Next Generation Energy is managed and written entirely by Seed editors and expert guest bloggers. Read more about them Last Tuesday, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg announced at the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas a plan to put windmills atop the city's bridges and skyscrapers, in an effort to generate up to 10% of its electricity by 2018. He also proposed building wind farms off New York's coast, where strong Atlantic winds could generate large amounts of power.
His announcement follows less than two months after oil mogul T. Boone Pickens unveiled his own scheme for wind energy, with the far more ambitious goal of generating 20% of the entire country's electricity needs in the same length of time. An extensive transportation network would carry power from farms in the windy stretches of western states to the rest of the nation, freeing up natural gas for use in cars and trucks and significantly reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil.
The fact that two of the largest-scale alternative energy projects currently in sight both involve wind power is not really very surprising. Unlike nuclear power plants, the biggest objection to living near a wind farm is that...they're loud. And ugly.
So, is wind the answer? Is it reliable enough to fulfill our energy needs? How much farther does the technology need to be developed? Are there any detracting factors likely to draw opposition? Let's hear about them.
Environment
Comments
It seems that wind power has a rather negative impact on certain species of bat - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7581990.stm
Another point I've seen mentioned is that the creation of huge numbers of wind generators would cause some degree of climate warming (due to its effect on the cooling impact of wind being disrupted - the energy it extracts from the wind lowers the cooling capacity of the wind). The figure I've seen is a 0.5 degree C temperature rise if wind power was utilized at significant levels.
Posted by: Sigmund | August 26, 2008 8:03 PM
No, wind is not reliable enough to fulfill our energy needs, because our needs are great. Even if we cut our energy via efficiency, we will grow. It is reliable enough to fulfill some of our energy needs, however, and onshore it is cost competitive. It's about $1.8 million/MW onshore to $3 million/MW offshore, or $.05-$.09 per kwh, but I'd bet the economies of scale work in the opposite direction for offshore, creating an artificial spot market with increased costs, but that is just a theory.
Detracting factors are noise and siting. Pickens seems to believe siting will be much easier in the middle of the country if you focus on the jobs it will produce. But I also think we could get creative with incentives for the land in ways they could not with the Federal Highway system. That does not mean it will be easy.
Posted by: Jonsi | August 26, 2008 8:04 PM
Wind is good... people who keep pushing the 'not reliable enough' FUD don't seem understand the scaling, much less increasingly common and efficient energy storage (such as chilling a thermal mass at off peak times).
Siting must be done with some foresight. We have learned that lesson pretty well, though it will still be necessary to keep people from forgetting it.
10-20% seems doable without getting into the really vast scale ideas which have some big potential problems.
Solar thermal is a good compliment to wind, and could produce a similar if not larger chunk of our power. Of course, more in some places than others.
Add in all the other techs we already have on hand and couple it with increased efficiency and generally more clever consumption, and getting to the 100% sustainable goal doesn't seem so tough. (I'm talking power generation... transportation fuel is still a problem.)
I'll repeat myself one more time...
Some people like talking about how France gets 90% of their power from nuclear. That isn't quite the right way of looking at it. In comparison with the US, France gets ~50% of their power by not having to generate it in the first place. Efficiency is the biggest chunk by far.
Posted by: travc | August 26, 2008 8:53 PM
The question was totally badly phrased. NOTHING - not one thing - will fulfill our energy needs because those needs are diverse and large and nothing fits all of them. Will wind contribute to our energy? Of course - it already is, we can't make enough wind generators as it is. Wind is not something we really need to worry much about now. Its economics are coming in line, it is growing about as fast as it feasibly can, and we will likely get 20% of our electric power from it in 20 years or so. Does that mean we need to stop doing other things? Of course not.
That is a weird claim of a 0.5 degree heating from wind (over what area?).
Even ignoring the thermal impact of the coal that wind would be displacing wind is a net energy remover from where it is generated. (Coal plants, for example, and the trains feeding them basically dump half their power generated into heat into the air and water.)
Assume Wind is only taking up the slack for energy use growth.
We remove some energy by using wind - it has to lose energy if we take some. Thus the system is losing energy. The solar flux is the same. Slower winds aren't going to radiate more into space, so where exactly is this extra amount of energy going to come from to heat things up half a degree?
I could see it happening perhaps in some small microclimate but not on any scale.
Posted by: Markk | August 26, 2008 8:55 PM
For a typical electricity grid up to 20% of power can come from wind before its intermittency becomes a major problem. Ways to increase this percentage include using smart electricity grids, demand management, and having a large well interconnected power grid that can deliver wind power from widely seperated turbines. If the price of wind power continues to drop, then it could be well worth upgrading power grids to cope with it. It is also possible for solar and other sources of renewable energy to complement wind. Storing power is currently expensive but may become cheaper in the future.
Birds can usually see and avoid the blades of modern large wind turbines and so they are less of a threat to birds than older, smaller turbines. (I hope the same is true for bats.)
Noise is a problem, but large modern turbines produce much less noise per watt than older turbines and if wind turbines are located near where people live they can be fitted with sound supression systems that operate something similar to noise cancelling headphones. This would add to the cost of the wind turbines, but it might be well worth it.
Floating wind turbines are being developed that can be located far out to sea, out of sight of land. This will greatly increase the area in which turbines can be located and can supply electricty to coastal areas where most of the world's population lives. They will cost more than land based turbines, but stronger winds are often found at sea.
Building large numbers of wind turbines will have an effect on the environment, but compared to burning fossil fuels this effect is likely to be quite insignificant.
So overall, the future of wind seem very bright. The only thing I can see halting wind power's expansion would be rapid decreases in the costs of other forms of clean energy.
Posted by: Ronald Brak | August 26, 2008 9:17 PM
Wind energy may be stored efficiently and cheaply in underground compressed-air tanks to time-shift generating capacity. Also, wind and solar power may be fed directly to local power consumers, e.g. producers of ammonia for fertilizer, which need operate only when power is available, avoiding storage conversion losses, transmission losses, and cost of building transmission lines. The resulting production may then be used locally, saving on transportation costs.
Whoever creates a modular, automated fertilizer production unit may do more for clean power generation than anybody working on the power extraction itself.
Makani Power (makanipower.com) is working on high-altitude wind generation, which eliminates problems attributed to windmills, including noise, footprint, and intermittent output.
Posted by: Nathan Myers | August 27, 2008 2:43 AM
[Citation needed]
Are you talking about 0.5 deg C globally? I'm pretty sure that's impossible.
And is it just me, or does anyone else find the idea of holding the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas absolutely hilarious?
Posted by: Dunc | August 27, 2008 5:16 AM
Talking about wind, this blog site sports an impressive roll call of esteemed expert contributors including William Connolley,
Samuel Hazen, James Hrynyshyn, Solomon Hsiang, Erin Johnson, Sheril Kirshenbaum, Scott Mackenzie and Joseph Romm.
I wonder if any of these people of integrity and high repute are feeling queasy about being linked to blog sponsored by the oil giant Shell, which has been censored by advertising regulators in the UK and the Netherlands for blatant acts of greenwashing; Shell has been found guilty on three counts thus far.
Misleading the public is nothing new for Shell.
It did the same in the massive securities fraud revealed in January 2004 after hydrocarbon reserves volumes had been artificially inflated. The FSA found Shell guilty of fooling the markets. The U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission found Shell guilty of securities fraud. The combined fines from the FSA and the SEC amounted to $150 million.
If Shell a good company to get into bed with as a sponsor of your site?
Posted by: John Donovan | August 27, 2008 11:04 AM
ScienceNOW just reported on a new finding about the bats being killed by wind turbines. Apparently, the bats CAN avoid the blades themselves, but when they do so, they get sucked into the low-pressure vortex near the high-speed tips, and their lungs hemorrhage. This is because they are detecting the onrushing blade, and moving a few feet away from it (plenty of distance in their natural environment), but then getting slammed by the low pressure zone.
I'm hoping some smart engineers can start working on feathering the tips in some way to prevent the formation of such a strong vortex. That, or that bats start evolving to move further away!
Posted by: Richard Hendricks | August 27, 2008 3:09 PM
"citation needed"
http://tinyurl.com/5qeova
Posted by: Sigmund | August 28, 2008 10:07 AM
Thank you. Haven't had time to read it in detail yet, but a quick skim of the "Implications" section gives:
[My emphasis].
Posted by: Dunc | August 28, 2008 12:18 PM