sawtooth fire, v47 turbine, vestas

filming sawtooth fire from vestas v47 wind turbine site.

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Howto & Style

Tags:

• fire
• sawtooth
• yucca
• valley
• wind
• turbine
• windmill
• vestas
• farm
• palmsprings
• green
• energy
• v47

[asilaydying1984]

Enercon sucks

[BASavage81]

The main argument is what is the most effective way to produce electrical power with out using fossil fuels. No matter what we do there will always be a waste product. Wind mill farms, despite advances in technolgy, are still extremely inefficient. They produce noise and visual pollution as well. We should do as France and Japan does, Nuclear which is still the most effient form of power there is. Before you knock nuclear take a physics course and find out for your self.

[asilaydying1984]

how are they inefficient? Also The new wind turbines make hardly any noise,a whole lot less than a car does.

[asilaydying1984]

I work for a company called vestas, and I dont know how this compares to other forms of energy but the turbines we are mainly putting up right now are called v90s and they produce 3 megowatts per hour compared to turbines in the 80s producing 65 kw an hour

[alanhowitzer]

Man it's amazing that so many people think they are ugly. I visited Germany and Denmark this summer and I think they only added to the landscape.

Ugly or not, they are going to become a necessity.

[M4V3R1K83]

You are so right!

[philkarn]

@jfirebug Do you realize that the Parisians hated the Eiffel Tower when it first went up? They thought it was a monstrous eyesore.

[philkarn]

@ccoraxfan As a space nut I'd love to see solar power from space but it just ain't gonna happen. The costs of launching it up there would vastly exceed what the ~5x increase in production from continuous illumination (ignoring equinox eclipses) would be worth. Panels are rapidly falling in price, and the place for them is on existing rooftops.

[ApolloWasReal]

@ccoraxfan You won't find a bigger fan of space exploration, but space power generation is simply out of the question. Launch to LEO is about $10K/kg, and GEO is > $20K/kg. (Gold is about $44K/kg). Most single-family homes get enough sunlight for a healthy annual surplus with present PV technology; the US geographical variation is only about 2:1, AK/AZ. Rule of thumb: rooftop PV duty factor is about 20% on an annual basis -- including summer/winter, day/night, cloudy weather, etc.

[ApolloWasReal]

@ccoraxfan Na/S batteries for load leveling have a lot of potential. The raw materials -- Na, S and Al2O3 -- are plentiful and cheap. Historically, generation is tuned to demand but that's not inherent. Dynamic pricing will incentivize load leveling and dispatchable loads. Many industrial HVAC systems already are. EV charging is easily dispatched. So are many industrial processes, like Al smelting. Even computer tasks can be suspended.

[ccoraxfan]

@ApolloWasReal I'm not yet banking on battery technology for grid-wide storage. Perhaps, eventually batteries will be feasible. As for load dispatch... what sort of major operations can be shut down at a moment's notice, enough to make this effective? And even if they can be, would it be too costly for a business to implement such a scheme?

Many orbits have eclipses at various times. However, by arranging satellites in various locations and different orbits, power production can be continuous.

[ApolloWasReal]

Even without dispatchable loads the demand curves are remarkably predictable. The diurnal variation is only about 2:1 in California. With nuclear for base load, hydro, wind, rooftop PV and desert solar all complementing each other, the development of industrial scale Na/S battery plants, and considerably more load dispatchability, I don't see the loss of large amounts of fossil generation as an insoluble problem.

[ApolloWasReal]

@ccoraxfan I never said wind only or solar only. It's a remarkably common fallacy: "unless some alternative energy source can provide all our needs, it's no good". We've never required that of any fossil fuel, why start now? Wind and solar supplies are remarkably complementary, and the more diverse and connected they are the better. Dispatchable loads and maybe Na/S batteries will take up the slack.

BTW, geostationary orbits have 70+ minute eclipses at the equinoxes.

[ccoraxfan]

@ApolloWasReal When the wind is blowing on the east coast and not on the west...

HVDC power lines still cannot store electricity, and wind turbines are always a variable supply which cannot be matched to the instantaneous demand, so the instability remains.

If you put solar panels on your roof, the sun will not shine on them all the time. They are a variable supply just like wind. In space though, they are perfectly predictable. Put them in orbit around the earth and you'll get constant power.

[ApolloWasReal]

@ccoraxfan I don't see much need to transmit power all the way across a continent. HVDC could relieve a lot of the stability problems of AC. Nuclear is definitely important, but I don't see the need to go to space for solar. A combination of rooftop PV solar, thermal solar in the deserts and wind in the mountain passes would be a better way to go, especially if Na/S batteries can be ramped up to utility scale buffers as the Japanese have been doing with some success.

[ccoraxfan]

@ApolloWasReal Yes, efficient within normal distances. But not across a continent. There are other problems too, involving grid stability, not just wire resistance.

As for choice, we do have more choices than what are being offered. Nuclear power is a good choice at this time. And solar would be an excellent choice... if we collected it from space and beamed it down to earth. But this is something which will take a while to develop.

I still won't trade my freedom for electricity.