And so it begins...

I can't wait to see the changes in technology as this takes off. Hold onto your seat.

To Van Jones et al - may the wind be at your back ...

actually, what appears to be reality is that all "green energy' project money is intended to put out of work construction workers back to work. Obama talked about creating, what 4.5 million jobs through green energy? that just happens to be the number in the construction pool. this is nothing new. the downside are all the young 'powershift' college activist who won't see these jobs -actually, most of them won't be applying for 'digging ditches' -they'll be more inclined to seek out public affairs and management slots.

so, maybe it is good, maybe it is just another quick fix, just like the housing boom was a quick fix for the economy and five to ten years from now, we'll be out of work again. then again, maybe the 'green movement' will end up becoming a selling ground for 'zero emissions' electricity through nuclear energy.
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ps. Ridgecrest is the Mojave Desert. About two valleys over from Death Valley. All you interested in going down and hitting the pavement, understand it can hit 120 degrees by mid-June. So, working 300' above the asphalt might just turn out to be a perk!

I myself was surprised that TX outpaced CA in terms of wind energy. But hey, our state's population is kinda evenly spread out throughout the land unlike CA's where most of it is on the coastal areas. Anyhow, good luck CA. You're gonna need all the power of wind, solar, and even good biofuels such as hemp and algae out there.

i saw van jones recently at a conference on c-span. what an eloquent advocate for saving the planet!

on my only trip to europe, i rode a bus from vienna to bretislava. for many of the miles there were windmills as far as the eye could see.

Good to see the United States headed in the right direction in some ways. Now, if we could just get China, which depends on coal, to invest heavily in wind energy, it would be a means of doing a little more to save our planet.

Well, it sounds like a good deal to provide jobs in building up the wind farms, but lets take a closer look at what they are building.

Interesting article here:

http://www.sovereignty.net/p/clim/wind-leo.htm

"There are a wide variety of turbines available and under development, and at least 10 major turbine manufacturers, most of them foreign (Vestas, NEG Micron, Mitsubishi). GE manufactures some turbines in the U.S. and some in Europe. As with any product, prices vary with demand, quantity, and currency exchange rates, and are affected by various government R&D subsidy programs."

"Towers of various styles and heights, some manufactured in the U.S. while others are imported."

Sounds like we will import most of the turbines.

"The base and pad area, usually about 50' x 50', contain tons of steel-reinforced concrete and gravel. The amount is determined by local soil conditions, tower height, turbine size, wind conditions, terrain, etc. Each tower (a site usually means 15-20 towers to make investment feasible) requires a hole filled with tons of steel-reinforced concrete. It may be as much as 30 feet deep or more and contain more than 100,000 cubic feet of concrete, production of which is a major source of CO2and other pollutants."

Concrete, huh.

"Because wind farms require hundreds of tons of energy-intensive materials, virtually all of the air emissions associated with the gas or electricity used to make the materials (such as cement or steel) must be counted against the "saved" air emissions once the farm comes on line and displaces fossil-fuel-generated output. For a wind farm of 45 effective MW, for example, the emissions associated with 10 million pounds of materials must be calculated. Scientific and economic analysis of 'embedded' emissions is another indication that the "green" balance sheet for wind is not as rosy as claimed."

Not so green I guess.

"Access roads and clearing of land. Costs are affected by terrain and other local conditions. In some cases, where siting is in wooded areas, trees may be cleared to eliminate interference with wind flow."

Ouch, not the trees too.

"On mountain ridges and many other locations, it may be necessary to blast into the bedrock. Construction at a site on the Slieve Aughty range in Ireland in October 2003 caused a 2.5-mile-long bog slide, due to road construction where the peat bog was stripped down to bedrock. Just as costs for restoration of land for coal strip-mining are passed on to consumers and taxpayers, costs for restoration of land at "wind farm" sites must be allocated."

Great, blasting.

"FPL Energy stated, "although construction is temporary [a few months], it will require heavy equipment, including bulldozers, graders, trenching machines, concrete trucks, flatbed trucks and large cranes." Transporting all the equipment, tower sections and rotor blades into an undeveloped area requires the construction of wide, straight roads. "

Nice, more roads to nowhere and burning oil to get there.

"The job of any wind turbine is to extract energy from the wind, thereby slowing the movement of air. Therefore, the wind turbines must be widely spaced so that they are never in the lee of each other." I quote from an article on the EPA website. 'Contemporary wind projects are typically rated at 25 to 100 MW. A 25 MW project might have 60 to 70 turbines covering 1500 acres.' One MW is a megawatt, one thousand kilowatts, the average per-capita electrical power usage of about 900 U.S. citizens. Let's translate those numbers. Twenty-five megawatts divided by 1500 acres is 16.7 kilowatts per acre, but that's using the nameplate value, which is about five times higher than the average value."

So about 1.6 acres needed per citizen at nameplate energy capacity, and 8 acres per citizen at actual energy provided.

"A single 555-megawatt gas-fired power plant in California generates more electricity in a year than do all 13,000 of the state's wind turbines. The gas-fired plant sits atop a mere 15 acres. The 300-foot-tall windmills impact over a hundred thousand acres, to provide expensive, intermittent, insufficient energy."

Oh boy.

"Some experts urge landowners/local governments to ensure decommissioning costs are covered by cash bonds held by independent third parties. Because many wind farm "owners" are LLCs with few assets and because tax breaks for wind are heavily 'front-loaded' (depreciation, 5-6 years; production tax credit, 10 years), there are huge incentives for the sale of facilities after tax breaks are used, or for abandonment if costs of maintenance, repair and/or replacement rise substantially. There is little protection for landowners/localities from surety bonds that depend on premium payments or cash bonds held by an LLC-owner in case of insolvency or abandonment."

So after 10 years they may walk away and leave if they start breaking down.

"The people who build wind farms are not environmentalists."

No sir.

"There are many variables and some big unknowns. Note that "wind farms" require and consume electricity from the grid to operate control equipment, even when not generating power."

No kidding.

"Since the grid or control area must be kept in balance at all times (supply and demand, frequency, voltage), generating units must be immediately available at all times to provide backup service (or balance) for the electricity (if any) coming from wind turbines. The units providing the backup service may be operating in an automatic generation control mode, running at less than peak capacity, and/or running in spinning reserve mode."

So these back up plants are operating and producing CO2 without even producing electricity that comes from wind power, when there is wind.

"Depending on wind conditions, the amount of backup capacity may have to equal the peak capacity of a "wind farm." That is, if wind conditions exceed the cutout speeds, the entire output of the "wind farm" could be lost."

Ouch.

Wind power is practical on a small scale, small turbines dispersed on a farm, or rooftops of buildings...

genaman
It seems we have also forgotten the birdlife kill of those windmills,oh was the new powers lines erected to the closest grids mention?

How about a different way to use these windmills?
say per town producing much of its own electricity? There is a great energy savings there and many less windmills in an area.

Another idea which has been long in coming saving and storing produced electricity. THat we might have to switch back to direct current still would save many of any power plants from needed to be built.

This could also cut the distance of the wasteful transmission of electricity.

I am told right in most tv and computer monitors there are huge amounts of electricity in storage. Imagine the same in every electric appliance?

I tell you right now this idea most likely has been perfected many years ago. can you guess why it has never been realized?

It is up to people like ourselves to force the powers that be into these techniques og saving produced electricity.

Next January ist,2010 PPL in Pennsylvania will up my electric bill some 35 percent.
But yet still produce electricity the same way. Hey they are not even getting into wind or solar power. Pennsylvania still has many coal fired electric plants
And guess what? WE are the ones at fault for paying their tribute all these years.
If we want CHANCE it is us who is going to have to be in the frontline starting it.
genaman

Instead of bailing out the shaky car industry or rescuing shady banks, this is where bailout money should go: retrain workers for the "green" industry. If Europe can do it, why not North America?

Inconvenient, genaman

Yes, multi-national corporations have destroyed our economy, shipping jobs and manufacturing capacity overseas.

Yes, US corporations have dragged their feet, stymied innovation, decimated government’s ability to protect citizens through stimulating such innovation, and have not kept up with the technology of the present, let alone the future.
Yes, our corrupt banking industry has skewed investment toward huge projects, and created bad investment laws and little government oversight.

Yes, climate deniers and delayers and rabidly anti-cooperative conservatives (since government is simply how we get together to do big things we think society needs) have kept us from responding reasonably to climate change, and now we’re faced with the inefficiencies inherent in rush jobs and crash programs. Those include replacing old things before they’re worn out, and not getting to slow down successive generations of improvements as much as we’d like, to learn from experience. This is just one of the legacies of CBE, Conservative Botching of Everything, and we must all live with it now, while trying to use more sense from here on.

All of those can and must be changed. Government must again become a force for protecting citizens and restraining the powerful and greedy, instead of using punishment and coercion as the answers to every problem.

You mention gas. But we’re not talking about gas. We’re talking about a society based on coal and oil, with a little gas. Gas is the least terrible of the fossil fuels, but it is finite and running out, and of course if we start using more as we use less coal and oil it’ll run out even faster. The actual impact of a fossil fuel burner extends far beyond the building itself, to deep mines, strip mines, mountaintops blasted into streams made toxic by the waste, coal ash dams breaking, oil spills, etc etc. etc. Large, polluting, centralized burners require vastly larger networks of transmission lines than decentralized, local energy systems like residential, commercial-building and farm projects-- rooftop photovoltaics, passive solar heating and cooling, wind, conservation , cogeneration, etc.

I suppose we’ll see this argument (the bad effects of alternative energy sources) tried, maybe with variations, a number of times until it becomes clear that it is so absurd that NO ONE is buying it. It is perfectly obvious to anyone who thinks and reads that conservation, solar, wind, tidal, geothermal and other alternative technologies are far more ecological than coal, oil, gas and nuclear. It is also clear that these are even more effective, ecological and economic when used in combination, as, for example, conservation reduces energy use, making complementary wind, solar and electric vehicles (as short-term energy storage) a fine system for providing all or virtually all of our energy needs, in combination with a smart grid.

And speaking of ridiculous, old, tired and untrue arguments… The real destroyers of wildlife are fossil and nuclear fuels, by a factor of many thousands, at least. Wind generators kill about .01% (that’s one hundredth of a percent) of the birds killed by human structures and acts, not even counting loss of habitat, which is a huge problem in a wasteful coal-and-oil-based society. Wind bird losses have been dramatically cut by siting and technology improvements, which will continue. I’m constantly amazed that people who seem perfectly willing to sacrifice trillions of beings of every description for war, waste, and wealth* suddenly find their affection for our winged cousins when talking about wind energy, and incredibly, passive solar houses (big windows). Curious.

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*actually pseudo-wealth, since our economy consists mainly of turning living beings into dead things and real wealth into fake wealth.