OTHER CON
Renewable Very high Free May need standby generation
Nuclear High Low Waster - proliferation
problems
Coal Medium Medium CO2
Gas Low High Insufficient supply

> > Windmills coast $1/rated peak watt or about $2.5/average watt plus
> > some installation costs.
> >
>
> Average watts? What the hell is an "average watt"? That's misleading. If
> you want to stress relative capacity factors the proper place for it is in
> output as kWh. If you want to cite $/kWh then you need to incude all the
> costs including O&M, subsidies, financing costs (a function of lead time
> which is higher for bigger plants), fuel costs and waste disposal and
> environmental costs including a carbon tax and charge for using the
> atmosphere as a dumping ground. Like I said, apples and oranges.
>
Wind turbines have a rated wattage, but offshore turbines would on
average produce 40% of this.

snip

> > 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.
> >
>
> Nonsense. If you have big turbine you of course need a bigger foundation
> and tower, so what? You improve the economics of wind by going to larger
> machines not the opposite. They aren't "massively super sized so that they
> can be placed in deep enough water." They aren't located in deep water.
>
That is correct, up to a point. 10 years ago, the biggest turbines
were about 1 MW. Now 2MW is standard onshore and 3.5MW offshore, soon
to rise to 5MW offshore. A consequence of increasing size is that they
become more suited to (slightly deeper water (10-25m). This opens up
huge new areas for offshore turbines.

snip
> >
> > 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.
> >
>
> As the technology improves larger machines become available. Denmark
> recently acted to replace many older smaller turbines with larger, more
> modern turbines resulting in increased output at the same sites. The same
> will happen again as turbines become larger and more efficient.

Though the future is offshore - or in really remote locations. I
disagree with the industry consensus that offshore is necessarily more
expensive. That's just used by offshore oil companies to justify
higher installation prices. Given that you can bring several thousand
tons of equipment to you site, and you don't need to build a special
road etc, offshore can be cheaper.

snip rest.

Alex

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