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You should actually check out black lung disease among miners and all the children afflicted with asthma from coal particulates in the atmosphere. Your concern troll post is ludicrous.
Exactly so. My mother's side of my family was full of coal miners. Every one of them ended up with black lung disease. Coal mining is an extremely hazardous occupation even with new technology and ventilation systems in mines. I have to admit that I am thrilled every time I hear about a coal power plant closing.
Summary-- right now, wind supplies 0.46% of total human energy consumption per year (solar & tide combined another 0.35%). Note- that's total energy, not just electricity.
Energy consumption has grown 2%/yr over the last 40 yrs.
To provide that 2% growth, we'd need to build 350,000 wind mills per yr-- @50ac per mill, that's the area of Great Britain. To continue for the next 50 yrs, we'd have to cover all of Russia with wind installations- just to supply the annual growth in energy needs.
The remainder of the article covers problems of energy and materials production in the building of wind mills.
Perhaps use of wind for power production is another limited niche only practical in particular situations.
Australia, Germany and GB are all regretting their shift to renewables, but their capital & political investment has been so high already, it's difficult to shift back.
The point of all this is that wind & solar have a worthwhile niche only in certain geographic areas, with certain usage patterns. They take up too much space (habitat destruction) for large scale replacement of other energy sources, and still require more reliable back-up sources be maintained, so their fantasy goal of reducing co2 emissions cannot be realized.
Large production facilities create more eco- problems than they solve. Small scale, personal installations have their benefits in regards energy security. They are financially smart only when govt subsidies help pay for them or when remote locations make grid connection too expensive.
Last edited by guidoLaMoto; 01-15-2019 at 12:41 PM..
Australia, Germany and GB are all regretting their shift to renewables, but their capital & political investment has been so high already, it's difficult to shift back.
Britain is not regretting it's investment in wind farms, indeed they are one of the countries main forms of renewables and produce over one quarter of electricity and are set to expand further.
Offshore Wind Farms will produce 10% of UK Energy by 2020, whilst on-shore wind farms produce a further 9%. Thats nearly one fifth of UK energy and nearly one thord pf UK energy is now created via renewable sources, with wind power accounting for nearly two thirds of this. The same is trie of other European countries who have invested in offshore and on-shore wind farms.
Train has left the station, guido. Wind and solar are major expansion programs for electric utilities. Natural gas has a role to play. It will naturally be controlled by control area dispatch rules. Coal plants are being shut down. They will go the way of the dodo bird.
BTW wind and solar a coming in at or below the wholesale costs of system energy in many areas today.
That's why coal plants are shutting down. Solar is cheaper, and China gets stuck with the manufacturing pollution.
Wind power will not be really practical until we build a national electrical grid. They have already had to shut down the wind turbines in the Columbia Gorge because the California intertie couldn't accept any more power. We need to be able to ship that power to Chicago.
That's why coal plants are shutting down. Solar is cheaper, and China gets stuck with the manufacturing pollution.
Wind power will not be really practical until we build a national electrical grid. They have already had to shut down the wind turbines in the Columbia Gorge because the California intertie couldn't accept any more power. We need to be able to ship that power to Chicago.
The loss for high voltage transmission is too much over that great a distance to deliver any meaningful amount of power. Either corona discharge (due to increasing voltage closer to 1 MV) or simple conductor resistance limits the range of power delivery from the station.
Unless someone designs the equivalent of fiber optics for power delivery with ultra-low resistance, we are stuck with generation at the local and regional levels.
By building a national electrical grid. The technology exists. Nobody wants to pay for it. The feds babble about infrastructure, but they would rather kill Arabs than build a megavolt DC transmission line from the West Coast to eastern population centers. The wind is always blowing somewhere. When there is a drought in the PNW and Columbia turbines have to shut down, it would be nice to ship power from Oklahoma to the west. Texas doesn't connect to anyone. Wyoming is digging up whole mountain ranges and shipping them east. One of the interesting features of flyover country is the miles-long coal trains heading east.
Local distribution grids will also need some redesign. They were built on a radial distribution model, with power generated at one site and distributed to customers. That won't work if a lot of distributed alternative energy supply comes online. For instance, I have a bare south facing hillside that would be ideal for about 4 acres of PV cells. Unfortunately, I'm the last house on the line, and the 1200 v. feeder to my property would not handle that much electricity. If we developed the whole hillside, which is all unbuildable goat slope with no water supply, there is probably room for 20 acres of PV cells. There's no infrastructure to collect the power.
The big renewable supply in my area is lumber mill co-gen. They feed unusable wood waste into boilers and run steam turbines, to both power the mill and sell power on the market. The waste heat from the turbines is diverted to resin distillation, OSB and chip board presses, lumber drying kilns and fuel pellets. Mountains of sawdust provide heat energy for thousands of homes after they are pressed into pellet fuel. Co-gen makes a lot more sense than blowing waste heat out of a cooling tower.
By building a national electrical grid. The technology exists. Nobody wants to pay for it. The feds babble about infrastructure, but they would rather kill Arabs than build a megavolt DC transmission line from the West Coast to eastern population centers. The wind is always blowing somewhere. When there is a drought in the PNW and Columbia turbines have to shut down, it would be nice to ship power from Oklahoma to the west. Texas doesn't connect to anyone. Wyoming is digging up whole mountain ranges and shipping them east. One of the interesting features of flyover country is the miles-long coal trains heading east.
Local distribution grids will also need some redesign. They were built on a radial distribution model, with power generated at one site and distributed to customers. That won't work if a lot of distributed alternative energy supply comes online. For instance, I have a bare south facing hillside that would be ideal for about 4 acres of PV cells. Unfortunately, I'm the last house on the line, and the 1200 v. feeder to my property would not handle that much electricity. If we developed the whole hillside, which is all unbuildable goat slope with no water supply, there is probably room for 20 acres of PV cells. There's no infrastructure to collect the power.
The big renewable supply in my area is lumber mill co-gen. They feed unusable wood waste into boilers and run steam turbines, to both power the mill and sell power on the market. The waste heat from the turbines is diverted to resin distillation, OSB and chip board presses, lumber drying kilns and fuel pellets. Mountains of sawdust provide heat energy for thousands of homes after they are pressed into pellet fuel. Co-gen makes a lot more sense than blowing waste heat out of a cooling tower.
Not sure how old that build-out was, but depending on whether the 1200V is for:
1. That's the voltage it takes to serve you and only you due to your distance from the public road, and it steps down near the dwelling, or
2. That's the distribution voltage for your entire street (never heard of anything lower than 13kV in modern installations) in which case I'm guessing it would be older service?
Either way, a PV array of several acres could be sent back to the proper level of distribution that could handle the input, maybe at the substation. The PoCo could (conceivably) add a second crossarm to the poles as a "return" path to the substation. But WOULD they? I think they tend to hesitate at taking on any sort of piecemeal, one-off project.
Guys-- we're missing the major point about industrial sized production of energy from wind & solar:
It destroys habitat...and habitat destruction is THE #1 Problem facing the Natural World.
As the article stated-- it would take an area the size of Russia to hold the new wind facilities required just to handle the growth in demand over the next 50 yrs.
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