Comments on: Nobel laureate: Wind is not the future
One of the world's leading physicists warns that wind energy is a waste of resources and that solar energy should be the focus.
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Exactly! And since the sun shines 24 hours a day, it doesn't suffer from this problem!!
Did you read the article?
Utility scale solar concentrating plants can run 24x7... that is the beauty of them... and we already have all the technology. The big problem (also indicated in the article for Europe... but also a problem in the US) is the transmission grid to get the power out of the best places for the plants.
So why does Obama back wind?.... simple, politics. He just wants to be seen as green and doesn't want to leave the wind people out. I'm sure they tossed a few $ his way as well.
And myles taylor, no you can't use the same technology to store energy for wind power.. maybe some different technology... but it is much harder and most costly. This guy is right... Solar is clearly the way to go.
Not quite. Solar concentrators convert sunlight into heat energy directly, but with wind turbines you have to have an intermediate step to make a conversion from moving air into heat (which in turn is quite inefficient).
Also, maintenance costs are a lot lower. 3 GW of solar farm takes less manpower to maintain than 3GW of wind turbines (all of the moving parts are centrally located and on the ground).
That makes sense.
Luckily for the USA, we have lots more sunlight than Europe throughout the year.
Sure, technically you are correct that the wind comes from solar... but I don't think most people think of the industries that way.... and I doubt this guy was unaware of solar causing wind either.
Your generalization about northern latitudes might hold true for Europe... but isn't so much a problem in the US (though the same problem exists for moving the power around). That said, this guy is right about solar being the key... I think wind can help, but has a lot more issues and not so much in return.
And, I love how people so quickly revert to the "destroy the messenger" defense when they are confronted with an alternate view to their belief system. Calling this guy a "retard" is really a solid argument. You convinced me.
Solar and wind both have bright futures. Maybe that makes sense for Europe, but in the US there are enough wind resources in North and South Dakota alone to supply the entire country's energy needs. It's the country with the most wind resources. Diversify and place solar power plants in the deserts of the southwest and place solar and wind in the best places around the country. Keep coal power plants as a backup. Supplement it with other green technologies.
It is wasteful to store the energy. You can't Efficiently bottle wind, storing the electricity takes batteries, lot's of batteries, and converting it to heat to store and back again is very wasteful.
Wind as an all encompassing replacement cannot work.
Industrial solar thermal does allows you to store the super hot liquid though the night giving you base load* potential.
Sun is reliable
It can be used on cloudy days.
Cheaper to maintain then pretty much every other power generation, including wind.
Cheaper to build.
Easier to work with the windmills
Quite
This is the future.
It isn't about wind v Solar Ideology, this is about crunching the numbers. IN all ways IST works better for large scale implementations.
We should also be building IFRs. Good nuclear technology where the byproduct waste has a half life of 90's; which returns to background radiation levels in 200 years.
*If you don't know what base load is then you should be in this conversation.
I saw an article a while back about a device called a Power Tube. It is a turbine run off of a closed loop freon system that is powered by the heat of the earth.
Aussie governments prefer funding "clean coal" projects; Mitsui, Rio Tinto, Xtrata, Peabody, BHP Billiton etc tend to donate more to political parties than innovative startups. And as a major export commodity coal's a major source of taxes, which the politicians use to influence the way people vote.
Another idea was to build a chimneys (2-3 km high) with conical skirts (5-10km diameter) at the ground level in the desert - basically bloody great stovepipes with big tin sheds at the bottom.. The sun heats the air under the shed which will then rush up the chimney to drive turbines that turn the generators. Its a naively low tech, low pollution idea that just might work.
There's enough geothermal energy in at least one spot of the Untied States to power a substantial portion of it continuously...
...problem is, that spot has a name: Yellowstone National Park.
Whatever happens Europe will need to import its energy, so they can import yellow cake transported in regular ships from responsible countries such Canada & Australia, or they can import gas and solar power from inherently unstable regions via easily "sabotaged" long haul infrastructure.
Turning heat into power will usually mean steam turbines and for that you need water, a commodity that's not in great abundance in North Africa as I recall. Another problem with storing the energy as heat is that heat will dissipate over time and its hard to transport, so you can't wait too long before turning the heat into electricity.
Another way of storing solar energy is to compress air. Once compressed, air will stay in an appropriately engineered container practically forever. And it can be transported over pipelines which may not be as dangerous as methane (natural gas) pipelines.
You can combine the compressed air with bio-gas to drive gas turbine generators. For safety and environmental reasons you'd send the compressed air to the bio-gas. Because methane is a greenhouse gas its not something you want leaking into the atmosphere, whereas leaking air into the atmosphere is relatively benign.
Putting solar on roofs in suburban areas is probably not worth doing unless the excess power can be stored or fed into the grid. Managing grids whose power is sourced from thousands of inherently unreliable sources is not as easy as you might think. And storing relatively small amounts excess electricity at the household level is also not easy or cost effective. The most effective manner of using PV is in large installations such as those in Spain, the US and Germany
Contrary to popular wisdom both Spain and Germany generate more power via PV than does the USA. Germany seems to have shown that PV can be made to work in countries that are not hot and sunny, not as well perhaps but maybe good enough.
There are parts of the US that get near constant wind most times, and there are other parts that get many hours of sun a day, regardless of the season. What power technologies we create and install will have to do with where they are located.
As for this Steinberger character - seems he just wanted to get his name in the paper again. What he says makes little sense. I wonder who is financing his current research, no?
Maybe you shoudl read up on it? You store superheated liquid and use that to create steam. That mean you can store the liguid wduring the night.
It also talks about locating the plants in other places and cabling the power to where it is needed.
This is a solution that can be done right now, and is far more effective then ANY other 'green' source. They should also be building IFRs
Voltaic is only good for small problems, biomass can not be used for large projects, hydro power is limiting, damaging, and expensive,wind is expensive, has a high maintenance cost, is load, and doesn't generate a whole lot of electricity.
To further abuse an already tortured analogy: Putting all you eggs in one basket is fine when all your other baskets are full of holes.
Diversify in location. Have you even looked into IST? at all? it makes a lot of sense and many states in the US are already moving this way. read up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal
Wind power needs to be just one of many types of renewable energy sources we use. I'm all for using our trash, nuclear power, solar, solar thermal, wind, etc. Whatever cuts our dependence on other countries and their agendas.
The idea of generating renewable energy from wind power sound like a wonderful solution to politicians, the media, and the public. The reality is that the Obama administration wants to power our society by spending three or four times more money to generate electricity using solar and wind power than it would cost to use coal or natural gas. The president says that this initiative will create "green jobs."
However, wind is just one part of the diversified energy mix that this country needs. Explore everything, ignore nothing. And by all means CONSERVE electricity - this is the fastest, cheapest, cleanest way to energy independence.
Be glad we are free to have this debate. What a refreshing time to live - just having an energy policy (good or bad) is an improvement over the past.
He notes that wind, even if you include the available space on land, shallow and deep water wind turbines, would produce only 40% of the power that photovoltaic could produce.
Check out the facts and leave the conspiracy theories and emotive adjectives aside.
Until PV solar is more efficient and energy storage cheaper, no one energy technology will meet all of our needs. Until then, wind power can provide a lot of cheap energy with no fuel, emissions, or waste disposal problems, and can be deployed quicker than any other kind of utility scale energy.
- by ikramerica--2008 June 2, 2009 12:20 AM PDT
- Mass harnessing of wind power would also be a blight on the landscape and would alter the weather patterns of the regions these wind farms are located.
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Showing 1 of 3 pages (73 Comments)In the name of decreasing air pollution and stopping "climate change" the solution has the potential to pollute the land with massive structures and create local climate change anyway.