Is Wind Power Worth It?

Picking up a sub-thread from elsewhere:

Is wind generation profitable (even competitive) on a utility scale? I read that Florida Power & Light was the largest wind operator. They are an investor owned utility so I downloaded their annual report. However, I can't decipher from that whether or not wind is _The Answer_ to our energy woes.

What is the nameplate capacity of a typical utility-scale windmill generator? Is there a financial sweet-spot for grid capacity connection in terms of kW or MW for these generators? What really drives the economics of wind? Why all the excitement?

And while I'm at it, what ever happened to "too cheap to meter"?

-mpm

Reply to
mpm
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Kills birds, intermittent power, noisy for the neighbors, an eyesore... apart from that, what's not to like?

OTTOMH - $1/watt was the capital cost, probably improved some since last I looked

Doesn't Vestas make wind turbines? Didn't GE buy out a division of megawatt-class wind turbines in the US?

FPL owns/operates the SEGS solar thermal plants in the Mojave Desert, CA. I wanted to buy their stock for that reason alone.

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Michael

Reply to
mrdarrett

A resonable place to start is

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martin

Reply to
Martin Griffith

Nuclear isn't popular.. Maybe it will be again now that all the existing plants that were built are now closing due to age.

Reply to
David Gravereaux

See page 13 of the 2007 Annual Report (Adobe PDF page 23)

About 1 MW, some more, some less

Heh.

Michael

Reply to
mrdarrett

It ran head first into "Too greedy to care". :(

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Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

Possibly if you put the turbines in the right place and connect them to the grid correctly. UK has failed on both counts here.

There is no one "the answer" or magic bullet a basket of different technologies has to be used. The wind isn't a reliable power source you have to feather them if the wind is too strong or they fly to bits and they can easily be becalmed for days on end. In the UK it is a better bet than solar power since peak winter demand is has feeble sunshine.

But the output scales as the cube of the windspeed so you need a huge reserve system to backup the shortfall.

Depends how big they are. Some of the blades going past where I live are at the limits of what can travel on a UK road at 42m and they are beautiful shapes. However, 2 out of 3 big wind turbines I pass regularly are out of commission on any given day, and a whole offshore windfarm is screwed because they could not be arsed to bury the cable.

Probably but I expect it depends on the choice of materials used.

In the right place it works iff you maintain the kit correctly. But with ROI depending on the average of the cube of the windspeed small errors in site surveys make for huge differences in profitability.

I thought that was a Harold Wilson "white heat of technology" for nuclear power speach bollocks. But it originated with Lewis Strauss.

For an amusing take on it try:

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Regards, Martin Brown

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Reply to
Martin Brown

Yeah, I saw that. Can't make heads or tails of it. Best I can figure, wind takes a lot more Capital Expense per MW generated. All this page really gives us is that they've got roughly 15000 MW of alternative generated power (which is not a lot), and about a third of this is wind (which is even less).

Especially when you get to the section on facilities. (page 23). Does it really take nearly 7,489 windmills to develop 5000 MW of power?

That's an awful lot of geographically dispersed generators to maintain! As as someone else mentioned, most of the time you drive by them, they are not spinning.

Reply to
mpm

mpm wrote in news:25880ba1-76b2-43d8-8c97- snipped-for-privacy@s21g2000prm.googlegroups.com:

Of course not - there is no ONE SINGLE end-all-and-be-all solution - the answer is "an integrated approach using diverse sources". It gets exceedingly irritating that someone or another blithers on as to how

*one* specific source won't meet "all" out energy needs, and then all alternative energy is pooh-poohed. Hell, not even oil meets *all* our energy needs, so, by the pooh-poohers' own standards, it therefore ought to be dispensed with! Don't get suckered in by that sort of simplistic nimcompoopery.

Personally, I think wind has enough potential that I've some investment exposure in it (as part of a diversified portfolio - as with energy, no one thing is "the one-and-only" solution). 'Nuff said.

Dunno, prob. can find that info by googling - find some Wind power companies and email them with your politely-worded questions; you'd be surprised at how many people actually answer email when the sender is poilte.

Uh, for one thing, because, like solar, once the system is built, you don't have to keep refueling it, you only have to maintain it. It's conceptually simple - wires, magnets, and something to rotate them one around the other.

Thing Two, unlike refineries and oil storage tanks, they don't explode.

Ting Three, no fuel means you don't get something like today's collision on the Mississippi near New Orleans that spilled a huge mass of oil into the river; you don't get situations liek the Exxon Valdiz.

Thing Four, they don't create fumes as they run, so you don't have to install scrubbers and pollution control devices adn so ons. Yes, materiel is required to build them, but the same is true of both oil refineries, and the engines that are needed to burn dieel and gas.

THere are more things, but those are a start.

Never heard of that so I dunno.

Reply to
Kris Krieger

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I used the term _The Answer_ facetiously. I guess you didn't pick up on that. I am very aware you can't put windmills on cars, for instance. (...although, earlier in life, I did have a couple Fords that would have benefited from that?) Though if we all had electric cars, then I concede the point.

"too cheap to meter" was a very famous slogan associated with the nuclear power industry.

But back to my point about Wind - which I guess is a knee jerk reaction to all the recent T. Boone Pickens commercials on television. (?) To me, that commericial, with its dramatically choreographed wipes to pictures of spinning windmills and what appears to be barely a 50-watt photoelectric panel makes me want to puke. Yesterday on MSNBC, Pickens when interviewed said we had to open up every approach: wind, oil, solar, nuclear, the works!! Duh?!

No mention of conservation, by the way. None that I heard anyway.

I was sincerely asking why there seems to be all this hype about wind generation in particular, when it not at all clear (to me at least), that wind power is even remotely capable of making any appreciable dent in our energy needs at any kind of competitive price per kWh (as compared to say, solar-thermal generation). I did not intend to debate any of the very fine points you mentioned about the greeness of these technologies.

-mpm

Reply to
mpm

It was a lie. :)

The biggest problem with producing wind power is the range of power levels you have to design for. The power available from wind runs as the cube of the wind speed. This means that you have to design the machine so that it can withstand power levels many times its average operating level.

Most modern designs have some method by which they drop their efficiency when the wind gets too strong. The ones like T. Boone Pickens is using in his ad usually are variable pitch and can feather in a very strong wind. Smaller ones are made so that they will turn out of alignment or have a mechanical brake on them to stop them turning in a strong wind.

Once you have made the power, you have to get it to market. People don't generally live right near where you would build a wind farm. You need power lines to get the power to where it will be used. Again you have the issue of the large variation in power level. You have to build lines for the peak power they will carry but they won't carry that much very often. This makes the power lines a less good investment than normal.

Wind power also runs up against the desire to store the energy. We don't have any good way to store it. The best options are to do things like pump water that don't really need to happen at a steady rate or to have a very wide ranging grid that can transfer the power from where the wind is blowing to where it isn't.

Reply to
MooseFET

No, the decommission costs will make reactors very unpopular. It will cost more than building them in the first place and since it doesn't promise any power too cheap to meter in the future it is all bad news. We have to wait for that problem to be behind us too before it is likely to get popular again.

Reply to
MooseFET

There are people who do spend their lives focused on these problems. I find it amusing that a few "experts" with no direct experience, but only opinions, have "answers". Besides, aren't all Greenies Leftist Weenies?

Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute was recently on Charlie Rose. Less than 10% of our electricity comes from oil. I think he quoted 3/4%.

I live in Minnesota where they can't build wind farms fast enough. Lots of high open prairie in the western part of the state where the wind blows incessantly. A wind generator does not interfere with farming and creates a nice income source for the land owner. XCEL Engery, the Midwest US power company is investing heavily in wind and stringing large new lines along I94 in SW Minnesota to tie that power into the grid. They even pay customers for installing energy efficient appliances since it cheaper than building a new conventional power plant.

Germany, which is more northerly than most of the US is investing heavily, we are told, in solar. (Genoa Italy is at 45 degrees North latitude, as is Minneapolis, Minnesota).

Way to much rational discussion above to ever escape not getting zinged in this opiniongroup.

B. Farmer

Reply to
Bit Farmer

Absolutely ;-)

I would guess that most plants are coal-fired, followed by natural gas, and water turbine, then nuclear.

I'm certainly for all sources of _useful_ energy.

The Democrats, stupid as bricks, are afraid to _start_ pursuing anything.

[snip]

...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

On Jul 25, 10:27=EF=BF=BDam, Jim Thompson

Me too. I wish I had more information about this whole wind thing. This weekend, I plan to set aside time to visit the link provided by Martin (above) and see what comes of that.

I must say I am not particularly impressed with BF's info regarding kickbacks to the landowner for generating power. I know this is standard practice, but it appears wind generation costs (even excluding the land) are already pretty high per kWh as compared to traditional fossil fuels. Does that make wind competitive, now or in the future as fuel costs climb?

Maybe it does just boil down to a matter of scale. If we build enough wind generators, costs come down, designs improve, people get employed, etc...

But right now, for reasons I guess I really can't explain - this wind thing is not passing the sniff test for me. I am now going to paraphrase some offline conversations I've had with other friends and engineers... See if you agree:

I would rather see us develop nuclear (with breeders), and/or solar- thermal. We have enough known Uranium stockpiles now for the next 500 years. It is just as green, (to the extent Uranium occurs naturally), and is renewable thanks to breeder reactor technology.

AND, it's not an unproved technology on large scales: France, and the US Navy (aircraft carriers & submarines) are great examples.

France produces something on the order of 80% of its needs from nuclear (since circa 1976) - so much so, that it exports energy to Italy, Germany, London, etc... and all without a single siginficant safety accident, saboage, or terrorist attack. Neither of the two Navy sub accidents (Thresher & Scorpion) were the result of nuclear, rather hull crushing at depth.

Chernobyl is another matter. That is attributable to sloppy engineering practices, poor reactor design, and human error. However, even that accident is arguably a lot less damaging than the smoke belched out by countless powerplants all over the world. (?)

Wind may be inevitable as a bridge technology - to get us to whatever better solution(s) might be out there in the future. Fusion? But given what I know, this really seems to be the hard way to get there. Or am I completely off base here?

-mpm

Reply to
mpm

Jim;

I think that power plant order sounds about right. Our biggest usage of oil is automotive. Natural gas is sleeper. And for the northern and northeastern tier of states, an awful lot of power comes in from Canadien Hydro-electric plants.

The Democrats lost their souls a long time ago. It must have happened when they had their spines removed.

B. Farmer

Reply to
Bit Farmer

The biggest issue with Nuclear is the waste management. They either have to store it on site, or ship it to a containment facility. There really aren't any in the US. Big NIMBY controversy over Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The local Nuclear plants store it on site in concrete casks.

Industry has never had a great track record in regard to hazardous waste. The materials used in Nuclear Power generation are not the kind of stuff you ever want showing up in anyones water supply .

Then you have the logistic nightmare of transporting it to the storage facility. Both rail and trucks travel through the hearts of major cities. Talk about the potential for a dirty bomb. No need for procuring the nasty stuff - just take out the vehicles transporting it!

If there was someplace or method of safely disposing of nuclear waste, I would think Nuclear Energy would be a great solution.

What does France do for waste storage?

b. Farmer

Reply to
Bit Farmer
[snip]

Feed the unemployed with it ?:-)

...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

[snip]

May I steal that line? Thank you!!

...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

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France uses breeder reactors, so there is actually very little waste.

Reply to
mpm

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