The wind-energy lobby has been masterly at garnering huge subsidies and mandates by claiming that its product is a “green” alternative to conventional electricity. But the hype has obscured a dirty little secret:...
This, by and large, is what modern (gov't funded) "science" has been reduced to. Not the betterment of mankind, not dealing honestly with the public--just being sure they get "their" piece of the tax pie by whatever means necessary. The gov't touches it, it gets corrupeted.
Chad
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"We can have no '50-50' allegiance in this country. Either a man is an American and nothing else, or he is not an American at all."-- Theodore Roosevelt
A wise man's heart is at his right hand; but a fool's heart at his left. Ecclesiasties 10:2
The last four letters in American..........I Can
The last four letters in Republican........I Can
The last four letters in Democrats.........Rats
It is a very expensive adventure, with little return to the consumer. When the subsides run out, they will have to compete with gas and coal or stand idle in the breeze. The market will pick the winners and losers, not the government.
Last edited by emptyquiver2; 08-13-2011 at 09:36 AM.
The idea is a joke, at least around here. We get very little sustained wind. There are a series of squalls moving through with lots of rain, thunder and lightning. (Lots of thunder and lightning.) But there's no wind at all.
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Proud parents of our own "Daddy's Little Girls"
I heard Jesus He drank wine and I bet we'd get along just fine.
Over the past week or so, Texans have been consuming record-breaking quantities of electricity, and ERCOT, the state’s grid operator, has warned of rolling blackouts if customers don’t reduce their consumption.
Texas has 10,135 megawatts of installed wind-generation capacity.
From what i been reading even on the good days 20+%-( is what they generate) a small precent of there( various ones around the world to) total nameplate capacitys- nowhere near there claimed max outputs.
The moneys spent there so far could have gotten them much more reliable power sources yep...( obama & the un,s green policys &his green movement friends policys/plans seem to favor" labor intensive projects"- why not just generate the power directly with humans( running on big hamster wheels then ?
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That $25 billion could have been used to build about 5,000 megawatts of highly reliable nuclear generation capacity, or as much as 25,000 megawatts of natural-gas-fired capacity, all of which could have been reliably put to work during the hottest days of summer.
More rolling blackouts possible? Didnt that just happen during feb(2011?
Not going to well these windmills elsewhere it seems to.
Farce of the wind farms: Power produced drops 6% after calmest year this century
Some of Britain's most beautiful landscapes are blighted by wind farms that will not generate enough electricity for the future.
The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has released figures which show a six per cent fall in the amount of electricity produced by Britain's onshore wind farms.
The department blames a drop in wind, revealing that 2010 was the calmest year this century, with onshore turbines producing only 1.9 per cent of all electricity in 2010, compared with two per cent the year before...
Wind energy; you hear a lot about how great it is. But what is the truth? Well, apparently this source of power which environmental activists tout as the solution to all of our problems is more unsustainable than it is sustainable.
Right now the wind-energy industry is lobbying hard to get subsidies which have sustained it renewed. For all the bluster about how great this alternative source of energy is, apparently it is not very economically feasible and has become yet another government boondoggle along the lines of the whole ethanol industry.
Just perusing the articles of the past couple days we see that those making their living off wind-energy are really concerned about not getting their hands into the precious government cookie jar.
Arlington, WY – avg annual wind speed of 31mph, gusts above 110mph, seems like a great place for a wind turbine ….right?
picts dont show inless clicked on for some reason
Photos from Feb 1, 2011 as the cold air mass that formed Snowzilla barreled through. The wind chill in the area from yesterday was extreme, -54F !!
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Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.-- Ovid (43 B.C.-A.D. 18)
Things ain't what they used to be and probably never was. ~Will Rogers
Tomorrow hopes we have learned something from yesterday.
"Shouldn't someone tag Mr. Kennedy's 'bold new imaginative program' with its proper age?" "Under the tousled boyish haircut it is still old Karl Marx—first launched a century ago.
There is nothing new in the idea of a government being Big Brother to us all. R.Reagan-1960
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Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.-- Ovid (43 B.C.-A.D. 18)
Things ain't what they used to be and probably never was. ~Will Rogers
Tomorrow hopes we have learned something from yesterday.
"Shouldn't someone tag Mr. Kennedy's 'bold new imaginative program' with its proper age?" "Under the tousled boyish haircut it is still old Karl Marx—first launched a century ago.
There is nothing new in the idea of a government being Big Brother to us all. R.Reagan-1960
We should be good here. Our local electric supplier just put a new power plant in operation, running on natural gas, of which there is a HUGE supply, right under our feet.
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Proud parents of our own "Daddy's Little Girls"
I heard Jesus He drank wine and I bet we'd get along just fine.
We should be good here. Our local electric supplier just put a new power plant in operation, running on natural gas, of which there is a HUGE supply, right under our feet.
Yep seems we are getting one of those to( first one for here- but wy is #2 in natural gas production in the US & the #1 exporter of NG( with some new( and some just finished also) big gas pipelines to the west cost etc also) i believe also.( and many more new gas wells planed for)
As the story says no sense in building new coal power plants( so ppl like obama & the epa, greenies can put then out of business etc ( not that they cant try & do the same with NG- just easyier now & less risk then using coal )( maybe we will have to ship a bunch of it to china?)
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Cheyenne Light, Fuel & Power has applied to state regulators for a $158 million power plant that will run on natural gas at a location within city limits.
Construction would start in 2013 and the 120-megawatt, three-turbine power plant would go online in 2014, if approved by the Wyoming Public Service Commission.
Stege said the utility, a subsidiary of Rapid City, S.D.-based Black Hills Corp, chose to build a natural-gas fired power plant because of concerns about the difficulty of getting the necessary permits for a coal-fired plant.
"Really, the only one that is viable is natural gas-fired generation," Stege said. "It would be extremely difficult to permit a coal-fired plant in this day and age, and natural gas-fired generation fits our needs."
Stege said the decision to go with natural gas also was an attempt to anticipate federal laws that would regulate carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas and pollutant also known as CO2.
The gas is a byproduct of burning both coal and natural gas, but natural gas burns more cleanly. That means the utility, which currently powers most of its customers using coal-fired power plants, sees natural gas as a way of ensuring its future sources of power can withstand stricture federal scrutiny, Stege said.
"We're heavily coal-fired-based down here in Cheyenne, so this will mitigate some of the risk if and when any CO2 legislation comes down," he said.
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Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.-- Ovid (43 B.C.-A.D. 18)
Things ain't what they used to be and probably never was. ~Will Rogers
Tomorrow hopes we have learned something from yesterday.
"Shouldn't someone tag Mr. Kennedy's 'bold new imaginative program' with its proper age?" "Under the tousled boyish haircut it is still old Karl Marx—first launched a century ago.
There is nothing new in the idea of a government being Big Brother to us all. R.Reagan-1960
First, our nation should not subsidize wind power. The technologies are mature. Electrical generators. Turbine blades. Nothing new. You tweak the designs to the peculiar requirements of wind electrical generation, but you don't need to spool up from a low yield, child's play level of function -- as was the case in the semiconductor industry -- before the technology can stand on its own. If the technology makes economic sense, then deploy it with your investment money, power company, not our tax dollars.
Second, it is not enough to evaluate this on the basis of how wind power produces on peak demand days. That is an issue, but there may be offsetting advantages. Basically it makes sense if the investment in these things -- by the power company -- is paid back in profit over their useful lives. Even if they lie idle 50% of the time, they may still be profitable. Even if you have to have other plant installed to provide those peak loads during heat waves and even if the wind decides during heat waves to drop to zilch, thereby idling most wind turbines . . . the bottom line is do these things turn a profit. You can throw into the mix that there may be some benefit involved in not emitting CO2, if you believe in anthropogenic global warming (which I do not). You can throw into the mix that there may be some benefit involved from not using coal and thereby not emitting harmful particulate matter and/or acid causing gases (sulfer dioxide). You can throw into the mix that there may be some benefit from not drilling for oil or natural gas. These are all a little bit thin from my perspective. The last I heard we have our emissions from coal fired plants managed to an acceptable level. Most electricity is produced by coal not natural gas. If we do drill for natural gas . . . so what. Again, I'm not convinced this is the kind of damage causing activity that it is often represented to be. The damage supposed to be caused by hydraulic fracturing is not substantiated to date and is dubious (if there was such porosity in formations that this stuff was going to flow readily . . . you wouldn't need to fracture formations in the first place!!!!!).
But the bottom line is that it has to make economic sense. If it makes economic sense, it doesn't need government subsidies. The government should not be picking economic winners and losers. That is socialism -- government centrally planned economies -- and that suks. It doesn't work very well. These bureaucrats do not have crystal balls and OFTEN don't have the detailed knowledge really needed to make prudent decisions in the areas that they wind up having authority over.
By the way, people who live next to these things -- like my sister who has a gazillion of them in her back yard (within a mile radius there are probably 10 of these things, and in a larger radius many more -- north western Illinois) -- do not like them. Their noise -- a low amplitude, low frequency pulse as blades cycle -- whUMMmm . . . . whUMMmm . . . . whUMMmm -- is difficult to get used to. Granted, she is on a 5 acre postage stamp piece of land and it is farmers who own hundreds of acres who are leasing their land for the installation of these behemoths. But the point is that people seem to complain about the appearance of drilling rigs as somehow a devil machine and ugly and damaging the ground . . . even when they themselves don't happen to own this land. Why can't we likewise consider the dislike that people have for wind turbines, even when it isn't their own land we are talking about.
Location: On an Island in the west coast of New England
Posts: 13,132
Lots of them going up in Vt and Northern NY. Mostly owned by power companies and will return a profit to their investment someday. Lots of opposition to these things but in the end they seem to win out. They look like hell and happily I don't live near any but I have to look at them across the lake up on the mountains east of the Adirondaks.
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Too busy with fishing to spend much time here.
The Wind-Energy Myth - The claims for this “green” source of energy wither in the Tex
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Wind energy; you hear a lot about how great it is. But what is the truth? Well, apparently this source of power which environmental activists tout as the solution to all of our problems is more unsustainable than it is sustainable.
