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and again WRONG!!!!!
Xcel Energy - Grand Meadow Wind Farm (http://www.xcelenergy.com/Company/About_Energy_and_Rates/Power%20Generation/Pages/Grand_Meadow_Wind_Farm.aspx - broken link)
Location: Dexter, Minnesota
The wind farm spans a stretch of farm fields six miles long and four miles wide, and is spread out over roughly 10,000 acres southeast of Interstate 90 three miles north and three miles south of Hwy 16, in Grand Meadow, Clayton, and Dexter Townships in Mower County. Plant Description: Grand Meadow is a 67-unit wind farm consisting of GE 1.5 SLE turbines. Power Production Capability:1.5 MW each for a total of 100.5 MW.
A 306-megawatt wind farm proposed for 77 acres in Brookings and Deuel counties would nearly triple the state's total production of wind energy - adding enough capacity to power 148,000 Midwestern homes. (Editor's note: The figure "77 acres" does not appear to be an accurate figure. Turbine facilities of this scale require hundreds to thousands of acres of open land.)
compared to 6700 acres for a 2400MW dirt burner and a 1000 MW nuc plant: http://miva.sctimes.com/miva/cgi-bin...03110312083792
4,500 acres for its Sherco coal-burning plant in Becker and 2,200 acres for the Monticello nuclear plant, said Dave Heberling, manager of environmental and plant services at the Sherco plant. The property includes about seven miles of river frontage.
Xcel Energy - Sherburne County (Sherco) Plant (http://www.xcelenergy.com/Company/About_Energy_and_Rates/Power%20Generation/MinnesotaPlants/Pages/SherburneCountyPlant.aspx - broken link)
The plant’s typical availability factor of 95 percent is well above the national average of 78 percent for coal plant availability...Now where did I hear that? oh right I said it.....
Another interesting beneifit not provided by a wind farm....
Becker, Minnesota Real Estate, Becker Relocation - RelocateAmerica (http://www.relocateamerica.com/minnesota/cities/becker - broken link)
In addition to being a "A1" residential area, Becker has a nice base of light and heavy industrial facilities. Everyone in the community benefits from the coal-fired electric generating facility dubbed "Sherco" (short for Sherburne County). The city enjoys the "lowest taxation rate in the state of Minnesota".
When many people where shouting "Not in our back yards", Becker provided a location for the generating facility. Now that the facility is built, many communities in the state are screaming for a "revenue sharing" plan to address the "unfair" advantages that the Becker community now enjoys. The city gets about $2.5 million of general fund revenue annually. More than 90% of this comes from the "Sherco" generating facility.
Moderator cut: No personal attacks or insults . Go out and look at the installations. These aren't acres of land out of agricultural production These are easements on acres where the farmer keeps on farming essentially then entire plot. Moderator cut: No insults or personal attacks .
Moderator cut: No insults or personal attacks .Go out and look at the installations. These aren't acres of land out of agricultural production These are easements on acres where the farmer keeps on farming essentially then entire plot. Moderator cut: No insults or personal attacks .?
The links provided were not written by me. I merely gave them as evidence Moderator cut: No insults or personal attacks .........AS for what I do in relationship to installations and my real work in the Utility industry I have provided a plethora of my bonafides (includeing renewable energy) while you sir have not. How unfortunate but so typical that people refuse to be corrected. I am only relieved that, Moderator cut: No insults or personal attacks .I will be training and instructing plant operators and energy professionals long into the future
[quote=rlchurch;8453629]Moderator cut: No insults or personal attacks .. Go out and look at the installations. These aren't acres of land out of agricultural production These are easements on acres where the farmer keeps on farming essentially then entire plot. Moderator cut: No insults or personal attacks .quote]
Wow, the point is moot if you must resort to ad hominem attacks in order to dispute the argument.
That chart includes liquid fuels such as gas, diesel and ethanol used in cars, trucks and other machinery. This graph is representative of net electric generation in 2007:
The links provided were not written by me. I merely gave them as evidence Moderator cut: No insults or personal attacks .........AS for what I do in relationship to installations and my real work in the Utility industry I have provided a plethora of my bonafides (includeing renewable energy) while you sir have not. How unfortunate but so typical that people refuse to be corrected. I am only relieved that, Moderator cut: No insults or personal attacks .I will be training and instructing plant operators and energy professionals long into the future
I still take issue with the job claims of green power. I do not feel the job claims are very accurate as the definition is often fuzzy. I can understand jobs, but the real question is, how long does a job have to last the be qualified as a job?
I think the only way to be fair is to develop a new definition of the number of jobs created by green power. Yes it is true that there are direct and indirect jobs, but a more accurate way to do a comparison would be to go by job days.
For example, here the turbines are always unloaded by cargo ship at the cargo port. Since the average ship has about 28 crew members, it could be said that putting up say 4 turbines at my farm just created 28 jobs. Then a crew of Longshoreman unloaded them, perhaps a dozen of them creating 12 more jobs. Then a dozen truck drivers hauled them up to my farm, where another 25 guys erected them. Add it two maintenance guys and you can say that my windfarm project would produce about 79 jobs.
To me that is fuzzy math because the jobs were not very long in duration. A better method would be to calculate the jobs on a job-day basis.
Let's say it took 10 sailing days to get here. That means it took 280 job days for the shipping. It took 4 days to unload and truck to the site; which equates to 96 ground transportation days. Add in erection time of 4 months and you get 3000 job days. This totals 3376 job days.
Now coal fired powerplant has say 200 workers, but those jobs are long term jobs and will be there year after year. So lets take that 3376 job days and divide it by 365, and you get a total long-term job rate of 10 jobs for 1 year. That is pretty pitiful.
Now we can all argue back and forth about what numbers to plug in here, but the fact of the matter is, only the two maintenance guys will be getting any serious job impact out of these windmills. In my opinion, this is the only true way to compare jobs with green power. We must compare apples to apples and not inject some inflated number that has no sustainability to the jobs being touted up.
If we assume (dangerous to but let's do it anyway) that the sales of wind turbines continues then all the manufacturing, transportation, assembly and maintenance jobs are all effectively full time. We are not just setting up a few turbines on one farm but several thousand on hundreds of farms. The same applies to all of the distributed energy facilities. Central station facilities generally require a couple of thousand people to build and a couple of hundred to run. So long as the construction is continuous the employment is steady because the workers follow the work.
In any case investing in clean energy collection and/or generation is IMHO better than building a new fossil fueled central station of the equivalent production level.
I still take issue with the job claims of green power. I do not feel the job claims are very accurate as the definition is often fuzzy. I can understand jobs, but the real question is, how long does a job have to last the be qualified as a job?
I think the only way to be fair is to develop a new definition of the number of jobs created by green power. Yes it is true that there are direct and indirect jobs, but a more accurate way to do a comparison would be to go by job days.
For example, here the turbines are always unloaded by cargo ship at the cargo port. Since the average ship has about 28 crew members, it could be said that putting up say 4 turbines at my farm just created 28 jobs. Then a crew of Longshoreman unloaded them, perhaps a dozen of them creating 12 more jobs. Then a dozen truck drivers hauled them up to my farm, where another 25 guys erected them. Add it two maintenance guys and you can say that my windfarm project would produce about 79 jobs.
To me that is fuzzy math because the jobs were not very long in duration. A better method would be to calculate the jobs on a job-day basis.
Let's say it took 10 sailing days to get here. That means it took 280 job days for the shipping. It took 4 days to unload and truck to the site; which equates to 96 ground transportation days. Add in erection time of 4 months and you get 3000 job days. This totals 3376 job days.
Now coal fired powerplant has say 200 workers, but those jobs are long term jobs and will be there year after year. So lets take that 3376 job days and divide it by 365, and you get a total long-term job rate of 10 jobs for 1 year. That is pretty pitiful.
Now we can all argue back and forth about what numbers to plug in here, but the fact of the matter is, only the two maintenance guys will be getting any serious job impact out of these windmills. In my opinion, this is the only true way to compare jobs with green power. We must compare apples to apples and not inject some inflated number that has no sustainability to the jobs being touted up.
I'll repeat my numbers:
1000 MW of wind would provide about 40-50 direct O&M jobs, ~80 indirect jobs, and ~50 induced jobs. Construction of that 1000 MW would generate about 5,000 jobs during the construction process.
The source for these numbers is work done by Black & Veatch.
To echo what Greg said, we installed about 8000 MW last year. That's over 5 thousand turbines. Coal????
1000 MW of wind would provide about 40-50 direct O&M jobs, ~80 indirect jobs, and ~50 induced jobs. Construction of that 1000 MW would generate about 5,000 jobs during the construction process.
The source for these numbers is work done by Black & Veatch.
To echo what Greg said, we installed about 8000 MW last year. That's over 5 thousand turbines. Coal????
Just doesn't seem to be the case in the EU where they have been involved in renewables far longer then the US. So who to believe? hypothetical or real world...... http://www.juandemariana.org/pdf/090...-renewable.pdf
Europe’s current policy and strategy for supporting the so-called “green jobs” or
renewable energy dates back to 1997, and has become one of the principal
justifications for U.S. “green jobs” proposals. Yet an examination of Europe’s
experience reveals these policies to be terribly economically counterproductive.
This study is important for several reasons. First is that the Spanish experience is
considered a leading example to be followed by many policy advocates and politicians.
This study marks the very first time a critical analysis of the actual performance and
impact has been made. Most important, it demonstrates that the Spanish/EU-style
“green jobs” agenda now being promoted in the U.S. in fact destroys jobs, detailing this
in terms of jobs destroyed per job created and the net destruction per installed MW.
Just doesn't seem to be the case in the EU where they have been involved in renewables far longer then the US. So who to believe? hypothetical or real world...... http://www.juandemariana.org/pdf/090...-renewable.pdf
[LEFT]Europe’s current policy and strategy for supporting the so-called “green jobs” or
renewable energy dates back to 1997, and has become one of the principal
justifications for U.S. “green jobs” proposals. Yet an examination of Europe’s
experience reveals these policies to be terribly economically counterproductive.
This study is important for several reasons. First is that the Spanish experience is
considered a leading example to be followed by many policy advocates and politicians.
This study marks the very first time a critical analysis of the actual performance and
impact has been made. Most important, it demonstrates that the Spanish/EU-style
“green jobs” agenda now being promoted in the U.S. in fact destroys jobs, detailing this[/LEFT]
in terms of jobs destroyed per job created and the net destruction per installed MW.
Interesting assertion. How does one square that with the fact that Spain's economy grew at almost exactly the same rate as the US economy from 2000 - 2008 and it's unemployment rate steadily dropped to 50% of the 2000 level? Maybe somebody is making up stuff?
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How unfortunate but so typical that people refuse to be corrected. I am only relieved that, Moderator cut: No insults or personal attacks .I will be training and instructing plant operators and energy professionals long into the future
