Posted on 09/05/2016 12:13:32 PM PDT by Lorianne
Letter to the Editor: Regarding the Aug, 28 Politics & The Nation article “Backers hope nation’s first offshore wind farm will jump-start an industry”:
As a retired engineer, I find it hard to justify wind farms from an economic, aesthetic or environmental perspective. The article stated that a five-turbine, 30-megawatt project off Rhode Island will provide enough energy for about 17,000 homes. What is the cost for backup power generation when there is little or no wind? What about the limited lifetime of the turbines (20 years estimated, but a British study found that 12 to 15 years is more appropriate)? Even with government subsidies, the economic value of wind farms is highly questionable.
The article said the nation’s almost 50,000 wind turbines account for about 5 percent of the nation’s energy generation. If only half of the nation’s renewable-energy needs are to be solved by wind farms, then we would need 500,000 turbines. The land/water area needed by each turbine depends on a number of variables — for example, the GE 1.5-megawatt turbine needs 82 unobstructed acres. So if one chooses 80 acres per turbine, 500,000 would need 40 million acres — about the size of Florida. On land or offshore, this would be certain to impact ecology and scenery.
Renewable energy sounds great until one gets into the details of efficacy, efficiency and cost. We need to tread carefully before jumping on the renewable-energy bandwagon.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
They also look horrid on the landscape.
Leave it to an engineer to point out facts that run counter to the narrative. How rude of him. /s
Not only they deny science, engineering and economics, it defies common sense...
Unless you are a bird, then they are deadly.
Small scale wind turbines to supplement one home make sense. Large scale turbines trying to power the grid do not.
I support renewables, but only on a personal level. I think it’s great to be energy self-sufficient through solar or personal blades that are small enough to fit upon your roof.
Anything helps, but they are not sufficient to replace fossil fuels completely and the science in this regard is pretty much settled by now.
The green crowd doesn't want anyone to think this through. Just government mandate after government mandate...
Di the turbines make noise? Might also be a problem for a bat.
Wind power would be great to use to pump water to high altitude reservoirs, as it only matters how much power is available, not so much when. The water can then be stored as potential energy until needed. It is absurd to try to use it in a live power system for high power needs.
Can we get the environmentalists to let this happen?
I agree with that, in fact, I have a number of battery packs that are solar charged so that my emergency radio and other electronic devices have a type of savings I can withdraw from.
LIberals love seeing windmills. They are a monument to their assumed superior intellect. The never bother to look behind the scenes at the coal fired plant that must sit idle to provide the base load generation required.
Windmills are monuments to liberal stupidity and government waste.
Efficacy, efficiency and cost aren’t considerations, how large the subsidies from the taxpayers will be is the only consideration.
Ahh, reminiscing about quaint old Dutch windmills, Hans Brinker, the Little Dutch girl... yes, now I am ready to say these huge metal wind turbines “look good”...naw, never. Only a dumb Watermelon could say that.
In my professional circulation I get to meet an talk with a lot of founders of companies. I have run across the CEOs of several “alternative energy” companies. Not a single on that is involved in wind power has a single mention it its business plan, nor in their capital plan, for setting aside reserves to decommission wind turbine equipment.
Wind power cannot compete economically on a level playing field with more conventional power sources. The field can only be tilted by government which does so in various ways. But in the end, the result is that wind power is economically unsustainable. Much like the well known Romulan Cloaking technology, the mirage can only be sustained by the continual expenditure of great amounts of energy. Government will eventually get exhausted to sustain the economic mirage.
When the economic mirage falters, wind power companies will shut down and will abandon their turbines. In only a few years, idle turbines will become first and eyesore than a danger to safety as they start to fall apart in high winds.
Then environmentalists will demand a new government program, to restore the vistas to their previous pristine clarity. And thus environmentalists will have come full circle, from where they blamed owners of open pit coal mines of greed for walking away from those eyesores without proper funding of remediation.
But should wind power companies plan for the eventual remediation, that economic truth would crush their already crush-worthy business plans.
As an addendum, let me also quickly observe that nuclear power enjoys a subsidy from the federal government that cannot be priced: government has redefined their risk so that should a plant have a radiological disaster that contaminates a wide area, government has assumed that risk.
No insurance company could price that risk, let alone reserve for it. So, nuclear power carries its own price distortion that is significant even as it is totally different in nature than the risks of any other source of utility-grade power.
Some complaints have been made that they can cause too much noise for residents living within a mile of the blades.
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