Germany moving towards 100% renewable energy

Weezbo

and iam not remembering where just at this momment...the firat time it rolled by me i thought ..'yah buh it cant be as sharp as the Gotts building in Germany..' then the second time i read about it it was like way more elaborate...it may have been back when i was asking about motorized venitian blinds that work off sunlight sensors that track the azmiuth of the sun on high solar gain window expanses....say did you see the post of the guy with a red fire truck in his "Office" ? the boiler room was done in stainless with swoopy 90's and a t drill and what looked alot like a propress transition ...?

hr

This article

http://www.solartoday.org/2005/march_april05/Germany.html

appears in the latest issue of Solar Today. See if you can pick up an issue and check out the high performance gym with displacement ventilation located in Mead, Colorado, and other alternate energy building projects.

hot rod

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PJO_5

I am proud to announce...

This mixes my experience in water/wastewater AND my interest in renewables;

The Atlantic County (NJ) Utilities Authority is building four windmill towers at the wastewater plant. They will be over 300 feet high and will supply the entire plant's electricity at design winds - no small task due to the type of treatment - and will be within site of the house that management (Kathleen) and I just purchased.

For those that have shown doubts about this type of energy production; it will look more beautiful than any smokestacks I have ever seen...and better than the rest of the AC skyline IMHO. Yes, a few birds will suffer a painful but quick death, and there will be problems along the way...but each of these units can power 4,000 houses at design. Brigantine, NJ (just north of this location) has one of the highest wind averages on the entire east coast.

Here's the link;

http://www.acua.com/windpower.asp

Take Care, PJO

gerry gill

i'm not very enviormentally friendly, but

it seems like such a no brainer to use windmills i just dont understand why we aren't tripping over them..

Weezbo

PJO That is a thing of Beauty

This is really a quiet way to make a statement...and a great way to head off those trumpeter swans i think the possibility of a bird flying head long into one of these is on the order of magnitude of a fish lunging out of the water into the frying pan )

Tony Conner_2

The Amount...

... of power you can get out of a windmill vs the upfront cost isn't a very good ratio. And in any event, the power you get is dependent upon if, and how hard, the wind is blowing. They're noisy (they're basically just fans running in reverse), and there is also dreaded "flicker factor" (strobe light effect through the rotating blades) at sunup and sundown.

Research should definately carry on with windmills, solar power, etc. but to get a meaningful amount of power out of these is a long ways off yet.

Floyd_7

Hey PJO....

good to see your still lurking...:-)
Is that the same plant that burns sludge?????
Did some welding there in a former life many moons ago....

Anyway we got a battle going on here in N. Central middle of nowhere Pa. A Co. wants to set up 47 windmills on a ridge and people are havin' a cow 'bout them.... I say would you rather have a oil or coal deal spewing ash all around or a nuke with 500' towers with steam so thick it blocks the sun????

I'll take a gravel road to service those bugggers and the whoooossh, whooosh of the blades any day... the darn dear ain't gonna care... and if a turkey buzzard or two get knock of.... oh well....

How do we please those environmental whacko's anyway?????

Guess we got to go back to the stone age.... dig a hole in the mountain and burn wood..... OH NO!!! we can't burn wood........but we can burn that sh......

Floyd

michael_15

soapbox

Since I do this for a living (that is, help people put up windmills), I thought I'd make some comments. Real life gets in the way of converting the US to renewable energy. And if you're not interested, here's a warning: this is boring.

1) Windmills make money. In fact, they're cheaper than fossil fuels today, energy-wise. HOWEVER, people won't build windmill farms unless the government provides tax credits. This has long been a crutch of the renewable fuel industry -- the government gets them started by giving tax credits to windmill owners, which makes them even more profitable. Utilities know this, and so they'll pay less for renewable energy -- not because it's worth less, but because they can get away with it. It's been hard to break from that trend and have the utilities pay more. This is changing as states are instituting mandatory "must get x% of your energy from renewable sources" laws. Windmills have only been profitable in the last several years, by the way. Solar energy is still not profitable on a large scale. Heck, it's more profitable to build a power plant to burn chicken poop than to use solar energy. In fact, I think there's a turkey-waste plant somewhere in the Midwest.

2) Windmills only work where it's windy. (Duh.) People want to live where it isn't windy. Therefore, wind farms tend to be in the middle of nowhere. Who is going to build the electric grid out to the middle of nowhere? That's not cheap.

3) We don't have good "battery" technology -- that is, we can't store electricity efficiently. So we only get the electricity when the wind is blowing. But the wind tends to blow at night, when fuel demands are lower. . . And besides that, it's intermittent. Is it not, and until good fuel cell technology is developed (and it isn't), it will never suffice as a primary source of energy. Germany (where wind farms are very common) I believe is tapping out on capacity for intermittent energy.

4) The government offers big-time incentives for wind farms. However, they keep letting the laws expire (there was no tax credit for building wind farms from January-September 2004, for example) and taking a while to re-enact them. Which makes the industry very antsy. Government is sloppy.

5) The tax credit thing again. Tax credits let you save money on the taxes. But the people who own the sites for wind farms, guys named Farmer Bob and Rancher Joe, they don't really make millions and millions of dollars, and hence, can't save millions and millions on taxes. The tax credits are so big that the only kinds of companies that would have enough taxes to pay them are. . . well, Bank of America, for instance. But they don't own farmland in the middle of nowhere. So it's complex to set it all up.

6) Only in the last few years has the technology gotten very reliable for big wind farms. Translation: GE has gotten into the windmill-making business very recently, when they bought out Enron's wind business.

There are plenty more reasons, but I should probably shut up now.

-Michael

michael_15

birds

Actually get hit a lot by windmills. In order to build wind farms nowadays, you have to do avian studies to prove that the windmills won't be in migratory paths, because, well, the blades are huge, heavy, and move really fast. And birds aren't too bright.

-Michael

Uni R

Noisy?

Perhaps some small home sized windmills with fixed chord blade designs are noisy, but the large turbines that can each provide 24/7 energy to hundreds of houses run at about 40db (unless you are right underneath it and even then they are definitely still at the quiet end of the sound spectrum). Noise is a sign of inefficiency and the large ones are extremely efficient, both in terms of blade design and for the generator itself. Their efficiency is further enhanced by computers that continuously adjust their direction and blade pitch to optimize their output and protect them from overspeeding in high winds.


This is the first time I have heard about the "dreaded flicker factor". Since they spin at about 20 - 30 rpm, and not at 2000 - 3000 rpm like a plane's propeller, I can't quite see the concern. I have one just east of me that I commute past every day with the sun behind it in the morning and at night through most seasons and the only bizarre thing I have noticed is how on foggy days it reminds me of a WWII bomber's engine idling on a taxi way once it finally becomes visible. It's blades are about 80' long.


As far as the power to cost ratio not being good, what are you comparing it with and what costs are included? Where did you get this information?

Uni R

Birds

Actually, the only issues with bird strikes have been in areas where there are windmill farms located in migratory passes and therefore that requirement makes complete sense. Birds are actually quite bright and must process information quickly or they wouldn't be able to fly safely.


The outer wing tip velocity of a wind turbine at speed with 80' blades maxes out at somewhere around 85mph (30rpm) which is around the speed of a car on the freeway. The middle of the blade would therefore be less than 50mph. If a bird were to somehow not notice 3 80'blades spinning in front of it and still somehow flew through the path of the blades oblivious to everything, it would still have a excellent odds of flying through completely unscathed. I would estimate those odds at over 95% unless the bird was huge like an osprey or capable of extremely slow flight. So Weezbo's example is pretty much bang on! I have never seen a struck bird under a windmill. I see many dead birds at the base of high rise buildings along the lakeshore. Bird strikes outside of migratory paths (where many birds are flying in close proximity to one another and therefore more easily distracted from the many obstacles that a large windmill farm would entail) just isn't an issue.


The windmill farm at Altamont Pass has been the focus of much of this debate. About 10,000 - 22,000 birds have died there over 20 years. Given that there are over 5000 windmills there that averages out to about 1 dead bird every several years per windmill.

Uni R

Employment

Denmark has 21,000 people employed in the wind turbines manufaturing industry. In comparison, Canada has 34,000 people employed in pulp and lumber.

Tony Conner_2

I Was Really...

...interested in windmill power a couple of years ago, and did some research. Look into the cost per installed power unit, as compared to more conventional sources. There was a website from Denmark regarding windmills, and it outlined the drawbacks. Contrary to most of the info that gets distributed, not nearly every Dane thinks "happy thoughts" about windmill power. Technical issues aside, there were a lot of people unhappy about the very large amount of government money involved. It seems that a lot of operators were not so much "farming" the wind, as they were "farming" the gov't subsidy money. Of course, that could NEVER happen here...

Check out what you'd spend to buy and install a windmill generator in your backyard. Then look at how much power you'll actually get out of it at various windspeeds. I suspect you'll be as disappointed as I was. You quickly find that you'll tie up a ton of money for enough power to run a clock radio - if the wind is blowing.

Things like flicker factor and noise have been acknowledged for at least decades. The old Audels Plumbers & Steamfitters books, and "Pumps Hydraulics & Air Compressors" from the 1920's talk about these. And from the articles I saw a couple of years ago, they haven't gone away.

There are downsides to every form of power generation, and that includes windmills.

Geno_15

too many people

on the planet, that's our only problem.

Biofuels an especially biodiesel are what I want to see more of. Diesels that run on this stuff have almost 0 emmissions, at the same time many cities are forcing bus co's to install catalytic converters when all they have to do is switch to biodiesel, duhhhh.

Willy Nelson is even getting into it.

PJO_5

Still Occasional Lurking...From A Wallie At Heart

Floyd,

Good to "see" you, too. Last time I posted was about your son I think - hope things have taken a better turn for him and your family.

I won't get into a long argument with anybody about it because it will get political at some point, but when the $$$ come in, remember two things; 1) The "real" cost of our petroleum-based economy, and 2) The absolute simplicity and reduced cost of NEVER using any type of petroleum fuel for a renewable energy source such as this....exploration, extraction, transportation, refinery, AND pollution. Adding these costs in a true fashion levels the playing field significantly.


Like somebody else said, no matter what you choose you are going to have "good and bad"...I'll take the problems with renewables any day because it IS the long-term solution.

Analogy; Remember 25 years ago, when the automakers had the technology for air bags and anti-lock brakes (a few cars had them)...and said that it was too expensive to implement them to a lot of cars? How many cars today have neither of these items?

Just my $.02

Take Care, PJO

Uni R

Apples and Oranges

Tony, my post was based on this thread being about large wind turbines and not on home systems. Your points are valid for home systems, and the flicker factor I would completely associate with the old wind powered water pumps with many close spaced flat metal blades used on farms. Small electric generating wind mills are noisy, high rpm and require much more maintenance compared to just paying an electric bill. To get a home windmill you either have to view it as an expensive hobby or have really huge hookup charges because electricity straight off the grid is a real bargain, even at $0.25/kwh. My post was strictly about the big turbines. I'm totally behind them. I wish there were more than just one between my home and work instead of an old coal generating station that is only cheap to run on paper. They aren't a panacea. A large one can only provide enough power for about 250 homes, but it all adds up.

Weezbo

yah say what you belive buh lots of people bad mouthed

insulation and triple and quadrapane windows too...i also remember 1/4 " cdx plywood too...oh that plywood stuff is blah blah bla...yah well ....your entitled to your opinion we have like 7 mountain ranges and not one windmill range here in the northern frontier...apathy and oil what a perfect marriage....

PJO_5

Weezbo...

I love your sense of humor...although sometimes I must admit it takes me a while to decipher some of your posts! :-)

They actually did have to do some sort of study, and also monitor certain kinds of species near there...all part of the package I guess.

Take care, PJO

Tony Conner_2

Here's The Link...

... to the Danish website http://www.naboertilvindmoller.dk/index_uk.html . I take a lot of the info on it with a grain of salt, like the magazine article that started this string. Everybody that writes articles like these, puts their own spin on things.

The only reason I used small systems was so people could have a realistic frame of reference. Like anything, you can get economies of scale with larger machines. Look at the installed cost for a wind turbine to power 250 homes vs the installed cost of other methods of generating electricity. The scale of the difference will remain the same. And in the grand scheme of power requirements, the electricity to run 250 homes is the square root of nothin'.

If you haven't considered flicker factor and noise, then I'd encourage you to do some research into the downside of this technology.

Rich W

alt E

When I was in school back in the 70's all the "experts" said that we would be out of oil and the planet dead because of over population. Every day they would scare us to death predicting a new ice age-OOPS!We've gone way past their so-called limits on both counts. Now it's Global Warming...

Mr. Jimmy gave us tax credits on solar and all the scammers came out of the woodwork with over priced crap that did not work. "Look at all the money you get back from Uncle Sam" was their main sales tool.A dozen people on our block were stung by these jerks(3 different companies). The "dealers" got their money and left many people with a bad feeling about alternative energy.

I agree with some of the other posts- when you look at ALL the costs of energy, alternative energy is very close now. Yes, converting will difficult and expensive- kinda like re-hab I would quess. There were a lot of people who fought the switch from gas to electric lighting, from the horse to the car. The list goes on and on.I would also prefer the woosh-woosh of a windmill to the smoke stack of a coal plant any day. Plus, there would be cool new equipment to work on. Besides, I want to save the petrol for my SUV. Since the city won't let me keep a horse, I need some way to get back to the fishin' hole with the kids.

Jason_15

Employment

The U.S.A. has 70,000 employees at it's 103 commercial nuclear reactors. The lowest paid of which is at least $55,000 per year.

Uni R

Unfortunately...

Tony, the objections you make just simply aren't factors for large windmills. I frequently visit a park in Toronto that has a large wind turbine. There is a quiet whirring sound when you stand directly underneath. My yound children love it. If it were noisy, they wouldn't. As you walk away, it quickly becomes inaudible. If research ever tells me that this is noisy, I will lose my faith in science. I have also visited different windmill farms in California when visiting friends in the Bay area. Noise just isn't a factor, even when there are many of them. Proof positive of how quiet they are is that Toronto put one up in its major lakefront park.


Also, I drive past it morning and night with the sun behind it during spring and fall and it never has a "flicker factor". It's been years since I have flown single engined planes but I know what is being talked about. That simply isn't a factor with 30 rpm blades. It takes 2 seconds at its top speed for the blade to do just one full turn. Come up to Toronto and I'll show you first hand. It is actually an interesting project and was done as a energy shareholder investment for the residents it serves. It's paying dividends already.

Tony Conner_2

There's...

...no way you've had time to read the stuff on the Danish website. And it's not the driving by that's the issue with the flicker factor, it's having it strobe the windows of your house.

The ONLY way that the Toronto windmill got installed was through massive grants. Toronto is also a city that somehow imagines that it doesn't generate any garbage, so reality doesn't always live there.

Here's the big test. See if 250 your neighbours want to chip-in for a community windmill, and go off-grid. Tell them what it's going to cost, upfront (no grants), and then make sure that they understand that much of the time, they'll have to make do with a tiny fraction of the power that they're used to, and there will be LOTS of time when there's no power at all. Or, get your co-workers together, along with your employer, and go wind power at work. Everyone needs to understand that there will not be power for lights, computers, production machinery etc on any kind of reliable basis. Everyone will only get called in to work on windy days. Good luck.

PJO_5

Here we go...

Getting a bit testy are we, Tony? :-)

Can't you make that same argument of the 250 homes going off grid to pay for a fossil-based plant? Two differences; 1) Yes you would have constant power... 2) Oh, by the way, you have to pay for EVERY dollar the fuels really costs for the life of the plant - as opposed to nothing for the other.

Up-front cost is much higher for most renewables - that's a fact. Planned and done right, the long-term costs will get closer and closer.

What if petroleum doubles in price in the next five years? What if it quadruples?

Uni R

Tony

You're talking to a guy who pays a surcharge on his electric bill to cover the debts of nuclear reactors built 20 years ago. Everything has high capital costs. I'm a little more comfortable with high capital costs if they reduce the need for fossil fuels or eliminate spent fuel storage problems. I'm not sure what your point is, but you seem entirely too defensive on all of this. BTW, I did read through that site. It has a particular spin to it, but that's fine. Unfortunately it is far more opinion than fact.


See you did lose me with the flicker factor. What you are referring to is a syncchronization issue with the AC clocking. That is again an issue with small generators of any type.


Toronto sells its garbage to Michigan. That's wrong, but please don't preach morales to me. Thanks.

Tony Conner_2

I'm Well...

...aware of ALL of the costs for fossil plants. I worked for a privately owned combined-cyle district heating/cooling co-gen operation for a number of years. I live in Ontario, so get to have MY money chipped-in for a feel-good windmill/lawn ornament on the Toronto waterfront. With windmills, it is necessary to do one of two things - you have to have an application that you can elect NOT to run while there isn't enough wind to make power, or INSTALL DUPLICATE GENERATING CAPAPCITY, driven by some other source. Wind-power guys often overlook that little nugget. Testy? You betcha.

The VERY best thing that could be done for conservation would be to charge the actual cost for electrical power. Probably too much political fallout for that to happen, though.

Should money be spent on research into more effective wind power? Absolutely. Does it make ANY financial sense at all to install vast numbers of windmills, as the technology stands right now? No it doesn't. Want to actually DO something constructive that saves fuel with relatively low environmental impact, and actually has some sort of reasonable capital/operating expense? District energy can actually deliver that in build-up urban areas. But you've got to be able to get enough money for the electrical power you generate to make it economically fly. Right now, that's not the case, in most locations.

Uni R

Jason

I just was illustrating how serious the Danes are about it. To follow your tangent in a different tangent, in India they have used people from untouchable castes to manually change fuel rods. They would get a few hundred dollars equiv for their families and then die horrible deaths. I'm not sure if they still do, that was maybe 5 or 10 years ago that I knew of this. Not everyone benefits from commercial nukes as much as Homer does.

PJO_5

Does \"ALL\" include

the military cost as well?

Being from Canada, maybe you don't see the same picture...but from where I sit we are running about 35% to 40% (depending who you talk to) of the U.S. total military cost in the Middle East. This is not counting the current efforts in Iraq...

I knew it would start to get political...sorry. :-)

Take Care, PJO

Constantin

There is a lot of unused potential...

Like most things, the scope of alternative energy approaches ranges from low-hanging fruit all the way to "gee-whiz". For example,

• In most areas of the US, it is effective to use solar energy to heat the DWH most of the time. If the industry reached a larger scale, then standardization and scale would make such systems quite inexpensive. A quick way to reduce household energy demand by at least 10%...
• Proper house design and insulation limits solar gain in the summer and maximizes it in the winter. The cost to the homeowner is usually close to zero.
• Wind, like hydro-power, is usually seasonal. Unlike hydropower, the output from wind cannot be scaled up and down by a push of the button. I personally find large windmills a thing of beauty, but that's just me.
• One potentially very exciting development is the advent of fusion power. If the current multinational experimental reactor is a success, then the follow-on DEMO reactor could pave the path towards virtually limitless power.

Constantin

Ummm... allow me to quibble.

Windmills would make money if the local laws, etc. allowed them to be errected with a minimum of hassle. However, their popularity frequently seems to be only eclipsed by cell-phone towers. Thus, like nukes, the approval process becomes a very large proportion of the installed cost.

My view of how windmills and people locate differs from yours. Usually, windmills have and will continue to be placed where its windy. People may or may not live in those locales as well. In my experience, the two are not necessarily negatively correlated, as you suggest.

After all, some folks on Cape Cod seem to have their underwear tied up in knots over having windmill farms several miles offshore. Many seashore areas/barrier islands are ideal windmill locations, and up and down the coast, people pay huge premiums to live by the sea... Given what barrier islands in areas like NC are subjected to, you'd think people would know better and leave the barrier islands to the seabirds.

As for the transportation of energy, nothing seems to stop Boston from buying lots of HydroQuebec energy, midwest energy, etc. There is a huge transportation grid spanning this country and it's only poised to get bigger as the urban centers expand and NIMBY forces relocate plants further and further away from the actual point of use.

In my mind, the biggest issue for getting large-scale alternative energy off the ground is a guaranteed market. Banks don't like risks, and the memories from the 70's continue to linger.

However, the technology issues were solved well before GE bought themselves into the market. Modern IGBT's and other solid state electronics simplify and replace many of the mechanical components that made the older windmills so difficult/expensive to maintain. Nowadays, modern mills can deliver energy across a much broader range of wind conditions for that very reason.

Lastly, the tax credits are, once again, simply a question of extant markets. If the market had even manageable risk, then leasing deals spring up easily. How else do you explain that the tax shields of the airline industry continue to be passed on to lessors? It's not like leasing planes is without risks these days...

hr

Birdbrains

Popular Science had a piece on birds flying into high rise buildings a while ago. Seem the glass or mirrored glass buildings are responsible for a lot of bird casulaties.

Nature always pays a price for development. Around here, like most areas, they name subdivisions and developments after the things they destroy. Deerfield, Quail Run, Red Hawk, etc

I suspect the birds will adapt after time. I sure hope so, or else we will have to travel to MJ's Neverland to see them

hot rod

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Mad Dog

Just leave the kids at home...heh?

Michael usually plans a sleepover for the boys...warm milk...cookies...cuddling. Couldn't help it....The freaky one will likely have to sell neverland since he is now 275 mil in the hole...better go soon. i bet Michael would LOVE the wind=mills...... Mad Dog

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Mad Dog

That's what we need in New York then...lots of windmills

A) Kill all the Canadian Geese (place them in the migratory routes) which no longer migrate, have ruined many a water way, and have overttaken our athletic fields. additional power will come in handy. c) The carcasses can then be turned in to biofuel...I'm gonna get my clogs on. Lets do it! Mad Dog

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Weezbo

memory lane....

YEEEEEEEEEEEEEE OHWUUUUUUUUU ...Duck down under the school tables kids and try to kiss you a.. goodbye !

Dean_7

Energy

Personally I am in favor of Nuclear plants and windmills. What i would like to see is the developement of clean hydrogen fuel technology. Yes there are technical challenges involved but are they any more difficult than developing a program from scratch to send people to the moon and bring them back? Or are they more difficult the the developement of nuclear power?. In both cases technology was literally invented for the purpose. What is missing is a national will to do so. Something which was present in both previous instances. National leadership which stood up and said we ARE going to do this and we ARE going to do it in a specific time frame. I don't believe much is beyond the ingenuity and capability of this country provided the effort is focused and aimed at a specific goal with real leadership behind it.

Weezbo

The snivelers and KING Snivelers would eventually show up

and start in with whine whine pi.. and moan... great sentiment though ..i'd rather start out with a plan and go for it ,and change the plan for the better later ...get the job done to the best of our abilities now......

Glen

Please visit southern alberta

the place is littered with wind mills with more planned each month. Almost outnumbering oil rigs and gas plants. The Calgary transit system is self sufficient most days due to wind generated power and there is probably enough redundacy in the system now to supply all the systems power - it has been embraced and accepted and proven very succesful. We are in the halcyon days of fossils fuels - solar - wind - geothermal will very soon be the new mantra. My personal favourite is my own windmill supplying modest power to my Vitosol dhw/radiant equipment. But right now - nat gas (and other fossils fuels)is still so very inexpensive that there is little incentive to switch.