I was listening to Science Friday on NPR last friday. They were discussing wind farms.
The one they mainly discussed was set up on tribal land in South Dakota. It supplied all the power they needed and the some left over to sell to the power companies.
Would these not be feasible on a nationwide level? Set up wind farms on the plains in North and South Dakota where wind is plentiful. Sure there would be a cost in building the infrastructure to get the power to the cities. But in the long run it seems it would pay for itself.
I’ve only got a second and I’m sure someone more knowledgeable than myself will come along but there are a couple of problems with this.
The main problem is economics. Electricity from wind farms is significantly more expensive than that from traditional coal, hydro and nuclear base-load generators.
Other problem is leakage. Due to resistance etc you lose electricity the further you transport it via electricity lines
Third problem is you can’t rely on the wind all the time - you can’t boost and reduce production at the flick of a switch (I’m simplifying here) as you can do with other forms of electricity generation
Fourth problem is aesthetic - wind farms are ugly and they take up a lot of land. I could do the figures for you if I had time but you have to take into account that you’re talking about an awfully large area of land required for your plan. People nearby generally hate them because they look terribly and because even the best wind generators make a lot of noise.
Fifth is that you need suitable sites (and this is related to the previous two reasons)- you need a place with constant, strong wind in an area that is a bit isolated but not too far from consumption centres.
I’m sure there are other reasons but those are the main ones given for reluctance to invest in big windpower projects
If the electricity is needed fairly close to where it can be produced, then wind power is competitive now.
One needs about 16 mph winds to make a commerical plant feasible and then there’s the problem power is only produced while there is wind. For the most part, the highest wind areas of the US are rather far from heavily populated areas.
Very true, the only difference is that you cover a lot more area with a windfarm - a 100metre tall (70m tower and 30m blades) wind turbine generates around about 1.3MW and they have to be spaced about 300metres apart.
To generate enough power to replace a reasonable sized coal-fired station -say 2000MW- you would require 1539 turbines. I’ll let you do the maths on how much land that would take up. Then if I tell you that total US electricity consumption (cite) is 1,037 billion kwH, you can almost work out how much land you would need. Just don’t get installed capacity mixed up with output.
However, don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti- windfarms, I’ve just had to deal with a lot of people from either side of the discussion and have seen some very unrealistic expectations. I also don’t believe that they are going to be replacing conventional baseload generators at any time in the near future.
There is talk of building wind farms offshore (in the UK), but the chief objection (as far as I understand) is from the Ministry Of Defence - the moving rotors play havoc with radar, effectively creating a blind spot.
Assuming the wind is there, is there any reason a wind farm couldn’t be on productive farmland?
The power in Montreal is (nearly all) hydroelectric and comes from 1000 miles away. Yes, the transmission towers are not considered things of beauty (although there is a certain elegance) but it is possible to transmit power over long distance with acceptable levels of loss. I think Hydro-Quebec’s long distance transmission goes at about 750,000 volts, which keeps the resistive losses low. And nowadays with high power rectifiers and choppers, they send at least some of it as DC which reduces radiative losses (although I think the main reason is for the benefit of aluminum smelters).
A year ago, Scientific American printed an article that predicted that world oil production would peak in 2008 and thereafter slowly decline. Since the US is currently facing shortages of natural gas, it would seem reasonable to predict that whatever cost disadvantages things like wind power face today will soon disappear.
The biggest problem is locating sites that consistently provide 16-18 mph winds. From this site http://kanat.faculty.jsc.vsc.edu/student/jorda/default2.htm you can see that the mid west seems best for energy density. A number of large population centres are hundreds to thousands of miles away.
The biggest problem with wind and solar is the relative density of the energy make it less competitive to natural gas/coal/oil ($/kwhr). As carbon taxes are applied the relative costs should fall into line. Hopefully.
One conundrum many environmentalists face: wind power is better for the environment than fossil fuel power, but because wind turbines take up so much more area, they can be a much greater disturbance to wildlife…
Of course, if farmers just plopped them in their cornfields in the Midwest as others have suggested (where, let’s face it, we’ve already driven off a lot of the wildlife, save for crows) I don’t see the argument vs. wind having any teeth.
Even worse is price. Wisconsin has about 15 Million farm acres http://www.fedstats.gov/qf/states/55000.html. Lets say only 5% is exploitable for wind farming. Now lets also assume 6 other mid- west states have comparable numbers. With wind mills centering on 600m a side squares we would have 50 000 mills possible.
Now it gets nasty. The cost of the Nantucket project is 700 Million/130 mills. Its in the water so drop it by 25% gives us 525 million for 130 mills so cost per mill is 4 Million. Cut that by 25% (economies of scale) we get 50 000 mills at 3 Million for a grand total of 150 Billion dollars.
That’s a lot of venture capital to try to dig up.
[From the NYT article]
…actually, the proposed wind farm isn’t even on Nantucket Island itself, it would be across a shoal about seven miles off the coast of Hyannis, in Nantucket Sound…
…It would provide Cape Cod with 75% of its electrical needs…
…“Embedded in the ocean floor, each turbine would tower higher than the top of the Statue of Liberty’s torch, its three 161-foot blades churning at 16 revolutions per minute.”…
…and the article is cut off there, and you gotta pay for it if you want the whole thing. And I don’t.
~
There’s a wind farm near Pleasanton, California, that’s built along a ridge line. They discovered that raptors, coasting along on the wind coming over the hill, kept smacking into the windmill blades (which were moving too fast for them to see), and getting killed. Animal rights groups got up enough in arms about endangered and protected animals getting killed by the windmills that the farm was shut down.
