Are wind turbines worth it?

I’m not sure anyone has fundamentally answered the OP, so I’ll baldly state that wind turbines are profitable without government subsidies.

They cost around $1 million per megawatt and last around 25 years without major retrofits. Assuming power prices don’t plummet over the next 25 years, the average wind turbine located in a windy place will see significant profits over its lifetime.

With all due respect, all spent fuel can be reprocessed to be used as fuel in our current reactors and materials that can’t be reprocessed can be used as fuel in a Integral Fast Reactor (IFR).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor

For all practical purposes, we have no nuclear waste. We have fuel that our politicians have chosen not to recycle. The problem was first caused by the decision of President Carter to shut down our reprocessing operations and second by the Clinton administration to shut down the IFR project in 1994. The IFR decision I mostly blame on Hazel O’Leary and not Clinton.

Actually throwing away our spent fuel would be criminal stupidity. It will be providing electricity for our children and grandchildren.

I’ve listened to audio clips of the noise and thought it was trivial. I could live with the low frequency whooshing.

But holy shit, that flicker would drive me bat-shit insane. I hope your brother succeeds.

New wind is coming in at $0.09/kWh, new baseload coal $0.13/kWh. We subsidize established energy production methods at ten times the rate that we do renewables.

Oh, and for bird kills, the Audubon Society has come out in favor of wind turbines. Many more are killed by housecats and buildings.

If you are interested in using pumped storage in connection wind power, David JC MacKay devotes Chapter 26 to this topic:

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c26/page_186.shtml

He does the math and it looks like the suitable locations for pumped storage are far smaller than what would be need to store the wind energy.

Personally I’m intrigued with the idea of using the wind turbine electricity to produce ammonia and transport it through our ammonia pipelines around the country and used as vehicle fuel. Ammonia’s advantage as a fuel is that the combustion products are nitrogen and water, so now greenhouse gases are emitted. This would require large storage facilities for the ammonia. I figure worst case we can store the ammonia in caverns like we do the strategic petroleum reserve.

http://www.ammoniafuelnetwork.org/why.html

Our ammonia pipelines? We already have some? And that link says it’s produced from natural gas and coal, which means it’s still producing greenhouse gases, just at the plant, not the vehicle.

Plus, of course, it produces toxic vapors. You’d have to overengineer all the pipes and tanks to make absolute certain that it never leaks, or you could kill whole towns, and you’d need to completely redesign the refuelling systems for the same reason.

Well the coal and natural gas is only used to produce Hydrogen gas, which is then combined with nitrogen and a catalyst to form NH3. You could use the useless night time wind power to generate the hydrogen by electrolysing water.

Mind you, why not then just burn the hydrogen in the daytime and forget the whole ammonia thing.

Here is an article about producing Ammonia from hydroelectricity. The principles would apply to Wind Power also.

http://www.hydroworld.com/index/display/article-display/0927773395/articles/hydro-review/volume-28/issue-7/articles/renewable-fuels__manufacturing.html

I just found a paper about using wind power to produce ammonia. The picture of the US Ammonia pipeline is on page 50 of the article or 7 of the PDF.

Transmission and Firming of GW-Scale Wind Energy via Hydrogen and Ammonia

The important thing to remember is that ammonia is a transport medium for hydrogen. It is much easier to transport and store ammonia than hydrogen.

What are your sources for those three numbers?

And the second paragraph has a logic problem - it’s not an “either-or”, it’s additive. If X birds die from housecats each year and Y from buildings and Z from turbines, which is larger?

X+Y

or

X+Y+Z

?

It’s possibly easier in areas where the wind generation is much higher at night to move production to the second and third shift. I have worked with an effort in Iowa to encourage factories to run all their big-MW batch processes at night and to move production to the night shifts. Alcoa has considered this, as has ADM.