Wind Energy Is One of the Cheapest, and It's Getting Cheaper | Hacker News Reader

Wind Energy Is One of the Cheapest, and It's Getting Cheaper

blogs.scientificamerican.com

451 pointsph0rque356 comments

I don't really know what I'm talking about, but I bring this up when we talk about wind energy and I've never had a satisfying answer. Maybe that's due to not knowing what I'm talking about.

Since the wind does other stuff beyond just feeling breezy, it stands to reason that there exists some level of wattage we could pull out of it that would have undesirable effects.

If there were no wind tomorrow, we can agree that this would be bad. Are there lower levels of energy depletion where the effects would be subtler and harder to anticipate? Would pulling 0.5% of the wind's energy result in shifts in weather patterns, even if it's localized?

I mean, since we're collectively so good at breaking things, maybe it's worth assuming we will fill some hypothetical area with as many contraptions to take energy from the wind as we can, and that these contraptions will get increasingly effective.

EDIT: There are some great replies to this, and the minds of HN are always an awesome resource to tap. I guess I can't shake the vague spooky feeling I get from interfering with a massive system that feeds into itself in unpredictable ways, but it sounds like ruthless expansion of some massive drain on the wind system is unlikely/impossible.

Here's a study that evaluated exactly what you're looking for, if I understand correctly: http://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/2/4/816/htm

In summary, if the entire Earth was powered by wind, it would result in a net loss in the lowest 1 km of the atmosphere of ~0.007%.

Looks like some far more competent folks have pretty thoroughly looked into it. I'll sleep better knowing I'm not the wind's sole protector

I know it's bad form to just offer an unexplained video link, but your phrase "the wind's sole protector" reminded me of this delightfully understated French commercial that illustrates why the wind has so few people looking out for it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mTLO2F_ERY

Although that would be a cool job description.

I'd really hope wind has a bus factor of more than one though.

If we increase our energy consumption 100-fold this estimation of net loss in wind would approach 1% which sounds bad. I guess we might need wind protector after all.

That's a pretty big "if".

Aren't trees and tall buildings in cities doing a million times more then if the whole world was powered by the wind?

Very likely, yes. Until wind farms dwarf the scale of our cities and forests, I doubt there's any reason to worry.

Besides, don't we usually consider trees to be good things? They block a lot more wind than any wind turbine.

I think once we solved the storage of energy from solar panels the wind won't really be needed. I still would love to see tidal generators that work but I guess it is to much upkeep.

Don't forget that CO2 is heavier than O2, [1]. So if we don't keep that wind going, all the CO2 will sink to the bottom of the atmosphere, pushing the O2 up. I'm not sure if that is a linear process (x percent less wind meaning x percent less oxygen).

[1] https://www.quora.com/Which-is-heavier-oxygen-or-carbon-diox...

You mean CO2 would concentrate at tree level to be more easily absorbed and converted back into oxygen, rather than in the upper atmosphere where it heats the earth? I'm not sure I see the downside.

Even in "still" air, the individual molecules have random velocities due to temperature - on the order of 100 m/s. Combined with the fact that there are more mixed configurations than unmixed configurations (entropy of mixing), this randomness effectively stirs the atmosphere without the need for the bulk motion of the wind.

Don't worry about pushing up O2 all them airliners will suck it up.

The amount of deforestation that we've engaged in, reducing "surface roughness" on a large quantity of the Earth's surface, that's a lot of wind energy we've stopped from being extracted.

We can draw an enormous amount before we'd even get close to break-even on our influence on the wind.

The amount of forest biomass on Earth is going up rather than down. https://theconversation.com/despite-decades-of-deforestation...

Quick "I have no idea how plants work" question, would a more carbon rich atmosphere promote faster growth?

That depends on the plant. Some plants are CO2 limited, and would grow better. Thus out competing other plants that are limited by something else. This is not necessarily good though, such plants tend to be ones we already consider weeds with little useful value.

Of course in the dry deserts everything is water limited. There are also temperature and altitude (air pressure) limits that affect various other regions/climates.

In specific controlled environments, yes. In the real world not so much. https://www.skepticalscience.com/Increasing-Carbon-Dioxide-i...

> In specific controlled environments

I think you mean, with sufficient soil nutrients, yes. That's not a controlled environment, that's a environmental requirement.

That's an interesting point. I wonder what exactly happens to wind (kinetic) energy when it is absorbed by trees moved by the wind. Does it turn into anything useful, like heat available to the tree for easier transportation of fluids, i.e. have some trees adapted to benefit from wind (other than by transporting seeds/pollen over longer distances)?

Without wind, trees don't grow strong enough to support themselves. The wind toughens them up. (This was a problem in the Biosphere project studying how to build a closed environment for use on other planets.)

Even if we covered the earth in windmills, we'd still only affect the lowest 100-200m of the atmosphere. And windmills can only extract 50% of the winds energy. I'm thinking a forest full of trees might even reduce the windspeed more than a field of mills.

I'm pretty sure that 50% number is for single mill. For a farm there should be no such limit.

Placing a windmill behind another one would be stupid. So, when you have a farm, you still capture a maximum of 50% of the energy that flows through the farm - only, you cover a bigger area and thus you get <= 50% of a bigger mass of moving air.

In (current) practice, yes, but not necessarily.

If windmills are dirt cheap, energy and land scarce/expensive, or transport losses large, a windmill in the wind shade of another windmill could still make economic sense, just as it can make economic sense to install solar cells on roofs in places far from the equator that often have cloud cover.

I don't know how practical they are but I've seen that inflatable flying windmill wind turbine thing that is meant to be 500-1000ft or higher? So doesn't that make the 100-200m a bit low on what altitude we can extract from?

The inflatable flying windmill thing isn't particularly efficient, the future high-atmosphere wind energy source is much more likely to be kite-based wind:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMTchVXedkk

And I assume that the two systems (upper and lower atmosphere) aren't so isolated from one another that they don't interact

50% sounds way higher than I'd expect. Windmills don't exactly block the wind. Most of it just blows through it unhindered.

In order for the windmill to turn, some energy must be taken from the wind and turned into that rotation. This hinders the wind.

If you were going to try and go turn that windmill, would you just freely spin it with 0 effort? No you'd have to push, it would hinder you.

I think the parent is saying is that, if you consider the circle traced by the outer tips of the windmill blades, the windmill blades themselves take up a very small fraction of the surface area of that circle. Thus, the windmill is fundamentally only capable of capturing a small fraction of the energy that flows through that circle.

The way I look at it, if you consider the air mass from ground level up to the top of the atmosphere, the bottom will always have a roughly zero speed since it is down in the terrain and the weeds. A carpet of windmills a hundred meters tall could at best move that zero speed edge a little higher. The kilometers of air above will be relatively unaffected.

To illustrate, consider https://embed.windy.com/embed2.html?lat=41.327&lon=-88.033&z... which if I've got that URL right will show you winds at a windmill farm in Illinois USA (nope, it misses slightly for some reason, odd, it is right when I copy it). Look in the lower right of the screen and find the slider with an airplane at the top and a mountain at the bottom. You can use this to change altitudes and explore the wind speed above ground level. Lots more windspeed up there even if the density goes down. Consider the 5500 meters up, about half the air pressure, but twice the wind speed today, so that works out to twice the energy per square foot (on edge).

The effect of wind turbines on birds and other wildlife is probably far more important, and also routinely gets ignored imo.

That's a conservative straw man. Skyscrapers have much more impact and no one notices.

If conservatives care so much about wildlife why do they support things that lead to deforestation and desertification and loss of biodiversity and pollution and...?

To be a conservative is to hold multiple contradictory positions at once, many of which directly harm your own health or well-being

Exactly. All these questionable concerns about the negative impacts of clean energy are straw men conjured up to protect the real devastating energy sources.

Not to mention cats. Some stats here:

http://www.currykerlinger.com/birds.htm

I'm pretty sure some people notice. I'm also reasonably sure that if we produce a substantial amount of our energy needs from wind, turbines will far outnumber any skyscrapers.

"Wind turbines kill between 214,000 and 368,000 birds annually ... compared with the estimated 6.8 million fatalities from collisions with cell and radio towers and the 1.4 billion to 3.7 billion deaths from cats, "

https://www.treehugger.com/renewable-energy/north-america-wi...

The problem is not wind turbines or radio towers. The problem is cats.

That data isn’t true. Multiple studies put that number into the millions.

http://www.nature.com/news/the-trouble-with-turbines-an-ill-...

And bird deaths from cats and skyscrapers will be many orders of magnitude greater. This is well-reasearched, and it's not hard to find the journal articles on this topic. We need not guess.

How is “protecting birds” a conservative straw man? Non-conservatives routinely block all sorts of projects because of endangered fish or frogs. How often do non-conservatives use the Endangered Species Act as a tool to prevent projects with which they ideologically disagree? It’s like they oppose a project and then find whatever legal means they have available to block it. It isn’t like non-conservatives in California have a profound desire to protect the delta smelt; if they did, then why wouldn’t they oppose the Altamont Pass wind farm that kills 114 golden eagles each year? How about the death of highly endangered condors because of of California wind farms? A skyscraper has never killed a condor but a wind farm has.

http://savetheeaglesinternational.org/new/us-windfarms-kill-...

Non-conservatives use the same straw man by somehow suggesting fossil fuels harm wildlife. But their own pet projects seem to escape the same scrutiny with which they apply to fossil fuels. My theory is that by restricting fossil fuels they can redirect the balance of economic power towards a direction that is more in line with their particular ideology. My point is that “environment” itself is being used as a straw man with the ultimate goal of changing wealth distribution.

Oil spills definitely harm wildlife and windmills also definitely harm wildlife.

It’s fair to point out the ecological effects of fields of windmills just as it’s fair to point out the harms of oil spills.

Also, we aren’t talking about skyscrapers— we are talking about energy generation. Whether or not skyscrapers harm wildlife and to what degree isn’t relevant because skyscrapers already exist and people aren’t suggesting we cover the countryside with skyscrapers. If that were the topic under debate, then the effects of skyscrapers on wildlife would be a relevant point.

Various international bird (and bat) societies support wind power as a net positive for their particular species, while contributing expert guidance on siting and design to minimize bird casualties and opposing individual projects that they feel are poorly designed or sited. (Of relevant interest to HN are computer vision projects that track rare birds and stop nearby turbines when they come too close)

So, if conservatives are really opposing wind power on the basis of "saving birds" then they're massively misinformed and ignoring the relevant experts.

Since they don't actually care about the birds, it's obviously a cynical ploy to protect fossil fuels that on balance are a greater threat to the very birds they claim to want to save.

And in doing so they're choosing not only an environmentally destructive option, but one which is more costly to society, just because the special interests who receive the benefits will provide kick backs to politicians that help them.

You couldn't really summarize modern conservative thought better if you tried.

If you want to protect birds, you have to ban people from keeping cats and letting them loose in rural areas. Good luck with that.

When complaining about loose cats, no one ever seems concerned about all the rats that are also killed.

As always, you should compare with other sources of energy. As long as windmills replace CO2 producing energy sources, it's a net gain for wildlife - not the mention the other pollutants you're displacing, which are usually much worse in the short term.

Do you still operate a car?

https://www.codot.gov/programs/environmental/wildlife/data/a...

It kills birds, albeit 10,000x fewer than housecats.

Trump likes to whinge about it.

> If there were no wind tomorrow, we can agree that this would be bad.

I think Houston would disagree.

There's an enormous amount of energy in wind. There's not a chance that we can hope to capture more than the tiniest fraction of it. And if we could, we'd certainly love to drain some energy from tropical storms.

It's good to think about such risks, though. There are people who thought burning carbon couldn't possibly have any meaningful impact, and quite clearly it can.

I've seen a proposal for clean energy, 1 km tall solar towers that create energy out of the difference between warm air close to the ground and cold air high up in the atmosphere, that felt to me like it might have some impact of weather patterns. I doubt it actually does, but it can't hurt to do the math.

I suppose if the energy source with the least possible side effects would be solar panels in the desert. Without them, the sun is just going to heat the sand and the air and make the place even drier. And you need only a tiny bit of the solar energy from the desert to power the entire world. Less than what's regularly lost to desertification, deforestation, or the land we pave with asphalt and concrete. Before we get worried about any potential negative impact there, we should first worry about all the very real negative impact we're having all across the world.

The question has been asked in the past and modelled with some level of detail. For example: Estimating maximum global land surface wind power extractability and associated climatic consequences [0].

At a higher level the question is easy: Sun shines, warms the air more in the tropics, creates a gradient, and wind flows. What if we capture all this energy? But the details of the calculation are subtle. The cited paper says: It could have dire climatic consequences!

But it may be over-estimating how many locations are really suitable for wind turbines. Many things limit the efficiency (i.e. cost effectiveness) of a wind farm (turbulence, minimum average wind speed, maximum speeds, access to the site, distance from cities, etc).

One important point is that most of the energy exchange happens at high altitude (where the turbines can't reach).

[0] https://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/2/1/2011/esd-2-1-2011.pdf

it's good to think through, but first order intuition on this (for me) goes something like:

1. the wind gets it's power (directly and indirectly) from the sun and we"re just too miniscule to affect that in any meaningful way.

2.on top of that, we return most of the acquired energy back to the atmosphere in the form of heat.

3. and we haven't built anything close to large and extensive enough in one place to create even micro-environmental effects.

we're just too miniscule to matter so it's a problem that might affect the planet in 1000 years when there are trillions(?) of people on earth but not worth worrying too much about now. by then, we might have become the brains of a superorganism or something and then it's time to worry =)

Wind also gets some of its energy from Earth rotation.

> we're just too miniscule to affect that in any meaningful way

Though this same argument is dismissed by those who support the idea that we're changing the weather by CO2 emissions.

You kinda took that out of context. "That" is "the amount of energy the sun radiates to the Earth's surface". That amount of energy 100% dwarfs anything the human race could ever hope to use

Well dwarfs what we need before we start colonizing the galaxy.

> Though this same argument is dismissed by those who support the idea that we're changing the weather by CO2 emissions.

Our direct effect is minuscule, it just so happens that our efforts magnify the not so minuscule effect the sun has.

In terms of wind energy, rotating mills are not going to have any measurable impact on wind energy or patterns.

But with CFCs, we clearly aren’t minuscule. We saw a hole in the ozone layer that opened when we used them, and is closing now that we’ve stopped.

For some things, we’re too minuscule, for others we’re not.

Who argues that human greenhouse gas emissions are minuscule?

Climate change will also increase wind levels tremendously (more energy => more wind)

Wind must blow in order to extract energy from it. Therefore, we will never slow down wind to zero with windmills. Also we already have mountains changing weather patterns. Sure, the weather patterns will change at some point as windmills grow to mountain size but in this case we will notice it way before it goes out of hand. In an emergency situation we can bring the windmills down at free fall speed with some thermate and gasoline.

Yeah, it must blow to get there, but it by definition has less "blow" on the other side. I think I'm getting that the scale of this is negligible, but it is certainly less

I understand the amount we might ever extract pales in comparison to the amount that would upset any natural phenomena.

Is it true that we once had the same rationale with coal?

I would say that with coal, we never even considered the impact - carbon dioxide, much less the greenhouse effect, were unknown when we started burning coal in earnest.

With wind power, smart people have at least sat down and done the math.

I've seen studies of this before, and googling "wind energy climate effects" pulls some up. I think the upshot was that there would be some climate effects but it would take a truly massive expansion of wind energy to amount to much, and would still be much less damaging than fossil fuels.

With traditional (coal, gas, nuclear) electrical power generation, one unit of energy is delivered to your wall socket by dumping about two units of heat directly into the environment somewhere else.

The star-studded and scientifically profound movie Southland Tales touches upon this, but with respect to tidal energy. It's quite a fascinating story that you may enjoy, given your questions.

Glad I'm not the only one who's thought about this :)

Based on that line of reasoning you ought to be really nervous about solar panels :)

It's cheap in the places that are windy. One big challenge (mentioned tangentially in the article) is in moving this cheap energy from the windy center of the continent to the populated coasts.

The coolest project to tackle this problem (in my opinion) is Tres Amigas, a superconducting interchange between the west coast grid and the (wind-heavy) Texas grid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tres_Amigas_SuperStation

Lots of coastline is plenty windy. Why isn't there more offshore wind generation in USA like there is in other nations? My impression is that rich people who own land on the coast have no taste and think that offshore wind generation is an eyesore.

At least with respect to the west coast:

> Unlike the Atlantic Ocean, where offshore wind farms can be bolted into the seabed in relatively shallow water, the West Coast's continental shelf plunges quickly and steeply.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-offshore-wind-20160703...

There's a floating wind farm being deployed off Scotland, so this could be possible in the future: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-40699979

Those "floating" wind turbines are still bolted to the seabed (so they don't float away) and are interconnected with wires. They showed how they work via infographics on their website that was on the HN frontpage recently. So the OP's comment about the sloping sea shelf is still relevant.

There are efforts underway to develop floating foundations, but I believe it's still in the test phase with only a few turbines deployed.

The first major floating wind farm is being deployed off the coast of Scotland right now!

What's the reason for going offshore? Is the wind not as strong on land?

Offshore you can install bigger turbines, because sea transportation of turbine components is not size-limited like rail/road transport. Taller turbines help to reach wind resources that are stronger and steadier. Also, even at the same height, offshore wind resources are often better than they are a few km inland. Finally, offshore wind can supply power to densely populated coastal areas when there isn't room to build turbines on land.

The disadvantages are higher construction and maintenance costs; waves and salt water are much more challenging to materials than the ordinary conditions onshore turbine towers experience.

Most cities are on the coast, so offshore offers generation near where it's needed. Doing offshore does not mean ignoring on-shore.

In some cases offshore winds are strong enough that on-shore turbines are less cost effective. That's true for some of the east coast of the US.

"Is the wind not as strong on land?"

Yup !

The turbines are anchored to the sea bed. The wind has a boundary condition against the ground. If the ground is the sea, then the sea current wrt to the sea bed adds to the wind speed wrt to the sea bed.

Therefore, the turbines have zero wind speed only if the wind is blowing exactly against the sea current. Which is hard and rare.

Because the land boundary condition is different, the further away offshore you are, the better the effect is. Also, you might as well pick spots with known stable sea currents.

Fewer issues re land owners. Wind tends to be more steady at sea.

No people complaining about noise, moving shadows and bad aesthetics there.

Offshore wind is considerably more expensive to build, maintain, and interconnect.

This article suggests that offshore wind is 3X as expensive as onshore wind:

http://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1380738/global-costs...

That puts offshore wind as more expensive than gas turbines, for example. And that's assuming an offshore wind project could get past NIMBY opposition. There's a lot more land in the Midwest than there is coastline.

Without floating foundations, offshore depends a lot on the specifics of the oceanbed. But DONG Energy, which I think is the world biggest developer of offshore wind, recently gave a bid on a subsidy of zero for a farm near Germany. Final investment decision is still in a couple of years so they may pull out of the bid if things don't develop as expected, but not without paying a big fee.

So offshore is expected to get cheaper.

There's a comparison with nuclear down in the thread. I think one important thing to keep in mind here is that these cost reductions coming from industrialization and improved economies of scale are REAL. They happen year over year, has happened for decades, and they will surely lower the price even further in the future. Just like solar. And battery tech for that matter. It's incremental improvements.

But what happens if you have a place like the North Sea surrounded by facilities for deploying oil rigs and associated infrastructure, for the oil to run out? There is considerable sunk cost in the infrastructure and with some subsidies to keep yards busy (as such things are needed for national security reasons) it all becomes a lot easier.

What happens is that you get crazy plans like this:

http://cphpost.dk/news/denmark-looking-into-building-north-s...

In a couple of decades, I think the North Sea is going have vast areas full of wind turbines.

There was an interesting City Journal article about fishermen getting in the mix that caught me by surprise in an interested party that never occurred to me before. City Journal has good historical background and context that they gather up on subjects too... "The mounting opposition to the development of offshore wind in Long Island’s waters is the latest example of the growing conflict between renewable-energy promoters and rural residents. Cuomo and climate-change activists love the idea of wind energy, but they’re not the ones having 500-, 600-, or even 700-foot-high wind turbines built in their neighborhoods or on top of their prime fishing spots. The backlash against Big Wind is evident in the numbers: since 2015, about 160 government entities, from Maine to California, have rejected or restricted wind projects. One recent example: on May 2, voters in three Michigan counties went to the polls to vote on wind-related ballot initiatives. Big Wind lost on every initiative." https://www.city-journal.org/html/bonackers-vs-big-wind-1533...

"'Not even Superman standing on Montauk Point could see these wind farms,' he said. Maybe not; and maybe wealthy beachfront homeowners won’t be able to see the proposed turbines, but lots of fishermen will. And that has them spoiling for a fight."

seriously? Why on earth does it matter if fishermen see wind farms? when did we invent the rule that all energy generation needs to be invisible?

I figured it was a simple matter of navigation and not crashing into these monstrous obstacles. I could even imagine it becoming a slalom sport of some kind if the danger was not too high risk. Something along those lines. Should be interesting to see the optimum grid layout for these things and how that scale of spacing compares relative to the average length of a fishing trawler.

The point is that they fear that fish will be scared away from the area by the presence of the turbines.

> "My impression is that rich people who own land on the coast..."

Yep. An example:

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/04/20/cape.cod.wind.farm/index....

Does anyone know what the status of using kite powered systems for off shore power generation is? I know makani has been working on that for over a decade now, it always seemed like a really promising approach to me but I haven't heard of any commercial applications of it. Here is a link to makani...

https://x.company/makani/about/

Kite power is one of my pet hopes. I keep hoping it will gain some significant traction. Looks like there may be a a test power installation going up in Scotland https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/kite-power-station...

What happens to these kite power stations when there's no wind to keep them flying?

>Lots of coastline is plenty windy. Why isn't there more offshore wind generation in USA like there is in other nations? My impression is that rich people who own land on the coast have no taste and think that offshore wind generation is an eyesore.

Offshore has promise but it's significantly higher in cost and there isn't a lot of long term data on how well they hold up yet.

> there isn't a lot of long term data on how well they hold up yet.

Whats your definition of long term? 26 years[1] is definitely getting there for me.

A part of the reason for that first farm being decomissioned is because new generation turbines are capable of generating more energy than the entire farm[2]. So maintenance costs per kWh are higher than the new gear.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vindeby_Offshore_Wind_Farm [2] http://www.4coffshore.com/windfarms/dong-to-dismantle-vindeb...

Some reasons:

- (lack of) political will

- abundance of cheap natural gas

- lack of US expertise (compared to Europe, where offshore wind has existed for decades)

- hurricanes

Now you are talking Florida home owners vs boat live-aboards.

I was shocked how windy Cleveland is. I'm told Chicago is more so. Windy city indeed. If its pratical to put wind farms in the North Sea off the coast of Scotland, I'm guessing using the Great Lakes would be too.

Yeah, that'll convince them to our side! Let's insult of their taste!

Never mind that taste is subjective, and you cannot deny that modern wind turbines don't exactly blend with the natural horizon, be it sky, mountain, or forest...

Well to be fair, skyscrapers don't blend with the horizon. Cell towers don't blend with the horizon. Cooling towers and smokestacks don't blend with the horizon.

The nice thing with coal and nuclear power is that rich people can push it's production to poorer areas and forget that there are major externalities to allow them to flip a light switch. Rejecting wind power because it [insert reason here] is just saying "make the poor people deal with it". It is quite literally one of the most selfish decisions anyone can make, to force the world to stay on coal power because wind turbines "don't blend with the horizon".

No. Don't make this a class warfare thing. The nice thing about nuclear/coal power plants is that you dont have to pepper the horizon with them. There is substantially less visual impact, and with nuclear, far less spatial footprint.

And plenty of people, rich and poor, oppose skyscraper construction because of view loss.

What is with this inane contemporary idea that we should not be able to use wealth to improve our quality of life? This is the ultimate form of empty virtue signaling. Why haven't you built a turbine on your property yet? I'd venture to guess that you're a well off developer, making you top 1% of the global population...

But it's ok, so long as you have your own 1% to sneer at, right? It's their fault that we dont have turbines!

Classism can be used for the same kind of scapegoating that racism and sexism are.

The US is only 2000 miles wide so from the center that's just ~1000 miles which is fine even with normal power lines. You can do high voltage DC power transmission over 4 times that distance.

At non-negligible losses. (Expected about 10% for the whole system.) Not to mention maintenance of such long cable will be real hard, so redundancy is needed. (For comparison, check costs on much easier and cheaper transatlantic fibre cables.) And of course a facility placed further of the shore is harder to maintain as well.

10% is practically negligible when the power is coming from cheap wind power on the plains.

The 1200 mile Xiangjiaba–Shanghai HVDC line in China has transmission losses "well under 7%" [1]. This line was also completed almost three years ahead of schedule, which is an excellent contrast to Western nuclear plants that are being constructed in China. But then, nobody knows how to complete the AP1000 or EPR on time or on budget, as far as I can tell.

Lots of HVDC lines are going to be essential for cheap power in the US in the future, I just hope the political will materializes for that.

[1] http://3phasepower.blogspot.com/2010/08/xiangjiaba-shanghai-...

Edit: corrected the nuclear comparison.

> EPR on time or on budget

Sure, on one hand, this kind of project is likely to get into cost overruns. On the other hand, Areva looks like a fairly dysfunctional company following the tenure of Anne Lauvergeon, so it's not only a technical problem.

A lot of our problems are technically solvable with very near term technology. Yet we choose not to do it.

Not sure what you're getting at, apart from the loss the same disadvantages also apply if the cable is superconducting.

Even worse, maintenance and running costs of superconducting cables are likely much higher due to the cooling (high temperature superconductors are "high temperature" in comparison to other superconductors - there's still lots of cooling needed).

This is a problem that--well, I'm not going to say it's solved, but it's certainly addressed in an ongoing way. In the NE you have a lot of dinky little power plants burning coal and whatever else, but if you look at the NW there's huge hydroelectric. Hydro has to be located where it made sense to build dams; this hasn't always matched up with the needs of the grid. Long distance transmission is thus an ongoing reality. Power from Bonneville goes out to Montana today; it's not hard to imagine the reverse.

Just to add some data to this comment, WECC's "State of the Interconnection" (The line you're talking about is "Path 8"): https://www.wecc.biz/epubs/StateOfTheInterconnection/Pages/T...

Transmission is a solved problem, as far as regional power is concerned.

> "Not to mention maintenance of such long cable will be real hard"

Not really. You'd have to do periodic helicopter patrols of the lines themselves. There isn't really that much "maintenance" that occurs on the line, definitely on the xfmrs/rectifiers/inverters though, but that is normal for any transmission/substation owner.

Also, expected losses are ~5%

So you could lay a power cable across the Atlantic?

It might be physically viable, but I imagine that wouldn't be economically viable.

You responded to someone talking about laying a cable across land. So, no, they did not say that you could cheaply lay a cable across the Atlantic.

Of course, if we just wait long enough, the coasts will move inland, making then problem conveniently easier.

Yeah and after they build wind turbines inland and the coasts recede, the land owners will now start complaining that these now-offshore turbines are ruining their waterfront view of the sunken remains of Miami.

Not sure if it's relevant question here but here I go: I was driving from LA towards Joshua Tree National Park and I saw so many wind turbines which were not operating even though there was plenty of wind blowing and the adjacent wind turbines were running. Is there any reason they were not operating? Can't be maintenance problem as I saw so many not running.

I believe this is because wind turbines are brought online and taken offline according to demand. Nukes/gas stations can't have capacity adjusted very quickly, and take hours to get up to full production. Wind can be started/stopped quickly as demand rises and falls throughout the day

"Demand response may also be used to increase demand during periods of high supply and/or low demand. Some types of generating plant must be run at close to full capacity (such as nuclear), while other types may produce at negligible marginal cost (such as wind and solar)."[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_response

If the wind force is too much for the turbine/blades to handle I think that the blades are locked in place. Don't know if that's what you saw though.

If your base load (power that can't easily or efficiently be switched off; typically coal, nuclear and hydro) plus your renewable production exceed demand, then the best solution is normally to turn off some of the renewable.

It could be curtailment due to overcapacity or lack of transmission infrastructure to get the electricity to consumers [1]. I'm not quite sure why a more expensive source wouldn't be shut down instead, but maybe the unpredictability of wind power makes them the first to fall when demand is low?

1: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/why-arent-those...

The key thing is reliability and most Balancing Authorities will have procedures dictating which generation comes offline.

Perhaps turning off some turbines can provide a marginal increase in efficiency for the entire turbine farm?

It's cheap in the places that are windy. One big challenge (mentioned tangentially in the article) is in moving this cheap energy from the windy center of the continent to the populated coasts.

I wish this was higher priority, because the same X is already very cheap where it is Y is true of so many renewable sources like solar as well. And a wide power grid with long distance markets produces more consistent power since it averages different weather in different places and different power sources all together.

To make something that is cheap in X but not on Y cheap in both you must first overcome the entrenched special interests who make money from that thing being expensive in Y.

>To make something that is cheap in X but not on Y cheap in both you must first overcome the entrenched special interests who make money from that thing being expensive in Y.

Yes, it's a huge problem. States fight against buying cheaper power out of a state because they'd rather pay higher prices but keep the jobs and tax revenue in their own state. And on the other end, places that ended up with unusually cheap power (because the local market changes for example) sometimes oppose building out power lines that would enable the power to be sold nearby because it would end up increase local prices.

So many screwy incentives! Really need a power grid initiative.

cool ... superconducting ... yeah, har har, I get it.

Seriously though, is that really cost competitive compared with HVDC transmission which has losses of around 3%/1000 km?

Why cant we factor in the human life and geopolitical costs in to fossil fuel cost?

The only valid argument in the economist's mind to regulate a market is to remedy market failures. Fossil fuel addiction create externalities like smog, global warming, and war; but no consumer has to pay for those costs at the pump. Instead, they're shouldered by the taxpayer, future generations, and direct casualties. So we have a classic, textbook market failure here.

If we really add up the true cost of fossil fuels it makes wind look clearly better.

That’s clearly not what this article is about.

But on the subject that you’re talking about, it would be great if the US started phasing out fossil fuel subsidies.

The article headline is:

"Wind Energy Is One of the Cheapest Sources of Electricity, and It's Getting Cheaper"

But their measure of "cheapness" only takes into account direct payments. Once you account for externalities like people dying of lung diseases, global warming etc. the headline would be:

"Wind Energy has been the Cheapest Source of Electricity for a while now, and It's still Getting Cheaper"

Which is a different thing entirely. For example, an EU study from 2014 already found that onshore Wind was the cheapest available power source, coming in at less than half the price of coal, once you factor in health etc.

Once those well established facts are recognized, the whole conversation about "when will wind be cheaper" seems a bit irrelevant. When will the so-called free market stop killing us? would be one alternative headline.

The case for wind that the article argued for can be additionally bolstered by the what I just mentioned. I dont see why that's off topic?

And here's why it doesn't matter for most of the US: energy companies are regulated to make a percentage of the money they spend. This incentivizes them to SPEND MORE MONEY for energy so they can make more money. Until we fix that, most of us are screwed (at least the ones who can't get off or mostly off the grid).

Sources: My friend who runs an energy company and I also found it here: http://blog.aee.net/how-do-electric-utilities-make-money

"And here's why it doesn't matter for most of the US: energy companies are regulated to make a percentage of the money they spend."

This is also found in the ACA (Obamacare) in the form of a minimum medical loss ratio. Insurers must spend 80% of what they take in from premiums on direct medical care and their profit is capped at 3% of premiums. It disincentivizes cost reductions as 3% of $5 billion is a lot more than 3% of $1 billion.

Apology to bring up Taiwan again in the same thread.

Taiwan's national health insurance was once praised by Michael Porter and other Nobel prize laureates. It was marveled as the best invention to bring to the masses. Basically, Taiwan congress establishes a fixed budget for health care for next year. Then no matter how many patients or how expensive it runs next year, National Health Insurance Administration pays the hospital proportionally by assigning "points" to treatments.

For example, pulling one wisdom tooth is 10 points. 1 point is 1 dollar last year then 10 points earn the hospital 10 dollar last year. This year it may go down to 0.8 dollar per point then 10 points mean 8.8 dollar due to more patient visits/treatment higher cost nationally. All the while, the cost of treatment hasn't really changed.

Now when NHI started out, it was indeed 1 TWD per point. Now it has gone to 0.5 TWD per point. (Detail varies, this is the gist of it). Hospital jobs are not as good as it used to be nowadays.

What happens if the pay per point is too low to retain employees, and all the doctors move to the US?

What is to discourage a doctor from doing a 6 point procedure even though a 3 point procedure has a better or same outcome for the patient?

1. Out of top 200 hospitals in the world, Taiwan has 14 of them only behind US and Germany. It is nice considering our population is only 23 million. Clinical technologies and results has been excellent in facial reconstruction, live transplant, heart transplant, fertility preservation, joint replacement, to name a few. Talents has been serving global clients where more money can be earned. (Somewhat like our IT export) Interestingly though, instead of moving overseas, prospective doctors move into high earning fields where National Health Insurance does not cover, for example, cosmetic surgeries.

2. Yes, business nature is to pump the points up. However, there is required monthly and annual reports to NHI. NHI has complete authority to deduct the points and fine you if they think you are cheating the system. And here the best part, you can appeal to the very same NHI for another review. They usually stand by their original decision from what I have heard. (This sounds just like Apple and its App Store.)

That sounds pretty good.

I wonder what it would take to scale to America scale.

Indeed, it sounds like a perverse incentive to compete in an arms race of increasingly expensive procedures

In my home country, due to electricity being classified as daily necessities, the profit is being regulated almost the same way as the article you cited above.

    US Version:
    Total Revenue Requirement = Rate Base × Allowed Rate of Return (About 10%) + *Expenses*

    Taiwan Version:
    Total Revenue Requirement = Rate Base × Allowed Rate of Return (About 3%)

    , Rate Base is utility company's asset.

I believe there is a huge difference between above 2 formulas.

Thus, according to the GP article: US cost 2-4 cent/kWH, price 12 cent/kWH Yet, Taiwan cost 6 cent/kWH, price 9 cent/kWH

The difference between price and cost would be reasonable profit and expenses including tax/regulation fees, pollution fees, renewable energy research funds, equipment deprecation, interest, salaries, maintenance, etc.

In Taiwan, profit plays an insignificant part in electricity price.

The only problem is variability. I know that many places have fairly stable wind 99% if the time, but it's the absolute lowest you need to worry about.

If we are to rely on wind as a power source, we either have to only rely on its lowest output or else rely on its typical output, but have a second source that can be easily scaled up and down. The problem is that the good sources of energy that can scale up and down well and cheaply are coal and natural gas.

Nuclear, by contrast, works best when is outputting constant amounts of energy.

I think in many places, gas peakers are already available. In the long run, we're probably going to need to do something else, but who knows where storage tech is in twenty years?

In Denmark, home of the biggest wind power companies, this is a frequent topic of discussion among people interested in energy, but the answer is really that there are many options on the table, including expanding the grid. While many options are too expensive to see much use today, that will probably change over years.

New ideas are also coming up, e.g. this

http://www.salon.com/2017/08/09/alphabet-turns-to-molten-sal...

which might work except they should just store the heat in rocks instead of molten salt which is a PITA to work with. I know of at least two independent designs (both Danish) that store the heat in a huge repository of insulated rock/dirt and use a turbine to get electricity back out, at an efficiency about 40-45% IIRC. A prototype plant recently received funding. Not sure it has reached the international press yet. I don't think it has much future in Denmark, though, there's plenty of hydro in Scandinavia.

This is a fun energy storage project - http://www.aresnorthamerica.com/

If you really mean that "it's the absolute lowest you need to worry about.", then Nuclear plants working 99% of the time, but going off-line for maintenance must really worry you?

Seems like a huge disadvantage for nuclear?

Also the fact that nuclear works best when outputting constant amounts of energy doesn't really seem to be an advantage - https://www.euractiv.com/section/electricity/news/german-nuc... ?

These are good points, but I think you may be falling into the Nirvana Fallacy.

These problems will still exist for any power source (planned outages and following demand). Nuclear is no worse than wind power at these things, so why does it matter that it doesn't perfectly solve these issues as well?

When there's a planned outage, you can schedule other sources to scale up as needed. Following demand is hard no matter where the power comes from, but for wind it's even harder as you can control neither supply nor demand.

There's no ultimate, perfect solution. But I see Nuclear as a good option to be the major strength of our power systems.

It's advantage practically everywhere else except on a suddenly windy day in Germany.

https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=all-sources&mo...

Consumption naturally spikes, when you add the natural volatility of wind power, you have greatly increased need for quick adjustment. Germany is using practically everything else than wind and solar to adjust. They also sometimes have to sell power with negative price. As a result even nuclear gets pushed into a role it's poorly suited to.

Coal isn't really any better than nuclear, and can take days to ramp up. Natural gas makes up virtually all fossil peaker plants and most load-following plants.

Usually, gas is used to cover shortfall, yeah. Here are stats for the Irish national grid (see the monthly view): http://smartgriddashboard.eirgrid.com/#all/wind

There are periods of almost no production for a few days; this is handled by spinning up gas turbines, mostly. In the future, storage may be more viable; here's an interesting project: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/07/germa...

Hydro scales quickly and cheaply (run-time, not capex.)

Powerwall can level the load.

And making Powerwalls can turn out rather cheap: electric car batteries degrade towards low energy/weight ratio, but it hardly matters for a stationary installations. Two used li-ion car batteries - one happy household.

> electric car batteries degrade towards low energy/weight ratio

And even then- barely. The Panasonic NCR18650B has a weight of 3.94 kg/kWh at the beginning of its life, and a weight of 4.92 kg/kWh after it's considered "dead". The average US household uses 30 kWh/day, which would require 117 kg of new batteries (in practice the pack will weigh double that) or an extra 29 kg if you use old batteries with 300k miles on them. That's an immaterial difference for almost any purpose.

Used car batteries will be incredible. Salvaged Tesla modules are already starting to have impacts on hobbyists, but if used cells make it to market at even just a 25% discount it'll be incredibly awesome.

>The only problem is variability.

It's a way overemphasized problem with a multitude of solutions:

* Spot pricing and time shifting demand

* Scaling up/down large scale industrial demand (e.g. aluminum smelting) to accommodate

* Hydro storage

* Gas peakers

* Overproducing and developing markets for electricity that's "almost free" at certain times

It's not like variability is causing brownouts in countries that rely heavily upon wind either (e.g. Denmark/Germany).

Yeah, "no issue", they just produce half of their electricity from fossil fuels. (Denmark a bit less recently)

Your point about nuclear is interesting; do you know an approximate magnitude disadvantage of varying nuclear plant output?

Presumably it's a concern of cool-down thermal stresses, or perhaps flux tilting/uneven fuel burnout. Or is it something else entirely?

Xenon poisoning. Nuclear reactors are not meant to be throttled outside of a narrow operating band, and xenon poisoning can result from attempting to throttle down to very low power output configurations. Xenon poisoning takes ~7-9 hours to abate due to the half life of xenon-135.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon-135

Fuel rod oxidation? https://www.euractiv.com/section/electricity/news/german-nuc...

Some alternatives for quick scaling up and down:

- finding some big consumers (like aluminium smelters) that can scale down.

- batteries (both as scalable consumers and suppliers); widespread electric car usage might accidentally help her

> batteries (both as scalable consumers and suppliers); widespread electric car usage might accidentally help her

I've been in a some jurisdictions that have periods of low water supply where you can't water your lawn or garden on certain days, or sometimes based on whether your house has an odd or even number. Imagine the same applied to fueling up your car. Not enough wind and sun this week, sorry you'll have to stretch out the capacity you put into your car last week.

Obviously demand could be shaped with spot pricing, but it's interesting to imagine how rolling brownouts would affect mobility and transportation.

Rolling brownouts (or even/odd licence plate rules and the like) only encourage inefficient stockpiling. People buying the bigger battery option when purchasing an EV (which is dead weight when not needed), degrading their batteries faster than necessary by putting their Tesla on max range charge mode all the time, because what if, and so on.

I'd say spot prices for everyone or a reliable fixed rate model, everything in between will turn into a negative-sum game. Exceptions only where discrete consumers are so big that their paid shutdown can be individually supervised and verified (aluminium smelters, ice storage cooling for datacenters and the like). You clearly would not want those to simply switch over to a fixed rate outlet behind your back in times of scarcity, they need to be verifiably off.

Restrictions like these have been used on electricity for roughly as long as they have on water. They're slightly different in that with electricity it's often the peak usage that they care about rather than total usage, but some people are ordered or paid to reduce usage at certain times where this is considered cheaper/better than building a coal plant that's only used 1 day a year.

Due to the nature of modern electricity generation, electric car batteries will help the grid rather than harm it, as they can be (and are) set to use off-peak power to avoid increasing the peaks, while getting best usage of the grid at other times.

The big consumers do scale down at times. When the price of electricity is high enough they send all their workers home with pay. However this is hard for them to do: the workers don't like it (they worry they might be told to not come back next time). Management has contracts to deliver that they cannot back down on, and this is in conflict with "just in time management".

I'd be quite happy stepping off the grid and having my own small suite of power-harvestors, out on the property and so on, and generally share the overage of the system with any other nomad who needed to charge their suit, so to speak.

I've sort of come to the personal belief that the way to solve the power crisis is for us all to be harvesting it from the most local sources, and .. perhaps .. become less dependent on mass/social- infrastructure, reducing our group load, decomposing cities, &etc.

The technology is there. I could easily live off the stream and wind energy in most of the world, personally.

I just don't quite have the harvesting device. I wonder what an "iEnergyHarvester", y'know .. the cool new disruptive kind .. would look like?

I live in a very windy rural area and looked at getting a small wind turbine.

But after researching I gave up the plan. The reason is maintenance. Every year have to find a way to get up to the thing and grease (too high and not suitable for a ladder, means renting a manlift at $300+). Also parts can go out and apparently do from time to time, it's mechanical with a lot of stress and movement. Can't buy these parts at home depot which means keeping a large inventory on hand or else potentially being down while on-line order comes in. The estimated expense barely justified the purchase (over a long period, I don't recall details but had it figured out at one point), with estimated repairs, particularly the need to reach the top every year, it just didn't add up and seemed like a fair amount of work.

I believe solar is much more feasible for home installations. Also, I have seen wind turbine models similar to the size I was looking at, quite often they appear to not work and are just sitting there. Maybe there are better models, but I really think solar is just easier to deal with at a small scale.

> "I wonder what an "iEnergyHarvester", y'know .. the cool new disruptive kind .. would look like?"

What do you mean by this? Are you simply talking about solar panels/wind turbine/etc?

I'm talking about someone like Apple, revolutionizing the local/personal power harvesting technology, by applying to this problem a similar ethos to that of the iDevices.

Like, I'd love to have a portable harvester that has a similar degree of comfort and performance as I'm used to with my laptop and phone. I'm sure they're out there - but I'd prefer an Apple-style level of quality ..

How many kW are you wanting this "personal power harvesting" technology to handle? When I first read your comment I thought you were talking about handling the energy needs of a single family house or something large like that.

It's really exciting to see wind and solar becoming so cheap to generate. As the price of wind and solar drop further, grid-scale energy storage will become more and more attractive (and necessary). Investment dollars chasing the dream of buying this cheap-to-generate electricity and sell it back to the grid at prices competitive with fossil sources.

Could someone comment on solid state solutions to harnessing wind energy?

Are there any? I can't imagine how one would harvest kinetic energy without moving parts...

This is the closest thing I'm aware of, but I'm not educated in this field:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22930552-600-plastic-...

The "grass" generates electricity when it waves back and forth in the wind.

An electrical generator is 100% solid state up to the output wire (battery storage may not be). Not sure what your question is.

Except for the spinning parts you mean? Those bearings run out and need maintenance.

Ontopic: There are some preliminary design for electrostatic wind energy converters: see for example http://www.wired.co.uk/article/bladeless-wind-turbine-ewicon

I think "solid state" is being used as meaning "no moving parts".

There are plans to build a 6 km^2 island in the middle of the North Sea to act as a marshalling point for a whole new raft of wind turbines on the Doggerbank.

https://arstechnica.co.uk/science/2017/05/north-sea-wind-pow...

It would also be a routing point for powerlines out to the surrounding countries.

My question is which country's territory would it be?

A key question since this would bestow rights on the surrounding ocean. If this is planned to be a European territory then wouldn't that in itself be novel?

It would probably count as a boat/ship: some country like Panama (ie no geographical relation to the north sea) will register, and on board their laws will apply. It will account for no ownership of the sea around it other than a safety factor so boats don't collide.

There's so much misinformation about renewable energy. I was quite surprised by this.

So how does it compare to nuclear energy?

Wind vs nuclear, USA edition:

Wind advantages:

* Faster to build

* Electricity production can begin before entire project is finished

* Lower cost per MWh generated

* Much less expensive worst-case-scenario failure mode

* No cooling water required

Disadvantages:

* No guaranteed output without storage add-ons

* Much lower areal density of annual generation (e.g. "how much energy can you generate yearly on a 10 km^2 parcel of land?")

Other differences:

* A nuclear reactor may operate 40-60 years before replacement; a wind turbine is more like 20-25 years

* Over its full life cycle, a wind farm demands less human labor per MWh generated

I put nuclear's long life under "other" rather than "advantages" because the other side of "long life" is "long term commitment." I also put the lower labor demands of wind under "other" because many people (not me, but many) consider "providing good jobs" as more of a benefit than a burden when they evaluate power sources.

On balance, I think that wind has the advantage now and for at least the next decade or so. Nuclear could become more attractive again once there's a high penetration of intermittent renewables on the grid that make guaranteed-output sources relatively more valuable. The high areal density of nuclear power vs. wind is much more of a theoretical than a real advantage in a country like the USA, which has low population density by global standards and a lot of windy area. The more interesting contest will be between wind and PV; the latter has historically cost more nameplate watt, but its costs have been falling faster. PV also has lower day-to-day variability even though its annual capacity factor is typically lower.

Once you factor in the costs to decommission a nuclear facility, nuclear becomes one of the most expensive options.

While decommissioning is indeed expensive and as far as I'm aware still mostly based on estimates since there's little experience with the full process, I don't think this statement is correct.

What's really, really expensive is building the plant in such a manner that it is both secure and maintainable.

The problem with securing it is that a critical event is so damn expensive (cf. Fukushima) that you need to secure it against all imaginable problems - and as you can imagine, that list is growing over time. And still, you can't buy insurance for a plant. So the government carries the bulk of the risk.

> you need to secure it against all imaginable problems

It's not that hard if you avoid greedy power plant owners. TEPCO was repeatedly warned many years ago that they had to build a barrier against tsunamis, and all other plants of the area followed the advice.

True, but nuclear energy has two important benefits. It has a stable output (so you don't have to invest in energy storage) and it takes up much less space (so it doesn't visually disrupt the landscape as much).

Demand is not stable so you still need energy storage or something else to fill the peaks. The only alternative is not running the plant at full capacity, which will make it even more expensive.

Less space: that's true. But you still need a fair bit of space to the nearest city. :)

Unless the 1/1000 failure event happens and all the land for miles around is rendered uninhabitable and unfarmable.

When you say that, does it take into account nuclear where we reuse fuel?

Fuel sourcing and disposal is a small part of the cost.

Edit: a projected cost breakdown for Hinkley Point C! https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Hinkley-Po... (figure 2)

So fuel is not inconsiderable; 6.2bn "fuel costs", 1.8 "fuel management", 2.6 "fuel disposal". From a total of £54.8 bn.

Add 10-50% to actual construction and decommissioning costs for overruns.

And yet still there are so many people that believe that nuclear is the only pragmatic path to a green energy future.

Traditional nuclear plants are simply too expensive to build.

They are not competitive, and haven't been for decades if I'm not mistaken.

It's not impossible that a new design could be cheaper, but figuring in both development, test, and time for industrialization, we're probably at least 20 years from that. Meanwhile, both PV and wind are falling in price from industrialization.

They are very very cheap, the regulations make up the bulk of their costs. Most regulations are important but the costly ones are not and it takes 10+ years to get approvals due to beuracratic hold ups. Even smoothening those out and keeping exact same safety standards would cut prices and time significantly

That said I am very pro Wind. The American Midwest is a goldmine for that and I'm very excited to see it increase over the next five but I hope they keep the tax credit, wind growth will significantly fall without it

Not true. Nuclear is fantastically expensive in every country regardless of regulations or NIMBYism. Regulatory expense is a minority problem that exacerbates the core issues.

The big problems are mostly competency. A nuclear plant requires huge parts from tons of companies all over the planet. People are always messing it up. The biggest issue is that this huge coordination problem makes everything take way longer, which means almost everyone involved with the plant is sitting around getting paid to do nothing. That's incredibly expensive when the project stretches over a decade.

Since Hinkley Point C is forecasted to cost ~£50bn, I don't think that regulation really makes up the bulk of that. Most of that will be for safety measures to ensure that it can run safely. The result is a power plant that produces energy above prices of both renewables and gas.

Aside from stuff others mentioned, there's a social/political component differing them. Nuclear energy has always been pushed by politicians. Harvesting the mighty atom is a prestige project and not something a business that wants simple tech that's quick to market. Wind energy in comparison is ancient, well-understood and something every person can harvest. Same with solar, generate your own, very anarchic.

I wonder how many turbines we'd need to be able to run them inreverse and affect the weather.

Edit: I know we're no where close to doing this but how far is it. Are we 1% of the way there?

Even a small fan slightly changes the weather. But let's say you want a 5MPH light breeze across the US. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaufort_scale

The atmosphere is really heavy. 14.696 pounds per square inch, but you don't need to alter it all call it the bottom 10 pounds * (5280mile/foot * 12foot / inch)^2 * 3.797 million square miles across the US. = 1.5 ^ 17 pounds.

That is 1.25 x 10 ^ 17 joules. Let's say your doing this over 1 hour that's 35,000 GW vs 82 GW of actual wind power generation.

Of course a 50MPH wind (strong gale) needs 100 times as much power and drag is going prevent this from being even close to 100% efficient.

PS: I suspect I am really messing up the units here.

This assumes the wind is flowing over a frictionless surface with no protrusions. In reality trees, mountains etc cause drag below, and other atmosphere causes drag above. Drag is proportional to the cube of speed, so I really don't think a wind turbine will be able to affect wind speed much. Well, not more than reforestation would, and wind turbines don't even cause local temperature or humidity differences like a forest would.

Turbines actively extract energy which may give them larger impact than say a building of the same size.

Anyway, as I said drag is going to be an issue. But, I think a larger issue air is never calm. So it's going to be hard to notice at low speeds because winds are often much stronger than that and going in random directions.

Still, IMO that's on the order of magnitude you would need to do things like shift a hurricane's path slightly.

This sounds like an excellent xkcd what-if

https://xkcd.com/1378/

Wind wars?

If only it weren't so variable. Averaging over a large area won't help. 4 to 1 daily variation in total wind generation for big grids (CAISO and PJM) is normal.

We're going to need huge battery farms. Huge. Tesla is building the largest battery farm in the world, in Australia, and it will only hold about 100 MWH. The Helms Pumped Storage Plant near Fresno is at least an order of magnitude bigger.

Once battery prices are low enough the result is probably not huge battery farms but batteries at every wind turbine. That way you can create a fairly constant output. With batteries at homes you can also levelize input demand so that the effect is steered from both sides.

We could also build four times as many turbines, and/or supplement with solar.

And is beautiful too. There are few things to see which feels high-tech and clean as a lot of windmills on a distance.

It is cheap because it is a poor power source, the energy is delivered at inopportune times. C&I doesn't want to sign PPAs with them, which is why they have to discount heavily to get them. This article then takes that fact and pretends it means wind can undercut gas? Gas, especially gas peakers command the highest prices per MW because they run at the times when we need energy the most. That then covers the cost of having them idle for the rest of the year.

Wind has low operating costs but the maintenance and depreciation are huge, so looking at it from an operating cost perspective completely undermines this.

The simple litmus test we should use is that there are no profitable wind companies. It's not very hard to run one - so if this article is accurate, where the hell are they?

There is a lot of ignorance in this post. But just to counter your litmus test, here's the first obvious example I can think of:

https://www.edpannualreport.edp.pt/en/key-numbers

with over 70% of renewable energy generation, the equivalent of a couple small nuclear plants in wind capacity (10GW) ... they are making hundreds of millions (sometimes billions) in profit. They are one of the largest wind turbine operators in the world and know how to evaluate an energy project. The key number is $/kWh over the whole lifetime of the project (including CAPEX, OPEX, financing, decommissioning, etc). This is called LCOE or levelized cost of energy. Over the lifetime of the machine, they make a lot of money.

For your information, other companies investing heavily (and profitably) in operating wind turbines are Iberdrola, Enel GreenPower, Dong Energy, etc (all billion $ operations)

...there are no profitable wind companies

I'm not sure where you got your information from, but there are plenty of profitable wind companies. Since a lot of them are publicly listed companies, they have an obligation to invest shareholder money responsibly to generate a profit. Additionally, many diversify their risk by being 'renewable energy' companies (e.g. solar, hydro, etc.)

These companies wouldn't be building wind turbines or operating wind farms if it wasn't profitable.

Example: Meridian Energy, 866 employees, NZD$2.37 billion revenue, $NZD185 million profit. Generates ~35% of electricity in New Zealand, with operations in Australia as well (3 wind farms)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Australia#Major_...

http://www.investopedia.com/investing/wind-stocks/

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=30112

If you can't get a loan to build wind farms, why was new 7.7 GW of capacity added in 2016? Also, Alstom, Invenergy? I know you are trolling but come on.

Where did I say anything about loans?

You do realize renewable energy is subsidized by RECs, who wouldn't want to add capacity when the government will pay the shortfall! They aren't profitable on their own, and barely turn a profit when you look at the full life cycle of these businesses due to the maintenance/depreciation costs which are hidden when you look at pure operating profit.

Invenergy has huge natural gas generation and seems to want to sell every wind farm they build. I don't know why you think they're an example of a profitable wind farm operator, there isn't any evidence that they make money off it. Alstom makes nothing off it's wind either.

C&I? PPAs are effectively the collateral for project finance in these cases so you can't build one of these things unless you have a PPA in place (unless you are vertically integrated or running a pilot). A solid percentage of new wind is being built in states without RECs (also the government doesn't pay RECs, ratepayers do). The PTC is being phased out but it is gravy at this point. Wind is profitable without subsidies in a lot of places (and the government subsidizes nuclear [insurer of last resort] and coal [socializing negative externalities]).

Regarding margin, coal and nuclear also barely make money. Natural gas steam barely makes money. CT peakers make high margins when operational but they are barely operational. None of this is surprising. Electricity is a commodity business (for IPPs at least), you sort of expect razor thin margins.

> The simple litmus test we should use is that there are no profitable wind companies. It's not very hard to run one - so if this article is accurate, where the hell are they?

"Vestas Rises to 9-Year High as Quarterly Profit Quadruples" (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-05/vestas-qu...)

They sell turbines, they don't run wind farms. Selling the equipment is very profitable because every purchase is hugely subsidized by the government.

Their profit is tied to the volume of wind farms deployed, not the profit generated per MW of wind.

Ah, great argument: as soon as examples are provided, just move the goalposts, or start talking about subsidies.

In a gold rush, sell shovels

I actually love that it's cheap, for the reasons you state. If nothing else this just encourages the market to look at storage more seriously, if there is money being left on the table that could be redirected to storage this might be a good means of replacing gas down the road.

>Wind has low operating costs but the maintenance and depreciation are huge, so looking at it from an operating cost perspective completely undermines this.

Sorry, what type of analysis do you have that refutes what everybody else is saying?

Take for example Lazard's analysis from last year:

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

Not sure why the maintenance or depreciation would refute the cheapness of wind.

These analysis are not comparing apples for apples. Renewables don't supply base load and hence they sell energy when people don't need it, which is why they are achieving lower prices.

Maintenance and depreciation are much larger costs because the asset is the business for wind farms. Who cares how much operating profit you make, if your depreciation is higher than it?

To understand depreciation, consider a guy driving Uber making $30/hr in an $80k merc. He might be making good operating profit, but when you consider he has to replace the car in 5-10 years, spending another $80k, is it really that good?

Are you claiming that profits don't cover depreciation? Because that directly contradicts the LCoE analysis from Lazard.

The LCoE, takes that into account. Dispatchability has no relevance to the profits/depreciation game.

Based on these comments I have to agree with another commenter that you're just trolling.

You make no sense with your statement about depreciation. Depreciation is expense which lowers profit. It's the accounting mechanism we use to spread one-time capital cash outlays over the service life of an asset so as to more realistically calculate profit and loss on an ongoing basis.

"Baseload" power is an outdated concept, a relic from a model of generation and distribution that is rapidly disappearing. Here's what the chief economist of the American Petroleum Institute says about it:

"Baseload is kind of a historical term. It’s not really relevant to how electricity is produced today…What you need is dispatchability… and [coal and nuclear] are far slower when you compare them to a lot of the technology natural gas plants have."

> It is cheap because it is a poor power source

This makes no sense. How good a power source something is has nothing to do with how cheap it is to produce. Otherwise horses running in circles around poles would be a dirt cheap power source and oil/solar (depending if you rank by convenience or environment) would be insanely expensive.

Imagine you run an aluminium plant (where you can't have the plant lose power or the metal solidifies and costs you millions).

Would you rather be powered by coal or wind?

I should also point out that power prices vary wildly depending on where and when the energy is delivered, the time of day is hugely important.

Electricity isn't stored - it must be consumed as soon as it is created. If you are delivering it at times when nobody uses it, then the only people who can pay you will give you much lower prices. Do you see how little relevance these lower prices are? It doesn't mean that coal is much more expensive, it just means coal commands a higher price because it sells when it has no competition.

I think the variability of a lot of renewables is why grid-scale energy storage projects are taking off (e.g. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/tesla-south-...).

With a decent quantity of storage and good interconnects to shift power from areas of high generation to other areas, it seems possible to balance out some of the issues you're referring to.

re aluminum plant: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/german-firm-tur...

You're right, it is completely illogical. But so are the rest of the claims.

Just as there are many people that are stalwart anti nuclear, and will say anything to fight against it without regards to honest analysis, there are a ton of anti-wind energy people.

> Wind has low operating costs but the maintenance and depreciation are huge, so looking at it from an operating cost perspective completely undermines this.

Source? I would expect inshore windmills to have very low maintenance costs.

http://www.windmeasurementinternational.com/wind-turbines/om...

quotes maintenance figures between 3% and 1.5% of the initial construction cost.

Thanks; reading the source, the 3% figure is for old technology turbines, while 1.5%/2% is for newer ones. Doesn't look like so high to me.

I think the article is about price of producing electricity rather than the price on market... We've gone from the "Renewables are theoretically good but too expensive" to "Renewables are too cheap" stage surprisingly fast. The growing influx of intermittent renewable energy means either you adapt and use the cheap electricity for you benefit. Or pay a higher price for more expensive electricity sources if you can't be flexible.

A lot of power dependent things are going to start being priced like AWS spot instances.

> no profitable wind companies

https://www.vestas.com/~/media/vestas/investor/investor%20pd...

I'm a happy Vestas shareholder :)

Also see Dong Energy. European wind companies are doing pretty well at the moment.

Yet people hate it from the bottom of their heart, it seems.

A friend of mine works for a company that builds these things in Germany and he says most people hate it.

And even those who like it say, they can't allow them to build on their property, because their neighbours would hate them for it.

People say these things are loud, ugly, kill birds and bats etc. pp.

They could have done so much to decentralise energy production, somehow the most are built and owned by big energy corps so they can tell the world how "green" they are...

Having lived in viewing distance of two nuclear power plants in germany, I can tell you I vastly prefer wind turbines. Coal power plants are not exactly beautiful either. Germany is a densely populated country, there's practically no space where you can build anything without disturbing someone. I'm afraid we'll have to disturb someone if we want electricity.

Yes, same here.

I lived in viewing distance to AKW Biblis, the sun basically set behind it in the evening, kinda surreal picture, haha.

I also regularly go on vacation on a farm that has multiple wind turbines in viewing and hearing distance, find them kinda soothing.

The Rhine valley is crazy with nuclear plants. A few kilometers upstream from Biblis is Philippsburg and then there's Fessenheim on the French side and Leibstadt in Switzerland. That makes 4 nuclear plants on 350km of Europes largest river valley.

That's one of the advantages of off shore turbines, no disturbing.

They suck! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQksc1-5Zoc - No one I know would enjoy living in this conditions.

So why aren't prices going down? On the contrary, if you subscribe to use something like Arcadia Power, you'd actually pay a bit more than regular electric bill.

Line a bunch of these bad boys along the south esst coast. Slow down those hurricanes..

Can anyone offer any advice for software engineers/product managers with a web app background, interested in moving into the renewables world? Open either to using existing experience or learning something new.

I work in that industry and have previously worked as TSO as well. There is a lot of software used for monitoring/data collection & analysis/work management/etc. that the TSOs and BAs rely on daily. The biggest issue I see with that industry though is that it is dominated by Siemens/ABB/OSI (on the SCADA/ICS/EMS side) and OSIsoft PI (database). There are some software applications that the RC will use (iTOA/Space-Time Insight/COS/EIM/ect.) that could easily be improved and don't have as much market dominance as Siemens/ABB/OSI. Also, mobile application for utilities is pretty much non-existent. Hope this helps.

Many thanks. Looks like one of the first jobs is figuring out the acronyms :) Any suggestions on where/how to go about learning the industry, and where the opportunities might be? e.g. Blogs, courses, forums, etc.

No way https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

Wind and solar costs have fallen significantly over the past decade. They are already cheaper than the most optimistic scenarios for 2020. This creates the problem that many statistics are out of date and projects that were too expensive in 2016 can be built profitably now.

I wouldn't trust Wikipedia's numbers too much for projects that are commissioned now (and therefore built in 2019/2020).

Germany reached 35% wind/sun/bio energy this year.

What about all the oil it takes to produce the turbines?

They need to figure out how to keep these things away from people's homes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQksc1-5Zoc

Imagine living in this constant flicker, I would go insane.

Most of those effects are from earlier turbines. For new wind parks, shadows are modelled to ensure that no residential buildings are in the shadow. Often no problem if they're close to farmland, there's usually only one inhabited building in a larger radius.

I completely agree with you.

(It's worth nothing that fracking and coal mining are even worse.)

Yeah, my current apartment is in the path of a small urban one for a little while in the spring and fall when the sun is in the right place. It is surprisingly annoying, but tolerable for me since it is just a short time of day for a short part of the year (and I don't get seizures, important since it seems to flash at seizure-triggering speeds). The big ones look like they are slow enough to avoid triggering seizures but would otherwise be worse, lasting longer each day and for more of the year and would be just as annoying. I never considered this side effect until it happened to me.

If by "constant" you mean "for a short period of time in the morning/evening". A tree waving in the breeze creates the same effect, and people seem to live with that.

A tree in the wind is random, a turbine is not.

edit: I love wind noise, it doesn't mean I also love car alarms because they are also noise.

That sucks. I wonder for how many weeks a year the angle of the sun is such that the shadow hits that house.

And yet we have a president promising to bring back coal. If only our population could elect leaders who will keep up with the outstanding technology the US scientific community (really the global scientific community) produces.

EDIT: It would be nice if folks down voting could leave a comment so I could learn what the objection is. I saw no mention in other comments about this specific challenge that America faces in terms of growing renewable energy installations.

We started with the topic of the price of wind energy, and now we're into generic political controversy with no steps in-between. Do you see how that takes us from a concrete discussion into tedious flamewar territory?

The guidelines ask us not to do that, and also not to complain about voting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I wasn't complaining about the voting. I'm fine with getting my comments downvoted as long as I can learn why. Without an explanation it might take me a lot time to guess what I did wrong and to improve. Isn't it better for the entire community if I improve my comments quickly?

> Do you see how that takes us from a concrete discussion into tedious flamewar territory?

If current US politics weren't relevant to the future of renewable energy, then sure. I thought it was a relevant concern. What I wrote isn't a political opinion, it's a fact. I have read the guidelines and I do try to be careful about posting stuff that's purely a political opinion.

Thanks for your comment, it was helpful even if I don't agree 100%. At least I now know which of the guidelines you think I was not following.

There's a lot of metallurgical coal necessary for the construction of certain high-grade steels, such as those you'd find in wind turbines.

Similarly, try and make a PV solar cell without coal in the value chain. You can't (I can).

Arguably, some coal jobs are green jobs.

The thermal coal industry, long on the ropes, and not at all green, has not been recovering.

Steel does not require coke (which can also be made from things other than coal): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_reduced_iron

Steel is <2% of US coal consumption, too. It's basically irrelevant to coal as a pollution or economic issue.

Any resource that uses coal can be replaced by a renewable source. Coal is just a carbon source, and carbon is one of the most accessible elements. Producing very pure carbon from biomaterials produces energy and is very similar to the production of coke from coal. It's very economical and the only reason it isn't used is because coal is so insanely cheap.

> There's a lot of metallurgical coal necessary for the construction of certain high-grade steels, such as those you'd find in wind turbines.

Sure. Though I don't see how that should preclude getting rid of coal for power and heat generation?

> Similarly, try and make a PV solar cell without coal in the value chain. You can't (I can).

What do you mean by "(I can)"?

Patent-pending technology. Email me for details.

I downvote every comment that complains about being downvoted, for what it's worth. Let the chips fall where they may, the place to discuss why something is or isn't downvoted is somewhere else, never in the replies to a comment that's purportedly about something substantial.

Downvote away. I'm more interested in learning than I am in internet points. And thank you for your comment explaining your downvote.

How close are we to mass deployment of rooftop turbines? Seems like the installation could be way cheaper than solar.

As jabl says, it is a question of the surface area of the blades.

Another consideration is the noise that they make. I am from rural Michigan initially, and the main push back from the residents (aside from seeing them) is hearing the constant / woosh woosh woosh / noise that you can hear if you live close enough. That said again that noise would be proportional to the area of the blades themselves.

I presume they become part of the background noise as these people have no complaints about the huge trucks that air break down the 2 lane highway connecting these areas to civilization and I notice it when I am back in the area.

> As jabl says, it is a question of the surface area of the blades.

Not just the surface area, but also altitude from ground.

Unlike solar panels, wind turbines really want to be big. The cost/watt goes down rapidly as the size of the unit increases -- the reason for the cost of wind electricity being driven as low as it is is basically that the turbines have been made larger.

Plus you'd need a way to clean up the dead birds. I know my mother loves all her birds that come to her bird feeders (she names them!), she'd never install a wind turbine around her house.

Turbines are about as dangerous as windows. Although you can alleviate that with stickers. https://abcbirds.org/program/glass-collisions/

Very far? In wind turbines, bigger is better, as bigger turbines are mounted on higher towers and thus get stronger and more consistent winds.

Micro wind turbines were a hot topic for a while before solar started getting a lot cheaper. In general, the ROI was always mostly suspect (except where you needed off-grid power). They're still sold but you don't hear much about them.

As others have said, it's not great for placement and small blades are not really what you want for wind power.

we at energy&meteo systems https://www.energymeteo.com/about_us/company.php provide means for overcoming the fluctuation problem of renewable energy while offering some cool software services. Two main methods for achieving that are the virtual power plants and would class forecast of the productivity of wind and solar power plants. We're based in Germany but have customers all over the world including the US. Find out more on our website or contact us.

The current method to harness wind energy is primitive and leads to visual pollution of the landscape. We're swimming in a vast ocean of endless energy, and, yet, we use very primitive mechanical means to harness it!

OK... What is a better mechanism? that'll look better to you?

Let's say, thorium reactors.

I'm not sure I understand how Thorium reactors capture wind energy...

I think they buried the lede: wind is so cheap because of tax credits. Once those are taken out, it's simply competitive with the LNG power generation, and about 2/3 of coal.

Turbines require a ton of high risk maintenance, and have limited lifespans due to the stresses they are put through.

Still very good, but not as good as the headline and the first half of the article claims.

Wind needs some subsidies so it can compete with the huge subsidies for carbon based fuels.

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=42940.0

Fossil fuels in the US also receive government subsidies, at least indirectly, don't they? If you take out wind's tax credits, shouldn't you also account for those as well?

Does no one care that thousands of birds get shredded every year regardless of endangered status?

Go look at this chart:

http://www.sibleyguides.com/conservation/causes-of-bird-mort...

Come back and tell me about how people bringing up bird strikes is relation to wind power are being intellectually honest and not pushing an agenda of some kind.

That chart is based on data from 2003!

Recently, for one Scottish installation, government reports indicated "that more than 1,000 gannets would perish in the turbines each week, along with a similar number of puffins and hundreds of kittiwakes [1]."

Many birders and environmentalists are very concerned about this issue [2]. The video footage of a bird attracted to a turbine's blades is fascinating.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/may/20/scotland-bir...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMfyJmSuOGM

Here's updated data:

http://www.ace-eco.org/vol8/iss2/art11/

Wind power kills far fewer birds than a wide range of human activities, including other forms of power generation even when compared per GWhr.

No, they don't; this is only ever brought up in the context of wind, and not any of the other risks to birds: https://abcbirds.org/program/glass-collisions/

I do think people care. But you should realize that in comparision with the hundreds of millions (!) of shredded birds because of cars/pesticides/powerlines/... this is peanuts.

Maybe if it was millions, but thousands of birds is a rounding error.

Illustration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-AYhMoLorI

No.

Sure, instead of destroying climate indirectly by heating atmosphere, let's destroy it directly by blocking wind paths.

Last time it happened, it created the largest desert in the world - just look at the effect Himalayas had on Sahara.

Seems ok to me. If anything we ought to be removing some of the energy we're so enthusiastically adding to the atmosphere.

If you mean temperature, then wind turbines actually increase temperature (friction, inefficiencies...) of locale climate. Solar panels cool the Earth, not turbines.

Wind is a byproduct of solar power. Why not derive energy from the primary source (solar) instead of going for secondary (wind).

Edit: really curious about downvotes. There is nothing in the above that's controversial. I've also provided data below: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/044.... "Specifically, we discovered that operational wind turbines raised air temperature by 0.18 °C"

The Sahara is in Africa and the Himalayas are in Asia. So not much effect I presume. You probably mean the Gobi desert.

Yes, I meant the climate formations moving from the north pole, and Himalayas affecting the amount of precipitation reaching North Africa. Can't find that larticular animation at the moment though.

Do you think solar panels also change climate by taking the sunlight away from the otherwise heated earth?

Nothing is going to grow underneath the solar panels. At least with solar panels you can selectivaly decide where nothing should grow. With roofs it's already an easy decision. With wind paths - not so much.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com