Cancelling Georgia power plant would cost owners billions

[Southern man]

Originally Posted by bellhead

Just think, Georgia Power could have built 20 gigawatts of wind power in Iowa & piped the power here for the cost of the two reactors. 20 Gigawatts is 10X the amount we are spending on the reactors, we could have closed all of the coal plants in the state & almost all of the peaker Simple Cycle turbines....

When we don't need the wind energy Ga. Power could have sold it off market at a profit..

The number I read for density of wind farms was 10 MW per square mile. My numbers are probably wrong , but that is about 2000 square miles for 20 GW. I would rather live near a fossil or nuke plant than a windfarm.

[MattCW]

Originally Posted by bellhead

Why isn't wind there?

Tell me why?

Southern Man put it well. Also consider the environmental effects. Birds aside, you're removing energy from Earth's winds. That 750 Watt Microwave oven you're running off a wind turbine means 1000+ Watts of wind energy not going and doing its thing elsewhere. Because not every place is windy (let's face it, wind power just won't work in Georgia) you have to pipe it to the not-windy places so you incur transmission losses and greater transmission infrastructure. You're also centralizing the national power grid because those windy places are only in a few areas so you have fewer points of failure with less backup capability. If one site goes down, there's no guarantee that the wind is even blowing at another site.

[bellhead]

The answer to getting wind from the plains to Georgia would be to build a HVDC line.

To give you an idea of the cost, there is another HVDC line project running from Wyoming to California costing $3 billion. You can expand the capacity of the HVDC line to carry a higher load than AC lines & they have a much lower loss.

If you really want to understand how cheap wind energy has become then look at Texas, which built transmission lines to carry wind energy from the Western part to Dallas. In July 2008, utility officials gave preliminary approval to a $4.9 billion plan to build new transmission lines to carry wind-generated electricity from West Texas to urban areas such as Dallas. The new plan would be the biggest investment in renewable energy in U.S. history, and would add transmission lines capable of moving about 18,000 megawatts. The transmission lines were filled to capacity within a 2 year time frame, due to this in areas where Smart Metering is commonly installed, some utilities offer free electricity at night.

We are not going to address the dubious science of Southern Man's ranting above.

[Southern man]

Originally Posted by bellhead

The answer to getting wind from the plains to Georgia would be to build a HVDC line.

To give you an idea of the cost, there is another HVDC line project running from Wyoming to California costing $3 billion. You can expand the capacity of the HVDC line to carry a higher load than AC lines & they have a much lower loss.

If you really want to understand how cheap wind energy has become then look at Texas, which built transmission lines to carry wind energy from the Western part to Dallas. In July 2008, utility officials gave preliminary approval to a $4.9 billion plan to build new transmission lines to carry wind-generated electricity from West Texas to urban areas such as Dallas. The new plan would be the biggest investment in renewable energy in U.S. history, and would add transmission lines capable of moving about 18,000 megawatts. The transmission lines were filled to capacity within a 2 year time frame, due to this in areas where Smart Metering is commonly installed, some utilities offer free electricity at night.

We are not going to address the dubious science of Southern Man's ranting above.

I said my numbers are probably wrong. I was quoting from this article. The author didn't seem too dubious.

https://sciencing.com/much-land-need...-12304634.html