Windmills to provide all of American’s electricity needs would take a land area a bit larger than the state of Nevada. The windmills also would make that much land area uninhabitable.
Nuclear fission plants to generate the same amount of electricity could be fit in an area no larger than Dallas County, and the bulk of that area would still be habitable.
Texas has huge Wind and Solar farms but they are very far from the places that use the electricity. This week wind and solar were more than 50 percent of the generation for the entire state. But; There is not enough transmission to handle windy and sunny days. A good problem I guess.
Now if Texas had been building nuclear power plants up near Dallas and over by Houston the cost would be about the same as that wind and solar.
Makes no sense to me but whatever.
“Windmills to provide all of American’s electricity needs would take a land area a bit larger than the state of Nevada. The windmills also would make that much land area uninhabitable.”
How would windmills make land under them uninhabitable to row farming or grazing goats,sheep,elk,buffalo or cattle? Here in windy West Texas cattle graze directly underneath huge turbines with little care about the turbine hundreds of feet above them. The land is good for little else then scrub brush grazing cattle or bison both of which routinely graze under West Texas turbines. As for housing developments sure the constant woop woop woop would drive people away from the area I’ll give it that.
I personally am looking at a 10kw turbine for my exurban spread to compliment the 15kw of panels I already have. The thing is when it’s cloudy it tends to be windy and storming and here in the far North Plains of DFW at night we regularly get 12+ mph winds perfect for a small turbine that’s cut in speed is 6mph. The permit for a 20 meter monopole tower is not that expensive. Even a 30 meter cable stayed tower would fit with similar permit costs.
Nothing inherently wrong with wind in class 5 or higher wind fields they make fiscal sense even without subsidies. The better way to look at wind is for every MWh they put on the grid that saves 8,000,000 to 12,000,000+btu of natural gas for another day. Our species needs that natural gas for fertilizer,lubricants and plastics more than burning it to the sky like drunken sailors using in two hundred years what took mother nature 400+ million years to make. Clearly it’s better to save resources for future use and generations.
Contrary to boomer folklore, wind over it’s rated lifetime has a EROI of 40+ all in including mining the materials to make the metal towers, wood,glass fiber turbines and concrete bases the IEA has report after report on the subject. Here again it’s better to get a fourty times return on your energy invested vs burning it once to the sky. This last point alone makes for a valid argument against directly burning any fuel for single use power. Think of it this way burning natural gas in a turbine once, or burning Ngas in a cement kiln, and steel furnace then getting a fourty times return on that chemical energy.
Solar panels modern polysilicon types that no longer contain cadmium or lead. They can and should be recycled at EOL. The EPA has a whole section dedicated to the growing solar recycling ecosystem the value per year is approaching $450 million is raw material cost offsets. As any geologist will tell you “Mine once use many”.
The EROI for polysilc can be under 4 years in a sunny place like Texas and down to a year with modern thin film polysilc in a desert. These are for panels with a 25 year warranty span and 15% EOL capacity loss the total EROI can exceed 100 to 1.
Here again what is a better use of the blessings of millions of years of fossil sunshine. Burn once and it’s gone forever or get a huge EROI and then still have the mined materials to recycle and use again at much lower energy to end product in the second generation of panels. Mine once use many. Again the IEA has report after report on those numbers should one take the effort to look.
The issue is how to store intermittent electricity there is no shortage of energy in solar a small fraction of any of earth’s deserts can power all 8 billion of us at middle class levels of consumption. Wind in class 5 or higher wind fields has more than enough yearly energy for tens of billions of humans at EU middle class levels of consumption. Storage is the issue. A demand based grid is not going to work at high levels of intermittence or curtailment power levels. With grid storage and large grid loads that are designed to be intermittently used you flip the grid from a demand grid to a supply based grid where the load will take anything you can throw at it at any time and you can curtail large less important loads to prioritise critical loads. Low capital expense electrolysis makes a supply grid not only possible but preferred since having huge amounts of cheap hydrogen is a plus for a number of industries. Same for ammonia which can be made in electric cells with water for the H2 and atmospheric nitrogen a side product is pure O2 has itself a valuable commodity.
Here in Texas 2 gigawatts of demand is going to come online making electro-gasoline,jet fuel too. The power demand curve in Texas is the classic duck curve
There is the ducks back from 0000 till 1200 here is the plot for yesterday, today and tomorrow.
https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/systemwidedemand
The ducks back is begging for large switchable interruptable demand to fill it
The Chinese have a copper nano catalyst used in a electrolytic cell that turns water and CO2 into C2 carbon products particularly eethanol. From 2021 to 2024 they have improved into the 90% range of faraday eff. Compared to a 30% efficient fischer tropsch synthesis of hydrocarbons from CO2 + H2 (electrolytic H2) and 40% for CO + H2 (coal based CO&H2) via gasification.
“Researchers in China led by a team from Fudan University have demonstrated the electrochemical reduction of CO2 toward C2+ alcohols with a faradaic efficiency of ~70% using copper (Cu) catalysts with stepped sites. “
https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2020.12.011
Ethanol is hugely useful it stores at room temp as a liquid in plastic tanks. It can be used to fuel every MCCI engine made with simple mods be that a cargo ship, locomotive or class eight truck. When used in class 8 it’s cleaner so clean it exceeds the highest EPA 2027 standards today. It’s also cheaper per mile today vs diesel on a mile for mile fuel cost basis. This is the independent third party peer review of those facts.
https://www.clearflameengines.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/ClearFlame-TCO-and-Emissions-Study.pdf
“As previously announced, an independent study conducted by Gladstein, Neandross & Associates (GNA), demonstrated that ClearFlame’s technology lowers total costs while meeting sustainability goals sooner than currently available alternatives.
ClearFlame-enabled trucks are expected to have the lowest TCO when compared with diesel, natural gas, electric, and hydrogen platforms.
ClearFlame’s cost per mile is expected to be substantially lower than electric and hydrogen platforms—40% less than electric and 30% less than hydrogen.”