This WSJ article will be of interest to those who follow the travails of disposing nuclear waste:
WASHINGTON—A federal court on Tuesday directed the Obama administration to revive consideration of the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste project in Nevada, breathing new life into a long-running controversy over a final resting place for the country’s roughly 70,000 metric tons of spent commercial nuclear fuel.
Read broadly, this ruling actually has implications beyond Yucca Mountain. This is a case where the judicial branch is telling the executive branch that they don’t get to override cleary stated law enacted and funded by the legislative branch. As such may be a foreshadowing of rulings to come on Barak Obama’s decision to unilaterally change provisions of Obamacare.
Of course it means Yucca Mountain may be back in play. Expect fights to begin in Congress: the branch the US Constitution empowers to enact laws and authorize funding.
Discussion With Owen in comments
If only they would.
It is an interesting development, but one that may not have a lot of immediate effect. Harry Reed is still Harry Reed and will do whatever he can to block waste from actually being stored at Yucca Mountain. The Obama administration will for certain appeal the Court’s decision, which could add years of delay until a final legal determination is made.
.
Like most administrations, the Obama administration will fight any legal constraints on doing whatever President Obama wants; a delay in the decision until after he leaves office is far better for him than an unfavorable decision. Same thing with executive-only modifications to Obamacare and other laws; the administration will fight/delay any legal constraints on those as well. While all administrations fight to maximize their ability to act how they want, I do think that the reach of the Obama administration has been excessive by comparison with most, and many Obama executive decisions have been little more than simple lawlessness. Only three more years to go.
Let’s review.
The Yucca Mountain debacle is a fight between nuclear power stations that have been paying a waste disposal fee to the federal government and a group of people in Nevada that don’t wish to live near a nuclear waster dump.
There is another alternative given the amount of money still sitting in the nuclear waster disposal fund,Integral Fast Reactors that actually burn the waste.
There are some diplomatic hurdles standing in the way of various countries building an IFR that are being ‘worked’.
http://walker-foundation.org/net/org/project.aspx?projectid=100125&p=95882
In the meantime it’s cask storage.
Tough to get past Harry Reid if he really wants to stop it. Supporters of using Yucca Mtn should include a provision that 20 square miles of federal land nearest Las Vegas be donated to Sen. Reid’s family members. It might pass and there are clear precedents for that sort of thing.
Maybe Detroit as a Plan B? Lots of available locations and a residual population apparently resistant to many categories of lethality.
Earle Williams (Comment #118560)
Sometimes gridlock is a feature not a bug. 🙂
SteveF,
On the Yucca Mt.: Yes. This isn’t necessarily a final victory for people who want Yucca Mt. to go ahead. I think the greater significance may be the court reasoning which is slapping the admnistration.
The administration is racking up a lot of losses on issue where they trampling separation of powers.
And in some cases, Obama can’t necessarily get his way by delaying:
http://newsok.com/oklahoma-obamacare-lawsuit-clears-first-hurdle/article/3871754
…
If the courts do not permit the IRS to impose penalties on large employers in OK, then the IRS will not be able to impose penalties. You know other states that did not set up mandates will either join this suit or file their own. And this court says OK has standing. So these are a go.
More detail here:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/350047/obamacare-oklahoma-leads-editors
Beyond this: I suspect once penalties start being imposed on employers in states with no mandates, employers will also have standing.
Oh– I’m not sure you I’m making the connection with Yucca mt. clear:
In both cases, the executive branch is rewriting clear wording of legislation. This isn’t just an issue of making rules under the guidance of an umbrella law (which is how things like the EPS work). This is rewriting what “shall” be done by “what date” and such like.
I’ll second harrywr2. I certainly hope it’s not a ‘final resting place’.
Lucia,
Agreed. It seems to happen surprisingly often these days. Somehow it doesn’t seem to strike some people as all that disturbing, although it certainly bothers the heck out of me. But maybe people are just shell shocked, what with the NSA revelations and all. Maybe they’ve become cynical. Maybe they never really gave a darn in the first place. I don’t know.
Re: Mark Bofill (Aug 14 13:55),
The MSM is in denial regarding our dear leader. In their eyes he can do no wrong because he’s one of the good guys, ends, means, etc. Now when a Republican President tried something far less than this, he got run out of town on a rail.
Re: Mark Bofill (Aug 14 13:55),
It gets better. Thomas Perez, the new Labor Secretary, has threatened California with a cutoff of federal funds if they modify the pension benefits of future employees.
Small wonder that Senate Republicans tried to block the appointment. I wonder if he’s written a similar letter to Kevyn Orr, Detroit’s emergency manager.
~applause!~ Quote of the Day!
DeWitt,
Yes. Have you ever noticed how President Obama’s approval rating absolutely never drops below about 45%, ever?
The guy is Teflon. I’ve often wondered what his magic is. People just refuse to hold him accountable for … anything, really.
Actually let me go out on a dangerous limb and advance a speculation: are enough people so conditioned to fear an accusation of racism that they under no circumstances will view critically any action of the first African American President of this country? Are there enough such people to explain his Teflon magic?
Mark Bofill–
I don’t think people answering phone poll are worried about getting accused of racism for answering a poll.
Lucia,
No, I didn’t mean it quite that literally. I wonder if people don’t steer clear of such explanations in their thinking for this reason. Maybe it becomes a habit of thought to find somebody else to blame. When the phone rings for a poll I don’t for a minute think people say to themselves, ‘oh, I better say the right thing or the poll taker will think I’m a racist’. On the other hand, I don’t find it utterly implausible that people are less willing or more hesitant to criticize the President in general for this reason. I think (at least some people) might be willing to cut him more slack. I mean, affirmative action is not a foreign concept; we have specific rules for dealing with minorities that do not apply to others, and this is politically correct thinking.
Maybe not so much fear of being called a racist, but of somehow being a racist? Having to wonder if it makes one a racist? I don’t know.
I’m not sure I’m right, but I’m not sure I’m wrong either.
Mark Bofill,
I think it’s simpler to assume that even if you disapprove of Obama, many people approve of him. There are people whose views differ from yours.
~sigh~ Yeah, you’re probably right.
Yet another perfectly good crackpot theory shot down. Oh well. One of these days, I’ll be both correct and nefariously conspiratorial in my ideation, just wait! :>
Anyways, back on topic, I think it’s encouraging that the judicial branch occasionally stands up to the executive. I hope it becomes a trend.
Seems to me that most presidents have a “floor” rating which they only go below if they offend their core supporters. Mr. Obama has never done that (for example, Keystone pipeline, no budget compromises on wealth transfer payments), and it seems to me very unlikely that he ever will. Clinton did some things (eg, compromise on welfare with Republicans) which offended his core constituents, and he paid a price in lower poll numbers. George Bush did some (very) stupid things that offended his core supporters, and his poll numbers reflected that. If Mr. Obama ever drops much below 45% public support I will be shocked. He is far too carefully doctrinaire in his politics to ever make a politically inept decision, even one clearly in the interest of the country as a whole. Mr. Obama is the most ideologically ‘pure’ president in my memory.
The Department of Energy submitted its license application for Yucca Mountain to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in June 2008, which contained the scientific justifications DOE had developed over a twenty-year period for demonstrating YM was a safe place to store nuclear waste.
It is well known that the NRC’s draft Safety Analysis Report for Yucca Mountain concluded that the site met the performance requirements by a wide margin. But then in late 2009, NRC chairman Gregory Jaczko, one of Harry Reid’s proteges, administratively kidnapped the draft SAR report and prevented it from going out for final signature and eventual release.
The Nuclear Waste Policy Act contains a provision that if DOE discovers through its scientific studies that Yucca Mountain is not a safe place to store nuclear waste, the Department is to report back to the Congress with a description of the problems that were discovered. The Congress then has to decide what to do next. That’s the way the law is written.
But that is not what was done. Why not? Because the license application would not have been submitted at all in 2008 had there been scientific issues that eliminated the Yucca Mountain site from consideration. So in 2010, the Department of Energy attempted to withdraw the Yucca Mountain license application using a variety of non-scientific arguments which were ridiculous on the face of it, given how tightly the NWPA is written.
Although the DOE didn’t say so in their in their arguments for the license application withdrawal — they said that Yucca Mountain was “unworkable” — the effect of their request was to abrogate the science-driven approach to determining whether or not YM is suitable as a nuclear waste repository and to replace that science-driven process with a politically-driven process which, for all practical purposes, concurs with Nevada’s arguments that Yucca Mountain is not a safe place to store nuclear waste.
The license withdrawal request was eventually denied, but then the opponents of Yucca Mountain among the NRC’s commissioners and inside the NRC’s professional staff basically sent the whole review process into administrative limbo.
In my mind, this is the most important precedent set by what happened with Yucca Mountain: a purely political process was used to successfully hide the most important scientific facts about Yucca Mountain; and the effort to hide those scientific facts was undertaken at the behest of, and with the concurrence of, senior political leaders in the Obama Administration, in the Congress, and in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
This also sounds pretty reasonable. So I’m refuted on both counts; he’s not Teflon, and even assuming he was, it’s not about race.
Good enough 🙂
The long term damage done by the anti-nuke fanatics is substantial. They have prevented a safe, clean and effective form of energy from being properly utilized for something approaching forty years. All by well funded fear and deception.
hunter (Comment #118634)
August 15th, 2013 at 6:57 am
“The long term damage done by the anti-nuke fanatics is substantial. They have prevented a safe, clean and effective form of energy from being properly utilized for something approaching forty years. All by well funded fear and deception.”
Assuming we overcome the NIMBY issue associated with Yucca Mountain, one issue remains: nuclear power plants are prime targets for terrorism and in time of war. One successful hit would contaminate a large area for a long time. If we decide that risk is worth living with, so be it.
Owen,
If you want to bring war into it: In war, the side with no baseload or ready supply of energy will certainly lose. When the Japanese bombed Pear Harbor, the failed to get (a) the aircraft carriers, and (b) the oil reserves. People tend to remember (a), but (b) was very, very important. Without the oil, we very well might have lost in the Pacific.
If a country powers by wind and solar only goes to war, against a country with nuclear energy and oil, the former will almost certainly lose.
We can thank Harry Reid for nuclear waste being stored on site, throughout the length and breadth of the USA, and all the safety and security concerns this entails.
DocMartyn,
Yes. The existing waste storage sites are every bit as likely to be bombed as a functioning nuclear facility if ones goal is to contaminate the water supply. (In fact, likely they are better targets.)
Lucia,
Regarding power production and war, one could argue that decentralized production of power is less vulnerable than large power plants. As wind and photovoltaic eventually are linked to production of hydrogen and/or methane, they will become baseload. Germany’s Energiewende plans to use rapidly-flexible baseload, driven by fast start-up gas powered plants, to level out the less regular, but sizeable, wind and solar contributions.
On 25 May 2012, German solar power produced 22 GW, as much as 20 nuclear power stations, which met 50% of the nation’s midday electricity demand. Germany’s democratization and delocalization of power production will be of immense value to them, especially as the challenges of photovoltaic hydrogen and wind methane production are overcome.
One hour of sunlight on Earth provides enough energy to meet the world’s current energy demand for an entire year. In the end, it will be the cheapest and safest, especially if we get to the point where we start to charge for the environmental and other costs associated with fossil fuels.
Owen,
Wow. There are so many holes in that story that it makes Swiss cheese blush! 😉 The real questions are: What fraction of German power comes from solar cells (not peak, average)? What fraction comes from coal (domestic and foreign generation)? What fraction comes from nuclear (including French reactors)? Getting to the point of charging for the environmental cost of fossil fuels would require some kind of consensus on what the environmental costs really are; that seems a very long way from where we are today.
SteveF,
As of 2012, 22% from renewables, 16% nuclear, 19% hard coal, 25% soft coal, 14% natural gas, 5% oil. Nuclear phase-out is complete in 2022. Goals are 60% renewable by 2050, including 80% of all electricity. 50% reduction in consumption by 2050.
Also—-
As of 2010, 50% of all renewable energy in Germany was produced by individuals, co-ops, small town enterprises, and the like. Big power companies produced less than 15% of the green energy. The democratization of energy production is driving a rapid expansion of green energy in Germany.
Owen,
One could argue that provided enough the decentralized plants produce sufficient energy to permit a comfortable level of capacity and energy independence. If you are bringing up war, there needs to be enough to provide for military needs. Do all these decentralized production facilities provide enough energy to power military action during war?
What fraction of energy used by Germany was imported? Wikipedia states “since Germany imports about two-thirds of its energy.” and ” It is presumed that fossil fuels, wind power, solar power, biofuels, energy imports from France and energy conservation will be enough to replace the existing capacity from nuclear power.”
I don’t know if this is accurate, but if Germany is importing 2/3rds of its energy, I would suggest that the renewables would not be sufficient to wage war.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany
Owen,
Which will be dandy during peace. But you brought up war. It’s tough to run a war on “conservation”.
Lucia writes “Which will be dandy during peace. But you brought up war. It’s tough to run a war on “conservationâ€.”
Hmmmm….thats a good reason for everyone to eliminate their fossil fuel use then.
Battery powered tanks dont seem so bad. And forget depleated uranium, we’re using recycled polystyrene coffee cups to make our “bad baby” bullets.
TTTM:
Nuclear baseload would be good. Nothing wrong with solar. Especially for people who want to supply their own energy to keep their own refrigerators, tv’s washing machines, juice up their own battery operated cars and operate other appliances running during the war. Sort of like everyone had victory gardens to feed families during WWII.
But if solar not providing excess capacity, it’s not going to run the war effort.
Owen,
You changed from solar cells to “renewables”, most of which is biomass (both directly burned cellulosic material and plant oil replacement of diesel), and wind turbines. Solar remains a very small fraction of total German production (and will remain so, since Germany is a bit less sunny than, say, central Australia). There are a couple of things to note here. The diesel replacement program is roughly equivalent to the corn ethanol boondoggle program in the States, with lots of conventional energy used in the production of that “renewable”. Whether allocation of farm land to fuel production is prudent is a legitimate question, and certainly unlikely in places like India and China. In addition, German population is falling, and on current trend, reaching the specified reductions in fossil fuels will be in large part due to a drop in population, combined with improved efficiency (make something very expensive, and people will do their best to minimize its use). Finally, the German social model, with public prohibition of nearly all land development, means few Germans can live very far from where they work, greatly reducing auto use. Following the German example would require major societal changes that are unlikely to be either practical or politically acceptable in many, if not most, countries. When it comes to low CO2 emissions, the most successful Europeans are the French. You might consider why.
Lucia,
Germany currently imports 100% of its uranium, 98% of petroleum, 86% of natural gas, and 72% of hard coal. It supplies all of its soft coal (ugh). This situation of heavy foreign dependence in a critical area has helped to drive the German green energy revolution (as well as CO2 concerns). There is no net import of electricity from France – quite the opposite. Germany is a net exporter of electricity due to its burgeoning green energy production. See: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/9967564/German-energy-surplus-quadruples-despite-renewable-push.html
SteveF,
Yes, photovoltaic produces 5% of total German energy use (the same % as petroleum), but it still supplies, on the average day, 30% of the midday electric peakload, which is nothing to sneeze at.
I also have real concerns about biomass (especially corn) and the use of agricultural land.
Germany is to date the largest producer of photovoltaic electricity – no other country even close. And that in a location and climate that is anything but conducive to solar energy. Imagine what our American southwest could produce!
I am not totally opposed to nuclear, but I am not convinced that it does not have long term disposal and safety issues. I live quite amicably in the shadow of a well-known nuclear plant that did have a problem a number of years ago. Luckily, a contamination of the Chesapeake Bay was averted.
One more reference on the net energy transfer from Germany to France (http://www.renewablesinternational.net/france-net-power-exporter-except-to-germany/150/537/59937/)
In 2012 Germany exported a net 8.7 terrawatt hours/year to France, which constituted 1.5% of France’s power consumption.
Owen
I think you’ll find things are suboptimal:
Peak time are important.
For your other article
Lucia,
The second article provides a possible explanation following the “odd aspect”.:
“According to German grid expert Bruno Burger, ……., Germany is actually a transit country for power that France sells to Switzerland and Italy. In all likelihood, the French are therefore counting actual sales, whereas the Germans are counting power flows irrespective of who ends up buying the electricity.
Owen,
Yes. And later in the article they say indicate lack of confidence in that explanation. There is a discrepancy.
In any case, because Germany was an exporter before starting to close nuclear plants and (I think) some German nuclear plants are still operating, we would need to watch ‘net imports ‘ (or exports) per year over a period. So– how is the current balance compared to before they began to get rid of nuclear. Otherwise, this comparison cannot tell us if:
1) renewables are replacing nuclear, or whether their generating capacity is dropping.
2) whether the renewables would be useful for industrial use– which generally doesn’t want to turn off during peak times and wants cheap energy. (The nuclear from France is cheaper.)
Lucia,
See the following PowerPoint (http://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/downloads-englisch/pdf-files-englisch/news/electricity-production-from-solar-and-wind-in-germany-in-2013.pdf), slide 7, which gives historic German energy net import/export data. After closing 6 nuclear plants in 3/2011, the net exports for 2011 dropped noticeably, but has since recovered in 2012 (a record year for electricity exports) and looks to increase again in 2013.
Owen (Comment #118680)
Germany is to date the largest producer of photovoltaic electricity – no other country even close. And that in a location and climate that is anything but conducive to solar energy. Imagine what our American southwest could produce!
What percentage of German households have air-conditioning? What percentage of households in the US Southwest have Air Conditioning?
Is the efficiency of solar panels sufficient to even power the air conditioning of the houses in the US Southwest with roofs covered in solar panels?
30% of peak load in a country without air conditioning isn’t the same as 30% of the peak load in a country where almost every household has air conditioning.
Peak daytime load in California about 9 months of the year is roughly 30 GW…summer heatwave ‘peak load’ is pretty close to 60 GW. Todays ‘peak load’ will be about 40GW, tomorrows peak load will be about 35 GW.
So when we throw out a statistic like ‘German Solar Voltaics achieved 30% of daytime peak load’ is that everyday…or was it on a nice sunny day when the temp was 70F or was running it the 95F peak load day?
Oh here it is
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany
On midday of Saturday May 26, 2012, solar energy provided over 40% of total electricity consumption in Germany
So on a nice mild sunny May day, on the weekend, when the offices and factories were closed…when no one was running air conditoning…40% of consumption was produced by solar…woohoo….
How much does the average German pay for electricity??? 35 cents/KWh?? That would put the ‘average’ US household electricity bill at something like $350/month.
Sorry..the projected cost for Vogtle #2 and #3 Nuclear plants is 11 cents/KWh.
Owen,
Page 5 is interesting. Looks like if we combine solar/wind, the production decreased relative to 2012. During this period, production by coal and uranium increased:
Click to enlarge.
Re: Owen (Aug 15 19:04),
And if pigs had wings….
Electrolytic production of hydrogen is expensive in both energy and capital. Battery storage would probably be cheaper and we know that is far, far too expensive to be practical. Electrolytic production of methane is a pipe dream.
The idea of the hydrogen economy was based on having nuclear power generated electricity produced so cheaply it wouldn’t even be metered. Hydrogen is produced commercially by reforming natural gas for a reason.
Re: Mark Bofill (Aug 14 14:47),
Gallup Poll released Thursday: 35%.
That’s just on the economy. Overall approval: 44%
Apparently his recent barnstorming tour on the economy sort of backfired.
lucia:
Solar shows up around peak demand so it is good for peak. It is also a relatively mature technology at this point and not likely to change in the near future. (The main expected change is spaced-based power, assuming the US becomes a space-faring nation again in the future.)
A few things about wind, while we’re on alternative energy sources:
Wind is potentially 24 hours, unlike the surface wind, wind speed at the height of the turbines is not tied to the diurnal cycle.
If you know the mean wind speed for the area of interest at the height of the wind mills, it pretty much follows a Raleigh distribution (but you will need to account for seasonal affect on mean wind speed).
If you distributed the wind mills over a large area (so that you extend over several correlation lengths, which I believe are shorter north-to-south), you will approach something close to a steady state wind power.
Unlike solar, wind is an immature technology, and the systems are rapidly evolving. So federal market-level subsidization will and has lead to substantial waste and suboptimal system.
A few other comments on it—
Wind mills kill birds—bird deaths “not ecologically significant”—if people really gave a flip about bird deaths, they’d rail against wild cats and transparent windows which lead to approximately 10,000 times more bird deaths, or habitat destruction associated with economic development. My bet is the same detractors of wind energy will fall of the “pro-development” “what’s a few raptors” side of any community debate on new economic proposals.
Wind mills are ugly—yeah and so is, e.g., coal. Ever seen a strip mining operation? I find steam stacks very ugly personally, and you can see their plumes for many miles. I don’t see that as “more okay”. When I walk along a beach and I see all of that washed up petroleum remnants from off-short drilling, that’s not exactly “rebeautifying” the beach either (doubt it’s particularly good for the ecology either). And of course, annual mortality rate from direct and indirect effects of coal power aren’t something we should ethically ignore either.
Wind mills kill bats—if it were another power source, I’d expect the detractors to be pushing for minimization of the problem rather than [wistful, and zero percent chance it will ever occur, desire for] elimination of windmills (and, by the way, calls for their elimination is actually a form of market interference itself, just to be clear). Not only would that be a more constructive approach, it’s one you might actually get listened to.
Interestingly, if you move away from white paint to paints that don’t attract the insects that the bats eat, that has been demonstrated to lead to a substantial reduction in bat deaths. I’ve noticed the wind mill farms are a bit less jarring with these newer “off-whites”. (I actually think a solitary windmill is very graceful looking, but I’ll admit the farms “take a bit of getting used to.”)
I can understand complaints about federal market-level subsidization, I think it’s a mistake too when dealing with immature technologies. Federal market-level subsidization is always wasteful and politically driven. And it most probably is always going to exist.
One of the most delightfully tin-hat theories I’ve seen is that bird mortality at wind farms is actually very high (based on really screwy notions of how do to statistics) and that workers are secretly going around at night hiding all of the carcasses and apparently hiding them in land fills.
I’d predict driving out to a wind farm, you’ll see more bird deaths on the highway en route to the farm than at the grounds of the farm itself. Based on my experience, I’d expect you’ll to see exactly zero dead birds on the grounds (no doubt this is result of the evil gnomes hired to hide all of the carcasses :roll:). If you are in areas with low bird populations, like the Western US, you’ll have to keep your eyes peeled to see any on the road either.
DeWitt:
That’s a statement of “now”, it ignores the influences of changing markets, sort of like arguments I’ve seen in the past over cost of solar panels (before market-driven prices dropped by more than a factor of four) or solar inverts (before market-driven prices dropped by more than a factor of four).
There aren’t any basic physics reasons I’m aware of why it couldn’t be used for locomotive power, and no physics reason you couldn’t have your own personal converter for your home.
harryw2:
Sounds good “on paper” but I’d rather what I say be factually relevant: Energy consumption still peaks mid-day regardless of whether you’re running A/C or not, even for Germany.
Re: Carrick (Aug 16 08:38),
Not according to the California Energy Commission:
So what’s evolving?
Carrick,
I don’t have anything against solar or wind. I’m just saying that people also need baseload. Nothing Owen is showing goes against that.
Moreover, Owen is making claims about the utility of renewables during war. Obviously any source of power is good during war. But once again: baseload is useful during war.
Our current feline hunter specializes in rabbits. But the orange one I use as an avatar was more into chipmunks and birds. We saw bird carcasses all the time. Of course, he didn’t kill hawks, but still… Yes. I’m not all that concerned about birds. (It is odd that some wind power supporters get upset about cats killing birds but ignore windmills, and then the detractors flip around on this. )
Yes. Nearly all power production facilities are more ugly than beautiful. Same with many manufacturing plants. Moreover, almost no one wants to go to the expense to dress them up and that would end up in the price of the energy or the product. Generally, the ugliness issue is dealt with zoning. All the ugly things are place near each other.
lucia, regarding your figure and Germany
here’s another. Of course this goes to 2010, but my prediction is …world wide continued exponential growth.
The capacity by sector is interesting too.
Carrick,
The problem with Owen’s data point involving 1 day in spring is it’s cherry picking. Here is may in 2013. Of course if we show January, there will be less solar:
Note that overall, solar is providing 10% was conventional is providing, not 40%.
I’m not bringing up this point to say solar can’t grow– it can. Nor do I think solar is bad: It’s good. Nevertheless, Owen wants to paint an overly favorable picture by cherry picking dates.
DeWitt:
I got a good chuckle out of using anything by the state of California as a primary source.
Wind turbine design, still poorly understood what is optimal, rapidly evolving. The height of the wind mills. Older ones were shorter and were at a less optimal height (perfect example of government subsidy driving a bad design).
Their locations. They were installed without any wind modeling. (Large-scale eddy simulations needed to accurately model terrain effects are only now reaching maturity. )
Spacing between wind mills.
Even paint color is evolving.
Practically everything in other words. The market does that, it favors economically more efficient solutions over less efficient ones, so over time the system changes as more information becomes available.
lucia:
Your feline also affects hawk population because it is killing their food source.
I agree you shouldn’t cherry pick data (picking one month is bad because it has a lot of variability in it). I also think it will grow, but would prefer less federal interference with the market (some of probably necessary, under a certain amount is not politically feasible, too many pockets to be lined for that).
Re: Carrick (Aug 16 08:47),
Sure it could be used, but there are multiple problems. Energy density is one. Electrolytic generation produces hydrogen at low pressure. So you’re going to need a compressor and storage tank in addition to the electrolysis apparatus. Methane can be liquified and stored fairly easily, hydrogen, not so much. Then what? Burning it in an internal combustion engine is going to reduce the overall efficiency even more. If you go to a fuel cell, you might just as well use a battery in the first place.
My degree is in electrochemistry. Most of the speculation I see on using electrolytically generated hydrogen and batteries for that matter comes from people who don’t have much experience in the field. This is stuff that has been worked on in the laboratory for decades. A new breakthrough on the order of the invention of the practical lithium ion battery is extremely unlikely.
The problem with fuel cells and electrolytic generation isn’t the hydrogen electrode. It’s the oxygen electrode. Again, it’s been the subject of much research for many years.
Re: Carrick (Aug 16 09:07),
Comparison with the past is irrelevant. The question is how much improvement is likely from the state of the art today. Tower height is limited by materials of construction and cost as is the length of the turbine blades.
DeWitt, don’t underestimate the power of the market. Economic incentive can produce breakthroughs in fields that have stagnated.
The reasons why this happens are complex but my observations are it’s a combination of newer tools, such as better modeling software that doesn’t assume equilibrium physics, and integration of effects that people traditionally weren’t exposed to.
It’s interesting how often the science (or technology) is settled, until it suddenly isn’t. And usually “isn’t” is driven by a new need.
I’m looking at your list of equipment.. compressor and storage tank. Is this really that unwieldy compared to say propane (I’ve a pretty sizable storage tank buried in my yard already)?
DeWitt:
Given that most of your arguments regarding lack of practicability come from comparisons with the past (see your other comment for example), this comes as a bit odd from you. But anyway, the items I listed are areas of active research not comparisons with past.
Also, you did ask if it was a mature technology, and comparing a few years ago to today does demonstrate that it is not. How that’s not relevant in this case is leaving me scratching my head a bit…
Anyway, materials aren’t the limit here: turbine heights can go much higher than they are even being put right now. It’s discussed in terms of costs versus benefit, not in terms of feasibility of construction or material costs by themselves.
You analyze the cost/benefits based on … wait for it… models. Models that are in the process of being validated. That’s hardly “mature” as in “we still don’t know how to properly install a wind turbine” and by properly I mean anywhere close to maximum economic efficiency. Mature markets look very different than that.
In terms of wind blades–that’s a source of continued evolution too. The shape of the wind blade that minimizes stress is one thats’s been considered. It is not economic cost of the construction, but rather lack of knowledge that is hindering optimal design here.
It’s not a mature technology, anybody who sits down and does a little reading can confirm that. The government agencies want to say “it’s mature” because that justifies
lining pocketsmarket-level subsidization.…and guess what? Because it’s a “mature technology” [tm], no need for all of that pesky R&D to improve the design and installation of these wind systems.
“Electrolytic production of hydrogen is expensive in both energy and capital. Battery storage would probably be cheaper and we know that is far, far too expensive to be practical. Electrolytic production of methane is a pipe dream.”
Hydrogen plants use natural gas with a catalyst.
Lucia,
Sorry about the cherry picking – that particular day made the international news, I believe because it was the first time German solar had eclipsed 50% of peak demand. I showed it only to demonstrate that solar could be a geniune player, even at an relatively undeveloped stage (far more solar is on its way).
Regarding baseload, the new German plan is to go from a high level of baseload to what they call flexible backup (largely by building more fast starting/stopping gas power plants. This may take a few years. The flexible backup provides on-the-fly balance to the fluctuating wind and solar outputs. This also obviates the need for large-scale wind/solar storage.
Carrick (Comment #118703)
August 16th, 2013 at 9:32 am
“….don’t underestimate the power of the market. Economic incentive can produce breakthroughs in fields that have stagnated.
…….It’s interesting how often the science (or technology) is settled, until it suddenly isn’t. And usually “isn’t†is driven by a new need.”
——————-
I love your technological optimism 🙂 GE appears to have made breakthrough in wind technology (glad to see American engineers leading the way): http://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/GEs-New-Intelligent-Wind-Turbines-could-Prove-a-Game-Changer.html
Lucia,
Glad to see you are enjoying that PowerPoint on German electrical power. You stated “Note that overall, solar is providing 10%…..” The number I gave was % supplied by solar at peak load (early afternoon). The solar peak and usage peak overlap fairly well.
Owen, the big issue for renewable is energy storage. One I’ve seen that looks promising is power to gas..
Commercial systems already exist that utilize this technology.
In the US, on average, nuclear power plants are off-line four hours every day, so it would seem you need it for more “conventional” power sources too (especially “all of your eggs in one basket” designs like large central power generators).
Re: Carrick (Aug 16 10:28),
Let’s see. According to your link we have a 360kW plant that produces 125 kg H2/day. That’s 249MJ/kg compared to the energy content of compressed H2 of 123 MJ/kg. So you start at 50% efficiency before converting it back to something else. PEM fuel cells are on the order of 50% efficient in practice due to things like ohmic resistance, electrode kinetics and mass transport effects on the cell voltage under load. So overall efficiency is on the order of 25%. Commercial sodium/sulfur batteries are nearly 90% efficient overall. Pumped storage is 70-80% efficient overall. That’s the target that needs to be reached before it’s economically viable.
Since hydrogenating CO2 to methane and carbon monoxide is slightly exothermic, you lose energy again if you do that. I don’t see this competing with shale gas any time soon without heavy government subsidies and/or restrictions on shale gas extraction.
The market is very good at allocating resources if left to itself. But of course, it isn’t. The market for wind turbines is almost entirely dependent on government mandates and subsidies just like corn based ethanol.
Like solar power, there are places where wind turbines plus battery storage make economic sense. But government meddling is causing misallocation of resources and we’ll likely see booms and busts (Solyndra anyone) as a result.
“Lucia, It is odd that some wind power supporters get upset about cats killing birds but ignore windmills, and then the detractors flip around on this”
It is probably how you view the natural world and your place in it. I like cats, and have two. I also like birds, indeed I like all the biotica. I don’t get upset about cats killing things because cats are killers, it is what they are. I don’t get upset when lions or orca’s or pikes kill, it is what predictors do. I don’t like birds getting killed by windmills, gas flares at oil wells or by pesticides.
I can do things about man-made stuff, because I am sentient. If the impacts of energy supply are small and can be mitigated by building wildlife reserves, then on balance, great, power and pullet.
However, if you think you have control over the environment, then you will spend all your life training your cat to become a vegetarian.
DeWitt Payne; in an hydrogen economy there is going to be some leakage of H2 into the atmosphere, where it is going to go up into the stratosphere and bump into Ozone.
Not a terribly good liquid fuel.
Great exchange (Lucia, Owen, Carrick, DeWitt)!
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I think the biggest challange is to not oversell (common) or undersell (less common) the potential contribution of “renewable” energy supplies. Especially important is to keep in mind the market distortions of the many ‘incentives’ which governments have offered…. and sometimes rudely withdrawn (Spain). The reality is that in most places at most times ‘alternative energy’ is, absent government mandates/supports, not financially viable. The future use of alternative energy sources needs to be looked at critically so that mandates and subsidies do not distort the economics too much; otherwise we will all end up looking like Spain in alternative energy.
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Nuclear power is the only alternative to conventional fossil fuels which maintains electricity generation in centralized ‘base load’ generation. As such, it offers the least disruptive (and probably lowest cost) long term alternative to fossil fuels for electric power generation. My personal opinion is that the long term energy needs of humanity will inevitably be dominated by nuclear power for centuries (or even millennia), because it is easily scalable, relatively low in cost, and is based on abundant raw materials. I think that the dangers of radioactive waste materials can be handled easily, especially if fast breeder and thorium reactor technology is used.
DeWitt:
The economics are trickier than that here: Remember that if you don’t store the energy and the energy is in surplus of what’s needed, it’s 0% efficient over that period. You might decide to use batteries or some other storage mechanism, but there are circumstances where these aren’t practicable (it’s my impression that batteries in particular don’t scale to large sized installations).
Yes I agree with you here. As I pointed out, in practice, it’s not just that it makes technologies seem economical that really aren’t, there are also political ramifications of the “the problem is solved so what is the need for research?” variety.
SteveF:
Since we’re in the “sci-fi” section, I expect space travel will end up nuclear powered (it’s a much more efficient energy source for space flight), but I expect that the majority of homes will end up “off the grid” with their own wind/solar energy systems, and there simply won’t the need for so much centrally powered energy.
Expect broad-band coast-to-coast high speed wireless too, so houses won’t have wires. If we finally get our Jetson cars that we were promised, there won’t be a need for roads either, at least for personal transportation. (You won’t be isolated though, the US government will help you with that “too much privacy” thing. ;-))
I agree with SteveF, it’s fun to have a pleasant forward looking conversation once in a while. The bigger problem is certainly market distortion and poor energy policies associated with “over-selling”. That’s where the money is, so that’s where we’re facing the potential and practical risk of substantive economic damage.
I really think that solar & wind will become as widely adopted as they ever would have without the interference of government in the market. The place the government really could have helped is with basic R&D of the sort I discussed above (what’s the best spacing, what’s the best height, east-west sprawl versus north-south, best turbine blade design?) etc. Instead they’ve stifled it in their quest to have a magical moment of “rapid adoption of technology.” California is full of these magical moments.
SteveF–
House aren’t the only users. Energy is manufacturing: Smelting, making concrete, running machinery and so on.
But yes, I think when photo-voltaics are good enough, many people will get a fair amount of their electricity from solar– at least in summer. I’m not so sure about wind but partly because I don’t know. Some of the issue is noise. People don’t like noise near their homes. Not road noise, not manufacturing noise etc. Solar is quiet.
Re: DocMartyn (Aug 16 13:18),
Hydrogen is even less persistent in the atmosphere than methane because it’s so easily oxidized. The effect on ozone and the stratosphere would probably be undetectable. It might, however, increase the lifetime of methane by competing for hydroxyl radicals. Leaks from high pressure storage wouldn’t be a problem for the atmosphere because hydrogen heats during free expansion so much that such leaks almost always self ignite.
Re: Carrick (Aug 16 15:50),
I can see it now. Every home with a guyed 100 foot tower in the back yard with a 10-20kW wind turbine on top, a roof covered with solar panels and a back yard shed full of batteries. Oh, and a 20kW generator that runs on methane or propane for backup when everything else fails. /sarc
They’ll only be off the grid if they don’t mind giving up central heat and air.
Lucia:
Agreed, but that’s why I said “so much centrally powered energy”.
Think about it this way: Most of the grid is there to provide power to homes, and there are alternatives besides central power for large industrial complexes (many of them already have their own power plants already).
You can make wind turbines (home size power usage) that are almost silent.
DeWitt:
Or they could just use passive solar heating and passive cooling, and a more efficient house design.
Not sure where you got the hare-brained notion you’d need a 100-foot tower for home energy applications. Jose Cuervo?
Excellent article here on recent German energy production with actual numbers: http://tinyurl.com/k5kvrmb. It is in German but the graphs are easy to figure out. Upshot: without storage, the vaunted ‘Energiewende’ is a massive destruction of investment capital.
Lucia,
“there simply won’t the need for so much centrally powered energy.”
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Here you are quoting Carrick, not me.
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I think that non-centrally generated energy is most likely to be a) wildly inefficient, and b) too costly compared to the grid. Sure, it would be nice (in a nose-thumbing sense) to be able to declare yourself ‘independent’ of grid power (I do this on my boat when anchored out for several days at a time). But for most people and most businesses, this is a fantasy. The efficiencies of specialization and economies of scale are not going to suddenly become obsolete because solar cells are available. Look for grid power to dominate for the foreseeable future.
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You are correct of course about industrial users, but I would add: big industrial users often have the option to substitute locally generated electrical power for grid power… and I have witnessed some contentious negotiations between large industrial users and their local grid suppliers when there are announced rate increases; big energy users can demand lower rates, with a (very real) threat to go to co-generation. My experience is that the local utility usually caves on rates with very big users; it is the normal free market in action.
Carrick
In the 70s the U of Ill showed that you could drastically cut the energy needs of a house simply by the orientation and allocation of windows. Mostly south facing for heat in the winter and minimal west to avoid heating in the summer
Look up the Illinois Low-Cal Home
Carrick,
“Not sure where you got the hare-brained notion you’d need a 100-foot tower for home energy applications. Jose Cuervo?
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Humm…. DeWitt is no fool. Maybe better to ask what he means.
Carrick,
As we have discussed a couple of times before, the big issue for off-grid electricity is the need for power storage. As best I can figure, state-of-the-art storage batteries, with useful lifetimes of 1500 charge/discharge cycles (if limited to 50-60% of name-plate capacity per cycle), cost about US$300 per KWH effective capacity (wholesale). So the “continuing cost” for solar energy can’t be less than the value of the batteries that are gradually consumed: 1500 cycles X 1 KWH per cycle = lifetime total stored power of 1500 KWH. $300/1500 = US$0.20 per KWH, just for batteries. Add everything else, and the number goes to US$0.30 to US$0.40 per KWH, for the ‘free’ solar or wind power you store.
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In certain circumstances, you may be able to ‘store’ the power in other ways (eg, a pool of chilled water for nighttime air conditioning use), and some electrical loads (like central AC) do correlate pretty well with daytime solar intensity, so the peak AC load may come when there is solar power available. Still, a substantial fraction of a small solar (or wind) installation would have to be stored in batteries to cut the tie to the grid. And that is by no means cheap electricity.
SteveF:
Not sure what “wildly inefficient” means here. How do you calculate that in this context? Remember to factor in the substantial amount of subsidization of private home grid power needed to make grid power economical for individual families. [I suspect you are aware corporate rates as substantially higher that individual rates. ]
“Too costly compared to the grid”… it’s nearly competitive right now, and which is more heavily subsidized is a bit of a foot race. In 50 years, scare fuels are unlikely to be less scarce, and that’s the economy that’s driving alternative energy as an industry more rapidly, not government policy.
Well I agree, but even today it’s not always possible due to the large power draws industry uses. I don’t expect that tension to get easier as the profile of users becomes spikier where the gradual loss of individual grid energy users that I anticipate to happen.
I pretty much did. There’s no way you’d put a wind turbine 100-feet in the air for residential use. 30-45′ would be optimal, vertical axis 5000-W generator as a supplement for solar during periods of extended cloudiness.
Meteorology works in our favor here for most of the US… periods where you have extended cloudiness tend to have higher wind speeds, periods with extended sunshine tend to be light wind. Go above 50′ and the winds would be too high for a light-weight turbine.
John Vetterling, thanks for the reference. You might be interested in this report. Some interesting work noted in it, but I haven’t had the time to go back and dig up better numbers than they quote in the report.
SteveF:
That’s the crux of the problem though—I don’t expect future power storage to look much like currently used chemical storage cells.
A lot of the cost you put into batteries is their assumed seven year life cycle. Other technologies don’t have this seven year full turn over, and it’s a bit pessimistic to expect a technology not developed for this applicate to remain the most economical.
I don’t see us as any where close to the “end game” in terms of how good alternative energy can get, and find it encouraging that scenarios exist where you can save money–even against heavily subsidized residential grid power.
Carrick,
By wildly inefficient, I mean in an economic sense. For example, when you do not need as much energy as you can generate, what do you do with the excess? When you need more power than you can generate, where do you get the shortfall? The current model of treating the grid as an infinite size battery that never wears out is only going to last until more than a handful of people are generating an excess of roof-top electricity. Selling excess back to the grid at wholesale and buying at retail when needed will pretty quickly make that investment in solar cell panels or a wind turbine not look so hot. Worse, the more widespread the installation of solar cells (or wind turbines) the sooner this dilemma will become evident, since quick-response utility power (like needed when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine) is always more costly than base load power.
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If there is some breakthrough in energy storage, that could fundamentally change the picture, but like DeWitt (another oldish chemist), I don’t see that kind of breakthrough as likely.
Re: Carrick (Aug 16 17:10),
Need, no. But according to one link I saw, it costs about the same to build a 60 foot tower as a 100 foot tower and the 100 foot tower generates a lot more power. I’ll see if I can find it again.
http://www.renewwisconsin.org/wind/Toolbox-Homeowners/Towers%204-Tower%20Costs%20versus%20Power.pdf
According to this, a 100 foot tower with a 10 kW generator will produce more than three times as much energy per year as the same generator on a 60 foot tower. But the construction cost only increases 5.5% because most of them, like crane rental, are fixed. Admittedly, this is from 2009 and the data is from one site in the Midwest. But I’m sure the same principle applies anywhere it’s relatively flat.
Considering that amateur radio operators often run into objections to antenna towers less than 50 feet tall, I’m betting it’s going to take an Act of Congress to override local zoning and deeds of covenant to get even a 50 foot tall wind turbine in your back yard unless you live on a farm.
The current state of the art for commercial scale wind turbines is a 90 meter tower and they’re working towards 100.
Re: Carrick (Aug 16 18:51),
That applies specifically to lead/acid batteries because it’s the lifetime of the positive plate under ideal circumstances, strong oxidant in direct physical contact with an easily oxidized material. Frequent deep discharge will shorten that life.
Other battery technologies have similar problems. With lithium batteries, it’s the electrolyte solvent that isn’t stable to either the positive or negative plate. The only reason you get away with it is that the kinetics are slow. But this is fundamental to any chemical battery. The lifetime of the NiMH batteries in the Prius, for example, is quite long because the battery is operated at its optimum charge depth and only about 10% of the total capacity is ever used.
Basically, you can only get 100% efficiency and infinite cycle life if your battery is infinitely large (and not lead/acid).
Carrick,
As to hare-brained, here’s a link to an actual manufacturer of small wind turbines, 5 and 50kW. Look down towards the bottom of the page for the tower specs for the 5kW S-343: guyed 31.1 or 36.6m or 27.5m freestanding monopole. That’s 102, 120 and 90 feet.
I looked into vertical axis wind turbines and it still doesn’t look like they’re ready for prime time. They’re less efficient than horizontal axis turbines and if you mount them at lower elevation, they generate less energy than a similar size swept area horizontal axis turbine at the same elevation.
A few things as a French and a European:
France is a net exporter of electricity.
France is a net importer from Germany if we focus on what transit on transmission line between Germany and France.
France is a net exporter to Germany if we include electricity we export to Germany via Belgium and Switzerland. Germany have no border with Italy, the idea that “Germany is actually a transit country for power that France sells to [..] Italy” is bizarre. See a map.
We fuel Switzerland dams with our nuclear during the night and Germany/France/Italy empty them the day (demand and price rule). Generally its misleading to focus on bilateral trade in Europe. Germany is still globally a net exporter but exchange terms are deteriorating, see below.
Peak demand in France is 100GW. Production capacity is 125GW + nearly 10GW we can import from surrounding country. If we want, we could shut down half of our nuclear capacity without blackout. We’re just a little silly so our President only promise to close 1,8GW of nuclear in 2016, net 0,2GW because of a EPR in construction.
Some of our excess capacity will no longer comply with environmental law in coming years. The numbers are similar in Germany (less nuclear and hydraulic, more coal), but they have much more erratic renewable capacity.
Subsidies to renewable do what we expect from subsidies and wholesale prices are falling. Operators cancel projects and close units. This is not sustainable:
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2013/08/14/1602802/who-needs-all-that-power-capacity-anyway/
The graph in Lucia 118698 has the same shape than German exports to France.
See graph 11
here: http://www.ccomptes.fr/content/download/58304/1473519/version/2/file/rapport_thematique_politique_developpement_energies_renouvelables.pdf
p. 76 for solar german production (yellow) matching German net exports to France (brown).
You can’t store electricity easily, so when renewable produce and there is no sufficient demand, Germany must export it. We are very grateful to the German taxpayer for this cheap electricity they even sometime sell at negative price*.
A Christmas tale: http://www.eex.com/en/Market%20Data/Trading%20Data/Power/Hour%20Contracts%20|%20Spot%20Hourly%20Auction/spot-hours-table/2012-12-31/PHELIX
Decentralized production is stupid because local wind and solar productions almost never match the local needs (In Europe there is huge incentives to put solar on home roofs, then solar produce at home when people are at work for an insane example). Decentralized production in Germany lead to a projected 4000 km more transmission lines they struggle to deliver for nimby reason. Grid operators are deep in love with decentralized production.
German model can’t work for entire Europe. If Europe make 80% of its electricity from wind and solar (like germans plan), there will be nowhere to export the surplus when wind blow and sun shine. Europe is surrounded by sea, not great markets.
Wind produce at a 20% charge factor. This mean that for producing 80% with it, you got too much electricity (up to three/four time the amount needed) most of the time. Solar is worst. Solar and wind can sometime be complementary, the problem stand still and they are primary redondance. Germany plan to multiply by six their energy (not electricity) capacity production !
Thanks to green economics, we need new ideas to waste useless production from a redondant system.
Regarding Yucca mountain, we have the same problem in France. A lot of costly delay but the project for a cheaper centralized storage show some progress.
*Negative price already occur because of strong wind and sun but also because you can’t shut down nuclear or coal without cost and having problems to restart them when you need. Grid operators in Europe are compelled to always bought wind and solar at high fixed price regardless the current market wholesale price.
Nicias,
As I understand it, the key to the German plan is an ever-increasing portion of the baseload that is flexible (through more rapid off/on natural gas plants) to level out the more sporadic solar and wind. Flexible baseload coupled with a smart grid would remove the need for extensive battery back-up. Such a plan seems reasonable to me, although the birth pangs will cause some discomfort.
Owen,
Yes. To get a flavor of how well that is working out, see: http://tinyurl.com/bwdv699.
Upshot: the ultra modern, highly efficient, brand new gasplant in Irsching has to be subsidized because the owner cannot compete with the heavily subsidized PV ‘Ökostrom’
peak at midday while running at a reduced duty cycle, dependent on how the sun shines through the year.
At the time the good citizens of Germany were voting on the “Energiewende”, they were promised it would be no more expensive than the cost of an icecream cone per month, the famous ‘eiskugel’ from Trittin (environmental chief at the time).
Meanwhile, back home, the ratepayers are paying this year 5.3 eurocent extra on their kilowatt-hour to subsidize wind & solar. At an average residential load of about 500 watt this works out to be a twenty euro ($26) icecream cone, next year: $34.- I hope we in the US take a very hard look at this wreck in process.
Owen,
Yes, in fact in the 80% from renewable, a part is biogas. As i remember they plan 90GW of backup from gas (demand will need to fall).
The problem is that German operator (and French too) actually close gas plants because price fall on the wholesale market.
More subsidies needed, for gas this time !
Nicias,
The French in the 70′ made the absolute correct decision.
Chapeau!
I read afew years back that Toshiba was developing a small scale nuclear reactor that could deliver lots of very cheap electricity from a site with a very small footprint.
Anybody know what the status of that technology is? Sounded like the nuke industry’s next wave.
DeWitt, rather than comment on each issue you’ve raised, I’m going to try and lump them together in a single narrative that describes the engineering assumptions I’ve made…everything I’m describing is available now.
Installation environment: mixed wind/solar in a residential community with 1 to 2 acres lots. Energy usage requirements: 50kW-hour/day, assume primary power is provided by solar with auxiliary wind “back-up” power, then we’re talking about a 20kW solar primary and 3000 to 5000-W wind-power auxiliary system. We’ll assume a state-of-the-art design for solar cells, so the diffusive light derating factor would be much less than current designs (I use a factor of three for my applications).
We can’t assume materials used since construction is likely to change between now and then, but even to 100-feet and existing materials, it would be unlikely that you would needed guyed towers. I’m assuming most people would consider guyed towers unsightly enough, they’d eat the economic costs needed to avoid them. For non-guyed systems, there definitely is a substantial difference between a system rated for 100-ft 5000-W and 50-ft 5000-W. However, the economic costs of either system aren’t that high even in the current market, so other considerations such as ascetics are likely to drive design decisions here.
Regarding vertical versus horizontal, here are the main engineering trade offs that favor vertical axis for this application: smaller wake (so systems can be closer together without losing power), more robust mechanical design, and lower noise.
In terms of the robustness of the design, it’s easier to engineer vertical wind turbines to withstand high winds because their maximum blade speed is much lower. Turbulent air flow is a big problem here because you can get differential loading forces across the blade, which are what lead to failure. While 100-foot elevations do give you more power, they are more costly for the same power rating, and as you go higher, you also expose your system to higher wind speeds, which is actually a bigger problem for horizontal axis wind turbines than too little wind.
I would pick something like this system for home use. (The shape of the blades would likely be much different.) For an application of this sort, existing vertical axis wind systems can meet the needs with fewer of the problems that horizontal axis systems face, so rather than “not ready for prime time” they are commercially available and a viable solution.
I will say I’ve had experience with installing and raising vertical towers, 30-feet crank-up free-standing to 34-feet guyed to 100-feet guyed, and it is exponentially harder the higher you go to install the tower. I would really be surprised if your total costs for a 100-ft tower, tethered or not, are going to be the same as that of a 45-foot tower. My footings for a smaller tower look much different than those for the taller one for example. (I used screw-in anchors on my 34-footer, no way I’d risk that on a 100-foot tower.)
Nicias:
That sounds like a design flaw for coal and nuclear then.
What’s to like?
SteveF:
I don’t see traditional chemical energy storage as getting much better than it is right now (but who the heck knows?).
I did look into hydrogen storage, it does look to be pretty inefficient. I’d use a 4x derating factor if I were incorporating that. Beyond that huge inefficiency, there’s little to not-like with it. You could actually store up to 2-weeks of power with a hydrogen or methane system, which could then act as “tertiary” power.
Regarding traditional grid power, I’ll point out that the economic analysis is complicated by direct and indirect subsidies to individual residential users. I’ve not been able to find firm numbers on that, but as usual, people (including me) seem to ignore even the existence of subsidies that they actually use, while railing against ones that they don’t. I think this is called “democracy”. 😉
Carrick,
One thing you mentioned about wind power made me hunt for a report I had read a while ago. You suggested:-
It may be that this could work in the US – I really don’t know enough about the local meteorology. However, studies in Europe have shown periods when there was basically very little wind anywhere. See this for example:-
The above is taken from a “pro-windpower” site…
http://www.ref.org.uk/publications/217-low-wind-power-output-2010
@Carrick
A priori no. Specialists I talk to, explain that shut down and restart a turbine cost money. I’m not good in physic but the machine must heat. The flawed design is in the subsidies.
@Paul_K
In 2003, during the heat wave that kill 15000 people in France, there was no Wind. From Portugal to Poland.
In France, every month, there a day with a load factor near 1%.
Paul_K,
I wonder how France’s nuclear plants were doing (in terms of load factor) at that time, though I would venture a bit better than 3 to 18%. 😉
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Variability without inexpensive storage capacity is (and always has been) the biggest obstical to alternative energy. Good thing you live in the land of nuclear electricity!
Kees van der Pool (Comment #118765)
August 17th, 2013 at 9:13 am
There is no doubt in my mind that the German experiment will end badly, if only for the rate payers. I expect at some point for people to tire of the costs and insist on a “delay” in nenewables for power generation… all fantasies ultimately confront reality, and reality prevails, though often at great cost.
@ Carrick (Comment #118769)
I like your system but my HOA would frown on it. Any suggestions? While on the subject, any ideas on powering up an aluminum plant with solar and wind without a standby gas plant at full required capacity?
@SteveF (Comment #118775)
Not a shadow of doubt. Unfortunately, the Germans are a persistent lot and it will be a while before the parties that are responsible for this lunacy are safely out of office or dead and things can change.
It is very hard to imagine a country with a stellar scientific and engineering tradition and led by a qualified physicist can be stampeded into a scheme like this.
Maybe a ploy by the cognoscenti to show W+S is a massively expensive pipe dream and have voters approve nuclear when reality sets in?
Meanwhile, back in Germany, shoveling lignite it is!
Nicias, it certainly isn’t a feature of a design that it needs a long time to start up and shut down. 😉 Modern designs using natural gas don’t have this problem by the way.
I agree that subsidies are an issue, but see my comment about our natural human blindness to subsidies that favor us.
Paul_K, I think the scale is big enough for the US and Canada that you could practically average over weather. Europe would have to engage with Russia and the Ukraine.
With newer mesoscale models that can incorporate boundary layer physics (ala large scale eddies, see e.g. this), it is a matter of time before we can forecast accurately days if not weeks in advance the power capacity of large-scale wind farms. I suspect that will clear up some of the issues with start up and shut down costs of large (probably obsolete design) power plants.
Kees van der Pool, I was speaking to the future (circa 50-75 years) talking in terms of what is available now. AFAIK, most HOAs will accept solar panels. I wouldn’t think the sort of smaller vertical tower like the one I linked would be problematic, as long as it was in the backyard.
As to industry, at the moment I don’t see any of these alternative energy sources being particularly scalable, although there are plants that are run on recaptured methane. Somebody mentioned small scale nuclear–that would be a better choice, if we could deal with the security issues relates to them.
We should all keep in mind that there are break points where different technologies gain or lose economic practicability. At some point, it is guaranteed that fossil fuels will no longer be the chief source of energy. The questions are when and what not whether.
Carrick (Comment #118778)
Definitely OK with this. Apologies for my slightly snarky comment, I’m a long time lurker @ Lucia’s and always enjoy your posts.
A firm believer, though, in the long term inevitability of nuclear (and no, no backyard for my windmill. . . . ).
SteveF,
Well, France is perfectly poised to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory.
France typically runs its nuclear at a load factor of around 76%. Interestingly, this is not an engineering limit. France uses nuclear to track load, rather than deliver baseload. This then allows more expensive renewables into the mix. Installed cost of solar in France works out to be up to 10 times more expensive than nuclear, some of which is explained by simple market distortion. France electricity provider (EDF) is forced to pay a tariff for feed-in renewables which is higher than the retail cost at which they sell electricity.
We all pay a direct tax on electrical bills, “the CSPE”, to support the obligatory purchase of expensive wind and solar. This is about 10% of invoices at present, but this is still not sufficient to cover the cost of the legally binding feed-in tariff for renewables paid by edf. There was a 5bn euro shortfall by the end of 2012. The government has agreed to meet this deficit. The green lobby is calling for a massive increase in the tax, and a broadening of the tax to (already heavily taxed) fuels.
Excluding the above, the government spent $19bn euros subsidising renewables between 2005 and 2011, according to the French audit agency; it reported that this “failed to spur as much economic growth and jobs as expected”. Now there’s a surprise.
Nuclear presently provides about 80% of France’s electrical energy, but this (rather terrifyingly) is planned to be reduced to 50% by 2025, under plans announced by Francois Hollande.
Most analysts with good reason believe that prices here will skyrocket in the near future.
Paul_K, that is just depressing. I am obviously more bullish on alternative energy than some here (being a user helps with that), but I do not and have never favored market interference as a means to try and establish new technologies.
As I commented above with DeWitt, I do not view large scale wind energy to be sufficiently developed to merit anything more than “learning how to most effectively generate power”… I think the market should decide which is the best of the alternatives. (The limit here being where national security issues are involved.)
Kees van der Pool, it’s all good. I was thinking of the US, where we have an abundance of space. I can see how Europe would need to follow a different model.
It’s interesting that even now that in some places, there are substantial enough market effects from people dropping off the grid, that we are now seeing taxes applied to off-grid people to … you guessed it … subsidize the grid.
This is the example that comes to mind.
@Carrick(#118770)
Less a design flaw – more horses for courses.
Nuclear (at least large Uranium/Plutonium based) – good for base-load – ideal load-factor 90+% (all sorts of problems if one tries load-following) – v.slow start-up & you wouldn’t want to rush it!
Coal (modern super-critical) a little better at load-following (s-l-o-w changes) but ideal load-factor still ~90%. Slow start-up, but faster than nuclear – have to get everything turning at right speed & get everything to right temperature.
Old (obsolete) coal – often used for load-following as drop in efficiency not so important (= costly). Start-up faster (don’t have to get everything quite right – it’s old & decrepit anyway).
Closed Circuit Gas (CCGT) – faster & can load-follow, but still need to get a steam turbine up & running (speeds/temperatures still important). Can (usually) operate in OCGT mode (when start-up very fast – but conversion while running takes care).
Open Circuit Gas (OCGT) – quickest for start-up – much less efficient than CCGT. Best for load-following.
For comparison, try a riding a cow in a horse-race. Incidentally, that’s where wind/solar sit – at least in terms of despatchability.
(17+ years in the industry – before I ventured into business/software)
@Carrick(#118770)
Less a design flaw – more horses for courses.
Nuclear (at least large Uranium/Plutonium based) – good for base-load – ideal load-factor 90+% (all sorts of problems if one tries load-following) – v.slow start-up & you wouldn’t want to rush it!
Coal (modern super-critical) a little better at load-following (s-l-o-w changes, please) but ideal load-factor still ~90%. Slow start-up, but faster than nuclear – have to get everything turning at right speed & get everything to right temperature.
Old (obsolete) coal – often used for load-following as drop in efficiency (= cost) not so important. Start-up faster (don’t have to get everything quite right – it’s old & decrepit anyway).
Closed Circuit Gas (CCGT) – faster & can load-follow, but still need to get a steam turbine up & running (speeds/temperatures still important). Can (usually) operate in OCGT mode (when start-up very fast – but conversion while running takes care).
Open Circuit Gas (OCGT) – quickest for start-up – much less efficient than CCGT. Best for load-following.
For comparison, try a riding a cow in a horse-race. Incidentally, that’s where wind/solar sit – at least in terms of despatchability.
(17+ years in the industry – before venturing into business/software)
Carrick (Comment #118788)
French nuclear: depressing indeed. Regarding small, individual PV/wind installations: agreed but in the grand scheme of things they won’t make more than a marginal difference.
I hope for Paul’s (and the French’s sake) that the “Enegiewende’ in Germany will provide a harsh lesson on how not to go about creating a nuclear/fossil fuel-less economy, if such a thing were indeed possible.
Showing how it is all going to work in 2022 is here: http://tinyurl.com/bznwez7. Basically, the study contents that is going to be just fine with only 20GW in gas and ‘some old coal plants’ as backup, mainly by screwing the individual customers by means of a ‘smart net’ that turns their supply off when necessary. Big customers are kindly requested to shift their load to periods with sunshine/wind ‘but only for 200 hrs per year’. If they don’t like that, they are invited to generate their own.
However, this study also cheerfully admits that the ‘Energiewende will fail’ (p.23) due to the fact that electricity prices will fall when there is a surplus (e.g. when the sun shines and the wind blows) and at times will turn negative, as is already happening now. Neighbouring countries with pumped storage capacity will gladly take the kilowatt-hours and some euro’s in the bargain and sell them back when evening falls, the wind dies and the TV’s are switched on. At a premium, of course. Good for the Swiss, Austrians and Swedes – for the Germans, not so much.
As a remedy, one of the schemes floated is to pay suppliers for ‘installed capacity’ instead of kilowatt-hours supplied (I’m not making this up). If this really happens, I think that the French nuclear industry is safe.
Re: Carrick (Aug 17 11:15),
You’re still comparing apples and oranges to some extent. Increasing height gives more kWh/year for the same nameplate capacity generator. And the sources I read said that vertical axis generators are not inherently more robust, they have to be built more strongly to withstand the higher stress inherent in a vertical axis design. That’s particularly true of the design you linked where the blades are perpendicular to the ground rather than curved.
A while back I asked myself the question, “what should large-scale solar power generation look like? Since we’re talking about very large collection areas, the answer for me was: – “wispy”. Thin and lightweight like gossamer, low resource, low cost. No crystalline silicon slabs, no arrays of heliostats, no steel or aluminium frames. Your photovoltaics need to be printable roll-to-roll, a gigawatt capacity on a few hundred tons of polymer film. The support structure needs to be webs of high-tensile wire on minimalist metal towers or something similar, the sort of arrangements used to put nets over orchards.
We build such “wispy” stuctures now in the form of antievaporation shades for reservoirs, see http://www.netprocanopies.com/water-management.html. The case study states 3.3 hectares covered at a cost of 200,000 AU dollars, around 6 AU dollars per sq metre. 10% efficient photovoltaics would give 100W / sq metre installed capacity (using the solar industry’s definition) so this is an installation cost of 6 cents /watt, IF we can manufacture flexible high-strength photovolataic “cloth”. Wiring it all up is an additional complication, of course.
Heliatek in Germany has a pilot plant up and running for roll-to-roll production of organic solar film, see http://www.heliatek.com/?lang=en. The quantity of pV material on the substrate is stated as only 1 gram per sq metre, with polymer film substrates possible to give a final product weight of 0.5kg per sq metre. Best conversion efficiency is 12% so far with improvement to 15% expected and low-light performance better than silicon. At the moment the site only talks about niche products for formable pV – integrated building materials, car roofs etc. But if the technology is viable, I hope to see flexible photovoltaic film with aramid mesh reinforcement available for cents per watt rather than dollars per watt. That would be a solar game-changer, at least for countries with handy deserts. In colder climes or with denser populations, I still see nuclear as the main player of the future, with wind staying very limited unless the turbine makers can integrate a LOT of storage into their units.
Energy storage is an unsolved problem but there are some semi-promising technologies such as solid state ammonia synthesis http://www.akenergyauthority.org/EmergingEnergyTechologyFund/EETF-AC_Stage1_Review/Abstracts/001.pdf. Not too efficient overall but trucks, planes and ships can be fueled with anhydrous ammonia and we can electrify virtually everything else. Zinc-air batteries have promise as a lower-cost alternative to lithium http://www.eosenergystorage.com/technology , http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/june/zinc-air-battery-060413.html and may even be suitable for heavy vehicles. Flow batteries are another technology to keep an eye on – see http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/enstorage-goes-live-with-a-50-kw-grid-connected-hbr-flow-battery-201450771.html
@Paul_K
“Most analysts with good reason believe that prices here will skyrocket in the near future.”
Retail price will rise with tax (and bad job from CRE on EdF costs) but wholesale price will not because that’s what append when you add heavily subsided capacity production. Price variability will skyrocket.
The stunning thing is that RTE and Ademe forecast rising wholesale price and projection of the cost of CSPE are made on that. The price of the first offshore wind project is based on a market price of 66€/MWh. Germany show that price fall, and It should not be a surprise.
Re: matt (Aug 19 00:21),
Trucks and ships maybe. Planes, I don’t think so.
The load factor on an airplane is going to drop drastically if you have to carry twice as much fuel to go the same distance. Then there’s the nitrogen oxides problem. Good luck putting a catalytic converter on a jet engine.
Nicias,
Current wholesale prices in France are 42€/MWh. (EDF has convinced the Audit Agency that the cost should be 49.5€/MWh.) The new nuke at Flamanville with all its tech problems and cost overruns looks like coming in at over 70€/MWh, which is certainly colouring the view of future costs. Additionally, some 22 of France’s 58 nuclear facilities are approaching their end-of-useful-life-design limit and are due to be either scrapped or recommissioned by 2022. Some increase in wholesale costs is inevitable, although I agree that the Audit Agency report seems very pessimistic (politically driven perhaps?).
For comparison, the life-of-facility costs for windpower in France historically is between 140 and 700€/MWh.
According to a recent EWEA report, it should be possible to get windpower costs down to below 60€/MWh (of delivered energy) by banking larger more efficient wind turbine design (this has already demonstrated some unit savings in Denmark and in Germany, as you have indicated), by judicious placement and by cutting O&M costs (by a factor of 3) down to 12€/MWh. If you accept the optimistic assumptions, then, on face of it, this could bring windpower costs in line with the latest nuclear costs from Flamanville, and significantly below the electricity cost projected by France’s Audit Agency.
The challenge which is not being dealt with however is that every windpower facility needs to be backed up by more secure generating capacity, which then needs to be left in reserve or run in a peak-shaver mode; alternatively, a major energy storage scheme, which could be centralised or distributed, is worked out and implemented.
These costs are not taken into account in the 60€/MWh projected future costs of windpower. There is of course another option, which is for for France to accept and manage brown-outs as a matter of policy. This seems to be the option being involuntarily pursued at the moment.
Additionally, some 22 of France’s 58 nuclear facilities are approaching their end-of-useful-life-design limit and are due to be either scrapped or recommissioned by 2022.
The old Fessenheim could run 30 more years. Its the purpose of the “grand carénage” to replace turbine with life design of 30 years and others components. US already have given authorisation for reactor to run 30 more years. The reactor and the tank were designed to last 60 years, and there is no reason they can’t do more.
These costs are not taken into account in the 60€/MWh
Yes, wind and Sun power spread weather risk on the system. It’s a negative externality with imply tax, not subsidies 🙂
The renewable fanatics should realize by now that a random energy source without storage is never going to replace continuously available energy sources. Arguments like ‘when the sun does not shine the wind blows’ and ‘there is always wind somewhere’ are wishful thinking. There are very good meteorological records killing the first argument and sprinkling windmill parks @ full required capacity at every ‘somewhere’ is lunacy – imagine the grid that would be required. It is already exceedingly difficult to get windpower from Northern Germany to Bavaria, some 3,000 km extra grid required with only 10% built so far.
Upscaling does not fix the randomness – it just depresses prices at peak generating intervals even more. Why produce something that cannot be used and therefore has no value?
DeWitt, I can’t figure out what is apple and orange that I’m supposedly conflating but oh well.
Kees van der Pool hit up on the main design issues with siting wind turbines in residential neighborhoods.
First, visual appearance. You are not likely going to get approval from your HOA for a 100-foot wind mill with guy wires towering over your house.
I would expect something like this would past muster in this regard. [The turbine blade would look more like this.
Secondly, health. Horizontal axis turbines generator large wakes and a substantial amount of turbulence in the infrasound range. The direct medical consequences of this aren’t fully understood, but I can say from personal exposure to loud continuous infrasound (10-40 Hz range, roughly 100 dB SPL), that nausea and headaches are a common side effect. I certainly wouldn’t want one above my house without a substantial amount of data clearing wind turbines of this level of sound.
Third, safety… you’d have to verify that the turbine posed no risk to structures underneath it, and potential energy = m•g•h applies here. The taller it is, the bigger the consequences of a catastrophic failure.
Fourth, nuisance. Horizontal turbines turbulence in the infrasound region. Even though it is inaudible, it can couple into the structure of your building (which typically has resonances in the same frequency range), causing your building to shake, especially when the winds aloft are higher. (Usually it’s things like ceramic bowls on display shelves, loose window panes, things like that.)
Fifth, robustness of design. Just looking at the mechanicals, the blades on a vertical axis will travel at a lower speed than the tips of the blades for the same power, and because of their geometry allows for reinforcement of the blades. Horizontal axis blades require a yaw mechanism to adjust the blades to wind speed, and of course must adjust their direction to face the wind. Vertical axis designs don’t care about wind direction. Wind gradients, which are larger near the ground, also do not favor horizontal designs, because the blades are not very tolerant to large variations in pressure over the swing area of the blade.
(I could go on. But really five enumerated points are enough.)
Perhaps you can dig up that reference or references you found discussing why a vertical axis design would be inferior to a horizontal one. I’ve done a substantial amount of reading, and not seen that claim.
I’m pleased this thread made me revisit the story of the German Dual-Fluid reactor which was popularly nominated for the GreenTec awards, before being cheekily de-nominated.
http://dual-fluid-reactor.org/
A Berlin court has ordered its re-instatement
http://nuklearia.de/2013/07/31/injunction-dual-fluid-reactor-nominated-for-greentec-awards-nevertheless/
We’ll probably be needing these in the UK before too long.
Re: Carrick (Aug 19 12:59),
Peak power vs total energy.
A formerly highly touted vertical wind turbine manufacturer, Windspire Energy, Inc. formerly Mariah Power, filed for Chapter 11 in January, 2012. They have a nice looking graph of total power generation per year vs. average wind speed. Unfortunately, the experience of some Windspire owners doesn’t match the advertising.
If small vertical axis turbines are so great, how come no vertical axis turbine has yet been certified by the Small Wind Certification Council? They have nine units certified as of today and all of them are horizontal axis.
You’re not going to get ELF noise from a small horizontal axis wind turbine because they rotate a lot faster than the multi-megawatt commercial units.
DeWitt:
That’s not actually a refutation of anything I said, including the part about wind turbines not being a mature technology. Nor does anything you’d linked address directly the supposed robustness issues with vertical axis wind turbines.
I’m afraid that’s an oversimplification. The turbulent wake isn’t just a function of RPM. The general belief in the infrasound community is that the pressure fluctuations observed downstream from a turbine are associated with an atmosphere with structure being advected across the obstruction associated with the wind turbine.
Typically these structures have a dominant wavenumber peak (we think this is associated with surface roughness), so the expectation is the the frequency associated with turbulence is proportional to the mean wind velocity at the height of the wind turbine and inversely proportional to surface structures (e.g. building spacing).
I’ve got data on this, I just have to have time to analyze it.
Carrick,
I don’t know about the HOA’s in your area, but my homeowner’s association won’t let you change your mailbox design or paint your house without pre-approval, and they tend to usually turn down those requests. There is zero chance of approval of a tower for a wind-mill (horizontal or vertical). You might get solar panels approved, at least so long as they are not visible from the street. 😮
.
But seriously, installing any kind of wind tower (unless you live on a farm) is likely going to encounter a LOT of resistance from neighbors and/or local government. An act of Congress almost certainly would be required.
SteveF, I don’t think it’s quite that bad. Except maybe in your community.
You can argue either way on this, but there is a zero-energy home, La Casa Verde, inside of San Francisco proper, hardly known for its loose rules on home building.
Photo.
So it’s not really clear to me, at the moment, what the limits really are. Most suburban environments would, I think, be tolerant of the design I linked above, as long as it didn’t make people sick, or cause their homes to shake.
Incidentally, if you go by the La Casa Verde house (assuming the turbine is still there), or find a youtube video floating around, it is friggin’ noisy. It’s one of the reasons we can’t use these to power acoustic sensors in areas where solar isn’t going to be available.
Here is an article on a man suing a wind-turbine company due to wind noise. Some issues here:
First I think he has zero chance of wining a law-suit (perhaps hoping for a settlement). That’s just an opinion.
Secondly, both parties work in units of dBA, which is a ridiculous unit to use. dBA is integrated power normalized to (2e-5 Pa/sqrt(Hz))^2, using a particular filter called the “A-weight” that is designed to produce a single number that tracks with perceived loudness, and is intended to work for relatively low level sounds. For high level sounds you use “C-weighting”.
Anyway, it’s ridiculous here, because the metric is linked to perceived sound, which has nothing to do with the sound field that is impinging on your body and perhaps causing physiological effects like the ones described by the complainant:
I can’t speak to all of those, but I can attest to headaches, dizziness and nausea after exposure to (relatively high level) infrasound signals. dBA will tell you nothing about the infrasound present in the signal, because it zero’s it out.
The best it can do is predict something about the nuisance level of the sound generated by the wind farm… but not much. Nuisance is measured by than just level of sound. You also have to factor in how intermittent a sound is.
A lower level (dBA) with a higher degree of intermittency will be more of a nuisance than a higher level with low intermittency—that is, it will objectively interfere with ordinary cognitive tasks and with communication (speech).
Unsurprisingly, the wind turbine farm owners aren’t very interested in getting all of this quantified. It makes them very short-sighted in my opinion, and I think will end up biting them in the rear.
DeWitt
Dammit, that’s quite an obstacle. Liquid hydrogen is possible but its a swine to handle. I’d hate to lose easy air travel in a post-fossil-fuel world, but I’m not convinced by biofuel solutions (they WORK, but expensive)
Carrick,
The references I have are either several years old opinion pieces or are from a manufacturer of horizontal axis wind turbines so you would probably discount them. But here they are anyway:
http://www.motherearthnews.com/renewable-energy/wind-power-horizontal-and-vertical-axis-wind-turbines.aspx?PageId=1#axzz2cVr7TvA1
http://www.motherearthnews.com/renewable-energy/vertical-axis-wind-turbines-comparison.aspx#axzz2cRmFn400
http://www.motherearthnews.com/renewable-energy/energy-matters-vertical-axis-wind-turbines-debate.aspx#axzz2cRmFn400
http://twnwindpower.com/2013/01/the-truth-about-vertical-axis-wind-turbines/
While lack of certification and bankruptcy are not direct refutations of the theoretical benefits of a vertical axis turbine, it is evidence that those theoretical benefits have still not been demonstrated in practical, robust devices. I therefore concede that the vertical axis wind turbine, at least, is not a mature technology. The question is, given the long history of poor performance, will it ever be mature?
Michael Hart,
Thanks for the links on the Dual Fluid Reactors – very interesting (and promising).
DeWitt, it’s a very new technology and there are plenty of success case studies in the literature at this point. I would disagree that it has not been demonstrated.
Calling a relatively new technology a “long history of poor performance” is a substantial exaggeration.
Mark, Carrick and Anteros who got blocked: I found the problem.
The new protective rules to prevent injections in badly designed ajax scripts were incompatible with the ajax comment editing. About 2/3rds of the rules are incompatible with this being a comment editing script used by normal humans. Ideally, the Ajax script would escape some dangerous characters that could permit a person to inject code. I took out the ones that ‘protect’ against scripts containing unescaped: ( ) ‘ ” ; > or < .
The script is still protecting against people injecting things like unescaped echo.
Thanks Mark for guessing the problem was related to comments. It was happening only when you edited comments.
That helped me figure it out. Naturally, the rule didn’t affect me because it is inside ($zbwhitelisted != 1){ }. I am whitelisted.
Lucia,
You mean I did something useful? Woohoo! You’re welcome.
Don’t let my boss find out, he might start expecting me to be useful…
Yep. Maybe I would have guessed what happened if you hadn’t suggested the reason. But I probably wouldn’t have. I tested after you suggested that, but I didn’t noticed the protection was wrapped inside the “whitlisted” exception.
It needs to be. Lots of ajax is used on the wp-admin side of WordPress. I’d probably trigger the rules constantly on that side! Unfortunately, Ajax is a security nightmare. I’m going to go over that script now… just to have a look see.
Re: Carrick (Aug 20 08:36),
Vertical axis wind turbines aren’t new. The idea has been around for centuries. See the Wikipedia article on the
Savonius wind turbine:
Hundreds of VAWT’s were operating in CA 30 years ago. They were neither cost effective or reliable.
As I said above, vertical axis wind turbines are not ready for prime time. I’m not sure why you disagreed above and then claim that the technology is too new to be properly evaluated. Maybe they’ll be viable 50 years from now. But maybe we’ll have cheap fusion energy by then too.
DeWitt, if you look at the references from Wikipedia as well as from who was giving the opinion in that seriously goobered-up article from Mother Earth News, you’ll notice a pattern:
People who are impartial (peer reviewed literature) have a generally favorable view of vertical axis wind-turbines as a developing technology.
People who are in the wind industry, which is to say are getting paid in a billion dollar industry based on the heavily federally subsidized status quo, like the systems they’re getting paid to put in, namely horizontal-axis wind turbines. Sadly, like vertical axis wind-turbines and in spite of being heavily federally subsidized for commercial installations, horizontal-axis wind turbines is still a developing and not fully understand technology either.
It’s a red herring to say “vertical axis turbines have been around for decades” because the newer designs that are felt to be superior haven’t been around for decades, and in fact are in continued evolution, as are horizontal wind-turbine blade design.
Also, I”m not sure how “more efficient, quieter, more bird-friendly, more cost-effective etc. whereas there is no factual evidence for any of these claims” got through Wikipedia:
That they are quieter in dBA is factually correct. That they are “more bird friendly” is factually correct. That they produce less wake-turbulence infrasound that the wind industry is trying to hide existence, that is plausibly true, but not demonstrated. If you define “efficient” in terms of economics, that is unproven, nor is cost-effective. I’d like the have the person who is claiming generically “cost-effective” to produce a citation of that.
Whether they are more cost effective depends on siting. You can’t cost effectively put in a large wind turbine in a suburban environment. So it’s either vertical axis wind-turbine or it’s nothing. How do you measure the economic efficiency of that? You have X amount of wind power. One design produces 0 power, the other produces Y > 0. Isn’t that always more efficient?
The point I was making above is you aren’t going to stick a large wind-mill farm in the middle of an urban or suburban environment without bad things happening. People are going to say “NIMBY”. People are going to get sick and it’s not just psychosomatic (IMO). People are going to sue, companies are going to shut down.
[Another area I have concerns with is placing horizontal-axis wind turbines near airports due to issues with wake turbulence. I am hoping nobody is going to be that stupid.]
In any case, there are several successful companies that sell vertical axis wind-turbine turbines for urban environments, a notable one Quiet Revolution, which sells the QR5, a 7 kW vertical-axis turbine designed for urban environments.
Carrick,
I suspect San Francisco is a lot more tolerant of eyesores that are ‘green’ than they are other eyesores. I honestly doubt that house (or anything remotely similar) would be acceptable in many places. A bigger issue would be any additions to existing homes, where the neighbors are often comically militant NIMBY’s… which is of course why there are so many HOA’s with iron-clad restrictive deed covenants.
.
The low frequency sound issues associated with wind turbines is not something I know anything about (I defer to sound experts… like you), but I bet personal injury lawyers are already sharpening their knives and licking their chops. As I am sure you are already aware (living in Mississippi), the claims of personal injury in liability lawsuits and factual reality are not always closely connected.
Carrick,
One is not several.
I’m looking at the specs for the quietrevolution qr5 and hy5 turbines. The warranty period for the qr5 VAWT is 2 years for parts only. The warranty period for the hy5 HAWT is 5 years extendable to 10 years with free maintenance for 12 months. Annual power generation at 5 m/s for the qr5 4,197 kWh and up to 7,500 at 7 m/s. The hy5 is rated at 8,458 kWh at 5 m/s and up to 16,068 at 7 m/s. Some of that is swept area. the qr5 is 24.6 m² compared to 16 m² for the hy5. The qr5 shuts down at 26 m/s wind speed. There is no shutoff speed for the hy5. The hy5 will generate at 3.5 m/s sustained while the hy5 requires a minimum of 5 m/s. There are over 1,000 hy5’s installed and only 150 qr5’s.
quietrevolution says:
But based on the example, for urban they mean on top of a high rise building. Both of them are too big for suburban use. The qr5 turbine weighs 450 kg. The hy5 weight isn’t listed but they claim that the qr5 is half the weight of the hy5. That seems a little unreasonable considering that the Endurance S-343 5kW turbine with a large swept area (31.9 m²) weighs 300 kg.
The horizontal axis turbine is the clear winner, IMO. The quietrevolution vertical axis turbine is a heavy kinetic sculpture that also generates some electricity. When Siemens or GE start building megawatt scale vertical axis wind turbines, they’ll be ready for prime time. I’m not holding my breath. I also believe, unlike you, that if GE or Siemens could build a vertical axis turbine that would outperform a horizontal axis turbine, they would do it and customers would buy it. But they don’t.
The fact sheet for the hy5 says it weighs 340kg. So it’s lighter too.
I was late to the interesting discussion above, which is mostly about small renewable power sources that might be owned by a family. However, when your renewable sources aren’t delivering, you will still want to obtain power from the grid, so the grid perspective is important.
In theory, the maximum amount of power that can be extracted from wind varies with the cube of the wind speed. For grid operators, if your forecast wind speed is 10% too high, the output from your wind farms will be roughly 30% lower than anticipated. Regulators often expect grid operators make plans suitable for providing power with 99.7% reliability (one day of outage per year). Grid operators formerly had a small amount of power available in “spinning reserve” to meet unexpected demand and that reserve can now meet shortfalls in forecast wind (and solar) power. Unfortunately, the reserve needs to grow as a larger percentage of power comes from wind. This isn’t a problem in Denmark; their reserve comes from hydroelectric dams in Sweden, which can be turned on or up almost instantly. When reserves must come from fossil fuel plants, the ability to forecast wind speed (and thereby power output) several hours in advance is critical. If I understand their published documents correctly (and I may not), the operators of the British grid believe their current forecasts are accurate enough to meet the 99.7% reliability standard with a reserve amounting to 50% of forecast wind output! They are hoping to shrink this reserve requirement to 30% through improved forecasting. So, when a windy day in the future finally allows Britain to obtain 100% of its power from wind, does this mean that fossil fuel plants capable of meeting 30%-50% of demand will be running in spinning reserve and spewing out CO2? Probably, but no highly regulated utility is going to upset the government by clearly spelling out the folly of the government.
See: http://www.nationalgrid.com/NR/rdonlyres/DF928C19-9210-4629-AB78-BBAA7AD8B89D/47178/Operatingin2020_finalversion0806_final.pdf
http://www.nationalgrid.com/uk/Electricity/Operating+in+2020/
Unreliable renewable energy certainly looks like a disaster from the perspective of the grid operator. As families and small organizations get more power from small renewable sources they own, the grid operator will still be required to meet the demand of all customers 100% of the time. As small renewable sources cut into the grid operator’s revenue, the capital and operating cost needed to provide this reserve will rise. This explains the calls for a “smart grid” – cynically speaking, a mechanism for reducing demand on the grid whenever needed through prohibitively high prices and/or “voluntary” service interruption. The grid operator, of course, wants someone else to pay for his “smart grid”, either the shafted customer or the taxpayer.
Frank,
The economics of local renewable energy look a lot worse if you don’t have a grid that is forced to buy your excess power at retail price. Passive solar water heaters probably make sense in many places, especially if the price of low emissivity coatings for the collector come down.
Paul_K (Comment #118810)
August 19th, 2013 at 8:22 am
According to a recent EWEA report, it should be possible to get windpower costs down to below 60€/MWh (of delivered energy)
The experience in the US Pacific Northwest is that balancing problems become more expensive. We initially balanced with our hydro-power without event…we’ve had a couple of instances now that we’ve ended up shutting down all the thermal, nuclear and taken the hydro down to the point of barely keeping the fish alive(maximum flow thru spillway and minimum flow thru turbines) and exported to other grids about 7 GW(about 1/3 of California off peak) and then having to ‘free wheel’ the windmills.
The last I checked ‘smart waterheaters’ were going to solve the problem..I.E…Overheating the water in residential water heaters in order to absorb the excess capacity.
Getting to 60 Euro’s/MW with wind when you end up tossing away a substantial portion of ‘off peak’ energy is a substantial challenge.