Near Atlantic City, wind farm turbines going up

[struggle4progress]

By Jacqueline L. Urgo
Inquirer Staff Writer

ATLANTIC CITY - <snip>

The 380-foot structures could generate enough energy to power 20,000 homes a day. At a cost of $12 million, it will be New Jersey's first wind farm and the first such coastal facility in the United States. <snip>

Community Energy, with partners such as Exelon and ComEd, operates eight other wind farm projects in the Northeastern United States and one in Illinois. There are about a half-dozen such companies marketing and producing wind energy in the country.

About 39 million watts of wind-generated energy are produced worldwide annually, with Germany accounting for 40 percent of this type of energy. The Atlantic City site will produce about 20 million kilowatt hours each year, Alderfer said. His firm will sell the energy to Atlantic City Electric Co., which will sell it to the Atlantic County Utilities Authority. <snip>

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/living/health/12853290.htm

[TheFarseer]

1. It's good to see this happening

There is a load of them going up in West Texas also.

[Coastie for Truth]

2. We have a wind farm in the Altamont Mountains

between SF Bay and the Central Valley.

The ecological-political issue: we still don't have a reliable (sonic? ultra-sonic) way of diverting off migratory birds.

[Ready4Change]

4. I heard Altomonts problems were due to...

The earlier tech, shorter and faster spinning blades they used? And that more recent designs are taller, with longer, slower moving blades that birds can avoid?

[Coastie for Truth]

7. Altamont was an early design -- And they are

talking of upgrading to a more "bird friendly" design (don't forget - this is California).

My "Bird Friendly" cat - too obese to catch birds-->

<>

[blindpig]

11. That is the Atlantic Flyway.....

Unfortunately, coastal areas with their ocean winds are also favored migratory routes for birds. No easy answers.

[midnight armadillo]

12. Bird deaths

The following is an old post of mine...I periodically repost it in response to the concern about birds. Windmills are the least of their problems.

---

The amount of birds killed by windmills is minuscule compared to the number killed by other human activities.

According to the US Fish & Wildlife Service...(http://www.fws.gov/birds/mortality-fact-sheet.pdf ) annual deaths out of a typical fall population of 20 billion in the US:
* 97-976 million birds dead from window strikes
* 4-40 million from communication towers
* 60 million from cars
* 72 million from pesticides
* 39 million from cats in Wisconsin alone(!)
* 10s to 100s of thousands in fish catching

And the total for wind turbines...wait for it...: 33000!!! There are bigger problems for our feathered friends. Like cats and windows.

[jody]

14. Your link suggests cats are the biggest threat to birds. n/t

[midnight armadillo]

17. That's right.

According to that study, bird deaths due to birds has never been studied nationwide.

It's an argument for keeping cats in, eh? I must admit though that the family cats when I was growing up dearly loved their indoor/outdoor lives.

[bahrbearian]

3. Is chimpy going to stand on one with a bull-horn and declare

war on foreign oil? Vow to bring Osamma to justice?

[ladjf]

5. That's $600 per home. Does that mean that a co-op of 20,000

members could each put up $600 and have free electricity for the life of the windmill, plus maintenance? Those numbers would work.

[skids]

8. A coop doesn't rub shoulders with the right people.

See, in order to buy and sell on the grid (and you'd need to, to bank power) you have to be part of the energy establishment. Or force your way on with legislation and then have the energy establishment drag their feet and do things to sabotage you, like drive up the cost of grid-tie during negotiations. They don't like new faces.

Fortunately, though, some towns are just fine in the eyes of the energy establishment because they have their own G&E's already. Like Hull, MA. Those G&E's are old faces. So they are welcome at the table.

[ladjf]

9. Perhaps it would be possible to design a wind driven system

that was independent of the "grid". In order for that to work, each home might need to have a substantial array of batteries to carry them through the no wind periods.

Or, perhaps the problem with gaining access to the grid could be solved politically. Just because it's a closed group now doesn't mean that it would always have to be that way. I used the number 20,000 just because that's the output of one 380 ft. tower. If there were ten such towers, the home output would be 200,000 homes. That should carry a lot of political clout.

[skids]

10. Or they could just start small with a "shaving" system.

That's an undersized system that you know will rarely exceed your usage. You use grid power as the base provider, and then just shave dollars off with cheap invertors. You don't need to invest in batteries that way, other than a small float battery to act as a honkin pre-invertor capacitor/combiner. Since the system rarely provides over 100% of the need, there is almost no waste so no need for the equipment to send it back to the grid.

You're not totally off the grid that way, but would have a small amount of emergency power if the grid died but the alternative system stayed up. It's a good first step at least.

Anyway, multi-user systems require distribution -- pipes, wires, or an intermediate fuel product -- and that's their achilles heal. Those require a lot of support and maintanance, and right of way on the poles is a treasured possession.

[NNadir]

6. 39 million watts?

How does that translate to units of energy?

Actually, I think the figure is just plain wrong, which is pretty typical of the kind of stuff you hear from journalists, who are notoriously weak at understanding even very simple energy issues.

Wind is doing much better. It now produces 47,616 Megawatts (one assumes "peak" power, i.e. when the wind is blowing) as of 2004 according to the World Wind Power Association. Oh well, what's a factor of 1,205 between friends?

http://www.wind-energie.de/fileadmin/dokumente/statistiken/statisiken_englisch/press_wwea_stats.pdf

(The WWPA is completely silent on the capacity loading factor, thus we hear all about potential capacity, but not real energy.)

Anyway, getting back to this new wind capacity in New Jersey. This is certainly a wonderful report, and on,e parenthetically, I support.

Still one wonders about the need for a breathless report on it. The twenty-million kilowatt-hours claimed for this wind plant in New Jersey will represent what portion of New Jersey's electrical production?

Any idea?

The Hudson coal and gas fired plant, the second largest powerplant in New Jersey, produces 1,120 Megawatts of power. Like almost all coal plants it is a baseload power plant. How many similar windfarms to the one advertised would be required to replace this plant in a baseload capacity?

Any idea?

Let me help you with something called data.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/st_profiles/new_jersey/nj.html#t2

Let's see your calculations.

And now I mention something that's dear to the heart of real environmentalists as opposed to people who engage in pseudo-environmental carping with no real plan or ability to address the subjects of their carping. I note that in 1999, New Jersey released 20 million tons of carbon dioxide of carbon dioxide into the earth's atmosphere. How many tons of carbon dioxide is this new wind capacity going to eliminate?

Finally, if you've been to New Jersey, you know that the wind sometimes doesn't blow here. Why, in fact, it's not blowing right now. I know this because I just went outside to take out the garbage, the garbage being physical garbage and not conceptual garbage. What do you recommend people with large wind capacity use for electricity when the wind isn't blowing?

Pseudo-environmental carp masters piss me off. These are the kinds of people who frequently identify themselves rather generously as "progressives." We know the type - the kind who can go on for hours about the failings of what everyone else is doing but who haven't even the faintest clue about do something themselves. Few among them have any experience or insight about how to build produce a single system or product that meets their self-exalted and wholly unrealistic standards. In short - one of the hallmarks of "progressives" is their inability to engineer "progress." They are in fact members of the famously incompetant "peanut gallery," with emphasis on the peanuts.

Let's hear it then. What do you recommend that future wind dependent economies do when the wind isn't blowing?

[jpak]

13. What is the current wind speed at 380 feet?????

any clues????

I worked at a marine lab in Denmark in 1995 and got to personally observe the operation of several wind turbines.

On days when the surface (boundary layer) wind speed was imperceptible, the turbines were operating (and silently I might add).

I guess that's why they mount wind turbines on tall towers.

But what to do when the wind isn't blowing?????

Make hydrogen when it is blowing, and store it for use when it's not blowing.

http://www.energycooperation.org/windproductionH2.htm

That's what they're doing today in Norway...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1506959,00.html

and Denmark is way ahead of anyone in wind turbine grid management with hydrogen electrolyzers...

www.risoe.dk/rispubl/nei/33030-0034.pdf

BTW: Denmark does NOT import nuclear generated electricity from La France when the "wind don't blow"...

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/74/newsDate/04-Jun-1999/story.htm

Their grid is interlinked with Scandinavia and Germany, NOT France...

[skids]

15. H2 will give way to better technologies.

Vanadium redox batteries have an in/out return efficiency in the range of 80%.

Flywheels have higher efficiency than that, though for the moment they are very pricey.

H2 fuel cells make horrible electric batteries, with return efficiencies on the order of 30 to 40%.

Not that they don't have their place, and noting that vanadium redox batteries wouldn't be around if it hadn't been for groundbreaking H2 fuel cell research, but the wild genuflecting that people do at the H2 altar doesn't help the renewables cause very much. The core of fuel cell technology is the PEM, not the H2. It's a false god, so to speak.

Read through your last link -- they have a nice comparison of alternatives to H2 at the end.

[jpak]

16. Flame

:hi:

Electrolysis of water to hydrogen has an "efficiency" of ~80-85% (1 joule invested yields ~0.8-085 J of hydrogen).

Hydrogen fuel cells have a theoretical efficiency of ~80-85% as well converting hydrogen to electricity.

The overall theoretical efficiency ~60% (if you deduct for compressors etc.)

Which ain't bad.

The current generation of fuel cells have efficiencies well below the theoretical.

Molten carbonate FC's, however, have demonstrated efficiencies of 60-80% and have been built and tested at industrial scale sizes (2-11 MW).

http://americanhistory.si.edu/fuelcells/basics.htm

Low pressure tanks can be scaled to hold large volumes hydrogen to buffer renewable energy systems without any technical breakthroughs.

IMHO this is the way to go in the near term...

(but then again it's all good...)

:)

[skids]

18. Can't see it as competitive anymore.

If we want to talk theoretical, vanadium redox is 85%. That's 85% electricity in to electricity out, minus power electronics.

But theoreticals get us nowhere.

Molten carbonate FC's are great except for the operating temperature. You'll note the high temperature NaS flow batteries were discarded as an idea by the Dutch for high operating temperature, and they have a lower operating temp than molten carbonate FC's (and extremely high return efficiency -- 89%.)

As far as storage, I'd rather maintain some vats of light sulfuric acid vanadium electrolyte than H2 pressure tanks, personally.

The only reason to continue with H2 cells in areas other than automotive (and even there there is competition) is to leverage existing infrastructure. A new build would be better off with one of the many alternatives.

http://www.electricitystorage.org/tech/technologies_comparisons.htm