Pro's and Con's of wind turbines

[SillyHeatsink]

We don't have enough wind in this country for them to be very viable. In addition, the national grid is not set up to handle the large currents generated when it gets very windy, and has no way of storing it.

Tidal power, on the other hand, is nice and predictable. That's where my money's at!

 

[ubersonic]

This reminds me of a debate on another forum when someone suggested that cars should have wind turbines on top so they could power themselves while driving, much hilarity and rage ensued.

Some airliners have emergency pop out turbines in case of engine failure (keeps the cockpit on, doesn't provide thrust ofc), just thought it worth mentioning.

That's just rubbish. They do work, just like solar they don't provide there peak ratings that's why it's called peak.

Mate over the last 24hrs the output of the entire UK wind farm network has not exceeded 700MW they have put less into the grid than French nuclear plants have. they never have and never will go anywhere near their peak figures. Apparently the UK is the world leader in wind farms, yet we only have enough to power 1/50 of the homes in the UK never mind anything else in the UK, wind power costs a lot more than nuclear and the reward is far less, only people with hippy tinted glasses on can ever see them as a good thing.

 

[anything I don't mind]

I saw two wind turbine innovations recently. One was having the wind turbines inside a massive inflatable circle like structure that is hoisted up in to the air and held there by a cable.

The other was a wind turbine that generates water from the air. Similar to the ecoloblue techonlogy.

But both of them were a bit gimmicky. Just like wind turbines.

Still no mention of the maintenance costs. They don't last very long, then you have to pay someone to fix it, pay for parts, transport the parts, produce the parts. I have seen studies from other places that contradict the study as mentioned earlier in this thread. IF energy companies want to invest in wind turbines without any government assistance then it must be viable. But i don't think that is the case.

 

[Zefan]

On the subject of nuclear, the Fukishima incident actually increased my confidence in their safety. When you think about the cataclysmic event that was the tsunami, it fared pretty well. I would've expected it to turn out quite a bit worse than that, in their circumstances they managed to keep it really under control.

 

[edscdk]

On the subject of nuclear, the Fukishima incident actually increased my confidence in their safety. When you think about the cataclysmic event that was the tsunami, it fared pretty well. I would've expected it to turn out quite a bit worse than that, in their circumstances they managed to keep it really under control.

My thinking is the same,

It took mega earth quake + washing the place away with a massive wave and even then it still needed some bad luck for things to get out of hand... add to that the old design..

 

[Le_Petit_Lapin]

I see Germany is suffering for turning off all its Nuclear generators now too. Less nuclear = more coal, the poor environmentalists aren't sure what to protest in favour of...it's rather amusing. People don't seem to realise that coal plants dump a huge amount of radioactive particulates into the environment far exceeding what a nuclear plant could ever get away with:

"In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy." - Dana Christensen, an associate lab director for energy and engineering at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as well as 1978 paper in Science authored by J.P. McBride and colleagues, also of ORNL.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste&page=1

 

[AndyT]

I would recommend reading the following freely downloadable book by Professor David Mackay of Cambridge University.

http://www.withouthotair.com/download.html

There is also a short 10 page synopsis available for those who would like to learn a little without investing the time in a full book.

Basically he tries to cut through all the bull **** and goes through the typical uses of energy and the available sources and compares them using real-world, useful measures of energy.

It's free and will make you cleverer than all your friends. Alsom when you hear some guy down the pub talk nonsense, you can butt right in, Karl Pilkingotn esque and shout "bull ****!"

 

[Glaucus]

Mate over the last 24hrs the output of the entire UK wind farm network has not exceeded 700MW they have put less into the grid than French nuclear plants have. they never have and never will go anywhere near their peak figures. Apparently the UK is the world leader in wind farms, yet we only have enough to power 1/50 of the homes in the UK never mind anything else in the UK, wind power costs a lot more than nuclear and the reward is far less, only people with hippy tinted glasses on can ever see them as a good thing.

that's good, no one expects them to go anywhere near peak. Just like solar you dont expect a 3.82KWp system to generate 3.82kw 24/7. You don't even expect it to generate 3.82kw at midday. What it is producing at any one time is meaningless. What's important is yearly average. Especially one the grid is upgrade and we have storage.

 

[ubersonic]

that's good, no one expects them to go anywhere near peak. Just like solar you dont expect a 3.82KWp system to generate 3.82kw 24/7. You don't even expect it to generate 3.82kw at midday. What it is producing at any one time is meaningless. What's important is yearly average. Especially one the grid is upgrade and we have storage.

It was the pitiful average I was complaining about tbh.

 

[Glaucus]

It was the pitiful average I was complaining about tbh.

How, you talked about 1 day, which is irrelevant.

Iirc it's around 20-30% generation, which is not insignificant, especially as they want in excess of 35GW installed capacity.

Produced ~10TWh in 2010 despite being one of the calmest years on record, installed capacity just over 5000MW. 2010 total demand 383TWh

 

[Jay794]

To anyone who said windturbines are ugly - really? and a powerstation isn't?

I'd much rather see a Windfarm (like in the netherlands) than a massive powerstation.

I really just don't get how a windmill can be ugly

 

[Werewolf]

My thinking is the same,

It took mega earth quake + washing the place away with a massive wave and even then it still needed some bad luck for things to get out of hand... add to that the old design..

Aye even after all that the only reason it failed was that the final, battery backup run out at the design time.

IIRC they had the cooling set to run from:
The Plants themselves.
Mains with multiple independent connections to the grid (so failure of one incoming line wouldn't be an issue).
Multiple generators.
Battery backups

If it were not for the fact that the whole country was badly affected by the quake and tsunami, all they had to do was get a couple of large, truck portable generators hooked up and it would likely have shut down fully and cooled down completely despite being a design that is out of date by modern standards (IIRC some of the modern designs have an option to flood the reactor with a coolant that is also a reaction damper and kills the reaction in very little time, but at the expense of making the reactor a dead lump).
I suspect if the tsunami hadn't washed out the roads, and caused so many other problems the Japanese Military would probably have got suitable generators into place quickly - and that's assuming the Power company didn't have any to hand (they probably did, but either the staff or the generators got affected by the tsunami).

All told Fukushima did far better in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami than any of the other coastal structures (from memory oil refineries and chemical plants that were not as badly affected blew up/caught fire almost straight away), and should increase confidence in the safety, given how much had to go wrong and how far outside of the design parameters the disaster had to be before it affected the station that badly.

It's like saying "all trains are dangerous" because a a lorry full of bricks crashes through the protective barrier at a crossing, and stalls on the lines 30 seconds before a a high speed train is due.

 

[nin9abadga]

I saw two wind turbine innovations recently. One was having the wind turbines inside a massive inflatable circle like structure that is hoisted up in to the air and held there by a cable.

The other was a wind turbine that generates water from the air. Similar to the ecoloblue techonlogy.

But both of them were a bit gimmicky. Just like wind turbines.

Still no mention of the maintenance costs. They don't last very long, then you have to pay someone to fix it, pay for parts, transport the parts, produce the parts. I have seen studies from other places that contradict the study as mentioned earlier in this thread. IF energy companies want to invest in wind turbines without any government assistance then it must be viable. But i don't think that is the case.

they are built to last 20 years all things considered (that's what the certification standards work to). they are just like any other large scale industrial enterprise - the unplanned maintenance is the real cost escalator - if you plan, predict and prevent all maintenance then it becomes a predictable on-cost. this is possible.

as i've said in this thread already, the UK has the largest offshore capacity in the world where lack of wind is a non issue. plus as the turbines get bigger the wind speed required for effective generation reduces. site them properly and the issues are reduced.

 

[ubersonic]

It's like saying "all trains are dangerous" because a a lorry full of bricks crashes through the protective barrier at a crossing, and stalls on the lines 30 seconds before a a high speed train is due.

Indeed, Fukushima should be more of an example of how safe nuclear power is than what the media has turned it into. Lets not forget this was a power plant from the 1960's based one designs from the 1950's and the only reason Fukushima is even considered on the same level as much worse disasters like Chernobyl and Kyshtym is because the site had four reactors three of which suffered level 5 emergencies (on par with the Windscale fire in the UK in 1957) and one suffered a level 3 emergency (on par with the Sellafield leak in the UK in 2005).

Like somebody above posted, what happened at Fukushima is impossible at a state of the art reactor like the French are building, and yes even if they are hit by a massive earthquake then a tidal wave.

 

[PlacidCasual]

Wind is an extremely capital intensive energy source for installed capacity. On shore is obviously cheaper than off shore but they have lower load factors. Also because the number of generators is highly distributed the maintenance costs are proving relatively high. Without the very significant subsidies they would not get close to being built. The John Muir trust produced a good report detailing how common it was for wind power to be generating pitifully small amounts of energy at times of high demand,like this February. Quite simply there is not enough hydro storage available to justify the investment. Without a decent method of storage for electricity the technical case for wind is poor. Politics is the only reason the damn things are being built. For all intents and purposes it;s a mature technology there are no economies of scale to come. Even with massive investment in the grid to accomodate offshore wind we will still be at risk of grid instability caused by the imbalance of demand and supply geographically which will introduce financial inefficiency.

 

[Energize]

Critics of wind energy often claim that the energy used to construct a wind turbine outweighs the energy produced during its lifetime in operation. This is not correct. An evidence review published in the journal Renewable Energy in 2010, which included data from 119 turbines across 50 sites going back 30 years, concluded that the average windfarm produces 20-25 times more energy during its operational life than was used to construct and install its turbines. It also found that the average "energy payback" of a turbine was 3-6 months.

Those are some very small sample sizes.

 

[nin9abadga]

Wind is an extremely capital intensive energy source for installed capacity. On shore is obviously cheaper than off shore but they have lower load factors. Also because the number of generators is highly distributed the maintenance costs are proving relatively high. Without the very significant subsidies they would not get close to being built. The John Muir trust produced a good report detailing how common it was for wind power to be generating pitifully small amounts of energy at times of high demand,like this February. Quite simply there is not enough hydro storage available to justify the investment. Without a decent method of storage for electricity the technical case for wind is poor. Politics is the only reason the damn things are being built. For all intents and purposes it;s a mature technology there are no economies of scale to come. Even with massive investment in the grid to accomodate offshore wind we will still be at risk of grid instability caused by the imbalance of demand and supply geographically which will introduce financial inefficiency.

i'll take a couple of things from here:

1 - offshore and onshore turbines are essentially the same

2 - maintenance costs are only high due to the lack of predictive and preventative maintenance practises (see my post above)

3 - valid point re subsidies, US are talking about dropping their credit system and the poopy will hit the fan as all investment will stop.

4 - it's not storage that's the issue it's the fact that all the best sites are miles away from the main grid i.e. offshore - and no one wants to pay the cash to connect it all up. plus as i said before, wind will be part of the energy mix, not the sole generator.

5 - it's not a mature technology. if it was all turbines would be 10MW and their contribution to the energy mix would be much larger. as it is, 3MW is slowly becoming the norm with the odd 5MW making it out into the field for testing (I think there is a 10MW either in production or being tested/designed). However I do agree that turbine prices are too high, I would put this down to the fact that it's fairly new technology and so it comes in a premium. that said, turbine prices are coming down as manufacturing improves - so it will become cheaper.

 

[Glaucus]

Uk and us have partnered up to develop floating turbines as well, meaning it opens up a load more areas.

The grid and connections are being upgraded/installed. There's basically two catogries when it comes to nay Sayers. Plain lies or it's allready been thought if and is being worked on/or implemented.

 

[PlacidCasual]

Yes I appreciate that the turbine is the same but the. It's of mounting it and installing offshore turbines is much higher. Also the largest turbines the 3-5MW designs are only being installed offshore to the best of my knowledge.

Storage is a issue because the random nature of their generation means it often won't coincide with demand. At night for instance the inflexible nukes must run but if we have more wind than we can use we have to pay turn turbines off. That is just mad turning our nose up to energy. But those are the technical constraints.

Maintenance costs are also high because there are many small distributed generating units that are in relatively inaccessible locations with significant safety hazards. Also the working environment seems to be causing problems with gearboxes and transformers. But luckily for the owners the electricity customer is being fleeced to pay for it.

 

[wilber]

What are the alternatives though? Wind Power should be part of "the energy mix". Wind is predicted fairly well so energy suppliers know whether or not they need to put more coal/gas on the fire to generate energy that way. You also mentioned that we pay to have turbines turned off this is the same for coal/gas/nuclear, wind receives far less money.