"Any new coal or nuke plant also needs transmission lines, NEW transmission lines, and the lines they tie into need upgraded to carry the additional power."

George is absolutely 100 percent correct here.

Again.

Anyone who doubts this, should google the exact phrase "national interest power
line corridor" and see what pops up. Very very interesting.

There are two of these right now, I think only two. One goes *directly* from the
palo verde nuclear power plants, in arizona, to southern california. The other one,
goes from the niagra area down into the heart of the DC metro area, through
various states.

These are defined regions where the federal government can effectively short
circuit (!) any state or local government opposition to the siting of power
transmission lines. California pushed long and hard to do this, because they
are *desperate* to get nuclear power from palo verde. The state of arizona
stupidly thought it had the sovereign right to regulate power generation
and transmission through its own state.

The real issue to understand with wind, solar power is that of 'baseload' vs
'peaking' power. As time goes on, utilities find that their 'peaking' loads become
their new 'baseload' values. So peaking power is nice but what they
reallly want is baseload. Which means you want a way to store power that
comes at irregular or unpredictable times.

Power storage. What it's all about.

Jim

Very true Jim.
I took a course at Raleigh earlier this year to be certified in wind and solar installation - it was very interesting and informative. Of course you had to get down to the bottom line cost, which is expensive at this point.
The funny thing about this whole discussion of transmission lines is that if most homeowners are generating their own power, that decreases the need for transmission lines, depending on how much is on grid or off grid.
Now if you are talking about large scale generation with wind or solar, then you have transmission issues.
But that isn't the smart way to approach this - unless your main priority is how to sell it and make money rather than providing a way to become energy independent.

gmatov, Mary Jo Killroy is a moron, not a Mormon. And no I didn't expect anyone in this country to get any work......

Yes, it really makes you wonder when people talk as if it (wind power) is the most wasteful, useless thing ever. It doesn't add up. It couldn't require MORE power.

You would think that your last sentence is a no brainer. It seems we have a lot of decision makers with LESS than no brains.

Jeff

Thru,

Sure. You wanna make a case FOR the ethanol subsidies? If you read and understand my post, you MIGHT get the idea that we stupidly and selfishly subsidized ethanol as a gasoline additive/replacement, ala E-85, and drove up the cost of damned near all foodstuffs.

Food is still higher than it was before, and the cost of corn is up near a buck from its low. That, I think, is probably the result of speculation, as my paper also had experts referring to speculators driving up oil to over 80 bucks again.

If there is a cost in electricity of building wind generators, it's the energy used in manufacture, and, you know, you can't build a coal, oil, gas, nuclear or photo voltaics plant without prodigious expenditure of energy.

Once in place, coal, oil, gas and nuclear will continue requiring vast input of energy, supplying the coal, oil, gas or nuclear fuel. Wind will require maintenance and lube, solar replacement and cleaning of the solar cells.

Hydro is about the only other source that is basically free of outside need. Maintenance, that's all.

Use the wind energy for pumping in a pumped storage facility, like Helms, if you don't want to spend for upgraded transmission lines.

Cheers,

George

MM,

I was kidding about the Mormon thing.

I didn't have issues with the whole wind farm thing, transmission of power and off wind provision etc are all technical issues that can be solved with various means. You can do off wind provision with hydro plants and the electricity used to pump the water back up etc, macro generation removes the need to have huge power circuits etc. Theyre all just technical details clouding the major issue being raised here, the funding specifying "must use chinese manufacturers" as a provision, then this being accepted as partial funding on a economic stimulus thing.

If the american side of the funding (which is the lions share) specified "american manufactured products only", the chinese and others would be in the streets bleating about how its against global trading laws and treaties etc.
And the really big point, is this is most definately the thin end of the wedge for this market and product placement, which is being hammered into whats left of the wests defence by chinese banks which have a large element of state control.

This is modus operandus from the chinese state, and I see it in other fields too within europe too. And it alarms me...

They can cry all they want. To specify American made products to be used in a government related/funded project, isn't denying the chinese or anyone else access to our markets in general. Just not in that one particular deal. They can stick it up their ass if they don't like it. Does anyone mean to tell me that they would HAVE to buy stuff from us for THEIR government related/funded/whatever projects? SURRRRRE they would!

Jeff

I'll grant you that to produce ethanol would result in some pressure on food prices and that your observation that it was probably the result of speculation is correct.

One thing I would like to point out.
Only a fool would try to mass produce ethanol from corn.
Y'all remember that next time someone from Exxon tries to tell you your corn prices are going to double or triple.

Corn is great for moonshine, but the yield is twice as much using sugarcane and 4 times using sugar beets.
And if you get the process right for converting methanol to ethanol, you can use any kind of weed, grass, construction scraps or whatever.

I've heard the higher corn price argument before and just wanted to point out the flaw in that supposition. Unless you're making it for drinking, you wouldn't use corn.
The other reason was my attempt to dispel that nasty rumor that was propagated in another thread, namely that us Southerners are a bunch of ignorant, union-hating, racist brainless S.O.B's.
I have noticed the tendency to subtract 75 points from my IQ when they hear the accent - but not all of us are as dumb as we sound.
Take my word for it.
Y'all have a nice day, ya' hear?

"Unless you're making li for drinking, you wouldn't use corn."

UNLESS..... you are the corn farmer lobby. Which is what happened in the US.
The only *good* thing about the ETOh added to gasoline is that it let them
stop using MTBE!

Jim

George, mark it on your calendar, this is one of the few times you & I are on the same page. The ethanol program was a "feel good" green project, cooked up by big agriculture. "create a demand, bid up the price, get the little guys on board, and sell short"

and get guv'mt subsidies to boot!

Denmark, the world’s most wind-intensive nation, with more than 6,000 turbines generating 19% of its electricity, has yet to close a single fossil-fuel plant. It requires 50% more coal-generated electricity to cover wind power’s unpredictability, and pollution and carbon dioxide emissions have risen (by 36% in 2006 alone).

There seems to be some value to the experience of the Danes .
If we all convert to driving government subsidized electric cars , and feel good about the "green" impact , then are we really going to question where the power comes from as they recharge in the wee hours of the night ?
If we are all going to get hooked on green wind power , will we tolerate any interruption of the increased demand for electricity ? Of course not ! We will demand the utility maintain the flow by any means necessary .
I do not have any magic answers . But early on , I thought corn ethanol was a big mistake , and I still believe that .
20 years ago , I saw a local farmer build an alcohol still . The alcohol was mixed with his gas , the corn mash was fed to the cows , the manure was converted to methane , the methane was burned in an engine that ran a generator that fed back into the grid .
Sometimes they had too much methane , so they'd pipe it back to the still to cook the mash .
The point is that this was ALL done with PRIVATE money . In the end , it did not make any
profit , the investor died , the project fell apart .
I told the farmer that the real money would be made selling plans to build the digester .
After all , every farmer has lots of Manure .
(Mother Earth News made plenty of $ selling " The alcohol fuel cookbook " back in the 70's )
So fast forward to 2009 , and I read a news item " Government subsidy to fund feasibility of farm based methane digester " .
I guess we can only learn that the real money is made from the subsidy itself .
The end product is merely incidental .
FBBob

"The end product is merely incidental"

the sizzle, not the steak

The question begs. Have they built any new coal gen plants?

Your statement leads me to think because of wind generators coal plants have to rev up.

What do wind turbines do, suck power off the grid?

One would guess their elect. demand has incresed but you seem to have another opinion blaming increased wind elect. generation for Denmarks problems.

That's pretty funny, seeing as aid to the 3rd World has generally specified that the money has to be spent buying goods & services from the donor countries - the USA does it, the EEC does it and Japan does it to my certain knowledge. So does Australia so don't think I'm being holier than thou.

If the Chinese are also doing it, guess where they got the precedent from?

PDW

CB,

I come to the same conclusion. IF you start up a wind farm, you are gonna have to build a new coal plant to....what?

If they start up a farm of 2.8 MW wind gens, they TAKE from the grid so they have to build new coal fired plants? For why?

Wonder who is paying the authors of that article to diseminate that BS.

Oh, I doubt that Denmark has grown their electricity use 50 % or more since the wind farms came upon the scene. If they had said 10 %, you could assume the demand was growing faster than even the addition of whatever wind power they did get was able to augment their need.

Cheers,

George

Wind farms can go off line without much warning when the wind dies. That means you need rapid turn-up stand-by assets ready to go, all the time, and which need to handle the entire existing load. If the wind dies during peak load you need to be damned creative. Even within a wind farm some props will spin and others sit idle. This irregularity is a serious engineering problem and it is not taken lightly by the folks whose job it is to keep the grid hot.

You can skip the Afghanistan segment if you like. Good program on the amount spent on grants for wind & solar power in europe, and the astronomical cost per KWH.

this ain't Fox news



http://www.kcrw.com/media-player/med...ible_afghanist

dp,

Of course you want the wind gen to produce all the time. They won't, but when they do, they take load off the base load gens. Generators spin with little effort when no demand is put on them. Less steam, less heat, less fuel needed.

So if you have load on the system with wind in the mix, the draw on the fuel plant will be less, or can be made less, coincident with the wind output. I would think even anemometers a mile or so away could feed a computer that would anticipate slacking wind, hot up the fire on the fuel plant.

If you GET 2800 KW from that wind gen, and COULD get it 24/7/365, you'd get near 2 1/2 mil per gen per year. (That's at 10 cents per hour.) 1/2 the time producing, still 1 1/4 million.

Multiply by 50 to a couple hundred per site, and you have some real money.

Why is it that a Spanish company is the one bankrolling a wind farm about 30 miles from me? They have money to invest and see a good return on their billions, or hundreds of millions.

They must be smarter than some on here. They are putting their money where their mouths are. Building the farms. We're selling our birthright. Selling our water systems, waste collection, wind, solar, even our Kennywood Park was bought by Spanish interests.

Globalized by being bought up by foreign companies. Profits go to those foreign companies.

What's the world coming to? This used to be our domain. We went there and set up companies and sent the profits back home. Now we're getting beat at our own game, and I think it is because the bosses of business are "Citizens of the World", NOT American at heart. Profit is where you find it.

Cheers,

George

Posted this response in another thread, but it's relevant here:-

This makes no difference from the normal operation of a country's grid. A grid will normally have sufficient spinning reserve to account for the loss of an entire station. Although wind speeds rise and fall, you are unlikely to see unanticipated changes in wind generation (over the entire grid) at a rate greater than that which can be handled by the plant that is already in the grid.

Take an example like the British grid:- Peak demand 60GW. 1.5GW of spinning reserve available instantly, 2GW of pumped storage available within 16 seconds, 2 GW of open cycle gas turbine generation available within 5 minutes, 8 GW on hot standby available within 2 hours, 10GW more available within 10 hours. This is what is currently in place.

The rate of variability in wind generation, taken over the whole grid is insignificant compared with the contingency already in place to allow for loss of generation and to permit Nuclear plants to run at full power 24/7.

As for dirty foreigners making wind turbines, currently the Chinese are the world's largest producers and aiming to be the world's largest installed base. Maybe belief in climate change has some minor effect on manufacturing policy

In all honesty we have two Vestas plants in my state, wind turbines and towers. We like them even knowing most profits go back home to their country. Why, because they provide jobs above minimum wage and meet all state/fed standards.

China is a much different beast. No jobs here, Mfg. plant elsewhere.