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| Wind: Not the answer |
Building and servicing wind turbines is expensive, and wind is an unreliable source of energy. If it it's not windy, you have to rely on other sources of power, such as coal and oil.
Last month Great Britain was clobbered by Chicago-style winter weather. How did its wind do? The Telegraph of London reports:
Despite high demand for electricity as people shivered at home over Christmas, most of the 3,000 wind turbines around Britain stood still due to a lack of wind.When Britain's energy demand went up in December, it became more reliant on fossil fuels.
Even yesterday, when conditions were slightly breezier, wind farms generated just 1.8 per cent of the nation’s electricity — less than a third of usual levels.
The failure of wind farms to function at full tilt during December forced energy suppliers to rely on coal-fired power stations to keep the lights on — meaning more greenhouse gases were produced.
Experts feared that as the Government moved towards a target of generating 30 per cent of electricity from wind — while closing gas and coal-fired power stations — cold, still winters could cause a problem in the future.
Wind is not the answer to our energy needs. Not in the UK, not in America.
Related post:
Wind: Green pork
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4 comments:
Another good place to look is in the Palm Springs area. There is a fairly steady wind through the pass, and they built hundreds of units there. Even from the air, you can see most of them, most of the time, are stationary. From the ground, you can see how much maintenance is required. I don't have a reference for this, but a good friend who is a retired EE that lives there seasonally said that the cost is about 10 times the next highest cost of power source in CA. Like gasohol, another case where emotion has overcome reason, and at great expense.
@Tregonsee-
I fly through the "Banning Pass" regularly at low level altitudes, looking square at the hub of many of the windmills to which you refer. I have never flown through there when "most of them were stationary". My experience is quite the opposite in fact...
The wind there is high enough to be damned spooky much of the time.
But that's not the question here, is it? The question actually is, "Is the power produced by these things economically feasible?"
And right now it's probably not. At Banning I would guess 10% of the machines are having serious maintenance done on them at any given time.
Should we give up on them? No. It's my hope that someday they'll be worth the effort.
But I do hope we continue to try to make them more efficient...
A "bag of many tricks" is a good thing, wouldn't you agree?
Oh, I'm "an all of the above" person, GB, as far as energy, and that includes wind. But wind can never be anything close to a primary source of power. Wind of course is inconsistent, wind is most powerful at night, when he need it the least, and it's very difficult to store excess power more than temporarily.
But it's not as useless as ethanol.
Peak wind times vary with geography, John. At the Banning Pass the wind rises early in the day from the lower elevations as it is heated, then reverses course as the sun begins to sink. As stated above I've been really spooked flying through there at times, with winds of 40 knots not being abnormal.
Those certainly are the sorts of places we ought to be using wind power.
South of Joliet?
Not so much.
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