By far the most wind turbines have been built on land and for good reason: it's much cheaper. As long as there is space/not too many people complaining it makes more sense to build on land. Not sure exactly but on land installed wind is probably ~10x the installed capacity offshore. However on land turbines are pretty much maxed out at about 7,5MW, due to logistical difficulties of getting larger blades, towers and nacelles transported over the road. These limitations don't apply to offshore sites, so the up-scaling continues. In the last few years typical offshore turbines have grown to about 9MW, but that is not the limit. Within a few years we should see 12-15MW turbines being installed, which should bring the cost down. Combined with the better wind conditions offshore (at least around the North Sea) offshore wind may become cheaper than expanding on land.
It was my impression that the main reason for building offshore is because the winds are much more steady there. The definition of trade wind is a "permanent prevailing wind"; building someplace with "permanent" winds sounds like a good idea to me.
The better wind conditions help, but offshore wind is really expensive. Transport and install alone for a big offshore turbine can easily cost EUR 1-2M. Add to that undersea cables, higher maintenance costs (salt water, difficult access) and it is clear why onshore wind (if possible) is still the preferred choice. Nonetheless, mainly due to the up-scaling and abundance of available ocean space offshore wind has taken off in the last few years.
Offshore siting also allows for much larger wind turbines, which are needed to economically exploit the higher quality winds given the extra expense of offshore construction and maintenance.
Onshore turbines are size constrained by transportation limits. Waters-edge construction and transport by sea allows for larger elements.
Transmission!!! A huge appeal of offshore for densely populated areas is you can put the huge turbines far off the coast of a dense area and then have very effective transmission, something which onshore is vastly limited by due to NIMBYism and lobbying and regulation.
Unfortunately, offshore gets hit by NIMBYism a lot more than it should. Senator Ted Kennedy axed wind off the Massachussetts coast because it would interfere with his view.
Ted Kennedy has been dead for a decade. More recently, the president said that the noise from wind turbines gives people cancer. In the end they are just two people that are wrong.
"NIMBYism" is a word that turns off critical thought in some people and ruins discussions.
There is a large inventory of coastlines with wind energy potential. There will be many distractions as they are developed by coal companies trying to derail those projects. That may be through astroturfing which will present itself as "NIMBYism" and divides people to weaken them.
Not so much NIMBY/regulation as lack of good sites onshore. Low efficiency sites effectively increase the cost.
Additionally, a lot of densely populate coastal areas are populated quite a ways inland. You need open space around the big wind turbines for safety reasons - farmland is best.
AIUI the next round of UK offshore auctions are expected to do better than onshore, along with being cheaper than already existing gas plants. That's based on the current state of the art 300m high 15MW turbines - and there's no sign scaling up is stopping yet.
This is nuts. I wonder what the effect of spending $1T on nuclear would be in comparison. I bet it's enough money to get to practical nuclear fusion in a decade, which would largely obviate the need in most other energy generation methods.
Then again the German government seems dead set on also subsidizing coal/gas by not internalizing their societal costs. So just removing those "subsidies" would already make wind/solar more attractive. Turns out, energy needs to be more expensive, and we should probably save energy.
> Cost: 1.4 billion Euros Lifetime: 20 years Power: 350 MW Max. capacity: 0.4 (40%) Price at the electricity stock exchange Leipzig: 36 Euro/MWh
Because wind farms have 0 fuel costs, they will operate at any price above a few eurocents per MWH. Which means once a critical mass of wind farms is operating in an area, the price frequently dives all the way to near 0. Sucks if you operate wind farms. Sucks less if you ALSO operate natural gas generators which you can then idle. And sucks a lot less if you're a consumer with dispatch able loads.
Why do you set a fixed price of 36 Euro / MWh for the next 20 years. At least take the phelix Futures to get a somewhat reasonable picture:
https://www.eex.com/en/market-data/power/futures/phelix-de-f... (45€ Base / 53€ Peak).
With the EU-ETS Certs getting more an more sparse and expensive over time, coal will be phased out more and more which will increase the price.
Interest in Germany: ~0-1%, expected inflation: 1-2%, terminal value: X unknown (but not 0). Just adding these parameters would change the conclusion of your valuation model significantly. Secondly losses are not subsidies. Subsidies are what governments dole out, losses are for investors and companies.
I don't know the specifics, but there are subsidies in place through the EEG[0] to prevent such losses.
In general energy also seems to be a low-risk business, where if the energy companies would ever loose money, they are either already covered by the government or can sue the government for losses due to changed regulations with a good chance of winning.
The platforms, towers and undersea cables are already paid for. Replacing one piece of the system isn't starting over. The math presented was of all return on investment ending at 20 years.
> It's going to take a lot more than $1T and a decade for fusion to be cost-competitive with wind and solar.
Wind and solar don't even compete in the same category as nuclear until you include storage. Cheap, bursty energy is useless for base-load.
Wind/solar are still far more expensive than fossil and nuclear when you take into account the over-provisioning and energy storage requirements to provide reliable base-load.
There is no requirement that the grid requires "baseload" sources of power. The grid can operate with flexible sources of power that can ramp (gas, some hydro, etc.) in addition to wind and solar. If anything nuclear and coal, which can only run at 80-100% capacity or 0% capacity are inconvenient and inflexible sources of power.
The grid survives fine when nuclear and coal plants go offline for several days for maintenance/turn-arounds!
> Wind/solar are still far more expensive than fossil and nuclear when you take into account the over-provisioning and energy storage requirements to provide reliable base-load.
Michael Shellenberger, founder of pro-nuclear lobbying outfit Environmental Progress.
He is so pro nuclear and anti renewables that he simply makes stuff up in order to show $50 is less than $5. Oh look, he's branded the graphs with his lobbying outfit logo. Why is he not comparing with other countries that are getting it right? Ah because the conclusion was determined before he wrote a single word.
The Forbes link is Shellenberger, it's even in the URL. I'm not going to plough through a 224 page joint Nuclear Energy Agency / OECD study, with 8 page densely packed conclusion. I don't trust Shellenberger to distil anything honestly - he has way too much form.
Without any awareness of relative pricing I'd have liked to see comparisons with nations who haven't had the well reported issues Germany has had, with negative prices and what seems a huge proportion of solar given their latitude - along with recent increases of using lignite.
The "obvious" choices would seem to be Sweden, Iceland, Morocco, Denmark and UK. Perhaps China, or even Costa Rica who seem to have the world's most ambitious target - carbon free by 2021. I'm sure there's others progressing quickly.
Is that with or without energy storage you'd need for the wind turbines? Does the estimate account for the fact that building a large number of nuclear plants means dramatically cheaper unit cost?
Looks like a single fission plant costs around 6 to 9 billion and construction costs tend to go up. There's not a lot of room for iteration and learning from experience; you have to get it right the first time.
Compare that with a competitive industry that's manufacturing in bulk and improving every year. Where do the lines cross?
When you spend $1T on building nuclear plants, you will be manufacturing in bulk and improving every year.
Let's assume that a single fission plant costs $5B (if you're building hundreds of them, you can take advantage of some economies of scale). For $1T, you can build 200 of them. New fission plants have something like 2 GW capacity on average. 2 GW times 200 is 400 GW.
Now, US uses 13 quads of BTU worth of electricity annually.[1]. 13 quads a year is 434 GW of power on average. So, we could basically cover our energy needs with $1T worth of nuclear plants, if you average things out and ignore peaking needs. Most certainly, however, if you add $1T worth of nuclear to our current system, as opposed to adding $1T worth of wind energy, we'll pretty much be able to go off fossil fuels in electricity generation altogether, with already existing water and renewable generation. The resulting system will be much better for environment (less land used for nuclear plants than for equivalent $1T worth of wind turbines), safer (wind turbines are more dangerous per kWh produced than nuclear, people die installing those every year), and more stable (the supply will be extremely steady, and will not depend on weather fluctuations).
One doesn't even need to build utility scale nuclear power plants. There is a better option now - SMRs which can be mass produced, quailty checked and incrementally improved in a factory. Install 10…12 x 60 MWe modules in a single setting and one can replace a 700 MWe utility size reactor. Refueling downtime also has less impact because one only has to refuel one module at a time.
>> drastic climate change which is now beginning to occur
Where is it "beginning to occur"? And if you do really believe this, wouldn't you want to shut down the second largest emitter of carbon worldwide as soon as possible by the most efficient means available to us?
Pretty much my thinking as well. It's not a question of not investing in clean energy, it's a question which is a better bang for the buck and which gets us to fully carbon free energy faster and more reliably. Economies of scale would drive the costs of power plants down like you wouldn't believe. And then there's the secondary effect of more investment into nuclear physics research, which, after we figure out fusion will make carbon based energy completely obsolete everywhere, forever.
I am watching right now a conference [1] on youtube precisely on the comparison of hypothetical 100% wind vs 100% nuclear.
Basically it explains that wind has a typical average utilisation of about 20% vs 70% for full nuclear. A turbine lasts about 20-30y vs 60 for a nuclear reactor. In addition, wind is producing the electricity at the edge of the network, and you loose the diversification effect of having a network (the example he gave is that in France the total potential consumption of all usage of electricity is 4-5x the total installed supply, because not all machines are switched on at the same time, but if you produce your electricity locally you must size it to the potential local need). In addition you have to stock more between seasons for wind than nuclear. So even though the cost per kW built of wind is roughly half or a third of nuclear, the overall cost is 10-20x higher than nuclear.
Another thing that isn’t lasting so well with wind turbines apparently are the blades. Their leading edges get seriously chewed up by tiny particles in the air (salt, dust, etc).
I cannot access this article [0]. But google image search pulled this chart out [1]. It seems to suggest that several trillion dollars have already been spend on fusion over the years.
Why is spending money on a sure thing, in the face of a global emergency with a ticking clock, "nuts", relative to wasting a decade and a trillion dollars on fantasy tech that may or may not work at all?
Yep. Watch what capital does, and don't make excuses about "regulations" or "politics". The capital is flowing into wind/solar, because the capital smells money.
People fall in love with the idea of nuclear power. They get offended that it may not be the savior after all.
My semi-educated opinion: there will never, ever be cost-effective fusion power. The unsolvable problem is neutron embrittlement. There just is no reactor wall material that can last long enough to make fusion worth it.
Probably the answer is a combination of wind, solar, and nuclear, but if we want to invest in wind, it has to be offshore.
The power output of a wind turbine is proportional to wind speed cubed and offshore wind is typically much stronger and more consistent than onshore wind. Probably we can take advantage of the expertise of oil and gas industry with offshore drilling to build offshore wind farms. Also it's safer for wild life.
The downside of offshore wind is the higher wear and tear of turbines. Last time I checked, composite delamination of turbine blades was still a problem. Also, it can be hard to recycle composites. Sometimes the only option is to literally burn them or use them as fillers in other products.
Oil and gas ("energy") companies are investing a lot into wind energy. They know they have to adopt. In the end they just want profits and they have the capital to make the right investments. I really wish the environmentalist movement saw them as just another money hungry corporation instead some evil villain out to destroy the planet. They would love to diversify their revenue stream, now is a good time to work with them because of the huge fossil fuel demand and the political pressure to wind down dependence on it.
On a separate note, I have two questions: why don't wind turbinea have more than one "wheel"? And does anyone know if ground tethered floating turbines (like airships) will be commercially viable?
> why don't wind turbines have more than one "wheel"
Which I take to mean more than one set of blades? In which case it's because they interfere with each other, and reduce the power generation possible in all surrounding turbines. Wind farms come with a minimum separation that is something like 5 or 10 blade diameters spacing, depending on prevailing winds. That spacing gives every turbine clear air free of induced eddy currents.
This is also why scaled down rooftop and urban wind generation doesn't really work - there are too many eddy currents such that generation becomes very intermittent.
Thank you, first time learnig about eddy currents. Maybe the mobility of sea based turbines makes them a bit more attractive if they can move around to position themselves for maximum efficiency?
It's a similar effect to wake turbulence from large jets - invisible without added cloud or smoke, but can have a dramatic effect, so they space landings out well.
The offshore turbines I know of are in relatively shallow water, and fixed construction on the sea bed. Not sure if deep water turbines could move around, but I imagine the processing needed to calculate would be immense - fluid dynamics is pretty complex!
The cynic in me thinks the reason fossil energy companies are keen to invest in wind and solar is that they don't believe it can operate independently of natural gas backup any time in the near future and they want to secure some baseline level of demand going forward by ensuring it wins out over nuclear (fission or fusion), advanced geothermal or any other promising low-carbon generation option that doesn't have intermittency issues.
Another reading is that those companies are in the energy business and at some level don't really care how it's generated as long as it's utility scale and has sufficiently low cost that they can make money. After all you still need distribution networks, load management, marketing, sales, administration, etc. regardless of where energy comes from. That's what energy companies provide.
The industry seems like a good fit for specialist contractors (many of which also work for oil companies) rather than an integrated oil company. They may have access to lots of capital, but that is hardly unique.
Arguably their real talent is dealing with market volatility, which could come to renewables when strike prices and subsidy levels get reduced.
They already own large wind farms and similar investments. It is already happenig. Regarding capital,oil and gas has very very deep pockets possibly second to actual governments. And their existing positio as supplier also gives them an advantage to be able to migrate existing consumers to renewables.
It's not an excuse, it is bad but their problem is the problem of capitalism. The problem with fossil fuels is both supply and demand. Involving suppliers with your efforts to move demand to a better fuel source is wisw in my opinion. Antagonizing supply while creating separate competition against fossil supply while scaring consumer demand to their competition means you made yourself their natural enemy. With a fight you must win in order to succeed. With a partnership you must find a viable solution to succeed but even then you still have to solve for demand.
Also,geopolitics: the west won agai at oil and gas? Cools, CNOOC,Gazprom and Aramco will supply most of the planet that can't afford to buy green cars and switch their electric grids to green sources, make their ships green,etc... Dying American geopolitical strong arming can only take you so far.
So disappointing journalists never understand the difference between power and energy. The opening sentences make me cringe so much I don't even want to read the rest of the article
> Last month the American wind industry hit a major milestone — 100 gigawatts of total installed capacity. That's enough electricity to power the state of California and New Jersey combined for one year.
This isn't just a journalist -- this is "the director of the Special Initiative on Offshore Wind, a U.S. offshore wind energy policy and communications program based at the University of Delaware"!!
I can only hope that the insertion of "for one year" was the act of an editor, and that the author is as upset about it as we are.
"Massive scientific breakthrough -- 100 trillion Watts of power, enough to power all the US, from just a single AAA cell flashlight battery!!!"
Sure, but the headline omitted that the power lasts for only 10^(-100) seconds or so!
In the news business, energy and power are nearly synonymous. E.g., from sports writing we might get something like:
"On Sunday Quarterback Joe Testosteroni with his massive energy and power will come with his game face on, ready to play, and win if he possibly can."
So such sports writing is in the formula fiction pattern of the high drama of a desperate clash of titans.
Be careful: Some people writing that stuff get paid more than some readers of Hacker News!
In my life, it took me some years to accept that quite broadly the news business forgot nearly all their freshman physics! They are a lot better at some of the patterns of formula fiction. We can guess they liked literature class better than physics class. They can be really good at creating smelly bait for the ad hook.
What is wrong with that sentence? As of 2018 there was ~98k MW of installed wind capacity [1]. Reaching 100 GW of installed capacity in 2019 make perfect sense. It seems like it's you that doesn't understand the difference between power (watts) vs. energy (watt-hours / joules) yet are confident enough to call a journalist out even though they are correct.
You can power some number of houses with 100 MW, or you can power the same number of houses for a year with 876 GWh, but you cannot power them for a year with 100 MW. It's as wrong as saying that the distance between San Francisco and Los Angeles is 60 miles per hour.
I know it's provocative to run across a comment that seems both wrong and arrogant, but please correct the former without escalating the latter. Then the thread for sure moves in a better direction.
installed capacity equals power. That amount of power either is or isn't enough to power the states of California and New Jersey. The "for a year" part makes no sense in this context.
I guess you've read "for one year" as "in one year", but that's not what "for" means, and anyway, I'm sure it took a lot more than a year to install 100GW worth of turbines.
The sentence is literally correct, but misleading. A continuous 100GW might power those two states, but that's not what you get out of a 100GW wind installation. The capacity factor for wind is about 25-30%.
It isn't though. Thats how we talk about installed power capacity. The capacity factor is important but seperate. Nobody says we installed a 2.5 MW* wind turbine accounting for capacity factor. They say we installed a 10 MW wind turbine. It is assumed, especially given this publications audience, that the power factor is a seprate point. The person I replied to said that the sentance was so wrong it was "cringy" which is not true.
You've highlighted my essential issue with wind (and other renewables). Under the guise of "ah the dumb public won't understand", things like the actual expected output of a wind farm are hidden. It's a long enough road to renewable energy without hiding away the essential facts. The capacity factor, and resulting actual output of a wind farm, is the most important figure, along with its cost (which is a whole different debate).
Also, as has been pointed out, the loose use of terms for power and energy in the article is enough to make an engineer wince.
How easy to maintain are these? Have they gotten better in the last decade? I see these things failing all the time around me but perhaps they are just shitty and better manufacturing saves the day?
You see a lot of dead ones around the Bay Area, because of an experiment by Lawrence Livermore Labs (1990s?) where they installed windmills of many different designs all over the East Bay. Many of the designs were unreliable.
It's a highly redundant technology. Any turbine is as good as any other in the farm. As long as the economics work out (which is the real question, and I don't have an answer), there's no particular reason to demand perfect reliability for situations where maintenance is expensive. It's just like leaving stale servers to rot in giant data centers.
remember how there used to be articles about how google wouldn't bother to replace failed hardware in racks because it was easier to just map around it?
thats what wind and solar are like for the grid. its pets vs. cattle gone terrawatt.
Pretty much anywhere with turbines installed between 1990 and 2000 or so. They don't work forever, and the tradeoff between durability and efficiency is often set to around a 25 year lifespan.
In fact, if they were cheaper to build, it might make sense to design them with shorter lifespans to take better advantage of the improvements in technology faster.
Are they dead/broken or market optimizing power delivery?
Spinning a few down to nothing can be better for a farm total life time efficiency. You might make more money curtailing output because it is easy to turn off a wind turbine, compared to reacting with an inflexible baseload plant.
For many I can't tell the difference between off and broken, but some are clearly broken (missing blades, collapsed towers, etc). Supposedly a lot of the companies that were originally operating in the San Gorgonio pass went out of business, and their old windmills are being gradually replaced.
Do you have some sources? All windfarms I know of are designed for at least 25 years. Not many have reached that age yet, so if they last is yet to be seen.
In 2015 Yttre Stengrund (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yttre_Stengrund_offshore_wind_...) was decommissioned after only 14 years in service. But that was a really small park and the decision to do so was mainly economical as the turbines were rare and thus spare parts expensive.
had just a few (<10) and really small (<2MW) turbines. Currently parks are designed/built with perhaps 100x9MW turbines. Because fo the scale differnece, older parks are reach end of life more for economical than purely technical reasons. The same reason why computers only lasted a few years in the early 2000's: they just became so much better so quickly that there was no economic point in holding on to them for more than that.
Trouble is, the "Renewable Energy Foundation" is really an anti-wind farm lobbying group set up by Noel Edmonds. Presumably a NIMBY reaction to some plan for a wind farm near wherever he lives. I'll need some validation of any "study" from them.
20 year is the guarantee period for wind and solar. Considering wind and solar are turn key provisioned, it is a reasonable assumption. Also consider than these sites are then habitually repowered. Which in the last 20 years would give you double the power on a site or more.
Depending on the tower choice up to a third of the cost of wind park is in raw metal costs. This does not lose value over all the years. Metal towers are going to be even more common in the future onland (cheaper to transport build and design) and on sea the only reasonable choice.
A VVER-1200 will see like most nuclear plants at least a major turbine renovations in a 60 year range.
Which is a major historic source of failure and costs.
Fuel cost is not as insignificant as we might think.
Remember, as well that for any single provider grid capacity factor is limited by the demand of such a grid. When talking whole grids you are limited to 75% max capacity for all sources combined. If you only have nuclear your 90% capacity factor will drop to 75%ish. This is why for example the UK has so much storage capacity. It's from when their nuclear energy was building out.
Also look at when construction even serial in Nuclear started to fail. In france this was the N4 generation that was designed in the 1970's. Since then costs and complications have arrived. i.e. to be safe the plants have become more complicated to build.
EPR's are terrifying in their complexity and the 11 year death march the European builds are on. The chinese build them but with closed books and unknown oversight. They are not going to build more of this model.
Westinghouse could not build it's design either.
VVER-1200 was specced to be build in under 5 years. It also took the Leningrad builds double that time. Novovoronezh-1 took 8 years, but -2 which is supposed to be faster took 10. What is up with that.
Also remember that Wind and Solar are often reported full project costs, including transmission, with repairs etc. . Nuclear is often only the reactor and transmission and other costs that are part of the project are not reported.
For wind if I have site and 10 billion, next year or the year after it's full and on schedule. For nuclear I might have something next decade.
Take a VVER-1200 at 90% capacity costing 10 billion USD
10 billion / (1200 * 0.90) => 9259259
Watney extension number, a current gen offshore
3 billion / (659 * 0.45) => 10116337
Wow you say, look nuclear is at least 10% cheaper! Yes, but your financing costs are double that for wind. Your running costs are higher, and you don't have a transmission. You can of course complain that I added 1.4 billion to the nuclear story (costs from the finish VVER-1200) project. Taking into account the finish VVER-1200 first paper work was granted in 2010 and is likely to be operational no earlier than 2028 the then year USD will easily make those numbers.
So in the best case nuclear is cheaper by 30%. Worst case it is 300% more expensive.
What will you do if someone builds wind next to your nuclear powerplant? They have 8 years of profit before you turn on.
Will you be able to sell your electricity? Will there be a market? i.e. you are building expecting an aluminium smelter as customer but it went bankrupt in the decade that you are building.
Nuclear, risks, risks and risks. For insignificant potential upsides on the market.
Wind, known quantities, insured, guaranteed, with fixed costs and often known profit margins.
Thanks for an informative comment. I assume that if a wind turbine has to be replaced every 20th year, then it stands to reason that the turbines in a nuclear reactor has to be replaced just as often? Especially since they are driven by steam and must be spinning very fast.
No, the 20 year number is a distraction. A well designed wind turbine, constructed to spec can last much longer without any major revision. It might also not (there will be early failures, as well as super long successes).
It's more like buying an router for the office, deprecating it in 3 years but running it for 7. The 3 years is the 20 off the windmill. How long it will actually last depends more on circumstances than on it actually being ok to keep on going.
Major reasons to repower are new tech, as in your network. Upgrading from 100Mbit to 1Gbit is a bigger reason to upgrade a commodity like a windmill or a router. That it still being under warranty. Putting a 3.4 MW where you had a 900Kw is good value for money. Especially if maintance costs are lower, yields are higher, it's quieter and can do more regarding grid stability etc.
For the router to fail after 4 years is ok. Next day new one arrives. For a windmill to fail after 25 years is ok, two months later you have a new one.
For a nuclear powerplant to fail in year 65, means you don't have a country left ;) (NL here)
The main problem is cost effectiveness. If it costs twice as much per unit of power for a building-level installation vs utility-level, then it's a hard sell. Cheaper to just buy utility-grade power from the grid.
It's also a question of retrofit vs new construction. Building it right into a new building is definitely going to be cheaper than adding it to an existing building.
What I expect to see more of is solar panels in parking lots. Easy to build over, and lots of otherwise wasted space. Plus you're getting power during business hours.
Sure, costs will come down. Soft costs like permitting and marketing are high in the US compared to Europe and Australia, there's room there. The biggest way to cut costs would be to design solar into houses when they are built rather than retrofit them afterwards. In California with the solar mandate for new construction we should see both of those costs go way down.
But it will always be more expensive because of efficiency that goes with scale.
Probably not. Most of that cost is having a professional sort out the specifics of your particular installation, plus paying the dudes to scramble around on your roof and actually do the work (plus the associated liability).
And even once it's all done, you take an efficiency hit because no one's roof will be at the ideal angle the way panels installed at ground level can be.
> And even once it's all done, you take an efficiency hit because no one's roof will be at the ideal angle the way panels installed at ground level can be.
Also, a lot of ground level panels are on single-axis trackers, at least in my country, which boosts efficiency even more.
What others said, plus the fact that most municipalities don't allow it. As a rule of thumb, the distance from a turbine to a permanent structure must be larger than the height of the turbine.
I was involved in design of Wind Farms and they affect wind directions at least locally. Naturally, they change climate locally. The question is how local is not global enough.
The papers all stress that wind farms are considerably better than fossil fuels no matter what, so 'accelerate' is maybe not the best way to put it. I propose 'influence'.
However, the consequences from each technology should still be debatable, and are an interesting question in itself I think. The problems start when questions become political - what are the implications? In the hard sciences we usually don't concern ourselves with that unless we have to, but when discussing sensitive research topics in public one has to be more careful since many people tend to deduce intentions where there were none. (I need to remind myself frequently.) I think your post fell victim to that.
My post raised a question and wasn't based on the papers you mentioned but based on what I was told by wind farm engineers (e.g., that many farms are not green positive when accounting for everything even when accounting for futures years of exploitation). After working in academia for years, I believe that there is a much higher likelihood of a paper being rejected if it shows that large wind farms harm local environment. It is basically $1T of interests and "green-greeen!" people against people who will figure out what happens only years later.
Is this really a problem? They probably leak at the same rate as any other machine, which includes almost any other power plant. The total spillage or "evaporation" of all wind turbines is probably not more oil than even a tiny oil spill in an oil field or pipeline.
Obviously we should fix a problem here if there is one, but the fact that we're discussing it in the context of larger scale issues is absurd.
In terms of pulling out excess energy from the atmosphere then yes. But the effect will likely be too small to measure on a global scale. Note that the acceleration in here will be in the reverse direction. Plus the heat will eventually be re-released back into the atmosphere thanks to thermodynamics.
The majority of the savings will come from offsetting carbon emitting sources of power.
I'm curious about the environmental or ecological impact.
This is a pretty naive question but: will capturing that energy for human use divert it from other parts of the current ("natural") system where it's being used?
Energy wise, the orders of magnitude are quite different so I would not worry. After all, we are not worried about the direct heating from the much more prevalent source of electricity (waste heat from oil or nuclear), rather we are worried about the heating from the sun that is exacerbated by the accidental byproduct of burning oil.
Habitat destruction from these new technologies: no idea...
The current problem we have is the energy imbalance between incoming solar radiation and outgoing thermal radiation, since a growing proportion of the latter is blocked.
Any quantity influencing this balance could theoretically be used to get back to the old point.
The discussed options are either solar radiation management which lowers the amount of incoming radiation or carbon capture which would allow more outgoing thermal radiation to escape.
The first option has ideas such as stratospheric sulfur injections (increasing albedo leading to more reflected incoming sunlight), deploying a sunscreen in space or simply painting areas white. (It should be noted that humanity has been causing albedo changes for a long time simply by changing land cover. Forests have lower albedo than fields, for example.) The problem with the ideas is that they are very unstable. Many need constant renewal and management to be kept active. There are also side effects apparent in the model such as changed atmospheric circulation patterns for some of them, and the ocean acidification due to dissolved CO2 etc are not addressed either.
The second option, carbon capture, can be achieved by different means. Basically, carbon needs to be stored in one of the sinks available. The natural sinks are the biosphere (quite small, but increasing it will help) and chemical weathering. If we wait long enough, chemical weathering will lower the CO2 concentrations sufficiently. [0]
So one of the ideas here is to increase the speed of the weathering by increasing the surface and availability of the the stone to weather. Others are increasing the biomass sink by planting more of it or fertilizing the oceans so the algae can grow faster and take a part to the ocean floors.
Then there is technical carbon sequestration, which needs energy input (you're talking about this, right?). Where the energy comes from shouldn't matter as long as the carbon emission is smaller than the sequestration. I guess all renewable energies and nuclear should work fine. (Maybe there will be a better technology at some point in the future as well, but better not rely on it.)
However, now this carbon needs to be stored, which is a problem in itself. Ideas are simply pumping it into the ground, for example depleted natural gas fields (unstable!) or changing it to other forms which needs more energy. (Any energy that can be changed to chemical energy is actually removed from the system, but that will probably not be very much. I'd have to check up on this though, I've found my intuition is not that good yet for these numbers.) There is not a lot of money in it yet, which makes research slow. This is still most probably our best shot.
All but one scenarios of the IPCC-1.5°C report have carbon sequestration from 2030 - in 10 years - (in the worst case on the order of half of current emissions!), and the one that doesn't uses biomass capture. We cannot reach a path of <= 1.5°C warming without it. [1]
No, pulling out excess energy from the atmosphere will not accelerate climate change -- quite the opposite, though I don't know that the effect will be significant.
How many birds is it worth sacrificing to build huge wind turbine farms instead of compact nuclear reactors? Is the worst case of a Chernobyl or Fukushima worse than the expected case from square miles of spinning blades?
>How many birds is it worth sacrificing to build huge wind turbine farms instead of compact nuclear reactors?
As many as it takes to keep even more birds being sacrificed to keep fossil fuel plants (and in particular coal) running longer. I certainly support nuclear for non-terrestrial-power reasons, but the fact of the matter is that it just doesn't have the free market power going for it that solar and wind do and thus I don't think it can be competitive fast enough. Solar and wind have enormously lower capex, enormously faster iteration, and avoid security, military, and geopolitics concerns that affect much of the global population. That in turn means they have a lot more raw scale potential too.
Nuclear has foot print advantages and many designs may have lower impact in other ways (though be careful, issues like where to dump heat can be significant such as a river getting too hot). More importantly in my mind, nuclear expertise will be necessary for space and they're important sources of very important isotopes. But on power alone I think their moment has probably passed. It'd be a very different story if we had internalized carbon emissions and had a Free Market in energy decades ago, but at this point I don't think bringing up nuclear as a contrast to renewables is very helpful or interesting on its own.
Solar and wind won't be the solution for the foreseeable future. The price of energy creation is good, but storage just isn't there. Consider a city like New York. How much solar power are you going to get in the winter when a big blizzard rolls through. Or how about Miami when a slow moving tropical storm comes through. You need to be able to store a more than a week's worth of energy for these huge cities. Nuclear is the only option.
I feel like making people add every possible qualifier to what they say is counter-productive. How about this... Nuclear is the only universally viable carbon-free option that doesn't require the end user to be in a geographically ideal location.
You've got to be incredibly concerned about feral domesticated cats and window collisions, which kill 1,000-10,000 times more birds annually (on the upper end between the two orders of magnitude) between them.
Basically, cats kills sparrows and other small and extremely prolific urban birds. Those birds aren't what wind turbines threaten. Wind turbines threaten larger prey birds like owls, eagles, falcons, etc.
Rather than trying to poke holes in my response you could look at all cause mortality tables for birds. You can compare wind turbines with the many other sources - heavy metal poising, car and plane collisions, habitat loss - and you can compare it to estimated turbine collisions. Cornell Ornithology Lab is a great resource.
This isn't an ideal situation, but you can't talk about this sensibly without the background that we are in a planetary climate emergency and this is one route to try to fix a bigger problem. All current life on Earth is headed somewhere bad unless human beings can alter the course of atmospheric CO2. That would be a worse outcome for large birds than more wind farms.
If someone wants to concurrently pursue nuclear or solar, by all means they should do so. Shellenberger is a controversial figure, and there is a reason for it.
Oh I hear you on the planetary emergency, and I'm all about having multiple irons in the fire. But each pillar of the strategy should stand on its own merits.
You don't get to lead with "meh the birds are not a big deal, they're mostly common ones" and then when challenged, pivot to "so what if it's endangered predatory birds? We're in an emergency here!"
Because we know how to build them, and have already built them. If you want to build more low-carbon power tomorrow, you can pour more money into turbines and get more turbines approximately immediately.
Small reactors are still an area of research, not a functioning industry.
Also, the politics of a Fukushima means that when something does go wrong, the entire fleet of reactors gets taken offline due to politics, and now you're burning fuel oil for light. It's not good if your overriding interest is in decarbonizing immediately.
Even if wind turbines killed birds by the millions, they're still better, because dead birds don't cause global climate catastrophe (but climate catastrophe will cause dead birds).
Right, and wind constitutes less than 5% of total energy production. I'm not anti-wind, but we can't pretend massive growth in wind production will have no impact.
So what you're saying is that with 100% wind production, it's now millions of birds. That's still about 3 orders of magnitude less of an impact than cats.
Basically if you look at the very early wind turbines in northern california, which the number comes from originally, these turbines had blades about 20 feet long, and spun very, very fast to produce any kind of power. Almost like a slow blender. Blades would rotate once per second of faster. They were very obviously dangerous even to the casual observer.
This was 20+ years ago during the infancy of the industry.
This is in contrast to all modern turbines, those built after ~2005, which is to say, well over 99%, it can take over 15 seconds for a blade to sweep through one revolution. Getting hit by one of these blades is unfortunate, but causes significantly less damage.
Comparing a Gen 1 "blender turbine" and a Gen 2 modern "sweeper turbine" is almost criminal when doing bird impact studies.
Finally the state of california quietly disabled the blender turbines as they were both very expensive to maintain being first gen technology and more importantly they were generating the bulk of bird strike fatalities and grossly inflating the number of bird fatality numbers for the global industry. The replacement of these ~20 blender turbines was 3 sweeper turbines and you'll note since the decommissioning of the last of the blender turbines, bird strikes for turbines fell off a cliff.
> This is in contrast to all modern turbines, those built after ~2005, which is to say, well over 99%, it can take over 15 seconds for a blade to sweep through one revolution. Getting hit by one of these blades is unfortunate, but causes significantly less damage.
If the blades turn slowly, too much wind passes through the gaps between the blades without interacting with the turbine. Although modern turbines may appear to be turning leisurely, because of their scale the blades are traveling large distances on each revolution resulting in high impact speed. The latest land based turbines being made by GE have a rotor circumference of 0.3 miles[1].
Modern turbine blades reach speeds of 180 miles per hour at their tips.[2,3] The blades of new turbines travel so fast that erosion of the blades is a serious problem.
Onshore turbines are size constrained by transportation limits. Waters-edge construction and transport by sea allows for larger elements.
"NIMBYism" is a word that turns off critical thought in some people and ruins discussions.
There is a large inventory of coastlines with wind energy potential. There will be many distractions as they are developed by coal companies trying to derail those projects. That may be through astroturfing which will present itself as "NIMBYism" and divides people to weaken them.
Additionally, a lot of densely populate coastal areas are populated quite a ways inland. You need open space around the big wind turbines for safety reasons - farmland is best.
Look at the new windfarm called "Wikinger" that Germany built near the island of Ruegen: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore-Windpark_Wikinger
Cost: 1.4 billion Euros Lifetime: 20 years Power: 350 MW Max. capacity: 0.4 (40%) Price at the electricity stock exchange Leipzig: 36 Euro/MWh
Thus: 3500.42436520*36 = 883 million Euros
Result: 517 million Euros loss
Because wind farms have 0 fuel costs, they will operate at any price above a few eurocents per MWH. Which means once a critical mass of wind farms is operating in an area, the price frequently dives all the way to near 0. Sucks if you operate wind farms. Sucks less if you ALSO operate natural gas generators which you can then idle. And sucks a lot less if you're a consumer with dispatch able loads.
In general energy also seems to be a low-risk business, where if the energy companies would ever loose money, they are either already covered by the government or can sue the government for losses due to changed regulations with a good chance of winning.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Renewable_Energy_Source...
Is that really the lifetime of the farm, or is it just when turbines need to be replaced?
Wind and solar don't even compete in the same category as nuclear until you include storage. Cheap, bursty energy is useless for base-load.
Wind/solar are still far more expensive than fossil and nuclear when you take into account the over-provisioning and energy storage requirements to provide reliable base-load.
The grid survives fine when nuclear and coal plants go offline for several days for maintenance/turn-arounds!
Do you have a source for that? Cost comparisons I've seen between nuclear and renewable energy doesn't reach that conclusion. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21479651
Full research http://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2019/7299-system-costs.pdf
Short https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/02/05...
Nuclear safer, cheaper (in short and long term) and produce less carbon emission
He is so pro nuclear and anti renewables that he simply makes stuff up in order to show $50 is less than $5. Oh look, he's branded the graphs with his lobbying outfit logo. Why is he not comparing with other countries that are getting it right? Ah because the conclusion was determined before he wrote a single word.
He was drastically wrong on the Amazon recently too: https://news.mongabay.com/2019/08/michael-shellenbergers-slo...
Also that don't rely on hydropower. That's something limited by geography.
Also, the paper was from the OECD NEA, nothing to do with Shellenberger.
The "obvious" choices would seem to be Sweden, Iceland, Morocco, Denmark and UK. Perhaps China, or even Costa Rica who seem to have the world's most ambitious target - carbon free by 2021. I'm sure there's others progressing quickly.
But you should provide some papers which support your position
If we want civil discussion
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019
How does that work?
Compare that with a competitive industry that's manufacturing in bulk and improving every year. Where do the lines cross?
Let's assume that a single fission plant costs $5B (if you're building hundreds of them, you can take advantage of some economies of scale). For $1T, you can build 200 of them. New fission plants have something like 2 GW capacity on average. 2 GW times 200 is 400 GW.
Now, US uses 13 quads of BTU worth of electricity annually.[1]. 13 quads a year is 434 GW of power on average. So, we could basically cover our energy needs with $1T worth of nuclear plants, if you average things out and ignore peaking needs. Most certainly, however, if you add $1T worth of nuclear to our current system, as opposed to adding $1T worth of wind energy, we'll pretty much be able to go off fossil fuels in electricity generation altogether, with already existing water and renewable generation. The resulting system will be much better for environment (less land used for nuclear plants than for equivalent $1T worth of wind turbines), safer (wind turbines are more dangerous per kWh produced than nuclear, people die installing those every year), and more stable (the supply will be extremely steady, and will not depend on weather fluctuations).
[1] - https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained//us-energy-facts/
Where is the waste being stored and how safe is that location against the drastic climate change which is now beginning to occur?
Where is it "beginning to occur"? And if you do really believe this, wouldn't you want to shut down the second largest emitter of carbon worldwide as soon as possible by the most efficient means available to us?
Basically it explains that wind has a typical average utilisation of about 20% vs 70% for full nuclear. A turbine lasts about 20-30y vs 60 for a nuclear reactor. In addition, wind is producing the electricity at the edge of the network, and you loose the diversification effect of having a network (the example he gave is that in France the total potential consumption of all usage of electricity is 4-5x the total installed supply, because not all machines are switched on at the same time, but if you produce your electricity locally you must size it to the potential local need). In addition you have to stock more between seasons for wind than nuclear. So even though the cost per kW built of wind is roughly half or a third of nuclear, the overall cost is 10-20x higher than nuclear.
[1] (in french) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4teA8ciuRU
Half that.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/19368
[1] https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/...
It looks more like several billion, not several trillion.
People fall in love with the idea of nuclear power. They get offended that it may not be the savior after all.
The power output of a wind turbine is proportional to wind speed cubed and offshore wind is typically much stronger and more consistent than onshore wind. Probably we can take advantage of the expertise of oil and gas industry with offshore drilling to build offshore wind farms. Also it's safer for wild life.
The downside of offshore wind is the higher wear and tear of turbines. Last time I checked, composite delamination of turbine blades was still a problem. Also, it can be hard to recycle composites. Sometimes the only option is to literally burn them or use them as fillers in other products.
source: https://www.npr.org/2019/09/10/759376113/unfurling-the-waste...
On a separate note, I have two questions: why don't wind turbinea have more than one "wheel"? And does anyone know if ground tethered floating turbines (like airships) will be commercially viable?
Which I take to mean more than one set of blades? In which case it's because they interfere with each other, and reduce the power generation possible in all surrounding turbines. Wind farms come with a minimum separation that is something like 5 or 10 blade diameters spacing, depending on prevailing winds. That spacing gives every turbine clear air free of induced eddy currents.
This is also why scaled down rooftop and urban wind generation doesn't really work - there are too many eddy currents such that generation becomes very intermittent.
The offshore turbines I know of are in relatively shallow water, and fixed construction on the sea bed. Not sure if deep water turbines could move around, but I imagine the processing needed to calculate would be immense - fluid dynamics is pretty complex!
Arguably their real talent is dealing with market volatility, which could come to renewables when strike prices and subsidy levels get reduced.
Greed can destroy the planet all the same. So money hungry is hardly an excuse for evil behavior.
Also,geopolitics: the west won agai at oil and gas? Cools, CNOOC,Gazprom and Aramco will supply most of the planet that can't afford to buy green cars and switch their electric grids to green sources, make their ships green,etc... Dying American geopolitical strong arming can only take you so far.
> Last month the American wind industry hit a major milestone — 100 gigawatts of total installed capacity. That's enough electricity to power the state of California and New Jersey combined for one year.
I can only hope that the insertion of "for one year" was the act of an editor, and that the author is as upset about it as we are.
"Massive scientific breakthrough -- 100 trillion Watts of power, enough to power all the US, from just a single AAA cell flashlight battery!!!"
Sure, but the headline omitted that the power lasts for only 10^(-100) seconds or so!
In the news business, energy and power are nearly synonymous. E.g., from sports writing we might get something like:
"On Sunday Quarterback Joe Testosteroni with his massive energy and power will come with his game face on, ready to play, and win if he possibly can."
So such sports writing is in the formula fiction pattern of the high drama of a desperate clash of titans.
Be careful: Some people writing that stuff get paid more than some readers of Hacker News!
In my life, it took me some years to accept that quite broadly the news business forgot nearly all their freshman physics! They are a lot better at some of the patterns of formula fiction. We can guess they liked literature class better than physics class. They can be really good at creating smelly bait for the ad hook.
[1](https://gwec.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/GWEC-Global-Wind...) Page 29
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Also, as has been pointed out, the loose use of terms for power and energy in the article is enough to make an engineer wince.
thats what wind and solar are like for the grid. its pets vs. cattle gone terrawatt.
You do? Where?
In fact, if they were cheaper to build, it might make sense to design them with shorter lifespans to take better advantage of the improvements in technology faster.
Spinning a few down to nothing can be better for a farm total life time efficiency. You might make more money curtailing output because it is easy to turn off a wind turbine, compared to reacting with an inflexible baseload plant.
The current lifespan of wind turbines is around 20 years (but 15 years is closer to reality). So ... not great.
The first offshore wind farm Vindeby was decommissioned in 2016 (after 25 years) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vindeby_Offshore_Wind_Farm
In 2015 Yttre Stengrund (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yttre_Stengrund_offshore_wind_...) was decommissioned after only 14 years in service. But that was a really small park and the decision to do so was mainly economical as the turbines were rare and thus spare parts expensive. had just a few (<10) and really small (<2MW) turbines. Currently parks are designed/built with perhaps 100x9MW turbines. Because fo the scale differnece, older parks are reach end of life more for economical than purely technical reasons. The same reason why computers only lasted a few years in the early 2000's: they just became so much better so quickly that there was no economic point in holding on to them for more than that.
[1]https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/energy/windpower/9770...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2011/may/18/ren...
And that with capacity factors ranging between 10% to maximal 50%.
Modern nuclear power plants (VVER-1200) reach 60 years of lifetime and have a capacity factor of 90%.
Depending on the tower choice up to a third of the cost of wind park is in raw metal costs. This does not lose value over all the years. Metal towers are going to be even more common in the future onland (cheaper to transport build and design) and on sea the only reasonable choice.
A VVER-1200 will see like most nuclear plants at least a major turbine renovations in a 60 year range. Which is a major historic source of failure and costs. Fuel cost is not as insignificant as we might think.
Remember, as well that for any single provider grid capacity factor is limited by the demand of such a grid. When talking whole grids you are limited to 75% max capacity for all sources combined. If you only have nuclear your 90% capacity factor will drop to 75%ish. This is why for example the UK has so much storage capacity. It's from when their nuclear energy was building out.
Also look at when construction even serial in Nuclear started to fail. In france this was the N4 generation that was designed in the 1970's. Since then costs and complications have arrived. i.e. to be safe the plants have become more complicated to build.
EPR's are terrifying in their complexity and the 11 year death march the European builds are on. The chinese build them but with closed books and unknown oversight. They are not going to build more of this model.
Westinghouse could not build it's design either.
VVER-1200 was specced to be build in under 5 years. It also took the Leningrad builds double that time. Novovoronezh-1 took 8 years, but -2 which is supposed to be faster took 10. What is up with that.
Also remember that Wind and Solar are often reported full project costs, including transmission, with repairs etc. . Nuclear is often only the reactor and transmission and other costs that are part of the project are not reported.
For wind if I have site and 10 billion, next year or the year after it's full and on schedule. For nuclear I might have something next decade.
Take a VVER-1200 at 90% capacity costing 10 billion USD 10 billion / (1200 * 0.90) => 9259259 Watney extension number, a current gen offshore 3 billion / (659 * 0.45) => 10116337
Wow you say, look nuclear is at least 10% cheaper! Yes, but your financing costs are double that for wind. Your running costs are higher, and you don't have a transmission. You can of course complain that I added 1.4 billion to the nuclear story (costs from the finish VVER-1200) project. Taking into account the finish VVER-1200 first paper work was granted in 2010 and is likely to be operational no earlier than 2028 the then year USD will easily make those numbers.
So in the best case nuclear is cheaper by 30%. Worst case it is 300% more expensive. What will you do if someone builds wind next to your nuclear powerplant? They have 8 years of profit before you turn on. Will you be able to sell your electricity? Will there be a market? i.e. you are building expecting an aluminium smelter as customer but it went bankrupt in the decade that you are building.
Nuclear, risks, risks and risks. For insignificant potential upsides on the market. Wind, known quantities, insured, guaranteed, with fixed costs and often known profit margins.
This was too long ;)
It's more like buying an router for the office, deprecating it in 3 years but running it for 7. The 3 years is the 20 off the windmill. How long it will actually last depends more on circumstances than on it actually being ok to keep on going.
Major reasons to repower are new tech, as in your network. Upgrading from 100Mbit to 1Gbit is a bigger reason to upgrade a commodity like a windmill or a router. That it still being under warranty. Putting a 3.4 MW where you had a 900Kw is good value for money. Especially if maintance costs are lower, yields are higher, it's quieter and can do more regarding grid stability etc.
For the router to fail after 4 years is ok. Next day new one arrives. For a windmill to fail after 25 years is ok, two months later you have a new one.
For a nuclear powerplant to fail in year 65, means you don't have a country left ;) (NL here)
It's also a question of retrofit vs new construction. Building it right into a new building is definitely going to be cheaper than adding it to an existing building.
What I expect to see more of is solar panels in parking lots. Easy to build over, and lots of otherwise wasted space. Plus you're getting power during business hours.
But it will always be more expensive because of efficiency that goes with scale.
And even once it's all done, you take an efficiency hit because no one's roof will be at the ideal angle the way panels installed at ground level can be.
Also, a lot of ground level panels are on single-axis trackers, at least in my country, which boosts efficiency even more.
Isn't the "value" of an industry normally taken to be the sum of the market caps of all the companies in the industry?
For example, all wind energy companies might spend $1T this year as an investment, but only bring in $10B in revenue. That would be a $10B market.
It is a large number. But it's a different large number from the headline.
edit: during its exploitation
I was involved in design of Wind Farms and they affect wind directions at least locally. Naturally, they change climate locally. The question is how local is not global enough.
Review paper (2015):
'Impact of wind-energy generation on climate: A rising spectre'
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403211...
'Potential climatic impacts and reliability of very large-scale windfarms'
https://www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16115.short#sec-2
'Potential climatic impacts and reliability of very large-scale windfarms'
https://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/10/2053/2010/acp-10-2053-201...
edit: There's more!
'Climate model shows large-scale wind and solar farms in the Sahara increase rain and vegetation'
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/JCLI-D-14-0024...
'Climate Impacts of Large-Scale Wind Farms as Parameterized in a Global Climate Model '
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6406/1019
However, the consequences from each technology should still be debatable, and are an interesting question in itself I think. The problems start when questions become political - what are the implications? In the hard sciences we usually don't concern ourselves with that unless we have to, but when discussing sensitive research topics in public one has to be more careful since many people tend to deduce intentions where there were none. (I need to remind myself frequently.) I think your post fell victim to that.
My post raised a question and wasn't based on the papers you mentioned but based on what I was told by wind farm engineers (e.g., that many farms are not green positive when accounting for everything even when accounting for futures years of exploitation). After working in academia for years, I believe that there is a much higher likelihood of a paper being rejected if it shows that large wind farms harm local environment. It is basically $1T of interests and "green-greeen!" people against people who will figure out what happens only years later.
Edit: Link 1: https://www.windpowerengineering.com/two-reasons-why-gearbox... Link 2: https://www.eastcountymagazine.org/investigation-launched-hy... Link 3: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-12/wind-powe...
Obviously we should fix a problem here if there is one, but the fact that we're discussing it in the context of larger scale issues is absurd.
The majority of the savings will come from offsetting carbon emitting sources of power.
This is a pretty naive question but: will capturing that energy for human use divert it from other parts of the current ("natural") system where it's being used?
Habitat destruction from these new technologies: no idea...
I realize that this is a very simplistic view, but if I am wrong I would love to learn something.
Any quantity influencing this balance could theoretically be used to get back to the old point.
The discussed options are either solar radiation management which lowers the amount of incoming radiation or carbon capture which would allow more outgoing thermal radiation to escape.
The first option has ideas such as stratospheric sulfur injections (increasing albedo leading to more reflected incoming sunlight), deploying a sunscreen in space or simply painting areas white. (It should be noted that humanity has been causing albedo changes for a long time simply by changing land cover. Forests have lower albedo than fields, for example.) The problem with the ideas is that they are very unstable. Many need constant renewal and management to be kept active. There are also side effects apparent in the model such as changed atmospheric circulation patterns for some of them, and the ocean acidification due to dissolved CO2 etc are not addressed either.
The second option, carbon capture, can be achieved by different means. Basically, carbon needs to be stored in one of the sinks available. The natural sinks are the biosphere (quite small, but increasing it will help) and chemical weathering. If we wait long enough, chemical weathering will lower the CO2 concentrations sufficiently. [0] So one of the ideas here is to increase the speed of the weathering by increasing the surface and availability of the the stone to weather. Others are increasing the biomass sink by planting more of it or fertilizing the oceans so the algae can grow faster and take a part to the ocean floors.
Then there is technical carbon sequestration, which needs energy input (you're talking about this, right?). Where the energy comes from shouldn't matter as long as the carbon emission is smaller than the sequestration. I guess all renewable energies and nuclear should work fine. (Maybe there will be a better technology at some point in the future as well, but better not rely on it.)
However, now this carbon needs to be stored, which is a problem in itself. Ideas are simply pumping it into the ground, for example depleted natural gas fields (unstable!) or changing it to other forms which needs more energy. (Any energy that can be changed to chemical energy is actually removed from the system, but that will probably not be very much. I'd have to check up on this though, I've found my intuition is not that good yet for these numbers.) There is not a lot of money in it yet, which makes research slow. This is still most probably our best shot.
All but one scenarios of the IPCC-1.5°C report have carbon sequestration from 2030 - in 10 years - (in the worst case on the order of half of current emissions!), and the one that doesn't uses biomass capture. We cannot reach a path of <= 1.5°C warming without it. [1]
[0] https://skepticalscience.com/weathering.html
[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM3...
As many as it takes to keep even more birds being sacrificed to keep fossil fuel plants (and in particular coal) running longer. I certainly support nuclear for non-terrestrial-power reasons, but the fact of the matter is that it just doesn't have the free market power going for it that solar and wind do and thus I don't think it can be competitive fast enough. Solar and wind have enormously lower capex, enormously faster iteration, and avoid security, military, and geopolitics concerns that affect much of the global population. That in turn means they have a lot more raw scale potential too.
Nuclear has foot print advantages and many designs may have lower impact in other ways (though be careful, issues like where to dump heat can be significant such as a river getting too hot). More importantly in my mind, nuclear expertise will be necessary for space and they're important sources of very important isotopes. But on power alone I think their moment has probably passed. It'd be a very different story if we had internalized carbon emissions and had a Free Market in energy decades ago, but at this point I don't think bringing up nuclear as a contrast to renewables is very helpful or interesting on its own.
https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shellenberger_why_renewabl...
Basically, cats kills sparrows and other small and extremely prolific urban birds. Those birds aren't what wind turbines threaten. Wind turbines threaten larger prey birds like owls, eagles, falcons, etc.
This isn't an ideal situation, but you can't talk about this sensibly without the background that we are in a planetary climate emergency and this is one route to try to fix a bigger problem. All current life on Earth is headed somewhere bad unless human beings can alter the course of atmospheric CO2. That would be a worse outcome for large birds than more wind farms.
If someone wants to concurrently pursue nuclear or solar, by all means they should do so. Shellenberger is a controversial figure, and there is a reason for it.
You don't get to lead with "meh the birds are not a big deal, they're mostly common ones" and then when challenged, pivot to "so what if it's endangered predatory birds? We're in an emergency here!"
Small reactors are still an area of research, not a functioning industry.
Also, the politics of a Fukushima means that when something does go wrong, the entire fleet of reactors gets taken offline due to politics, and now you're burning fuel oil for light. It's not good if your overriding interest is in decarbonizing immediately.
Even if wind turbines killed birds by the millions, they're still better, because dead birds don't cause global climate catastrophe (but climate catastrophe will cause dead birds).
http://theconversation.com/wind-farms-are-hardly-the-bird-sl...
How many birds are the turbines killing and what kind of impact is it having on ecosystems?
Hundreds of thousands, apparently
Turbine blades tend to kill larger birds, usually raptors that have populations that regenerate slowly.
Basically if you look at the very early wind turbines in northern california, which the number comes from originally, these turbines had blades about 20 feet long, and spun very, very fast to produce any kind of power. Almost like a slow blender. Blades would rotate once per second of faster. They were very obviously dangerous even to the casual observer.
This was 20+ years ago during the infancy of the industry.
This is in contrast to all modern turbines, those built after ~2005, which is to say, well over 99%, it can take over 15 seconds for a blade to sweep through one revolution. Getting hit by one of these blades is unfortunate, but causes significantly less damage.
Comparing a Gen 1 "blender turbine" and a Gen 2 modern "sweeper turbine" is almost criminal when doing bird impact studies.
Finally the state of california quietly disabled the blender turbines as they were both very expensive to maintain being first gen technology and more importantly they were generating the bulk of bird strike fatalities and grossly inflating the number of bird fatality numbers for the global industry. The replacement of these ~20 blender turbines was 3 sweeper turbines and you'll note since the decommissioning of the last of the blender turbines, bird strikes for turbines fell off a cliff.
If the blades turn slowly, too much wind passes through the gaps between the blades without interacting with the turbine. Although modern turbines may appear to be turning leisurely, because of their scale the blades are traveling large distances on each revolution resulting in high impact speed. The latest land based turbines being made by GE have a rotor circumference of 0.3 miles[1].
Modern turbine blades reach speeds of 180 miles per hour at their tips.[2,3] The blades of new turbines travel so fast that erosion of the blades is a serious problem.
[1] https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/wind-energy/onshore-wind/...
[2] http://www.acua.com/uploadedFiles/Site/About_Us/WindFarm.pdf
[3] https://gizmodo.com/the-worlds-biggest-wind-turbine-blades-a...