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, Fri, 19 Jan 2007 13:51:23
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There are a lot of misconceptions about wind. Everybody like to say a wind farm can produce X number of megawatts, enough power for X number of homes but fail to take in to consideration the fact that the wind is weather; it's unreliable and unpredictable. Take a 200+ MW wind farm located in the NW; care to guess how many MW have been produced in the past week? If you guessed anything over 5, you'd be wrong. In fact, last night was the first time I've seen wind generation in a week. And that leads to another point, when does the wind typically blow? At night. When is demand for energy at its lowest? Again, at night. So when you and your neighbors are sound asleep consuming very little energy in your house, the wind is blowing. Once you get up, turn on your lights, TV, furnace, make toast and coffee, and head to the office, the wind has typically subsided so the energy you're using is being generated by another source such as hydro (still the cheapest form of energy production by the way), coal, nukes, and natural gas.
There is still a lot of debate as to how expensive wind is. Basically, you can throw a wind mill up and say, "Look, free power!", but you have to have something else on standby to replace that energy once the wind stops blowing. So, whether that's an entirely new natural gas generator you had to purchase (ironically supplied by the same company that sold you the wind generator) or something else already on your system (often an older more expensive source of power), those costs needs to be accounted for.
Wind is a nice feel-good alternative but it has its limits. I've often thought it would be interesting to see how consumers would react to wind power if they had to rely on it exclusively. Here's the closest example I have: go buy one of those lawn decoration windmill things and put it in your yard. Now, don't turn anything on in your house (including the refrigerator and furnace) unless you check to see that the decoration is spinning. The faster it spins, the more you can turn on. Once it stops spinning, turn everything off in your house.
I also enjoyed an article I read about how wind is 60-80% reliable. Let's put that into perspective: assume you work 5 days a week, that's 10 one-way trips between home and the office. If your car was 60-80% reliable it would mean that 2 to 4 times a week you would be walking home or to the office. That doesn't include trips to the store, gas station, mall, and vacations. How many people consider that a reliable form of transportation? I suspect most people wouldn't last more than a week with a car that was that "reliable".
All I'm saying is that wind is fine _in moderation_. Once you begin to get too much of an _uncontrollable_ generator on the system, you going to start to have reliability and cost issues.
Ultimately, finding new ways of producing energy is the wrong way to look at the problem. Conservation _needs_ to be addressed first. Take a look around your house and it's amazing how much energy is being consumed by things that aren't even 'on'. And the more and more electronic gadgets we buy the bigger the problem gets. Also, walk around an office complex at night - it's amazing how many computer monitors are sitting there 'on' for the 16 hours when no one is in front of them. Energy waste is far too prevalent.
posted by 70.56.12...
, Thu, 18 Jan 2007 21:29:30, Sun, 21 Jan 2007 12:48:21, Mon, 22 Jan 2007 09:37:35, Sun, 21 Jan 2007 17:51:47, Sat, 20 Jan 2007 04:09:47
, Fri, 19 Jan 2007 09:07:04, Fri, 19 Jan 2007 10:32:35, Fri, 19 Jan 2007 13:51:23
, Sat, 20 Jan 2007 21:20:55, Sat, 20 Jan 2007 18:13:30
, Fri, 19 Jan 2007 07:08:40, Fri, 19 Jan 2007 08:48:50, Fri, 19 Jan 2007 05:53:55
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