Posted on 09/15/2012 4:13:12 PM PDT by 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at usnews.nbcnews.com ...
With this plan, the tax payers would be on the hook for 144,000 more of them.
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.
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.
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.
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....
how is that doable? These people are insane.
The maintenance nightmare from hell.
You can tell when an engineering professor has never fixed a boat.
Sacrificial zinc anode? WTH is that? Waste of money.
/johnny
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
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.”
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.
Ever seen capillary action of saline solution in stranded wire?
144,000 wind turbines but NO OIL RIGS?! At least oil rigs don’t murder poor little birds. And we KNOW they produce ENERGY.
'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
BTW, I want to see envrionmentalists/Hollywood put wind in their plane while jetting around lecturing the rest of us!
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/
I saw Mike Rowe Changing the zinc nodes inside some sort of lock gates in New Orleans a few seasons back on Dirty Jobs.
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.
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:
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