Mass. Wind Farm Foes Face Legal Setback

Guardian ^ | 08/21/03 | AP

[Robert A Cook PE]

"Stop construction of a test tower currently operating there"????

Either the test tower is operating, or it is under construction .... but I don't see how it could be both.

I lover their hypocrisy.

What's Hillary's position on her liberal friend's opposing an enviromentally friendly energy producer?

(She's spent more time off the shore in Martha's Vinyard and at the Kennedy compund than in her NY "house"...)

(By the way, the latest liberal opposition ad calls it a massive "industrial facility" and NOT an offshore "WIND FARM." See? They know how to manipulate public attitude - and the TV news goes right along with the enviro's babble - never correcting the lib's, and presenting the MEAN, GREEDY COMPANY as the evil capitalist pigs!)

[chimera]

The price of the powerplant is not important, it is the price of the electricity that we care about.

The price of electricity includes a component for amortization of the capital costs for the generating equipment. You don't build a plant for free, no matter what kind it is. That cost has to be recovered in the rate base.

So, you do care about the powerplant's capital costs, because it determines in part the rate you're paying.

[biblewonk]

The price of electricity includes a component for amortization of the capital costs for the generating equipment. You don't build a plant for free, no matter what kind it is. That cost has to be recovered in the rate base.

So, you do care about the powerplant's capital costs, because it determines in part the rate you're paying.

Yes but that is all summed up in the price of the power contracted by the windfarm investors. That really is the bottom line, how much will you sell the power for? If you have to have 10 cents per kwhr to get investors, you aren't going to get investors because you won't get many customers.

[Willie Green]

The price of the powerplant is not important, it is the price of the electricity that we care about.

You don't think the cost of the powerplant will be reflected in the price of electricity???

Bwahahahaha! Excellent example of how STUPID enviro-weenie pinwheel freaks really are!

C'mon biblewanker, put forth a credible "analsys". I dare you!

[chimera]

(By the way, the latest liberal opposition ad calls it a massive "industrial facility" and NOT an offshore "WIND FARM." See? They know how to manipulate public attitude - and the TV news goes right along with the enviro's babble - never correcting the lib's, and presenting the MEAN, GREEDY COMPANY as the evil capitalist pigs!)

Manipulation of language is the coin of the realm for Luddite propagandists. We had the local Luddites going around calling the decommissioned Fernald facility (which was basically a uranium foundary) a nuclear fuels enrichment plant. Wrong on both counts.

[chimera]

So now you're saying the cost of the plant does matter? If so, I agree. But you made a declarative statement earlier that the cost of the powerplant doesn't matter, what we pay for electricity. One affects the other.

[Robert A Cook PE]

Maybe they (the wind generators) could begin paying for themselves rather quickly.

Couple of advantages here, several disadvantages compared to a loarge conventional power plant. or a conventional wind plant too for that matter.

The wind itself is "free" - IF they can actually build the bases, towers and generator units - BUT the transmission cost of the cables underwater to the shore-side distribution facility IS NOT "free" and the constant maintenance cost of many small generators spread all over the bay is deadly!

That (perpetual maintainence) of many hundred SMALL generators at remote, hard-to-get-to spots (on top of small towers) is the real killer of wind farms in CA. Each time I drove psat, more than half were stalled out on even the windiest days - no power, no money earned - only money spent (by the taxpayers !) on "free power."

Now, multiply a simple wind farm where you can drive up in a truck to a widely distributed group in a remote bay miles from the shore where access is MUCH, MUCH slower in a boat than an open field. Worse, work itself is slower: imagine a wind farm where you can drive up and get a crane on site "cheap" (only a few thousand dollars rent vice tens of thousands for a boat/barge crane/tugboat plus the crew for the whole thing!) for a single day.

What if forget a part? Now, you'd need several hours to get back in the boat, go back to shore, and THEN drive to the supply shed. On shore, you call your buddy on the cell phone, HE drives out from the supply shed and gives you the part.

Salt spray and salt-laden winds are DIRTY compared to land farms. Things will break sooner, and even paint becomes more expensive, and less successful - what happens when the AL and fiberglass housings start to fail, or internal copper tabs and circuit boards and electrical connections need to be replaced in ten years? Or in two years? Or the grease and bearing fail in three years - as they do in CA?

One advantage of distributed power plants is that each small generator can come on line faster - so SOME money can be recovered even before the whole project is done - unlike a conventional power plant where the whole has to finished and tested before any money is generated. Also, since each small genreator is independent of the others, losing several dozen to maintenance at one time leaves the remainder able to make money.

But then too - the power connections and control system and distribution has to be built before anything is sold - and the infrastructure won't be cheap - so the company will be in the red for decades before they see an investment return.

The generators are comparable to an entire 727 WING - they require care and expensive maintenance to keep working - or they tear themselves to bits of expensive aluminum shreads.

[Willie Green]

What if forget a part? Now, you'd need several hours to get back in the boat, go back to shore, and THEN drive to the supply shed. On shore, you call your buddy on the cell phone, HE drives out from the supply shed and gives you the part.

What if there's a storm? What maintenance crew is gonna go 5 miles offshore in violent seas to repair a windmill?

IMHO, it'd much more efficient to simply generate electricity from tofu.
All ya gotta do is put a bunch of enviro-monkeys in one room where they can beat on quartz crystals with little hammers. That'll generate plenty of piezoelectricity that can be sold commercially. And since the only fuel that is consumed is tofu, it's the perfect means of disposing of that hazardous waste!

[chimera]

One advantage of distributed power plants is that each small generator can come on line faster - so SOME money can be recovered even before the whole project is done - unlike a conventional power plant where the whole has to finished and tested before any money is generated.

This is exactly how the Luddites have killed the larger projects (all of them, not just nuclear units). Stretch out the completion time until the carrying charges kill you. So an advantage of a smaller unit is faster completion time. Start generating revenue quicker, as you say, and start paying off the bonds and other financing charges.

So it sounds like a typical engineering problem, making the best of the trade-offs. But if this recent blackout snafu has taught us anything, its that we place a premium on reliability. If a sizable portion of your baseload capacity is derived from a source that is inherently intermittant, instead of having grid instabilities that take you down every 20 years or so, you'll be dealing with them on a weekly or monthly basis. I for one wouldn't want to have a NE blackout occurring on a monthly basis. The economy would go to pieces, and the people would tar and feather and run out of town on a rail any utility executive that "allowed" such things to happen.

[chimera]

It just seems like a dicey proposition, putting 130 of these monsters literally in the teeth of the Atlantic Ocean. This is the region of The Perfect Storm, remember. I know we've placed complex structures far at sea, but things like oil drilling platforms, or the Troll gas production platform, are humongeous, gigantic, tremendously strong and robust structures. Somehow I don't think they're in the same league as these things.

[biblewonk]

So now you're saying the cost of the plant does matter? If so, I agree. But you made a declarative statement earlier that the cost of the powerplant doesn't matter, what we pay for electricity. One affects the other.

In the context of certain statements by certain willies on this thread the price of the plant does not matter. The cheapest plant may use the most expensive fuel or the most expensive plant may use the cheapest fuel. What we really want to know is how much is the electricity going to cost such that the plant is paying for itself in a reasonable amount of time. I think we all understand that. It's the automatic anti-wind response that drives me nuts.

[Robert A Cook PE]

See? THAT'S the problem!

A wind farm can't be the baseline source - which means that you (the utility in the region, not the wind farm supplier!) HAVE to keep up and build a baseline supplier because the wind farm is vunerable to drops ...

Sudden,irregular, unpredictable drops.

No wind - sure. No power. No money.

Only a little wind - only a minute amount of power (which means the EXPENSIVE baseline utility has to provide the difference! - but maintenance and deterioration and upkeep stays the same for the wind operator.

Regular "day" - Some power.

Windy day (the "peak power" time used the article!) means the wind farm makes a profit, the regular baseline utility has to pay all ITS workers and the power plant expenses - BUT DOESN'T GET PAID for its standing expenses!)

Stormy day - The wind farm HAS TO SHUT down. Its power generators must feather their props to protect the turbine when wind speeds GET TOO HIGH. (the blades can withstand storm winds of (maybe) 75 - 100 mph - but they rarely can be designed to generate regulated power over 45-50 knots. So, when there is too much wind - the baseline generators must run again.

When damaged by storms - the wind farm is OOC for maybe years - until repaired by experts who rebuild each generator and propeller wing. Again - a conventional power plant is almost NEVER damaged by storms - only the rural overhead lines are destroyed and can be simply repaired by outside line crews who come from out-of-state. Anybody can fix a power line.

Who is your "outside crew" who can drive up their crane and tugboat and aircraft factory from TN or VA or GA to fix an airlane wing in mid-air from a boat anchored in a bay off Mass?

[biblewonk]

I gotcher pinwheel right here!

[ChewedGum]

Very coherent analysis. Thank you!

Gum

[chimera]

You're telling me. Even having a sizable fraction of the baseload supplied by an inherently intermittant source is a recipe for disaster.

Lets forget about the Nantucket Sound boondoggle for a minute and think about a more likely proposition, maybe somewhere on the Western plains. Lots of land, a fair amount of wind, etc. But has anyone here ever seen a thunderstorm blow up on the Western plains? It is a fearful thing. Those who live back East can't imagine the difference.

You could be sitting there purring along with your windmills, then comes the dreaded "calm before the storm". If you're supplying a baseload to the grid, the grid power starts to sag. Dispatchers start to scramble to bring in neighboring power or maybe switch in spinning reserves from conventional plants. The stormfront is ragged, so the power sags are irregular and intermittant. As the storm breaks the windmills start to resupply their load, but the dispatchers have already switched in reserves. You're loading up lines with excess capacity. Instability sets in. So you throttle back the spinning reserves to allow for the capacity coming back online from the wind farm. But then the full fury of the storm hits. Too much wind! Feather those props so they don't fly apart! So output droops again. This time the dispatchers can't bring in enough power from spinning reserves or neighboring grids in an orderly manner. Only one thing to do: shed load.

The bottom line: intermittant sources mean system instabilities. Maybe your isolated ranch or homestead doesn't mind being out of power for a while if your farm windmill goes down, but its not the most helpful thing to have happen in a technologically advanced society where reliable electricity is literally its lifeblood.