the death of coal?

Quote: Pacomartin

I can see your point, but surely it wouldn't hurt to have 100% net metering. The "customer-generators" would probably give much more than 100% in an effort to have a buffer against a bad month. Plus the resident would still be liable for the customer charge every month ($15 where I am, but varies with location).

As most people cannot produce electricity at costs lower than the utility, it will remain a hobby for the philosophical crowd, more than a true business.

My only issue here is reliability. I do not know how to run a power grid but I am pretty sure it is a balancing act. Unpredictable power coming into the system is one more thing to balance. Then there is can the local lines handle the capacity?

Show that all can be balanced and I am cool with it. I am against it if all interests are not balanced.

Quote: petroglyph

I don't think any of these big windmills will in their lifespans be net positive for the KW used to construct them. I haven't seen one yet that would produce what is on the nameplate. So when a facility is "rated" at 2mg or 10 or whatever claimed, that is potential power creation, not actual. So in winds case the guys still working it figure around a third of nameplate.

A friend worked on one I believe in Mich. He said the whole thing weighed around 320 tons. That is not all iron but if it were, figure what the energy cost to mine the ore in Australia, ship it to China, process and smelt it and create steel, ship it to Florida to Florida power who makes a lot of windmills, manufacture the parts, put them on a truck or ship them to location, prepare many tons of rebar reinforced footings, bring in crews and tall and big cranes to erect, then the switchgear to connect it to the grid, and phase synchronising gear. They never pay for themselves in their useful lifetimes. It is all a hoax.

Please point me to some hard data to back up this claim.

If your claim is correct, there sure are a lot of scientists in on the hoax:

This source says the energy payback time is between 5 or 6 months.

This source says 8 months to 27 months.

This source says 7 months.

Per Wikipedia, windmill manufacturers Vestas says 9 months, whereas Siemens says 10 months. (As wind manufacturers, those sources are biased, so feel free to discard their claims.)

With a 15 year lifecycle do you really believe windmills don't recoup their energy costs?

It takes energy to build a coal plant, or a nuke plant. And it takes energy to mine uranium & coal. Everything has a cost...

Quote: reno

... says the energy payback time is between 5 or 6 months.

It is not clear if "petroglyph" is talking about "energy payback" or "financial payback". The articles you talked about are clearly "energy payback" , and are talking about a major forest of windmills. The cost to an individual on a personal windmill are going to be very different.

Quote: AZDuffman

I do not know how to run a power grid but I am pretty sure it is a balancing act. Unpredictable power coming into the system is one more thing to balance.

It certainly is a balancing act. I think the "customer generator" who is generating 2 MW of electricity may be one thing, but certainly someone who is trying to generate the power for a single home and 100% net metering can't be a big issue.

Quote: Pacomartin

It certainly is a balancing act. I think the "customer generator" who is generating 2 MW of electricity may be one thing, but certainly someone who is trying to generate the power for a single home and 100% net metering can't be a big issue.

"One Person?" No. 3-5% or more of the entire grid? A different question. Again, I do not run a grid, but logically thousands of extra inputs affects things.

Why should the power company buy back the power from you at the same rate you paid for it. You in effect rented the power for free then. Try going to McD's and get a few burgers today and then return some burgers the next day and want a full refund. The consumer needs to be paying a reasonable standbye charge for the power company to have that power available on demand for the consumer. The power company can't count on the power from the solar cells and must size their capacity and lines for the worst case scenerio ie winter storms like we had last year with no power returning to the grid for weeks.

Quote: Pacomartin

It is not clear if "petroglyph" is talking about "energy payback" or "financial payback". The articles you talked about are clearly "energy payback" , and are talking about a major forest of windmills.

I got the sense that petroglyph was talking about both, but I was specifically responding to his point about energy cost, (not the dollar cost).

Quote: petroglyph

I don't think any of these big windmills will in their lifespans be net positive for the KW used to construct them... That is not all iron but if it were, figure what the energy cost to mine the ore in Australia, ship it to China, process and smelt it and create steel, ship it to Florida to Florida power who makes a lot of windmills, manufacture the parts, put them on a truck or ship them to location, prepare many tons of rebar reinforced footings, bring in crews and tall and big cranes to erect, then the switchgear to connect it to the grid, and phase synchronising gear. They never pay for themselves in their useful lifetimes. It is all a hoax.

Seems like a lot of windmill parts could be refurbished. Other parts should last with proper care a hundred years just like a regular building structure so you don't have to start from scratch.. The thing is not driving around getting wrecked like a car.

Quote: rxwine

Seems like a lot of windmill parts could be refurbished. Other parts should last with proper care a hundred years just like a regular building structure so you don't have to start from scratch.. The thing is not driving around getting wrecked like a car.

Refurbishing structures usually costs as much or more than starting from scratch so the little value in what is there once you need to do a major refurbishment.

Quote: kenarman

Why should the power company buy back the power from you at the same rate you paid for it. You in effect rented the power for free then. Try going to McD's and get a few burgers today and then return some burgers the next day and want a full refund.

The consumer needs to be paying a reasonable standbye charge for the power company to have that power available on demand for the consumer. The power company can't count on the power from the solar cells and must size their capacity and lines for the worst case scenerio ie winter storms like we had last year with no power returning to the grid for weeks.

Well an electric utility is not the same kind of company as McDonalds. You might as well ask why a power company should encourage conservation measures who help in replacing energy inefficient appliances. Power utilities have obligations to the public well being.

Besides, these standards have been in place for a long time. In PA they were part of the Alternative Energy Portfolio Standards Act of 2004. I am in favor of a lower standard than currently exists in law. I am in favor of net metering only to 100% of a customer needs, not for a revenue generation from the utility.

Quote: reno

Please point me to some hard data to back up this claim.

If your claim is correct, there sure are a lot of scientists in on the hoax:

This source says the energy payback time is between 5 or 6 months.

My point on this is just like I wrote. The net energy produced when the cost to put these giant structures in place by my estimation won't be net positive for around twenty years. The warranty is I believe one year.

In the article you mentioned "The work presented examines life cycle environmental impacts of two 2.0 MW wind turbines. Manufacturing, transport, installation, maintenance, and end of life have been considered for both models and are compared using the ReCiPe 2008 impact assessment method. In addition, energy payback analysis was conducted based on the cumulative energy demand and the energy produced by the wind turbines over 20 years."

This guy is saying that this estimate uses nameplate 2MW as part of his estimate of payback time. I'm saying I haven't seen these windmills or anything else produce what it says it will. His estimate apparently claims not only nameplate generation but the wind never dies down or fluctuates? If you want steady power from wind, it takes battery backup to smooth out the fluctuations in wind. I don't see those costs mentioned. The switches go crazy trying to regulate the other generation that they are married up with in the system. Everything is high tech now and the constant making and breaking of the load burns out expensive equipment regularly. Somewhere in every system making and breaking load there is a sacrificial element. These ones are many thousands of dollars each [siemens], and the downtime, and expense of repair isn't in the profit equation on wind energy either. I am talking true cost, not headline.

The 3 windmills pictured in Kodiak which are an example referenced far and wide cost around 15 million dollars to get running, sans the maintenance which is continual. They make around half nameplate, but the grid [at least there] doesn't like what they are putting out. It messes with the power factor, [a measurement to indicate type and quality of watts]. The island is possibly and unfair example as much of the load there is motors. Windmills are lousy for base generation as they have no reserve capacity to draw from, for switching or load shock, as in a large demand coming online all of a sudden, so the company needs something to balance the shockload. They have already had to replace the leading edges of the blades, and install battery backup to balance the generating ability of the windmills, this doesn't seem to make it into the cost/benefit analysis. If the fed's weren't loaning the money out [ours] at point zero, zero something percent, the interest on the loan would cost more than the surplus valure of the electricity made , imo. They are a political bonanza when the true cost is never mentioned, who doesn't like free clean power?

Maybe somebody can help me with the math, using my statement about mining the ore from Australia and turning it into a working windmill somewhere. I'll will try a little? So 2MW's divide by 1kw is 2000 x [.15?] per kwh is about 300 dollars per hour at full steam +/-. So 3 hundred per hour is 7200 per day, [round the clock, nameplate production, wind never stops] x 30 days per month is 216000 per month of generation. This guy says payback in 6 months? Maybe my math is fuzzy, but these things are as needy as hell.

Many are genning in salt air. Corrosion never sleeps. That salt air is working not only on the iron structures but the gen motors themselves which have mass amounts of dissimilar metals. Try bolting aluminum to copper to lead to iron, stand back and watch it rot. That 216k per month doesn't include the steady deterioration under adverse conditions or the battery back ups. When blades are being worked on , they aren't genning, many times when the blades are spinning they aren't making power.

Plenty of links about the negatives of wind power if you are interested, I peeked but didn't go into depth here: https://www.wind-watch.org/

Then this; http://www.eastcountymagazine.org/ocotillo-wind-farm-keeps-limping " the Ocotillo wind farm produced just 18% of capacity in 2014. Eighteen percent of capacity, ouch!

I have seen people going off grid and powering their homes with wind, it is a beautiful thing. There are many personal units available very reasonably priced. I talked to one guy here who lived off of a 1kw unit for years, until his daughters became teenagers, then he had to add a unit. lol. When people talk about personal windmills [with battery backup and inverter] when repairs are made, the labor is generally "free" as they do the work themselves. That doesn't happen on an industrial scale.

Quote:

This source says 8 months to 27 months.

Quote:

...Siemens says 10 months. (As wind manufacturers, those sources are biased, so feel free to discard their claims.)

I have installed a lot of Siemens equipment, it is generally very good stuff. I worked on the original installation of the light rail in Portland Ore., the common belief was, they were furnishing equipment at a loss as it was such a new field [US] and they wanted a foot in the door? Not sure how it has worked for them since. Siemens is definitely a world leader in electrical manufacture.

Quote:

With a 15 year lifecycle do you really believe windmills don't recoup their energy costs?

See links, dead birds, vibration, turbine failures and fires, downtime, etc. What is the value of the mill after 15 years, is it still worth what they paid or is it then scrap? If we use the mills I mentioned, if you had to shove them into the ocean after 15 years, would they have made 15 million dollars worth of profit for the company minus what the continual cost of maintenance is? I hope so, but I don't believe it.

Quote:

It takes energy to build a coal plant, or a nuke plant. And it takes energy to mine uranium & coal. Everything has a cost...

PGE built a nuke across from Kalama Wa, in Ore., WAG, the rumor was it payed for itself in 2 years.

I started to read your second link and it appeared to me pretty biased for clean power and I didn't agree with his opinion. The article also mentions "remote, not connected to the grid". I skipped the 3rd, but my opinion stands on the efficacy of wind power at least as it is now being advertised.