Wind Power Could Provide For 100% of Human Energy Needs? no…
June 30th, 2009
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An recent entry on Slashdot stated the following:
“To estimate the earth’s capacity for wind power, the researchers first sectioned the globe into areas of approximately 3,300 square kilometers (2,050 square miles) and surveyed local wind speeds every six hours. They imagined 2.5 megawatt turbines crisscrossing the terrestrial globe, excluding ‘areas classified as forested, areas occupied by permanent snow or ice, areas covered by water, and areas identified as either developed or urban,’ according to the paper. They also included the possibility of 3.6 megawatt offshore wind turbines, but restricted them to 50 nautical miles off the coast and to oceans depths less than 200 meters. Using [these] criteria the researchers found that wind energy could not only supply all of the world’s energy requirements, but it could provide over forty times the world’s current electrical consumption and over five times the global use of total energy needs.”
This based on a study which was presented to the National Acadamny of Sciences. Technically, they are correct in so far as there is enough energy there, but damn is it defuse. Hell, I’m surprised it could only provide 40 times the energy needs of man. Note that they use all the area that is not classified as forested, not covered year round by ice or snow and does not quality as “urban” in terms of population density and development. Note also that they would like wind farms to be located within 50 nautical miles of shore, except where water depths exceed 200 meters. In general, you won’t find water that deep right off the coasts except in cases where there is a very steep drop.
Thus, I took a map of what are generally considered “urban areas” and placed it ontop of a map of forested areas and ice-covered areas. Finally I transposed the remaining land area to this map. It might not be perfect, but this is a pretty good approximation of what is suggested:
(Click to Enlarge)
Yes, that’s right. Imagine wind turbines stacked on a grid with one every four to eight acres, covering most of the Western United States, up through the Rockies into Canada and down into Mexico. Indeed a large portion of North America is covered as is much of South America. But that’s nothing compared to Australia. Damn near all of that country is covered, save a few forested areas and the urban areas around Perth, Sydney, Melbourne and such. Africa also gets a lot of area covered, with most of that country qualifying as neither forest or urban. As does most of the Middle East and Central Asia, from Southern Russia through the Gobi desert and into Central India.
Not to mention, of course, the fact that wind turbines will be off the coasts for as far as the eye can see. A few islands in an area with a shallow reef topography can make for a surprising area covered as well.
All I can say about this plan: I really hope you don’t live in a “rural” area, because if it is not fully developed, you could look forward to some misery.
How would this be buffered anyway? Does it even matter? Obviously this is not going to happen. Hell, even 1/40 of this are is still absurdly large – even 1% is absurdly large. So why is this crap put out anyway? Oh I know the answer to that: it clouds the issue and makes unsophisticated readers think that there is a prayer of a chance this will happen.
NEWSFLASH: There is more than enough energy to power all human needs in the orbital motion of Jupiter. It’s roughly as likely we’ll recover that as this ridiculous idea.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 1:05 am and is filed under Bad Science, Enviornment, Obfuscation, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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June 30th, 2009 at 2:13 am
I think wind power on such a huge scale would be a good idea…
… IF the work of Storm van der Leeuwen were factual, instead of a hack-job by the Club of Rome (which it is).
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June 30th, 2009 at 3:26 am
I note that the area around Hudson’s Bay and the Arctic coast forms part of exploitable areas on the map. Well good luck putting wind turbines up there and having them last a Winter. The same is probably true of the Siberia coast as well.
Dreaming in color, or what.
At any rate check this out: Nuclear industry accused of hijacking clean energy forum
It seems that France – a major user and exporter of nuclear technologies – is accused by critics of trying to win the top job inside the International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena) so it can move the organization towards being a promoter of atomic power.
Naturally the Greens are having an aneurysm over this. Eric Martinot, a senior research director with the Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies is quoited as saying: “Are the original goals of Irena being co-opted so that renewables become a mere appendage to a nuclear agenda? ‘Sprinkling some renewables on top of nuclear power’?”
I say we can only hope.
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June 30th, 2009 at 9:21 am
There are clearly a few spots where wind power makes sense – The passes out of the SF Bay area for example which are very windy on the hottest days of the year (right when amd where you need the power). Generally you are right just not enough punch to to the job or if you have enough wind it is too remote to be worth transmitting.
I live in the N. Coast of Cal – home to the “off the grid” solar power “lifestyle.” In general what this means is about 15-20% of our housing stock has some solar panels batteries (lead acid largely) some “microturbines” if they are near running water and perhaps a wind generator. Plus a wood stove of course. Finally thier is ALWAYS a shed in somewhere on the properly with a Gas or Deisel GENERATOR to charge the batteries. Why do they need a generator? Because Solar, Microhydro and Wind can’t provide all the juice they need to keep the batteries charged! The whole thing is a lie. You have hazardous wastes from the generators (oil and fuel), hazardous waste from the batteries (lead, acid and plastics) smoke from the woodtoves (and the 3 cords of wood it takes to heat a house all year), deforestration (for heat and sunlight access for solar), dust and silt from dirt roads and a general degredation of the environment – all in the name of “renewable energy.” It’s a pretty messed up world we live in.
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June 30th, 2009 at 11:12 am
DV82XL said:
Technically speaking, the area is not subject to ice and snow all year round – just most of the year. It does have a thaw period in the summer. Those ares don’t have contiguous permafrost, at least not until you dig down a good two feet or so. Even most of Syberia qualifies under their definition.
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June 30th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Great map! I somewhat envisioned miles and miles and miles of windmills, but this map really drives home the point that windmills have limited value.
Rhetorical question: do they plan to have any farming? It is difficult to farm underneath a windmill and has serious dangers associated with it. We could have lots of energy under this plan, but we would all starve to death. My starvation prevention technique: I’d hang around the windmills to collect dead birds until we ran out of them. Migratory bird routes would be a great place to hang out. Sandhill crane tastes like chicken, at least that’s what they tell me
.
Buzz0: have you figured out how many windmills there are under this plan? Is the density of windmills (1 per 4-8 acres) based on the average wind speed? Could the density be higher? Even so, Wow! One every 4-8 acres. It really boggles the mind.
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June 30th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
leg said:
I haven’t seen the final report in its entirety, but they suggest 2.5 megawatt wind tuirbines on land and as a general rule the area each turbine occupies for maximum return is about 4-8 acres, depending on a few other factors like topography. If you pack them much closer than that they can end up interfering with each other in so far as blocking wind or creating pressure pockets.
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June 30th, 2009 at 2:13 pm
drbuzz0 said:
Well it wasn’t the ice and snow I was thinking about as much as the very high winds and blowing snow that makes movement up there impossible for days on end during the Winter months. But that’s not all. Transporting anything that can’t be airlifted across the muskeg is impossible during the thawed periods, the mines up there are served by an ice road that is open for a few short weeks during the high winter, anything heavy that doesn’t make it up then, waits.
For gold and diamonds this might be worth it, but for a network of windmills, it would be out of the question. The cost of the fuel alone for such a project would be staggering.
The thing is there are literally quads of unexploited hydro available ‘North of 60″ on the rivers running to the Arctic Ocean that are not considered viable investments, wind turbines aren’t going to happen there first.
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June 30th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
I wonder why we almost never hear anything about this scheme
http://www.skywindpower.com/ww/index.htm
from the renewables enthusiasts.
This idea for tapping the much stronger & steadier winds a few km up doesn’t strike me as a sure thing to work, but at least it avoids the diffuseness & intermittency that makes most solar & wind schemes impractical.
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June 30th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
Jim Baerg said:
Flying anything that big in the atmosphere is never trivial, to do so for an extended period of time is even more of a challenge. Large aircraft require a huge number of man-hours of maintenance and an inventory of spare units (like engines, and landing gear, and so on) to keep operating. But more important, they land every few hours, making it relativity easy to carry out any maintenance, and more importantly to see if anything needs to be fixed.
I really can’t see these platforms being cost effective, given the state of the art in aviation at this time.
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July 1st, 2009 at 1:04 am
Has anyone seen the TV ad that has started running recently were this man is standing out on in the countryside with hills in the background. As he stands there thinking windmills start springing up obscuring the landscape. Until a row runs from him to the hills and across the tops of the hills.
Now I think the ad is supposed to be about possibilities with some school or the other but it does a great job of visually showing why you don’t want wind farms in an area. By the end of the ad the wind farm is cluttering up the landscape. Oh and unlike a real wind farm all of the windmills had their blades turning at a very low RPM that couldn’t have been generating much power at all.
So while I think the people making the ad intended it to be a hip positive message about wind power buried in their other ad it instead is a graphic demonstration of why you don’t want wind farms.
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July 1st, 2009 at 11:03 pm
DV82XL said:
Thanks. That explains the major difficulty with getting the scheme to actually work economically. Of course a scheme being unworkable is no reason for it to not be hyped by lots of enthusiasts.
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July 2nd, 2009 at 3:34 am
Wind power strikes me as being less feasible than it is always trumped to be. No matter how many new wind farms they build it never seems to really make an impact. The fact that they have been going at it so long and it still needs subsidies so heavily makes me wonder if it has what it takes. They say it creates a lot of jobs. Explain to me how this is a good thing? Jobs are only good when they do something and not when they are supported by payouts of everyone else’s pocket. I just don’t know, but it occurs to me that these grand plans to provide 20% of power from wind, assuming they happen at all, still fall 80% short and I can’t believe this is lost on most.
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July 3rd, 2009 at 12:19 pm
It does not matter if wind can provide 100% of human energy needs.
There is no reason to centralize the use and production of energy. Individuals use energy sources of whatever type on the basis of cost and convenience. For some , energy from wind is either cheaper or more convenient than alternatives, and that is good enough for them.
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July 3rd, 2009 at 11:22 pm
Michael Ejercito said:
Of course it does. Wind and solar advocates typically propose phasing out all nuclear and coal power, running on natural gas in the interrim until wind and solar can provide for all energy needs. This is a dangerous fantasy.
Michael Ejercito said:
Sure there is. It’s cheap, effective and requires much less transmission and grid complexity whenever you have big, centralized consumers. There is no reason the likes of cities and industrial districts should use diffuse and decentralized sources.
Michael Ejercito said:
I’m not opposed to people buying wind turbines, solar PV or investing in these sources. I’m opposed to raping the tax payer and/or rate payers to prop up a dangerous delusion.
For some, the reason wind power appears cheap and practical is that generous subsidies are provided, most of which arent all that apparent to the users. E.g. it’s not immediately obvious that net-metering is a huge subsidy, because it’s not understood that most of the electricity you “export” to the grid will be wasted and that for each kWh negated you have transmitted 2 kWh through the grid but paid for zero.
Proping up delusions can be extremely dangerous; Greenspan and George Bush spent the last 8 years proping up malinvestments after the dot com bust with loose monetary policy and massive deficit spending rather than allowing the recession which would have liquidated the malinvestments and reorganized the land, labour and capital tied up in them in more productive ways. They succeded in propping up the “consumer-driven economy”, that was a sheer fantasy, by allowing people to buy rapidly appreciating houses(~20% per year! Due to piss-poor lending practices, securitization, cheap money and option-arms with negative amortization) and borrow out the appreciation to spend on buying stuff. Rather than face the severe recession in 2000-2001 you have now brought yourself and much of the world to the brink of a depression. If Obama and Bernanke continue the effort to ignore reality and defend the malinvestments it will not be possible to blow up another bubble and kick the can another 8 years; they’ll be forced to monetize countless trillions and nationalize ever more failing institutions because nobody will want to hold, much less buy, US treasuries. The US will face a currency crisis if they continue this way. They’re walking in the foot-steps of Hoover and Roosevelt; doing everything they did to turn a severe recession into the great depression.
Proping up illusions is like a cancer victim trying to ignore their cancer, taking morphine and stimulants to keep going when going gets tough rather than facing reality and getting chemo and radiotherapy. If you do it for a week, it probably won’t change the outcome; keep doing it long enough and reality catches up to you with a vengence sooner or later.
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July 4th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
Michael Ejercito said:
At one time, energy was not centralized. Some want to go back to these days.
Also, at one time, agriculture was not centralized in big “factory farms” but was done in a “distributed” way where people all farmed their own land. Under that system, people had a tendency to starve on a frequent basis.
At one time, production of manufactured goods was not centralized in big factories, but was done locally and in a “distributed” way exclusively by craftsmen. Only the rich could afford manufactured goods.
Before the centralized steel mill there was the distributed blacksmith and steel was very expensive.
Before the centralized auto production line, cars were built in carriage houses by small time mechanics and were toys for the extremely rich.
Before the centralized papermills and printing shops, books were created in a “distributed” way by monks or scribes who transcribed them by hand. They were so rare that they could be worth their weight in gold.
Some people seem to have a lot of trouble realizing that there are advantages to not “distributing” everything into smalltime operations.
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July 4th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Why do Greens claim to oppose centralization of energy production, while supporting centralization of transport (trains and buses are centralized, while private cars and taxis are decentralized).
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July 14th, 2009 at 1:11 am
GE, it should not surprise you, makes wind turbines. Their on shore 2.5 MW model is the apple of their eye. It has 100 meter long rotors.
4 of them can generate 10 MW if the wind is between 28 and 56 mph. And 40 can generate 100 MW, and 400, 1 GW. 100 GW would require 40,000 of the pups.
How far apart do they need to be? This document from Australia says 3 to 5 rotor diameters across the wind (N-S in the Great Plains) and that the rows need to be 5 to 7 rotor diameters apart. Trying to work this and be generous to the case for wind energy, I take the rotor diameter of the GE 2.5 MW turbines as 200 meters. I would guess that they need to be spaced about 0.5 km N-S and 1 km E-W.
In the Great Plains the US is about 2000 km from Mexico to Canada. 2000 km will host a N-S line of 4000 machines. Its nameplate capacity would be 10 GW. To get 1 TW there would have to be 100 rows spaced over 100 km. 200,000 km^2 is about the size of Nebraska. This is not a big project, it is pharaonic.
And how much would it cost? I don’t know precisely, and I don’t think anybody does. My research tended to indicate that the generators themselves could be had for $1 to $2 per Watt, installed on dry land. (Anything in the water will cost a lot more). But that does not include things like land, service roads, and auxiliary buildings. Nor does it include any type of energy storage.
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October 2nd, 2009 at 9:04 pm
Wind power is good although it looks a bit bulkier compared to solar cells. i am trying to build a small wind generator at home too.
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November 4th, 2009 at 6:55 am
Wind Power is one of the best alternative energy sources that we should utilize, it is very clean and non-polluting. I was able to built a small wind generator at home which can power small appliances.
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November 5th, 2009 at 1:44 am
Critique of ‘A path to sustainable energy by 2030′
Posted on 3 November 2009 by Barry Brook
http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/11/03/wws-2030-critique/
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