'Wind Is Less Costly Than Coal' Claim Blown Away by Federal Stats

Capitol Confidential ^ | 8/11/2011 | Tom Gantert

[tcrlaf]

Those huge fiberglass/composite blades can’t the kind of stress a smaller blade can.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

In order to impoverish the peasants, you have to make energy costs SKYROCKET.

Prosperous peasants build roads and houses and clutter up the view.

The ruling-class swells deserve to live in a pristine Walden paradise, and the sooner the peasants starve the sooner they get to have it.

[MsLady]

Ahhhh that’s what it is. Geez what a waste of money. At least coal and water flow, as in a dam is reliable. Wind is just hit and miss.

[Reeses]

One of the largest environmental footprints

They want to fight "climate change" by extracting large amounts of energy from the very thin layer where all evaporation takes place, the origin of weather. Advocating a medicine worse the disease is indicative of a hidden motive, hidden because it is evil and cannot withstand light.

[5thGenTexan]

I think wind can work; we are just going about it wrong. Rather than centralized large units, Their mass seems like it would large negative.

I beleive distributed smaller units is a better route. The Helix Wind S322 unit (http://www.helixwind.com/en/index.php) is optimized for low wind speed and responds well to variable wind direction.

Units can be placed at 6 ft. spacing if you stagger the height, giving you 10kW of nominal generation in a 24 ft. line.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks MichCapCon, and thanks TheCause:

The problem with photovoltaics is -- as the notorious greeniac and demagogue Barry Commoner drummed away about -- there is no economy of scale. In order to generate more electricity, more cells have to be added, covering more and more space. The cost of maintaining the arrays just rises arithmetically (to borrow a phrase from Malthusians). Yes, they can be installed anywhere -- covering existing homes' roofs, for example -- but their 15 or 20 percent efficiency is a peak number, and greatly reduced by time of day (not much going out at midnight), cloud cover, and whether or not a windstorm ripped a whole mess of them down.

Wind generation makes more sense in most climates, if only because wind blows at night as well as day. But the economy of scale with wind is to build bigger (and taller; the wind is more reliable and stronger at high altitude) mills. Another place the wind is stronger is out to sea -- average is something like eight times more wind energy is available. Then the problem becomes, oh, that ruins our view, or, oh no, birdies got killed. In order to push wind power alone to equal coal (which is what the Kenyan-born Muzzie sez he wants) would mean building the biggest possible mills, and building them all alike (to minimize replacement parts inventories and the costs of intermittent and unpredictable repair), while erecting them offshore (and shutting them down during hurricanes to prevent destruction of the mills). Given the massive use of electricity in the US (a significant fraction of all the electricity produced worldwide), it would require literally millions of mills, including a nice padding of extra mills in order to compensate for unpredictable periods of no wind. Those periods are another reason to A) build offshore and B) spread the mills across as wide an area as possible, rather than building, say hundreds of smaller mills on the same 640 acres.

[Jim Noble]

It is of no importance whatsoever if "wind" is less costly than coal.

Coal is a nearly perfect energy source for modern civilization, "wind" is a joke.

Cost doesn't really come into it.