Power East Coast via wind? Doable with 144,000 offshore turbines, study says

NBC News ^ | 9/15/12 | Miguel Llanos

[Libloather]

Power East Coast via wind? Doable with 144,000 offshore turbines, study says
By Miguel Llanos, NBC News
10 hours ago

Placing wind turbines off the East Coast could meet the entire demand for electricity from Florida to Maine, according to engineering experts at Stanford University.

It would require 144,000 offshore turbines standing 270 feet tall — not one of which exists since proposals have stalled due to controversy and costs. But the analysis shows it's doable and where the best locations are, says study co-author Mark Jacobson, a Stanford professor of civil and environmental engineering.

The team is not advocating for an "all wind" approach, saying it'd be foolish to put all of one's energy eggs in a single basket, but they do think it could reach up to 50 percent. Today the U.S. gets about 4 percent of its electricity from wind, but only via turbines on land.

[Libloather]

And when the wind dies down, pray for a hurricane.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

And it is RACIST to wonder how much climate change would be induced by such a monstrosity.

[knarf]

Or we could just wait for the 144,000

[smokingfrog]

The lifespan of an offshore turbine is not going to be very long. Plus, keeping that many constantly maintained would be a logistics nightmare.

[southernnorthcarolina]

One windmill mounted on an exhaust vent on the Capitol Building dome should provide all the power needed.

[Sacajaweau]

We have plenty of gas here. My heat is gas and it’s friggin expensive. NYS should be able to cut my cost in half with fracking....but thast will never happen. The big “cut” will go into the NYS coffers...another way to rob the workers.

[Argus]

the analysis shows it's doable and where the best locations are

Martha's Vineyard, Hyannisport, Newport, the south shore of Connecticut, the Hamptons, Hilton Head, Palm Beach...

What? Too many big Democrat donors have vacation homes there? Whaddya say? What????

[Big Horn]

144 thousand reasons not to do it.

[cripplecreek]

LOL this from yesterday.

Michigan blowhads are admitting that its pretty much impossible but want it in the constitution anyway.

Proposal 3 would require that the state add as many as 13 times more wind turbines in Michigan than currently operate. Proposal 3 would mandate that 25 percent of Michigan’s energy come from renewable sources. Wind is expected to be the primary supplier of renewable energy if the proposal passes.

Advocates and experts predict 2,300 to 3,790 nearly 500-feet high wind turbines would have to be added to meet the 25-percent mandate. Michigan currently has 292 wind turbines in operation.



Most of Michigan is 'Poor' or 'Marginal' For Wing Energy

Keep in mind, that's only for 25%. 100% will mean something like 12,000 windmills.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

You can be sure they'll build them. Or at least start to build them until the money ran out.

They would never let a chance to loot the treasury like they did with Solyndra slip through their fingers.

[ConservaTexan]

Unfortunately, 138,473 of them would be too close to Kennedy land.

[USFRIENDINVICTORIA]

The bogus photo that purports to show the view of a wind farm from Nantucket Island, does not show the turbines in motion. When these things move, they are incredibly distracting. We are hard-wired to notice motion & these turbines will be mesmerizing. They will destroy views. The Kennedys got this right.

[JRandomFreeper]

but only via turbines on land.

And only when the wind blows.

I'm all for alternative energy. My shack up in the mountain was too far from commercial 'lektrikity to have commercial power. I had wind, solar, and a backup diesel genset. Lots and lots of batteries.... Maintenance... sweeping snow from solar panels...

Sure, it can be done. If one doesn't mind living like a mountain man.

Nothing like washing your hair on the front porch in -18F weather, and feeling better about being in the 38F shack, because there isn't any wind.

/johnny

[Pollster1]

The lifespan of an offshore turbine is not going to be very long. Plus, keeping that many constantly maintained would be a logistics nightmare.

Salt water, waves, and storms; no power when there is no wind; no power when there is too much wind during storms - what could go wrong?

[Stosh]

I have a relative in the energy services business, and he always points out to me how critical it is to balance power supply and power demand on the grid - if demand exceeds supply by too great a margin, the grid goes down, hard.

And the problem with wind is that it doesn’t always blow, so typically when utilities install wind farms, they also build gas fired turbine units as back ups for when the wind dies out. The more you rely on wind, the more back-ups you need (a few years back, the grid in Texas almost went down as the air got still, and the utilities desperately looked for back-up).

So if these bozos are going to try to put up hundreds of thousands of wind turbines (and in whose backyard, I might ask - certainly not any Kennedy’s), they’re going to need a boatload of gas turbine power plants to keep that grid operable.

[FrankR]

To paraphrase a famous movie line; “Just because we CAN do something doesn’t always mean we HAVE to do it.”

[beethovenfan]

What a horrible thought!

[The_Media_never_lie]

Silly.

[manc]

one it kills thousands of birds and wildlife, secondly if anything was ugly on the contry side it has ot be those disgusting looking windmills.

So where are the animal protectoring groups on this?

[The_Media_never_lie]

Silly.

[concerned about politics]

Every wind mill farm we have in America today is subsidized (supported with tax payer dollars), because they're unsustainable. They're just as much a losing proposition as solar panels.

With this plan, the tax payers would be on the hook for 144,000 more of them.

[cripplecreek]

We have a great deal of underutilized hydroelectric potential in this country. The newer turbine tech makes a lot of the small dams effective power generators.

It explains why liberals are in such a big hurry to tear them all out before anyone notices.

[manc]

ugliest things I have ever seen and think about how many birds will get killed , how will this hurt the fishing and fish, and then the cost of maintaining these ugly things.

[pfony1]

Ho hum,

I’d bet that not one of these wind-power advocates has ever replaced a failed reduction gear in the nacelle that is “up there”, just behind the blades, during periods of “normal” wave action.

Experience shows that all of the maintenance costs of these cartoonish devices always - ALWAYS - exceeds the claimed “value” of the energy they produce.

[Popman]

These idiots are going to send us back to the stone age.... Doing everything by fire light when the grid goes down half the time....

[GeronL]

how is that doable? These people are insane.

[Carry_Okie]

Saltwater, steel, and electricity.

The maintenance nightmare from hell.

You can tell when an engineering professor has never fixed a boat.

[JRandomFreeper]

You can tell when an engineering professor has never fixed a boat.

Sacrificial zinc anode? WTH is that? Waste of money.

/johnny

[JRandomFreeper]

Doing everything by fire light

Green liberals are best cooked and eaten by the light of a camp fire. Tomorrow, we invent electricity, so we can refigerate the left-overs.

/johnny

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

I am reminded of an old Bloom County comic, in which the little genius boy had figured out “an original idea”, a way to put 100 porcupines on treadmills and feed them raisins, as a way to theoretically generate enough electricity to power the entire world.

However, as his science teacher pointed out, “Porcupines are allergic to raisins,” then cuttingly added that, “failure is hardly original. Sit down.”

[The Working Man]

Let’s see, 144,000 wind turbines at a conservative estimate of 2.5 million each would be $360 billion dollars. You can buy a lot of Nuclear power plants for that much money. And they don’t stop producing power when the wind is too low or too high.

[Carry_Okie]

Sacrificial zinc anode? WTH is that? Waste of money.

Ever seen capillary action of saline solution in stranded wire?

[kcvl]

144,000 wind turbines but NO OIL RIGS?! At least oil rigs don’t murder poor little birds. And we KNOW they produce ENERGY.

[JRandomFreeper]

Nope, I was a zoomie, not a squid. But I'm not suprised.

'lektrickity and salt water don't mix, without a hell of a lot of maintenance.

Hats off to the squids that keep aircraft in the air at sea.

/johnny

[kcvl]

BTW, I want to see envrionmentalists/Hollywood put wind in their plane while jetting around lecturing the rest of us!

[kcvl]

Mark Z. Jacobson

http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/MZJ19Feb2012Paris.gif

The main goal of Jacobson’s research is to understand better severe atmospheric problems, such as air pollution and global warming, and develop and analyze large-scale clean-renewable energy solutions to them.

Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Director, Atmosphere/Energy Program
Senior Fellow, Woods Institute for the Environment
Senior Fellow, Precourt Institute for Energy

http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/

http://woods.stanford.edu/

[cripplecreek]

I saw Mike Rowe Changing the zinc nodes inside some sort of lock gates in New Orleans a few seasons back on Dirty Jobs.

[kcvl]

Jacobson says that wind, water and solar power can be scaled up in cost-effective ways to meet our energy demands, freeing us from dependence on both fossil fuels and nuclear power.

In 2009 Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi published “A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet With Renewables” in Scientific American.

******

He uses “computer models” not that he has actually ever built anything.

[kcvl]

Jacobson states that if the United States wants to reduce global warming, air pollution and energy instability, it should invest only in the best energy options, and that nuclear power is not one of them. Jacobson’s analyses show that “nuclear power results in up to 25 times more carbon emissions than wind energy, when reactor construction, uranium refining and transport are considered”.

His work also shows that “carbon capture and sequestration technology can reduce carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants but will increase air pollutants and will extend all the other deleterious effects of coal mining, transport and processing, because more coal must be burned to power the capture and storage steps”.

Jacobson has studied how wind, water and solar technologies can provide 100 per cent of the world’s energy, eliminating all fossil fuels. He advocates a “smart mix” of renewable energy sources to reliably meet electricity demand:

[kcvl]

[MNJohnnie]

Of course the cost of getting the power from the turbines to the grid means your monthly electrical bills, plus everything else you buy, will have to go up about 250% but HEY at least it will help “solve” the completely fictious problem of “man made global warming”

[CincyRichieRich]

Let’s see...how many birds can that kill per day?

Anywhere but in Ted Kennedy’s area.

[CincyRichieRich]

Let’s see...how many birds can that kill per day?

Anywhere but in Ted Kennedy’s area.

[Red Badger]

Perfect targets for terrorists wanting to knock out all power.......

[trebb]

The lifespan of an offshore turbine is not going to be very long. Plus, keeping that many constantly maintained would be a logistics nightmare.

My thoughts too - it might create 500,000 jobs for folks to maintain the equipment, quadruple the cost of electricity, make supply less reliable, and a bunch of other "benefits" that the Dims always ignore because the cause is so "pure".