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

On Jul 11, 2:54 pm, "rlbell.ns...@xxxxxxxxx" <rlbell.ns...@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Jul 11, 11:00 am, disgoftunwells <disgoftunwe...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:





On 11 Jul, 17:48, "rlbell.ns...@xxxxxxxxx" <rlbell.ns...@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

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.

I would suggest its closely linked - more so than the age of the
technology.

Economic viability and technological maturity are disjoint.
Reciprocating steam engines, as a technology, are as mature as it
gets, yet they stopped being used, as fast as they could be replaced
by diesels, gasoline engines, and/or steam turbines.  Aircraft diesels
are at least as mature as turboprops (and even more efficient), but
the savings in fuel are not worth the extra weight and mechanical
complexity, so they are unviable.







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.

Electric cars are not mature at all. GM is spending 100s of millions
trying to figure the best way of configuring one.

GM is spending the money to configure an affordable people mover that
will die in the marketplace, when compared to internal combustion
powered conventional people movers.  The only immature component is
the storage.

But, that's also why the people who actually know how internal
combustion engines work,
long ago specified to all the idiot car makers, to make
bumpers,rather than making cars.
And let the people with shoes, A.I., lasers, digital computers,
fiber optics, robots,
magnets, and satellites make the cars.






Yes - apart from the batteries, most of the needed technologies are
reasonably mature but no one* has yet integrated them into an
effective electric car - but expect several to arrive in 2010.

You know nothing about electric forklifts.  While they are unconcerned
about weight, they do care about minimising battery cycles, so they
have efficient drives and regenerative braking as a matter of course.
They even have whiplash inducing acceleration when fully loaded (half
the trouble faced by novice drivers).  You can even thrash them for
eight hours on a single battery charge.



*Except Tesla, but at huge cost, because of the immaturity of the
technologies.

Only the battery, everything else is 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.

The early stages of development happened 70-80 years ago and are still
going on.>

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.

THE Airfoils are pretty new. By that I mean 80m long carbon fibre
airfoils.

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.

Of course - don't you?

I see no point chasing dreams when we have solutions, like nuclear
power, that are both mature and economically viable-- right now.  If
they only gains for wind power are reduced costs from economies of
scale (more of bigger units), the potential for wind improvements are
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