Now that we've explored the meaning of a watt, we can hopefully understand the feasibility of wind power generation on a more global level. Does it even make environment and economic sense to rally for more wind turbines around the world? Is this just a lofty dream to have a good chunk of our energy come from clean sources, or is there enough wind to even do this? In theory, becoming more dependent on wind seems like a good idea, but with the US only using about 3% of it's power from this source, you have to wonder, what's the hold-up and is there a reason for the hold-up?
U.S. Energy Information Administration
First off, let's look at the numbers. According to a recent study, our planet requires about 18 terawatts (or 18 trillion watts) of power to run, and it was determined that yes, our atmosphere provides well over that amount of power in wind before hitting a saturation point (the point at which adding more turbines would actually decrease energy output). Unfortunately that would take many more millions of turbines ( Currently, there are only around 200,000 turbines worldwide today), new infrastructure, and entirely new energy policies to make this work. So you have to ask, if the potential's there, is this still even remotely realistic?
Scientific America: The Sky is the Limit for Wind Power
Global Wind Day
To me, it sounds a bit crazy, but maybe we don't use wind for the majority of power, just a good-sized chunk? Now, countries like Denmark and Germany are already way ahead of the game on this one, so let's look closer to home. Let's see if there's any reason we (the US) can't raise that 3% to something more significant. Recently, (well if you call 2008 recent) a report was prepared by the U.S. Department of Energy (with contributors from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the American Wind Energy Association, and a handful of others from the energy sector, etc. etc.) outlining a possibly more tangible wind scenario for the US, the idea of 20% Wind Energy by 2030. There, of course, are some major hiccups to overcome along the way, such as, installing about another 100,000 turbines, but in the end, outlook seems positive. Ok, that's good news, but, for now I'm interested in what those pitfalls are that are leaving the majority of our country so blasé about wind at the moment. Besides the simple fact that we have far too few turbines installed to reach this 20% goal, here are a few other constraints holding us back:
Turbine size
Over the past 30 years, turbines have done a fair amount of growing up. Starting at about 15m in diameter producing about 50kW back in the 80s, technology has enabled spans over 150m diameter at a rates around 6MW of power (Siemens B75). (Most commercial inland turbines, though, are more like to 60-80m diameter generating between 1.5-2Mw). A point is reached, though, where bade size vs. tower height vs. blade weight peaks at efficiency. Though there are dreams to make even more megafied mills, some serious engineering will have to be mastered to upscale these puppies any larger without compromising efficiency.
Tower Height
The higher you go, the more wind there is to capture, right? And lucky for us, with a 10% increase in windspeed, you get a 33% increase in available power. Unfortunately, towers have only reached about 80-100m in height due to some basic setbacks such as: cost of materials, weight and strength of steel, and physical limitations on transport. In addition, with taller structures (including more massive turbine and rotor components) the tower will need to be a bit beefier to alleviate buckling. Carbon fiber towers are in the works to replace it's clunky competitor, steel. But if this is the next solution, it will surely won't be a cheap one.
Transport
This goes hand-in-hand with developing larger components. Sure, you can design this stuff as large as you like, but how are you going to get it to the site? Trailer capacity/length and highway limits restrict sizes of turbine parts to be no larger than about 4.1m high x 2.6m wide and under 80,000 lbs. Transport by railroad is less of an issue in terms of weight, but component dimensions must also be able to clear tunnels and underpasses. If sizes exceed these limits, expensive rerouting must be done in order to avoid such barriers. Perhaps this will actually lead to more onsite manufacturing?
Construction
So you got your oversized pieces to the site, now how are you going to erect this without the proper crane? Cranes able to lift such oversized items to greater heights are expensive and hard to come by.
Manufacturing
The US just isn't up to speed in component manufacturing that is required to make this venture super affordable and accessible. In North America alone, there are only a handful of companies with the rest being over the pond in Europe or Asia. And with the dollar not as strong these days, having to buy from overseas doesn't really help the pocketbook. See here for a list of worldwide manufacturer
O&M
It's said that this year, 2012, $50 billion worth of wind projects will be out of warranty putting the burden, now, on owners to maintain their machines. This is a huge chuck of the overall investment of owning a wind farm, but the DOE's 20% by 2030 report states that O&M costs are actually on the decline. With higher tech machinery and more knowledge available for maintenance crews, we can hope to see these numbers drop more and more over the years to come. For now, though, to any new investor to wind, may see these costs as the deal breaker.
Noise and Wildlife
Ok, I'm going to be a bit biased and wave these off a bit. Yes, they are issues to consider, and don't get me wrong, I'm all for saving the animals, but I don't see how these could be driving factors on the possible hope for a cleaner environment in the future. I mean, you can't tell me that power plants all over the world aren't already causing some kind of imbalance in the environment, possibly killing more than a few 100 birds each year. Perhaps one day technology with have quieter rotors to keep farm owners and neighbors from going batty and some sort of sonar warning devices to keep birds away? Who knows. Call me heartless, but I kinda see these as non issues in the overall scheme of the scheme.
Transmission
And here's the kicker. You can generate all the power you want, but then what? Where does it go if there's no way to transport it? The DOE has determined transmission as the greatest obstacle for achieving the 2030 goal. With our current, outdated grid in place, these new proposed loads have no way of getting to where they need to go. A conceptual network to handle the planned capacity of wind has been studied and diagramed, but who knows how easily this can come about.
Subsidies
If we do reach this goal of 20% wind within the next 20 years, how will we know that we will be able to maintain this sort of production? Those less optimistic argue that the cost and maintenance that goes into running a wind farm actually outweighs the benefits, and once the subsidies run dry to take care of these costs, they're out of business. The turbines stand still. I read this crazy article, Tens of Thousands of Abandoned wind turbines now little American Landscape, that I can't quite believe to be entirely true (some sources deny this, others simply spread the craziness), but it gets you thinking. If there's no government money (aka, taxes from ya'll) or simply not enough to support the initiative, is it already prone to failure? All the above setbacks are one side of the coin, but if there's no money to begin with, then no deal. Back to using the cheapest dirtiest resources possible to fuel our nation.
All things said (and trust me, with all the info and controversy out there, this is barely scratching the surface), I'm a bit on the fence on all of this. Can all these things be achieved? Of course they can, but I don't see this happening without a ton of hair pulling and name calling along the way. There are a ton of things to make this 20% by 2030 work from many different parties, some of which still may not see the entire benefit of wind and the investment into it. BUT, to leave you all with a more feel-good vibe, check out the DOE's Wind Energy Report Card to how the future is looking in their eyes despite all the drawbacks. Sounds good to me. Let's just leave it at that.
Sources:
U.S. Energy Information Administration
First off, let's look at the numbers. According to a recent study, our planet requires about 18 terawatts (or 18 trillion watts) of power to run, and it was determined that yes, our atmosphere provides well over that amount of power in wind before hitting a saturation point (the point at which adding more turbines would actually decrease energy output). Unfortunately that would take many more millions of turbines ( Currently, there are only around 200,000 turbines worldwide today), new infrastructure, and entirely new energy policies to make this work. So you have to ask, if the potential's there, is this still even remotely realistic?
Scientific America: The Sky is the Limit for Wind Power
Global Wind Day
To me, it sounds a bit crazy, but maybe we don't use wind for the majority of power, just a good-sized chunk? Now, countries like Denmark and Germany are already way ahead of the game on this one, so let's look closer to home. Let's see if there's any reason we (the US) can't raise that 3% to something more significant. Recently, (well if you call 2008 recent) a report was prepared by the U.S. Department of Energy (with contributors from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the American Wind Energy Association, and a handful of others from the energy sector, etc. etc.) outlining a possibly more tangible wind scenario for the US, the idea of 20% Wind Energy by 2030. There, of course, are some major hiccups to overcome along the way, such as, installing about another 100,000 turbines, but in the end, outlook seems positive. Ok, that's good news, but, for now I'm interested in what those pitfalls are that are leaving the majority of our country so blasé about wind at the moment. Besides the simple fact that we have far too few turbines installed to reach this 20% goal, here are a few other constraints holding us back:
 |
| The US needs a lot more turbines to produce enough power to reach the 20% goal. If each turbine here represents 100 turbines, this is how many we're short. |
Over the past 30 years, turbines have done a fair amount of growing up. Starting at about 15m in diameter producing about 50kW back in the 80s, technology has enabled spans over 150m diameter at a rates around 6MW of power (Siemens B75). (Most commercial inland turbines, though, are more like to 60-80m diameter generating between 1.5-2Mw). A point is reached, though, where bade size vs. tower height vs. blade weight peaks at efficiency. Though there are dreams to make even more megafied mills, some serious engineering will have to be mastered to upscale these puppies any larger without compromising efficiency.
Tower Height
The higher you go, the more wind there is to capture, right? And lucky for us, with a 10% increase in windspeed, you get a 33% increase in available power. Unfortunately, towers have only reached about 80-100m in height due to some basic setbacks such as: cost of materials, weight and strength of steel, and physical limitations on transport. In addition, with taller structures (including more massive turbine and rotor components) the tower will need to be a bit beefier to alleviate buckling. Carbon fiber towers are in the works to replace it's clunky competitor, steel. But if this is the next solution, it will surely won't be a cheap one.
Transport
This goes hand-in-hand with developing larger components. Sure, you can design this stuff as large as you like, but how are you going to get it to the site? Trailer capacity/length and highway limits restrict sizes of turbine parts to be no larger than about 4.1m high x 2.6m wide and under 80,000 lbs. Transport by railroad is less of an issue in terms of weight, but component dimensions must also be able to clear tunnels and underpasses. If sizes exceed these limits, expensive rerouting must be done in order to avoid such barriers. Perhaps this will actually lead to more onsite manufacturing?
Construction
So you got your oversized pieces to the site, now how are you going to erect this without the proper crane? Cranes able to lift such oversized items to greater heights are expensive and hard to come by.
Manufacturing
The US just isn't up to speed in component manufacturing that is required to make this venture super affordable and accessible. In North America alone, there are only a handful of companies with the rest being over the pond in Europe or Asia. And with the dollar not as strong these days, having to buy from overseas doesn't really help the pocketbook. See here for a list of worldwide manufacturer
O&M
It's said that this year, 2012, $50 billion worth of wind projects will be out of warranty putting the burden, now, on owners to maintain their machines. This is a huge chuck of the overall investment of owning a wind farm, but the DOE's 20% by 2030 report states that O&M costs are actually on the decline. With higher tech machinery and more knowledge available for maintenance crews, we can hope to see these numbers drop more and more over the years to come. For now, though, to any new investor to wind, may see these costs as the deal breaker.
Noise and Wildlife
Ok, I'm going to be a bit biased and wave these off a bit. Yes, they are issues to consider, and don't get me wrong, I'm all for saving the animals, but I don't see how these could be driving factors on the possible hope for a cleaner environment in the future. I mean, you can't tell me that power plants all over the world aren't already causing some kind of imbalance in the environment, possibly killing more than a few 100 birds each year. Perhaps one day technology with have quieter rotors to keep farm owners and neighbors from going batty and some sort of sonar warning devices to keep birds away? Who knows. Call me heartless, but I kinda see these as non issues in the overall scheme of the scheme.
And here's the kicker. You can generate all the power you want, but then what? Where does it go if there's no way to transport it? The DOE has determined transmission as the greatest obstacle for achieving the 2030 goal. With our current, outdated grid in place, these new proposed loads have no way of getting to where they need to go. A conceptual network to handle the planned capacity of wind has been studied and diagramed, but who knows how easily this can come about.
Subsidies
If we do reach this goal of 20% wind within the next 20 years, how will we know that we will be able to maintain this sort of production? Those less optimistic argue that the cost and maintenance that goes into running a wind farm actually outweighs the benefits, and once the subsidies run dry to take care of these costs, they're out of business. The turbines stand still. I read this crazy article, Tens of Thousands of Abandoned wind turbines now little American Landscape, that I can't quite believe to be entirely true (some sources deny this, others simply spread the craziness), but it gets you thinking. If there's no government money (aka, taxes from ya'll) or simply not enough to support the initiative, is it already prone to failure? All the above setbacks are one side of the coin, but if there's no money to begin with, then no deal. Back to using the cheapest dirtiest resources possible to fuel our nation.
All things said (and trust me, with all the info and controversy out there, this is barely scratching the surface), I'm a bit on the fence on all of this. Can all these things be achieved? Of course they can, but I don't see this happening without a ton of hair pulling and name calling along the way. There are a ton of things to make this 20% by 2030 work from many different parties, some of which still may not see the entire benefit of wind and the investment into it. BUT, to leave you all with a more feel-good vibe, check out the DOE's Wind Energy Report Card to how the future is looking in their eyes despite all the drawbacks. Sounds good to me. Let's just leave it at that.
 |
| My, they just grow up so fast! |
Sources:
See here for the report along with other supporting studies.
