Re: Research: Wind power pricier, emits more CO2 than thought

On Jul 10, 4:14 pm, disgoftunwells <disgoftunwe...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 8 Jul, 08:06, "rlbell.ns...@xxxxxxxxx" <rlbell.ns...@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On Jul 7, 2:44 am, disgoftunwells <disgoftunwe...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Wind Power is still not a mature technology - the largest wind farms
in operation are only several hundred MW of capacity. That puts them
with early PWR designs in terms of maturity.

How do you define mature?

It is not merely a matter of size. A mature technology is where all
of the black art has been codified to the point that you can stick
performance numbers and constraints into a formula and crank out a
design. Wind power has more constraints, so the result is not
particularily desirable, but that does not make it less mature.

More relevant is the production technology. I presume you can model a
wind turbine in a CAD package, but what's equally important is how
cheaply you can build it, erect it and maintain it. That's partly a
matter of numbers - we won't see benefits till wind farms are 200 x
5MW.

Every component of wind power, taken in isolation, is mature. Towers
are mature. Airfoils are mature. Generators are mature. Even power
electronics are mature. I fail to see how you can consider wind power
to be less than a mature technology. They have been building wind
turbines for power production for seventy years, and then some. How
can it not be mature?

Good question. Significant research has been going into wind turbines
since about 1990 - less than 2 decades compared with six decades for
nuclear power.

People started building wind generators at about the same Chadwick
discovered the neutron. It was still very immature, so nothing much
came of it. More experimental units were built by the time it was
known that a sustained fission reaction was possible. It was touted
as the next Big Thing after the first oil shock. According to my
memory, that was in the early to mid 1970's.

The maturity of a technology is independent of both scalability, and
economic viability.

More importantly, when a set of technologies becomes mature, the
performance gains tend to level off. Petrol engined cars haven't
improved that much in the last five years, but watch what happens to
electric cars in the next five years.

Electric cars predate petrol engined cars. Except for range, the
early ones tended to outperform the early petrol engined cars (max
speeds exceeding 100 km/h). The only immature technology is an
inexpensive, light weight, energy-dense storage system. Platinum
catalyst fuel cells were mature when they went to the Moon, but are
rather pricey for an econobox people mover. Thanks to the usefulness
of battery-powered electric forklifts (where a four thousand pound
battery is a desireable feature, not a bug), electric vehicles are
very mature.

Wind energy is in the early stages of development so the economies of
scale haven't yet been exploited and the learning curve is still
steep.

No. Wind produced electricity is in the early stages of
exploitation. The early stages of developement happened seven, or
eight decades ago. The early stages of non-electrical wind power go
back a few millenia.

And not all the technologies are mature. The aerofoils are pretty new
stuff. Carbon fibre is being used extensively in airframes for the
first time and turbine blades are longer, and more stressed, then
aircraft wings.

Airfoils are pretty new? Explain that to Bernoulli, Lillienthal, and
the Wright brothers. Not to mention thousands of years of kite
flyers. Turbine blades are stressed differently than wings, but the
design of both benefit from the maturity of aerodynamics and
structural engineering.

You seem to want wind turbines to be immature, so that there still
exist great leaps forward in performance, but wishing does not make it
so.
.

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