Wind Toons: Recomended Website
June 7th, 2009
|
| Share |
A few years ago it seemed like daring to insult wind power was nearly blasphemous. Since then, a lot has changed and a lot more turbines have been going up. As more and more people deal with shadow-flicker, reduced home values and other issues more and more are starting to question the wisdom of the investment in wind power. As time goes on the electric bills are not dropping and no coal or gas power plants are being shut down, thus skepticism is starting to prevail and people are starting to take a second look.
Could the honeymoon be over? Perhaps.
There are now a number of cartoons (political cartoons) that are taking a decidedly un-wind side and highlighting some of the problems with wind as a power source.
Many of them can be found on the website Windtoons.com
Here is one of my favorites:
This entry was posted on Sunday, June 7th, 2009 at 9:19 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Culture, Enviornment, Humor, Misc, 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.
View blog reactions
June 7th, 2009 at 9:59 pm
One of the argument ‘renewables’ advocates like to make against nuclear power is that nuclear power reactors take too long to build in comparison to things like wind turbines, and therefor can’t contribute in time to make a significant impact on the process of AGW.
I have taken aim at that destructive meme in the latest post on my blog:
http://channellingthestrongforce.blogspot.com/2009/06/pressing-need-for-vast-power.html
If you think this is an effective argument for the pro-nuclear cause, feel free to utilise it wherever effective.
Quote Comment
June 7th, 2009 at 10:16 pm
Nowhere on the planet has industrial wind energy proved it’s claims. Wind farms are carbon credit creators. They have no other purpose.
The wind industry is a fraud and governments are complicit. Governments know that wind: first, does not have the ability to keep the lights on. Second, wind is not capable of substantially cutting C02 emissions. And lastly wind cannot continually power anywhere near the number of homes the industryclaims.
Yet, these are all things being promoted by the people we elect. Now please tell me that they haven’t been bought and paid for.
Quote Comment
June 8th, 2009 at 10:56 am
Finrod said:
You can build a nuke plant in six years and if you had a number of construction projects going at the same time you could build a bunch of them. That’s going to impact coal use. How about wind turbines? There are a lot more of them than six years ago and no coal mines or power plants are going out of buisiness. No gas plants either!
Sorry but the whole idea is stupid.
Even the biggest proponents of wind power say we could have 20% in 20 years. Excuse me, but if there is impending doom, then a few percent is not going to change much.
As if there were impending doom anyway. What? We suddenly hit the tipping point in six years? So if we get things in control in five years then we’re fine but if it takes seven then we may as well give up because all is lost? I don’t think it works that way. They can’t even predict the weather in a month.
Quote Comment
June 8th, 2009 at 11:34 am
Giant Pulsating Brain said:
I can’t speak for the validity of Professor Sacket’s claim. The precise details don’t matter all that much to the point I was trying to make, which was that the ability to use the power from nuclear reactors for geoengineering AGW solutions eliminates the old pro-’renewables’ argument that a widespread increase in nuclear power generation can’t make any difference in the battle against climate change because it would take too long to do.
Quote Comment
June 8th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
It would be nice if the honeymoon is over but it seems that the marriage is still in force:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=10-largest-renewable-energy-projects
Quote Comment
June 8th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Farmer Gary said:
The other thing of course is that the whole wind thing is a case of urbanite Greens, who wouldn’t know what end of a shovel goes in the ground, are pushing for more wind over the objections of the rural communities that have to put up with them. The wind industry with the backing of the govt. is picking off small municipal councils one at at time with lies and threats to build these things.
Only the individual landowners leasing their land can be said to benefit. Yet for negatively altering our common landscape and degrading wildlife habitat and water ecology (with clearing, foundations, and roads), for adding noise and light pollution day and night, the landowner (who more often than not, it seems, does not live in the area) signs a lease drawn up by the wind company and effectively becomes a caretaker of their interests in perpetuity.
In balance, there is no benefit to the country, to the state or region, and certainly not to the hosting localities from industrial wind turbine installations.
Quote Comment
June 8th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
DV82XL said:
The argument sometimes given is that the total magnitude of the impact of wind turbines is fairly small all things considered. They do produce annoying shaddow flicker, but only for a given distance. They do produce noise, but plenty of other things like highways do too, they do alter the landscape, but they don’t alter it as badly as some other things and they’re only on a portion of the landscape.
This is valid to some point, because anything does produce some impacts that might not be welcome but the context should be cost-benefit. Sure the impact is not catastrophic, but what do you get in return? If they produced many gigawatts of reliable energy it would be worth it to have to put up with their downsides but they don’t and that tips the balance.
Quote Comment
June 8th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Here’s a pretty interesting graph about wind and its usefulness in Germany:
http://i171.photobucket.com/albums/u304/wflamme/DE_2006-Stromexport_ueber_Windeinsp.png
You won’t find this info on windindustry sites. The graph shows German electricity imports/exports over wind power production for the year 2006. Each dot represents 1 hour of the year. The horizontal axis is windpower production in MWh/h, the vertical axis shows electricity exports (positive values) and imports (negative values) in MWh/h.
One can immediately see that during times of low wind production a lot of electricity has to be imported from other countries. During times of high wind production a lot of electricity production exceeds demand and has to be exported. Much of it goes to Switzerland, Austria and Norway.
Countries that have large hydro recources.
These countries then can throttle their hydro production by letting more water bypass their turbines.
Wind production typically peaks in spring and fall, as summer and winter are dominated by high pressure systems with low wind. In spring hydro production peaks also from snowmelt. In fall the low pressure systems that bring high wind, also bring high rainfall amounts, therefore the reservoirs are full also.
Of course the wind power produced gets CO2 credits. Even if it just displaces some hydro. Or in this case its sole benefit is to reduce some wear on hydro turbines.
But even when NOT exported, its effect is NOT to replace existing power plants, but to change the production mix from coal/nuclear to natural gas.
Wind acts as fast changing virtual load. That load has to be compensated by fast reacting natural gas turbines if hydro is not sufficiently available.
And if you have enough hydro, you don’t need the wind anyway.
The natural gas capacity in Germany and Spain for example has grown in lockstep with the wind capacity.
And that’s why the oil/gas conglomerates invest in wind. With its capacity factor of 17-18% (Germany), the gas companies can capture the other 83-84% of that capacity.
Which they couldn’t otherwise because gas is too expensive for base load.
Quote Comment
June 8th, 2009 at 8:37 pm
KLA said:
Wind can save some hydro capacity and if paired with gas turbines it can reduce their usage a little bit, but it’s not as good as it might seem at first. Most of the energy is still lost and spinning reserve has its problems. For one thing, there is no power source that can go from zero to 100% output quickly – not even hydro. Hydro can go from *near idle* to 100% quickly, but not from shut down. The generators have to be fully energized and the gates have to be open to begin with. Otherwise it takes some time to energize the field coils and spin the system up and then lock phase and bring it into power.
Therefore, the system has to always be at about 10% water flow, even if it’s not generating any power, just to assure that it is ready to do so immediately and smoothly. Gas turbines can be throttled up, but not from a cold start, so they need to burn at least some gas continuously. The other thing is that throttling these things up and down ends up wasting power. With hydro it does save some, but when there is rapidly reducing load, then the turbine needs to remain at the proper spin rate and this means that either water is diverted and just goes to waste or in some circumstances, the turbine is actually made to actively resist the flow, even expending energy in the process, just to keep it from over spinning.
This shouldn’t result in a net loss, but it gets worse as things get more variable.
There was a report from the IEEE that showed on some gas plants paired with wind, the effeciency actually went down. This isn’t all that surprising when you look at the big picture. The high effeciency gas fired plants are combined cycle. They have a gas turbine – basically a jet engine, and that is used for power and then the exhaust heats a steam boiler for additional power. Gas turbines tend to function best when running at a relatively consistent load. They don’t like being throttled up and down heavily and it impacts their performance.
The bigger issue is the steam turbines though. If you have a combined cycle plant which is running at idle for a while and then suddenly the wind stops blowing and the throttle has to be brought up to 100%, then you’ll get plenty of power out of the gas turbines, but the steam boiler wouldn’t have much pressure after having been run in idle for a while. It will take a while to build up a good head of steam before you can start running the steam turbines at full power. While the steam system is heating back up, you end up running in simple-cycle mode and this can cut down the effeciency by as much as 50%.
The loss that is incurred whenever a power plant is throttled is normally minor and acceptable, because normally it doesn’t have to be so heavily throttled very often, but if there is a system where it’s swinging back and forth between high and low load it can be severe. In extreme circumstances, even to the point of negating the gains.
To make an analogy: You burn less gas when your car is going relatively slow when it’s going fast, but you burn even more when your car is repeatedly cycling between stopping and going. That is the worst of both worlds.
Quote Comment
June 9th, 2009 at 12:22 am
If the Renewable Portfolio Standards for new Renewables, which will be almost entirely Wind, are fulfilled in Europe and the USA, as required or likely will be required, then Wind will commonly peak at 100% of Grid Capacity in many regions. Right now, Wind Penetration is so low that in Europe the peak in the few countries that have a lot of Wind is simply exported, but that won’t work when every country meets the EU’s requirement for Wind energy. Similarily in the USA, if current expansion plans go ahead, there will be nowhere to export the Wind energy peaks.
So what is going to happen when the Wind Energy Peaks commonly displace baseload Coal and Nuclear Power? What are the implications of that for Utilities when they consider their future Generation Sources?
Quote Comment
June 9th, 2009 at 2:41 am
Warren Heath said:
Without contributing any reliable capacity, wind will nonetheless make nuclear, by far our most practical and reliable form of zero carbon energy, less profitable. Existing plants will be caught in a trap and new construction will be discouraged entirely. Already the British Nuclear Group is complaining that it can’t build any new reactors if they have to compete against subsidized wind farms. Anti-nuclear activists are turning handsprings, claiming joyously that wind is finally replacing nuclear. But that’s not what’s happening. Instead, nothing will be replacing existing capacity–namely, the coal burning plants that are one of the largest sources of carbon emissions–as demand increases in years ahead. That means carbon emissions won’t be meaningfully reduced, since coal plants will have to stay on line to provide backup.
Quote Comment
June 9th, 2009 at 5:02 am
Warren Heath said:
It will mean that when the wind blows there will be a bit more thermal discharge from the power plants that actually provide the energy. It could, however, mean that there will also be less profit, because the law requires utility companies pay full market price per megawatt-hour for wind and solar power, even if it’s worse than worthless to them. If someone provides 100 megawatt-hours of reliable continuous power and someone else provides 100 megawatt-hours of power in the form of a few short bursts without any notice or reliability, they must pay the same if the one who provides the crappy power is “renewable”
I don’t think it will kill nuclear, even if it does take some of the profit away from it by forcing payment to a source that is more trouble than it’s worth.
I guess the alternative would be just to start building lots of really big resistors to take up the extra unwanted surges and just take a hit on the cost.
Quote Comment
June 9th, 2009 at 9:36 am
drbuzz0 said:
Now that’s an idea a politician could love. Have the Utility buy Giant Load Banks to dump the Surplus Wind Energy into, that way we can still pay for and subsidize every bit of it, without it causing Grid Instability. And it will still show up as Wind Power Generation in the EIA stats. And spend more billions subsidizing Energy Efficiency. Keep thinking like that and you’ll have a job offer as Secretary Chu’s Right Hand Man.
Quote Comment
June 9th, 2009 at 1:05 pm
As the law is written in most places power companies really can’t negotiate with wind power producers and have to pay what is considered the wholesale price in the area for power. It is a total scam because normally power distributors consider factors like load response and reliability and other things like that when considering contracts with generator owners. It makes it expensive and it needs to be paid even if they dont want it. Wind might be worthwhile if the producers actually had to regulate their output and have local flow batteries or something. That won’t happen because the law is that they get as much money with or without that. It’s all a giant scam. The distributors all know this and don’t really like wind but what are they going to do? The law is the law and also in many states they can get a reimbursement or a tax credit for claims of expenses from buying wind power. They don’t care them if they’re paid to deal with it.
Quote Comment
June 10th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
The best way to create opponents to wind power is to build a big turbine farm near them. If you’ve ever been near one for a long period of time you will understand. They are not loud, but they produce this woshing thumping pulse that makes everything around them reverberate. Things like shutters and anything made of sheetmetal buzz in pulses every time the blade woshes through. Also they create this wicked strobe light effect that is about the worst thing you can imagine if you’re lying in bed on a weekend morning.
Quote Comment
June 10th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
I think that utility companies should go ahead and let wind power proponents use wind power. And if they want to tear down the coal plant, that’s fine too. They just have to sit in the dark whenever the wind dies. Interrupt American Idol once or twice and they might get the message.
Quote Comment
June 10th, 2009 at 6:39 pm
People love wind power because there’s so little of it!
Wind currently produces less than 2% of our total electricity in America. But public resistance to these noisy and expensive bird and bat killing eye sores is growing. I believe that the anti-wind sentiment will rival that of the anti-nuclear sentiment in America long before wind capacity reaches 10% of America’s electricity production.
Quote Comment