Leland Teschler's Editorial: Not Enough Juice: Reality and Alternative Energy
Appears in Print As: Not Enough Juice: Reality and Alternative Energy
On the eve of the recently completed Wind Power Conference, Siemens Energy put out a press release trumpeting an order for 33 of its 2.3-MW wind turbines. The units are destined for a wind farm in North Dakota expected to have a generating capacity of up to 75 MW.
You might think a wind farm with 33 wind turbines would make a significant dent in the demand for fossil fuels. But its contribution as a green-power source only comes into perspective when considering the power needs of a big city. Peter Huber, a Manhattan Institute scholar and one-time MIT associate professor, has figured this out. He calculates that meeting New York City’s total energy demand would take about 13,000 wind turbines the size of the Siemens units going into North Dakota, all spinning at top speed. And to meet the Big Apple’s peak energy demands, you’d need about 50,000 of them sprinkled in dispersed locales to give yourself enough reserve margins of power.
Huber’s point in making this calculation is that there is a lot of ignorance floating around about how difficult it is to get a large amount of power out of wind and, for that matter, out of solar cells. And though exhibitors at the Wind Power confab displayed a lot of interesting technology, there was nothing there that invalidated Huber’s projections about getting enough juice from green-power sources to run cities.
Huber also points out that power would still be expensive even if the 50-story-high turbines themselves were free. Proponents of wind generation explain that the technology continues to improve, with more reliable generators, gearboxes, and ancillary equipment coming off the drawing boards. Nevertheless, the infrastructure costs of maintaining wind installations are significant and will remain so. There probably isn’t even enough government subsidy money to make wind more than a niche power source.
Companies supplying the wind industry understand this, but are enthusiastic about wind anyway. It is easy to see why: Capital-equipment manufacturers I spoke to all said their business is essentially dead except for wind-energy contracts.
The facts about wind power are all the more sobering in light of recent proposals to make coal-generated electricity more expensive through cap-and-trade climate bills. Backers of such legislation see it as a way of promoting green-power alternatives. Ironically, the more-likely outcome will be to make the U.S. more dependent on foreign oil. Even if wind farms were on an economic par with coal-fired generators, it would take time to erect enough turbines to make a difference.
For example, Siemens figures it will take about two years to get its 33 wind turbines up and running in North Dakota. At that rate, the 13,000 turbines necessary to meet New York’s average needs would be ready in the year 2797. In the meantime, utilities will be burning more petroleum products to avoid passing onerous carbon taxes onto ratepayers.
Of course, there is an easy way around burning coal or buying foreign oil for electricity, and it doesn’t involve dedicating thousands of acres to wind farming or solar cells. Nuclear power is clean and compact, and it is safely used in countries ranging from France to Japan. It’s just not politically correct, at least in the U.S. But unlike some of the alternatives, it is not a green bridge to nowhere, either.
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Comments
not enough juice
There certinly are enough 'juiced up' persons around pushing alturnative sources rather then up-to-date engineering/science - the signal of and advanced, developing society or nation. Just as ole Ben Franklin revieled that the latest scientific inquires and discoveries and inclinations of such in a population could and would create conditions where a underdog could beat the britches off a world power.
The idea that America should return to ancient "technology" to survive is ludacrist . Wind and solar would never produce enough 'power' to build advanced steel mills, much less run them - or high speed trains - those presons glorifing the 'post-industrial' America are fornicating with the old dead crowd that proclaimed " if man was ment to fly, God would have given him wings!". So these debachers of the dead cannot conceve of an America lit thru fusion generated brilance - they wish to hide under the covers of darkness - in bed with the bodies of the past. Lets shuck the schackles of the childish feelings that our Nation is done for and all we can do is scrape togather the scraps of outmoded forms of energy production and instead go for developing the highest form of "flux density" necessary to bring America, and the world into a culture fit to be classified Brilliant, Creative Humans, and pull the plug on the economics preventing us from doing so. Time to shed your 'blankie', kids, and grow up!
Fossil fuel suppliers love wind farms
I apologize for being so late to the party, but someone just sent me a link to this column.
The comment thread is interesting, especially since it appears that most of the contributors are thinking about the challenge from an engineering perspective.
One thought that was voiced by several people was that even if wind was not the answer, it was still worth doing because it would do something to reduce our use of fossil fuels. Other commenters believe that wind is at least better than leaving radioactive materials behind for future generations.
I will give the commenters the benefit of the doubt and assume that they are not employed in the difficult, job generating task of improving the performance of the enormous machinery needed to collect a meaningful amount of energy from a low density, low entropy, weather dependent source.
Quite frankly, people that sell natural gas and oil LOVE it when wind promoters succeed in erecting new "capacity" in the form of large turbines because they know that they will end up selling lots of fuel to the backup power generators that will have to be ready to respond almost instantaneously when the wind does not blow at the rated speed. Since a typical wind installation will operate with a capacity factor of just 30% or less, the oil/gas burning quick response turbines will operate with a CF of 70% or more. That is better than most gas installations in use today.
About 90-95% of the cost of electricity from a gas fired turbine is the cost of fuel. Translated from the viewpoint of a petroleum pusher, 90-95% of the REVENUE produced by a gas burning power plant goes directly into the pockets of the fuel providers.
There is no mystery why companies like Chevron, Shell, and BP are some of the biggest investors in alternative energy. Even though those investments are a TINY fraction of the capital expenditures of the companies each year, they play an important role in ensuring that petroleum maintains its market dominance and keeps upstarts like atomic fission suppressed. It does not hurt that the wind and solar installations do not make much useful energy to complete with the real revenue generator - continuing to sell billions of tons of fossil fuels every year while producing 3.4 times as many billions of tons of CO2.
Rod Adams
Publisher, Atomic Insights
Host and producer, The Atomic Show Podcast
Green Bridge to Nowhere
Someone finally tells the truth! Try to Google "green energy" and all you get is the PROS and no CONS...
Leland is 'On-Target' with his Editorial - 'Not Enough Juice'!!
Not only can you NOT get enough power soon enough from these renewable sources, but as long as these renewable energy sources are 'grid connected', absence of these sources [when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining] - present demand energy detriment to the base supply capability of the grid and as more and more of these 'interruptible' supplies eat up the capacity reserve margins in the base grid supply, 'brown outs' and 'blackouts' will ensue! Continuous 'base' supply generators (esp. Nuclear) are the right answer! Polically correct or not, Nuclear is the technically correct answer for our power needs! It can be the cleanest cheapest form of electric power production and the waste can be separated, compacted and handled safely - just ask the French who get 80% of their power from Nuclear!!
Numbers Off Target
awea.org states that construction of a 50MW wind farm takes
less than six months. The average size of a US nuclear power plant is 964MW. If the tiny wind farm construction crew were to work
in series, they would complete erection of 964MW in about
nine years, which is probably less time than it would take to
construct a new nuclear power plant. Expand the wind farm
construction crew to the size of the construction crew that would
be crawling over the nuclear construction site and the wind
watts would arrive much faster. Secondly, off-coast wind farms
could be positioned closer to demand than nuclear power
plants, so Mr. Teschler's statement regarding enormous
wind infrastructure costs should be reconsidered. Wind power
is not the only solution, but it is already a very viable,
cost-competitive part of the solution with a clear cost-reduction
path as rotors grow larger and towers taller.
"Not Enough Juice" Article - Agree, Except The "2797"
Good article mostly, in that it does put into perspective the renewable energy challenge that we face. I agree that nuclear power is the most realistic solution to energy independence. Your article didn't even deal with the power transmission issues for wind and solar. Nuclear can be placed much closer to the user, and should start with expanding existing plants that already have permits and land.
Just think how many of our current problems would not be there if nuclear energy had continued to be implemented from the 1970's and on.
I do have to take issue with the statement you made where you projected that it would be year 2797 to implement wind power at the rate being done at one facility. While your math is likely correct, you know that this is not the rate that it would occur if money and effort were put behind it. Thus this is the type of exaggeration that politicians do and just causes me to lose confidence in other things you said.
Overall, good article, however.
Dennisdu
Mr. Teschler's Editorial
Mr. Teschler:
Your editorial insinuates that people in the wind or other renewable energy industry are delusional. Your strategic sprinkling of self-created statistics to make your point is so agenda-oriented it is disturbing. I am a regular reader of Machine Design and your editorial, and you often have an interesting view even if I don't find it agreeable. Today I feel like you are not an engineer at all, but rather a closed minded nuclear lobbyist. A true engineer looks for solutions when presented with a problem as big as climate change or the contamination land for hundreds of thousands of years the way nuclear does.
The simple fact is that more wind generation capacity was built in 2008 (almost 6 GW) than any other generation source, including coal, natural gas, nuclear, etc. The industry's current goal is to supply 20% of the country's electricity by the year 2030, and it is completely achievable and on schedule. This, incidentally, will surpass the nation's nuclear capacity which took decades to develop and even decades later doesn't have a waste solution.
There are thousands of engineers working to solve the challenges of integrating renewable energy across the country in a meaningful way. These challenges cover all aspects of engineering and there are many exciting advancements in everything from synthetic, carbon-free fuels to energy storage to offshore energy and distribution/smart-grid. The men and women working in these technologies, your readers, are largely comprised of individuals who are trying to avoid the environmental nightmares of legacy power generation. I consider your attidude and comments a slap in the face to us all.
Wind Energy
I have grown tired of explaining too all of my family, friends and business associates exactly the points you have made in your article. What is really frustrating are all the people who tell me they are going to put a wind turbine up in their back yard for under 10 grand to power their home and sell the "excess" back to their power company and turn a profit. I try to make a wager with all of these people that this is a pipe dream but none of them take the bet and to date none have made the attempt to try it.
Alternative Energy
Going a little into science fiction, let's assume we are nice and want to have the same amount of energy of the New Yorkers for all the people in the world we would need 4,000,000 windmills producing 1,760,000 MW; this will produce an slow-down on earth because of the tangential force absorved and the days will be longer and and and... we will certainly become "greener" like those martians from the old cartoons.
Honestly, I do not know if I am missing any zeros but surely the numbers are big.
Interesting article. This
Interesting article. This should be passed around to the folks in DC. How much more will the American public put up with from the folks we vote into power and who are supposed to be looking out for our best interests???
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