DISCLAIMER: I wrote this BEFORE this week’s debate. ?♀️ We really need to have a serious discussion about the climate crisis going forward, not 3 minutes shoved into the final minutes of debates.
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If there is one alternative energy source that sparks my interest, it is wind power. Elegant, kinetic sculptures creating clean energy and local jobs.
From the Carbon Nation documentary:
Jobs that cannot be outsourced.
One of the best ways to create a sustainable future for our planet is to invest in sources of clean, renewable energy like wind. Wind energy isn’t just a clean alternative to the fossil fuels driving the climate crisis – it’s also an engine for job creation across the US.
What about the birds?
Interesting study out of Norway on reducing bird deaths from windmills.
- A study finds painting windmill blades reduced bird fatalities by over 70 percent.
- Scientists are always looking for ways to reduce bird deaths from turbines.
- The emphasis on windmills’ threat to birds is politically charged.
Could a ridiculously simple change save birds from wind turbine-related deaths? Scientists in Norway have presented a 9-year study where they painted wind turbines a highly visible black and observed a 70 percent drop in bird deaths. In turn, this could remove one of the most stalwart critiques people have used to slow the spread of wind power technology.
In the new study, the researchers focus on “passive visual cues” that are easy for flying animals to internalize and act on. The researchers explain:“We tested the hypothesis that painting would increase the visibility of the blades, and that this would reduce fatality rates in situ, at the Smøla wind‐power plant in Norway, using a Before–After–Control–Impact approach employing fatality searches.”
If all the blades were painted black, the spinning turbine might still appear as “motion blur” that is not visibly distinctive enough to alert passing birds. So in this study, the researchers built on the example of previous findings and painted just one rotor on each turbine, which means the single black rotor spins with a frequency that keeps it visible instead of part of a blur.
How many are killed by wind turbines? According to US Fish and Wildlife:
Available data indicate that some regions are higher risk than others. Bird/turbine collisions in California are estimated to be an average 7.85 birds/turbine/year, higher than in the East (6.86 birds/turbines/year), the West (4.72 birds/turbine/year), and the Great Plains (2.92 birds/turbine/year).
A simple solution that can be administered during manufacturing or servicing that can solve this issue, reducing bird deaths.
Here are some Wind Energy Facts:
(excerpted from Climate Reality Project Facts About Windpower)
FACT: WIND ENERGY IS AFFORDABLE AND JUST MAKES ECONOMIC SENSE
When we pay for electricity, we typically pay per kilowatt hour. According to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), “onshore wind electricity costs have dropped by almost a quarter since 2010.” That means, on average, the cost of wind (per kilowatt hour) is about six cents (USD) around the globe. Alternatively, fossil fuels fall between $0.05 to $0.17 per kilowatt hour. But these market prices also often don’t reflect one big reality: the costs fossil fuels impose of our health and environment. And Big Polluters don’t foot the bill. We do. These costs of fossil fuels are what’s called “externalized costs” – basically costs that producers impose on someone else (in this case, the rest of society) instead of paying themselves. What are we talking about? We’re talking about everything from air pollution to tax dollars to rebuild communities to the human costs of hurricanes, droughts, and floods made worse by the climate crisis.
FACT: WIND ENERGY IS PUTTING PEOPLE TO WORK
Demand for wind power is growing, and that means the industry needs workers to help fulfill that demand. Between 2007 and 2017, global wind power capacity (or the maximum amount of power output of all the turbines in the world) grew by about 500 percent, or five times what is was. And the industry is expected to keep growing. In 2017, more than 1.15 million people were employed by the wind industry around the globe. That’s incredible!
In the US, wind turbine service technician is projected to be the second fastest-growing job in the nation through 2026, right behind solar PV installer. Better yet, these are blue-collar jobs that pay well; in 2017, an American wind turbine technician could expect to be paid $53,880 per year – or about $28 an hour.
FACT: WIND ENERGY IS A RELIABLE WAY TO POWER OUR WORLD
Combining wind with other renewables like solar or with battery storage in a flexible, smart grid design is a reliable way to keep the lights on in the twentyfirst century. In addition, there is more than enough wind to meet our electricity needs—and then some! In fact, by some estimates, wind could supply more than 40 times as much electricity as the world consumes today. Using multiple sources of clean energy and twenty-first century electricity management tools can often make wind just as reliable as dirty fossil fuels —with the added benefit that it doesn’t pollute the air or warm our climate. The right combination can provide around-the-clock power — even when the wind isn’t blowing. In fact, by adding more wind power and using the free fuel it provides, we’re making the entire grid more dependable, with energy coming from many diverse sources. Which is a good thing, because every power plant is vulnerable to disruption at some point or another from everything from storms to mechanical accidents and failures.
Next up will be Solar Power facts and resources.
cross-posted at LivingLightlytv.com
evap
Two stories about wind power: 1. I visited Palm Springs a few years ago, we drove from San Diego. I found the wind farms in the desert beautiful.
2. Stayed in a BnB in the west of Ireland, run by a Dutch man who was really into being “green”. He had a small windmill on his property connected to his house that provided almost all of the energy he needed. It’s really windy in that part of the world!
jl
Thanks, great post. I’ll watch for the one on solar.
jl
Except, nothing in the post about windmill fums. I’ve heard those are a big problem.
Charluckles
A recent cross country road trip had my wife and I noticing that wind energy seems to be popping up in a lot of areas of the country that don’t have much else going on. It makes so much sense.
Dan B
Thanks for this. Good jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced is a phrase that needs to be repeated until it gets a foothold in the public. A more reliable grid for a lower price is another one.
P.S. It drives me nuts that Bill Gates keeps dumping money into nuclear. Invest in safe disposal.
West of the Cascades
Wind is all about location, location, location: it’s fantastic for states like Texas, Iowa, Kansas that have steady winds (with infrequent storms – turbines shut down and lock when wind speeds are above a certain level so they don’t tear themselves apart), and habitats that have been largely converted to agriculture over time (and thus less-good bird habitats). Don’t put them directly in flyways; don’t put them really close to significant nesting areas for imperiled birds (some projects in the West have been rejected or defeated through litigation because of potential serious harm to golden eagles nesting in the vicinity). Also don’t put them in areas with marginal winds just because there’s a tax credit (the average wind project has a “capacity factor” of about 32% last time I checked — it produces about 32% of the energy output that it’s rated for, based on if it were operating 24/7 — and some projects have been built with 18%-20% capacity factors, which isn’t a great use of resources/tax credits).
But that leaves vast areas of the US where wind is viable and can be developed without harming either bird habitat or habitat for other critters, or being disruptive to highly scenic federally-protected areas. Ultimately it’s about tradeoffs, and how a smart government can “direct” wind development towards areas that have less conflict with protected resources (avian, other wildlife, scenic, or human) by putting environmental sideboards on tax credits/incentives – e.g. no tax credit is available for wind projects built within 10 miles of federally-protected areas, none where the incidental take of birds listed as endangered, threatened, or candidate species for ESA listing would exceed a certain (very low) level, etc.
Texas, btw, has 1/3 of the installed wind power capacity in the US, more than three times more than the next biggest state (Iowa) — so I don’t think that Joe Biden did any harm to his chances there by saying that, over time, the oil industry needs to be replaced by renewable energy sources.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Iowa gets over 40% of its electricity from wind. I don’t know what portion of total power is electricity, but I still think that’s impressive.
NotMax
Not windmills, but utility related and mentioned to put into some perspective that the towers and blades are not a unique avian hazard.
Ruckus
@West of the Cascades:
Add solar and batteries to that mix and you’ve got some real electrical output that burns nothing. More than enough energy to mostly/completely eliminate burning to create heat or process. There are some things that still have to have a lot of heat, like making steel but that can be done with electricity (a lot of it!) rather than burning coal or natural gas and already mostly is. Which lessens the likelihood of spillage and the pollution. Now is anything truly clean? I’m thinking no, it’s not, but taking out the burning and that makes a huge difference.
planetjanet
I understand they are a great resource, but windmills are noisy. So they must be carefully sited. A long time ago, I did some testing on a cell tower in the middle of all those windmills near Palm Springs. There were recurring problems with the site, and we suspected the antennas were getting misaligned from vibrations and the local wind patterns. A vacation rental in St. Croix had a windmill on the adjacent property was also noisy. The constant whirring spoiled the peaceful setting in a residential area.
trollhattan
@Dan B:
In its current state fission power seems so unbelievably expensive–and the federal government probably needs to be on the hook for liability insurance–that I’ll wager it would be cheaper to take the money and install lithium batteries in every home, for storing off-peak surplus power plus PV power generated on site.
Wind is problematic in California because our peak demand is during heat waves and the absence of wind is the reason for the heatwave. But because we’re sunny as all getout, solar can take up the slack. And wind, especially offshore wind not yet developed, can become a major source in winter when solar flux is at a minimum and cloud cover is at its peak and wind is usually present.
We’re in the transition season and on a Sunday afternoon, CA ISO shows 13k of 20k MW total demand is supplied by renewable, the split is 7,600 solar and 4,300 wind.
IIUC the upper plains have the highest potential in the US for wind development. Presuming the transmission grid is in place to deliver it south and west, there’s ample space to install it.
Diablo Canyon units 1 and 2 (owned by PG&E) are scheduled to go off line this decade, removing a steady 2,250 MW hole in our supply. IDK what is planned to fill the hole, but lots of solar is being built.
West of the Cascades
@Ruckus: That seems to be the promise of the future – the ability to store energy from intermittent renewable sources via batteries. You’re absolutely right that taking the burning of fossil fuels out is what makes a huge difference — any energy generation system is going to have some pollution, or some adverse environmental effect, but in the balance most renewable sources (not “biomass”) are going to be far less polluting than any fossil fuel-based system. Stupid Trump is even slightly correct that there’s pollution from manufacturing wind turbines — it’s just miniscule when compared to the pollution from a coal-fired power plant.
Then it just becomes a question of how to develop renewables so we preserve the other desirable parts of our environment, or at least minimize the harm to them. One good way is to develop wind, and particularly solar, in environments that are already built-up or degraded … rooftop solar in the southwest, for example, should be mandated or highly incentivized, which is going to require some changes to how we regulate energy generation and distribution.
WV Blondie
I’m supportive of green energy generally, but there’s one big caveat that I rarely see mentioned – the cost, in both dollars and lives disrupted, of transmission.
For instance, the very best wind resources in the US actually are offshore. Which actually have the advantage of being near the highest population centers.
When you talk about wind farms in the Midwest, you’re also talking about thousands of miles of new transmission, affecting hundreds of thousands of Midwesterners who will not benefit very much, will not receive anywhere near fair compensation, and will resent the prosperous blue state residents that actually do benefit.
The Midwestern states ought to look at developing their wind resources as an attractor for industry to locate there, while the East and West coasts look at offshore wind for their own needs.
Add: also, invest federal resources in developing industrial-scale storage.
Richard Grant
Glad you’re posting on renewables.
I came across this 10/23 RenewEconomy post that leads with: “The results of a multi-year scientific study in Denmark has concluded that birds are quite good at avoiding wind turbine blades, putting a serious dent in a common argument raised by anti-wind and -renewable activists.” https://reneweconomy.com.au/danish-research-shows-almost-no-birds-die-in-collisions-with-wind-turbines-43335/
West of the Cascades
@WV Blondie: there’s a lot of push in some parts of the West for more distributed generation, “micro-grids,” and rooftop solar (that requires no transmission at all). Bit by bit, this will start to be more prevalent.
WV Blondie
@West of the Cascades: Yes. I have this vision of millions of microgrids, connected like a honeycomb.
Sab
True story from NE Ohio. Guy I know installed a wind turbine on his property. He was somewhat disappointed in the resulting power generated. So he cut down the line of trees at the end of his property. (Older generations would have called those a windbreak.) Next big storm his roof blew off. But the turbine did work better. He installed a new roof and laughed about it later.
trollhattan
@planetjanet:
I worked on permitting and installation plans for a wind turbine project in Solano County on the Sacramento River. One of the big hurdles was Air Force approval because it could affect radar at Travis AFB (which is pretty far away).
Geoboy
pat
Good to know that there are ways to prevent bird deaths. Thanks.
I drive along I90 in SE MN and am always amazed at how many windmills there are around Dexter, MN. Acres and acres of them.
I once watched a truck loaded with a propeller (HUGE) make the turn off the interstate… Man those guys are good.
Stuart Frasier
@WV Blondie: You resent that the midwest has a valuable resource they can sell to the coasts? And your solution is to let the coasts develop their own resources to cut out the midwest from the market? That’s…I mean, it’s an opinion…
West of the Cascades
@WV Blondie: There was some murmuring in Oregon about ten years ago about “community wind” developments, that would have five-ten turbines to service moderate sized but remote cities, mainly in eastern Oregon. Nothing came of it at the time, but with better storage today, it might be feasible. A five-turbine project that has a nameplate capacity of 15 MW would have a lot less environmental impact than a 200 turbine, 600 MW project.
My vision is “small-scale renewable generation, local transmission” to get away from the current model of “large-scale generation (fossil fuel or renewable), long-distance transmission.” And avoiding important habitats and scenic areas while doing so!
West of the Cascades
@Geoboy: Here’s a good map of average wind speed in the US from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory: https://windexchange.energy.gov/maps-data/319
Best wind is in the Great Plains and Upper Midwest.
Matt McIrvin
@Geoboy: In the middle of the continent, and offshore.
Matt McIrvin
@West of the Cascades: Scale is an interesting thing with wind turbines: the ideal size of a single turbine is colossal–little ones aren’t nearly as efficient as big ones–but beyond that, there’s not much of a scaling issue with the size of a wind farm. Which means that it can make sense to build in capacity piecemeal.
TaMara (HFG)
@West of the Cascades: Micro-grids is an upcoming topic… :-)
trollhattan
@pat:
You’re not kidding about the size. The largest current model made by Vestas has a rotor diameter of 162 meters(!) installed on a tower that can range from 119 to 166 meters.
Sab
TaMara: Thanks for this post. It was an interesting earlier thread that I missed/read-after-it-died.
Chetan Murthy
@planetjanet:
With respect, unless you’re willing to live next to a refinery or other petrochemical plant, or downwind from a coal-fired power plant, you really have no right to complain. Every form of power generation has drawbacks, and compared to wind power, fossil fuels are *incredbly* worse. And they’re placed *invariably* near poorer communities, creating cancer clusters and worse.
West of the Cascades
@TaMara (HFG): Excellent! Thanks for this post and looking forward to the forthcoming ones.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@jl: It’s not the fumes, it’s the sound they make. Gives you cancer.
I always turn the tunes up to 11 when I pass the windmills when I go on night shoots in the desert.
West of the Cascades
@Chetan Murthy: So in St. Croix it might make more sense to install solar arrays rather than a wind turbine in a residential area.
planetjanet
@Chetan Murthy: Hence, I said they have to be sited carefully away from residential areas. They are not a panacea.
A Ghost to Most
@Ruckus: Yep. And solar has a couple new tricks up its sleeve: perovskites and light channeling covers, both of which promise greater efficiency and lower costs.
Sab
@trollhattan: Yikes. One and a half football fields?
planetjanet
@West of the Cascades: Yes, the rental property had solar on the roof. I believe the owner said it could handle half of the needs of the house.
TriassicSands
This would have to be studied, but after doing all we can to reduce bird deaths from wind turbines, it may be possible that the bird lives saved by our reducing our carbon footprint might outnumber those lost from the effects of climate change caused by the alternative of continuing to burn fossil fuels.
The saved lives might be among species not threatened by wind turbines and it would be a net saving with some bird species taking the hit and getting much less benefit.
trollhattan
@TaMara (HFG):
Possible sub-topic: Found a place (based in the Bay Area) who sell PV and battery systems that connect after the meter and require no permitting or interaction with the utility. It just means you won’t be pushing electricity back into the grid but instead, store it on site (or sans battery, limit your generation to no more than current use). I am intrigued.
https://legionsolar.com/index.html
Anoniminous
@planetjanet:
A noisy windmill is an inefficient windmill. The owner needs to shut it down and do some maintainence.
Chetan Murthy
@planetjanet:
Tell it to all the poor people whose objections were ignored (and continue to be ignored) by petrochemical companies all over our country and the world. This is NIMBYism, pure and simple. Noise pollution is inconsequential compared to the advice that ALL pregnant women should cease eating fish b/c of mercury contamination from coal-fired powerplant emissions. Remember that advisory?
CarolPW
@planetjanet: New (last 10 years or so) utility-grade turbines are much quieter than either small-capacity or older utility-grade turbines. The nacelles (where the generator is and to which the blades are attached) are very high, and a lot less of the noise reaches the ground. The rotors (blade set) rotate at much slower speeds in the modern ones. The Palm Springs turbines are generally first- and second-generation installations, and they do clatter and flap a lot.
Turbines that are used to power a single facility, farm or residential/commercial compound are quieter than they used to be, but the nacelles are low so you get both the blade swish and mechanical noise. Fine for an agricultural area but not something you want in a tourist area selling serenity and quiet.
Sab
@TriassicSands: Also too keep your cats inside.
Geminid
@WV Blondie: There is a proposed 2100 Megawatt, 349 mile underground transmission line, to run from Mason City IA and connect to the Illinois power grid at Yorkville IL. Eighty per cent will run along a Canadian Pacific Railroad right of way. The project is well along in the approval process, and the developers plan to start in 2022, finish by 2024. It will use technology developed by Siemans for electricity transmission from windy north Germany to south Germany. About 27% of U.S. CO2 emissions come from electrical generation. That is where cutting emissions will be easiest, even though we’ll need more electrical power to charge cars and small trucks and vans, and make steel, glass etc. And concrete. I read that concrete production accounts for 8% of global CO2 emissions.
Ruckus
The part about wind is that it isn’t constant, the part about solar is that it isn’t there half the time.
The large storage of energy smooths that out. What really works is solar for your house and what’s known as a wall battery to store that for after dark. But one of the things that the US has to work on is the average amount of home energy usage. We use far more per home than Europe or the UK, or pretty much every where else in the world. How many people fought and still do, LED light bulbs? And they are brighter at 1/5 the power of an incandescent, last far longer but there are still a lot of people who just can not have them. Heads in the sand (or a body orifice) is the real problem here.
VOR
Place nearby recently got a non-industrial scale solar farm on farm land right next to the edge of an existing residential suburban area. The MAGA neighborhood complained about the noise – from a solar installation! When it was pointed out this was nonsense, they shifted to “we meant during construction with all the trucks” and complaining it was an eyesore.
CarolPW
@trollhattan: One of the facilities by Rio Vista? We had radar issues we had to deal with in north-central Oregon, solved by giving them lots of $$$ for a radar upgrade. I hated them because they lied so much.
Pete Downunder
No one has mentioned the horrible risk of wind spills!
West of the Cascades
@Chetan Murthy: What is the point of the fight you’re trying to have? That we need to degrade the quality of residential environments (and presumably habitat for other creatures) because we’ve historically damaged the environment in which poor people live? We can walk and chew gum at the same time: bring environmental justice to poor communities by shutting down petrochemical and coal-fired power plants, AND develop renewable energy in ways that minimize impacts to the environment (natural and human). Bonus points if minimizing impacts to the human environment makes developing renewable energy more politically palatable to voters.
Chetan Murthy
@planetjanet: Look: I’m not trying to beat you up. But (as I’m sure you’re aware) there is a well-known strategy of “well-meaning concern-based pushback” that has worked marvelously to stymie progress in all sorts of areas: from upzoning, to bike lanes, to pedestrian-friendly traffic rules, and on and on and on. Again and again, incumbents stymie progress with “but I have concerns” bullshit that in FACT are completely outweighed by the actual existing harm suffered by actual existing people, that the progress would remedy.
And this strategy is one pursued by *liberals* in very liberal places. Like California. Like the Bay Area. Like the down of Can~ada, where they stopped upzoning. And on and on and on.
If you’re going to decry noise pollution from windmills, then propose a solution (like PV solar) or show that it’s worse than the pollution being visited on poor people by your current energy consumption.
Ruckus
@Geminid:
A lot of steel is already made with electrical smelting. Very large graphite electrodes. It works, just requires a bit of electricity. OK a very large bit. But the concept of where the electrons come from as far as the steel is concerned is irrelevant.
WV Blondie
@Stuart Frasier: I live in WV, not the Midwest. But I have friends in MO, OK, IN and other places fighting transmission projects tooth and nail, because the companies want to use eminent domain to take property they’ve farmed, often for generations, as cheaply as possible, to deliver electricity to Chicago and points east.
Oh, and it’s for “merchant” (i.e., private sector for profit) transmission, with no requirements to benefit local markets.
I was just trying to point out there are many facets to this issue. Being aware of potential sources, so to speak, of friction and conflict makes sense to me. Doesn’t it to you?
Redshift
One thing that really annoys me is that all conservative environmental arguments are made in incredibly bad faith. Trump talks about birds, which you know he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about, but beyond that, far more birds are killed by collisions with glass buildings – his actual business.
But they’re like that about all of this stuff, and have been for decades. They latch on to sure simplistic argument, like “the sun doesn’t shine at night, did you think of that?” and think they’re being clever. But really the only cleverness is in trying to make us engage with their bullshit.
planetjanet
@Chetan Murthy: Take a deep breath. I am not saying place them near the homes of poor people. They need to be away from ALL residential areas. Noise pollution is also pollution. You can feel the vibrations from those big windmills near Palm Springs in your chest. Imagine that 24 hours a day.
Matt McIrvin
@Sab: My benchmark for tall objects is the Washington Monument–that’s 169 meters tall. So, yeah, these are Washington Monument-sized towers and rotors.
Chetan Murthy
@planetjanet: An argument AGAINST wind power (and that is what your argument *was*) is an argument *FOR* coal fired plants, fossil fuel, etc.
WV Blondie
@West of the Cascades: if the map doesn’t show offshore wind, it’s an incomplete picture (and the one aspiring commercial wind developers use, so a little misleading).
Sab
@Redshift: Also too cats kill a lot of birds. My indoor cats spend most of their days drooling at the sight of the outside birdfeeder.
Sab
@Matt McIrvin: Thanks. Good to know.
WV Blondie
@Geminid: I wish all transmission were underground! And focused on using existing ROWs as much as possible.
CarolPW
@West of the Cascades: What specific impact to the environment? If it is about the birds, people should be aware that, at least in the U.S., only three or four of the hundreds of avian mortality studies performed included reference or control areas. That is like running drug trials without a placebo cohort. So we do not know with any level of certainty the actual level of avian impact; we only know what the maximum is.
Fair Economist
Nuclear is dead because the price of battery storage is dropping so fast. A power plant needs about a 30 years payback. By 2050 renewable + battery will be much cheaper than nuclear even with the insurance and waste disposal costs dumped on the population, as they are now. New nuke plants don’t pencil out anymore.
Sab
@Ruckus: My oligarch brother in CA installed solar on his roof. Works well and feeds excess power back into the grid. Big problem is that when the grid goes down, like it does all the time in CA wildfires, then his solar is shut down. So not useful as a backup.
Ken
The real danger is that the windmill will overwind the spring and break it.
planetjanet
@Chetan Murthy: It’s not all or nothing. Windmills have their place. Solar has its place. Maybe wave energy in the oceans. It can take a multitude of solutions, including conservation of energy, no more vampire devices stealing energy when they are off. Mental health is just as important as physical health when trying to manage environmental concerns.
trollhattan
@CarolPW:
Southeast of Rio Vista in the Montezuma Hills. They have three phases installed with #4 planned to start this winter.
To your point, the Air Force gets very little pushback, even in hippie-rich California. IDK how they were eventually placated, but I can say there’s a hole in the DOPPLER weather radar image where Travis AFB sits. (Fun fact, they evacuated Travis in August when the Vacaville fire was bearing down on it.)
West of the Cascades
@WV Blondie: Fair point – here’s another NREL comprehensive map that also shows off-shore windpotential: https://windexchange.energy.gov/maps-data/324
Chetan Murthy
@planetjanet: Sure. I can and do understand that windmills aren’t right everywhere. Arguing that for a sunny place like St. Croix,PV solar would be a better fit than windmills, is a different story, than simply arguing that windmills aren’t right. Because in a place like St. Croix, isolated, far from the mainland, that’s the same as arguing for the status quo.
That’s all I’m saying: when you argue *against* a remedy, without proposing your own remedy or amendment, you’re really arguing *for* the status quo. And this is something that groups have used to block change for my entire lifetime. Right back to seat belts and airbags. And smokestack emissions from power plants.
planetjanet
@Chetan Murthy: You are putting words in my mouth. I did not argue that windmills must be eliminated. I mentioned a drawback that must be dealt with. The world is not black and white, angels and demons.
trollhattan
@Ken:
An actual wingnut talking point is windmills rob us of…wind. Or something like that, I can’t keep it all straight.
CarolPW
@trollhattan: Congratulations, those are lovely facilities. some of our work was in California but not there. My sister and I took my dad (from Stockton) there several years ago so he could see the type of things we had been working on for the last 15 years. He died two years ago, and it is a good memory.
ETA: The Palm Springs turbines suck Valley Fever into the area is the best one I have heard.
trollhattan
Some time in the not-too-distant future:
“Today, the price of a barrel of oil passed the two-hundred dollar mark.”
“Uh, so what?”
Those who remember even/odd day gasoline buying, lines at the pump, Exxon Valdez, Deepwater Horizon, Texas City, Kuwait invasion and Gulf War, Iran-Iraq War, etc. etc. will appreciate that no matter how our grid is powered and organized in the future, we’re not truly “self-sufficient” until the global oil and coal markets have gone the way of the dodo. And that can happen sooner than a lot of people think.
Geminid
@WV Blondie: The Energy News Network article on the underground Iowa-Illinois line contrasted its lack of public opposition to the proposed above-ground “Grain Belt” project. That one is longer, running from Kansas across Missouri and Illinois to Indiana. It’s approval has been mired down for four years, with widespread opposition that includes the Missouri state legislature. Given the Siemens technology, above ground transmission may not have a large role in the future.
trollhattan
@CarolPW:
Valley fever will get you! :-0
Interesting side note re. SMUD–it was the first utility in the States to voluntarily retire their nuclear power plant (Rancho Seco) well ahead of its permitted lifespan, based on a public vote (they’re publicly owned). They’re still bearing the decommissioning costs but have managed to build an impressive sustainable portfolio, paired with by quick-start NG plants for the balance of the supply.
CarolPW
@trollhattan: Lived in Sacramento a long time and my sister still does. We both love SMUD. Our local PUDs here in Eastern WA are pretty good too.
TriassicSands
@Sab:
My cat is inside, when she’s not in an outdoor enclosure.
But it isn’t necessary to keep all cats inside, all the time. Apart from outdoor enclosures, many young cats cat be leash trained, something I did with two cats who enjoyed more than sixteen years of outdoor walks. Sadly, too many people are unaware that cats can be leash-trained and many more adopt cats because they think they will require little or no time on the part of humans. Just open the door and let them go. That’s bad for not only birds; it’s bad for the cats, too.
Sab
@CarolPW: My dog died of Valley fever. He wasn’t doing anything. Just sitting in a kennel.
Benw
Birb Lives Matter
The Lodger
@WV Blondie: Facebook, Google, and other server-farm-based companies are always looking for cheap, abundant electricity. Look for them to suck up any expansion in available Midwestern windpower.
Geminid
@trollhattan: Natural gas electrical generation will be neccesary for a while. But excess electricity can be used to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen, so maybe the natural gas used to pick up slack in solar and wind generation can eventually be replaced by hydrogen.
trollhattan
@Sab:
Sad :-(
Valley fever is not commonly tested for and if found too late can become impossible to treat. Confess I never heard of pets getting it. My current employer has had a fatality and several severe cases among field staff, usually on construction sites or doing field maintenance.
Masks are a good thing!
trollhattan
@Geminid:
Hydrogen generation is an interesting possible use of excess production. We’re one of three metro areas where you can get a Toyota or Honda fuel cell car, and they’re kind of neat (although I have no idea where they actually fuel up). I’ve been next to a few and they sound like any electric car, only with water and steam coming out of the tailpipe.
I’ll bet they cost hundreds of thousand each, to build.
Sab
@TriassicSands: Agreed. They just shouldn’t romp outside unattended. I hate to bring it up here, but Tunch was only halfway through his expected life when that dog killed him. Inside it would not have happened.
I have made stupid pet choices myself. I didn’t let the surgeons chop my Simon when he got lymphoma. Didn’t trust them. My vet is still mad at me. Simon should have lived more years.
But cats outside is a no brainer. My toddler wants to walk in the street with traffic. Why should I crimp her creativity.
CarolPW
@Sab: I grew up in the Valley and know very well how bad it is – not Valley Fever I’m making fun of, but the idea that the turbines were somehow sucking it into Palm Springs from the coast.
Wapiti
@Ruckus: How many people fought and still do, LED light bulbs?
I have a number of acquaintances who studied electrical engineering at Georgia Tech who bitched and moaned about the earlier move to CFL bulbs. Not when GW Bush signed it into law, but later when the law went into effect under Obama. Tribal signaling, just like wearing masks during a pandemic.
Sab
@CarolPW: I know that. Still just sad for my dog.
CarolPW
@Sab: Good, I was worried you missed the target of my comment. And I’m very sorry about your dog. We thankfully didn’t lose any of ours from it.
Ruckus
@Chetan Murthy:
One of my customers, 2 or 3 thousand yrs ago was a bottler of motor oils. Next door to a refinery in southern California, in Torrance. He was there because there was a RR track nearby with a siding so that RR cars of oil could be parked there to fill up the several thousands of quarts of oil he would fill per month. Another customer near to him was a well known supplier of antifreeze, who would make 50,000 one gallon bottles a day and fill them in one 8 hr shift. They had a mini RR yard, several sidings. But the part that amazed me was the oil refinery. Now this was an industrial part of Torrance but still it’s not that far from homes or the beach. We live with the modern world all around us and some of it is rather dangerous if anything goes wrong. I’ve lived within a couple of miles of fossil fuel powered generating plants and they were not really any more dangerous than a lot of the rest of modern society. That’s not saying they were not dangerous, they could be massively dangerous, it’s just that they aren’t normally. Both of those plants had been converted to natural gas which was far cleaner.
RepubAnon
@Sab: We call windows “Cat TV” – my 100% indoor cats are endlessly intrigued by all the cat toys flying around.
mad citizen
@Geminid: It will be interesting to see if this project makes it to service. There have been similar projects proposed that never made it. Grain Belt was to take wind from Kansas to just inside SW Indiana. Problem: They could never sign up wind producers on the Kansas end and buyers on the other side.
I am following this new one in the PJM (grid) interconnection process.
I work in regulation in the midwest and this is my area. Generally I’d say wind is great, and of course has been all the rage, but now solar is eating wind’s lunch. Solar and solar/storage hybrid projects are dominating the requested interconnections in the midwest grids.
Also as noted, solar isn’t done developing: perovskites! I got to do a tour at NREL and a longtime solar scientist there showed us and talked in glowing terms about perovskites and new solar panel efficiency on the way. He was thinking we would use these types of renewables to make hydrogen to run things; like he said amazon could do this to run the forklifts in their warehouses.
It’s all about manipulating energy, and low cost- and long-duration storage will make a lot of new things possible.
And as also noted, fusion may yet be solved.
Ruckus
@Sab:
There should be a disconnect, just like there is in my apartment and every apt/house I’ve lived in. Even the ship I was on in the navy had a disconnect to the shore power. And that was a massive power suck that could be changed from ship to shore or reverse with the flip of a switch. A large switch mind you. And just for the info, my job on that ship required a fair amount of power, we had 2 – 440v 400 cycle motor generators that ran a lot of rather sensitive equipment for both our equipment and that of the missile operators. Big ass things they were. And yes I personally rebuilt both of them. Good times…..
WV Blondie
@West of the Cascades: Thanks, West. I just like having as much info available as possible.
Ruckus
@Geminid:
Using hydrogen is being implemented in Europe as we speak, as a way to supply temporary needs. It doesn’t seem to be necessary as a normal power source, at least there, as there is more than enough wind and solar. But they have been working on using less for a while because they never really had a lot of oil, like we did at one time. Now that a lot of our oil is either too expensive to get to, or requires extremely dirty fracking to get, we are having a political revival of the dark ages in our conservative party but at least they went way too far this time and maybe have given us a small reprieve which if we work it right we can use to the advantage of the country.
Marc
Most modern windmill blades are constructed from glass fiber-reinforced composites with epoxies that cure at room temperature. UV and elevated heat degrade the structural strength of the resulting composite, blades are painted white to protect against damage due to sun exposure. Composite materials can be made from higher temperature epoxies that would allow black paint, but these materials require curing at elevated temperatures for hours. Given the size of some of the blades, that would be one very large oven.
I used to fly racing gliders made of glass or carbon fiber composites. They are always painted white (more correctly, the outer layer painted into the mold is white), except those from one odd manufacturer, who could paint other colors as they had a (large) oven for curing high temp epoxies. Some glider manufacturers also make windmill blades (and skis!), the materials and processes are the same.
WV Blondie
@Geminid: Grain Belt is one of the projects I’ve been following.
Ian
@TriassicSands:
I no of almost no one who is a serious environmentalist who says “F* WIND! SAVE THE BIRDS!”
I know of many conservatives looking to defend fossil fuels and the profits that people gain from them that say “Wind is evil! it kills Birds!”, and then turn around and have no problem defending a judge or senator willing to gut the endangered species act.
Matt McIrvin
@Wapiti: CFL bulbs honestly kind of sucked in several ways, which LEDs largely fixed. The CFLs I got never lasted anywhere near as long as advertised in the light fixtures in my home, and when they die, they have to be disposed of specially because they’ve got mercury in them. LED bulbs actually do last long enough that their price isn’t really an issue, though they’re not immortal; a couple of them have failed on me. And it’s possible to get LED bulbs that produce attractively colored light.
Bill Arnold
@TriassicSands:
Not just birds.
The consequences of business as usual with some reduction in fossil carbon burning are basically RCP 6.5. That would be a global catastrophe. If one ballpark estimates that it would reduce global human population by about half (reasonable, because agriculture and ocean fishing both break, wars, disruption, human migration, etc), that is a cost of about 1 human life per 250 tons of fossil carbon burned. (Back of envelope style calculation, if anybody wants it I’ll post it.)
It also means a lesser mass extinction because the speed of change is too fast for species to adapt by moving north and island species can only move up (up is cooler) to the max height of the island.
It also means large anoxic regions of the ocean near the equator.
It also means large regions near the equator become uninhabitable without air conditioning.
etc. And all this excess CO2 lasts at least many hundreds of years unless we build CO2 removal plants, which would consume a lot of power.
Basically, any near-zero-carbon energy source is better than burning fossil carbon. That includes nuclear; shutting down existing nuclear plants is insane; some of the energy they produce will be replaced by fossil carbon burning, which is insanely long-term destructive and deadly. (250 tons of carbon per human life, roughly.)
A Good Woman
While we are all cheering renewables I do hope we are also taking into account the waste that is generated.
Wired article on solar waste.
Feathers
I am a terrible person, because when I saw those bird death numbers, I thought – That’s all? Glass windowed office buildings kill that many. That’s a monthly number for a feral cat. (It’s feral cats who are the birb murder machines.)
Yes on any intervention to lower the count, but it is definitely not a good faith argument.
Robert Sneddon
@Wapiti: There’s a known problem with cheaper CFL and LED bulbs which causes problems with the grid supply, the power factor. It’s complicated but regular filament bulbs are quite simple resistive loads so they don’t distort the power factor, it’s usually around 1 (i.e. the current drawn matches the voltage level). Cheap circuitry for cheap CFLs and LED bulbs can phase-shift the power factor to 0.8 or worse and that, in extreme cases, can cause the grid to go bonk!
Industrial electricity users are charged extra if they run plant that distorts the grid’s power factor to any great extent — I know of one place here in the UK that used to pay extra to start up a big rubber mixer for making car and truck tires since as it came up to speed it seriously loaded the local grid. The grid operators could compensate for this on a case-by-case basis if they are given enough warning but they can’t cope so easily with a billion cheap bulbs on their lines.
More expensive bulbs and structural LED lighting units are less prone to affecting the power grid this way so it’s something that’s ageing out but it is a real technical problem, not just a longing for the Good Old Days thing.
Mart
The Biden / Obama stimulus plan included bringing the power grid to west Texas to allow their wind power to supply Houston and Dallas. I have been to blade and turbine manufacturing plants. Really cool. They provide a lot of jobs to build and erect, and more to maintain.
Mart
The Biden / Obama stimulus plan included bringing the power grid to west Texas to allow their wind power to supply Houston and Dallas. I have been to blade and turbine manufacturing plants. Really cool. They provide a lot of jobs to build and erect, and more to maintain. More birds per kWh are killed by mining coal than by wind turbines.