First wind farm in N.H. about to open

[struggle4progress]

... In southwestern New Hampshire, Lempster has approved a plan by a Pennsylvania company to erect 12 wind turbines, much larger than Loranger's, on Lempster Mountain.

Vermont has the Searsburg wind farm, which dates from 1997, with 11 turbines on a ridge line next to the Green Mountain National Forest. The company involved, the Deerfield Wind Project, wants to add 20 to 30 turbines extending into neighboring Readsboro.

In western Maine, a Canadian company wants to erect 200 wind turbines on mountains north of the Sugarloaf USA ski area. TransCanada is seeking state approval for the wind farm, which would generate enough power for 70,000 households.

Another project, a joint venture of Endless Energy Corp. of Yarmouth and California-based Edison Mission Group, calls for 30 wind turbines just west of Sugarloaf. The Land Use Regulation Commission is reviewing Maine Mountain Power LLC's 1,600-page proposal ...

http://www.wfsb.com/Global/story.asp?S=4334285

[bbinacan]

1. Good idea and it

reduces our dependence on other nasty forms of energy.:woohoo: :applause:

[NNadir]

2. Big Wind!

From the link:

Some environmentalists are fighting the larger wind projects. They say 300- to 400-foot towers are too big, noisy and destructive to birds and bats, which can be killed by the spinning blades.

Lisa Linowes of National Wind Watch says a project on the scale of Loranger's isn't nearly as bad as some. But if it succeeds, she predicts big companies will try to move in to capitalize on the resource.

"What he will do is invite big wind into Berlin," she predicted.

"Big oil," "big coal," and now "big wind."

Some people think that being environmentalist is coterminal with being a vaguely socialist "progressive." It is not. An enviromentalist is someone who gives a shit about the environment. Working for the environment involves proposing and enacting practical solutions, since impractical solutions leave the environment in the same state that it already is: Terrible.

Generally when a person describes himself or herself as a "progressive," he is substituting a euphemism for the word "hypocrite." Progressives are in fact to a man and woman, opposed to progress, including progress on the environment. All they can do is to raise specious objections to everything, including in this case, the tired old shibboleth about birds and wind farms.

"Big wind," of course is a good idea, since if wind power gets say, 5X, bigger, no matter who owns it, it might reach one exajoule and reach a full percentage point of the 105 exajoule US energy demand. This would be a happy outcome, not a negative one. It would represent environmental progress.

[JohnWxy]

17. Bird deaths and other falling sky scenarios

Studies have confirmed that bird deaths from wind turbines are vanishingly small when compared to death by buildings, high tension lines, bridges, towers and other structures. The noise from wind farms has been wildly exaggerated too. Frankly I don't think I could hear a wind turbine situated in South Dakota or Wyuoming. The areas of greatest wind potential, other than coastal areas are the Great Plains states, where mostly just Bufalo roam (well, okay, cattle). ONe of great thinkgs about wind farms is that they permit dual use of the land. Farmers can farm, cattle can graze and grass can grow, all while the wind generators turn gracefully in the wind.

Fact and fancy about wind power

[phantom power]

3. I wonder when/if anybody will start deploying these by the 1000s or 10000s

By my estimates, we need these by the hundreds of thousands to make any useful impact on the national energy budget. More, to account for redundancy on windless days.

I'm always glad to see anything, but if people keep building these things by increments of 11, 30, 200, etc, they'll never become relevant in time to make a difference.

[jpak]

4. Maine is well on the way toward 100% renewable electricity capacity

Currently, wood-fired, small hydro and waste-to-energy plants (1066 MW total capacity) generate ~50% of the state's electricity (~5.6 million MWh per year).

(Note 1: waste wood from Maine's forest products industry provides 80-90% of the wood consumed by Maine biomass plants - the remainder is comprised of demolition debris and non-merchantable wood).

There are currently ~900 MW of wind generating capacity in various stages of planning/contraction in Maine.

With aggressive conservation efforts and domestic PV and small wind turbine installations (driven by economics and/or state policy) Maine should become self-sufficient with renewable electricity in the next twenty years.

(Note 2: Maine Democrats have proposed a ban the sale of non-Energy Star rated appliances in the state. Maine Republicans are opposing this legislation. Maine also initiated a $2.80 per watt rebate on residential PV this year. The latter has contributed to a state- and nation-wide shortage of PV modules as demand has greatly outstripped domestic supply).

(Note 3: Maine paper mills have recently installed ~620 MW of gas-fired combined-cycle co-generation capacity at sites in Jay, Rumford and Bucksport. These plants make very efficient use of natural gas and cannot be replaced by nuclear electricity - they could however, be replaced by biomass co-generation plants in the future).

(Note 4: Maine also has modest but unexploited potential for biogas/landfill gas production at municipal landfills, sewage treatment plants and dairy farms).

(Note 5: Maine is currently an net exporter of electricity to ISO New England).

As Maine Goes...etc....

[phantom power]

5. That's good, but their population is only 1.3 million people.

For example, that's about 1/4 the population of the Phoenix metro area. About 1/2 of one percent of America's population.

[jpak]

6. Sunny Arizona can't produce solar electricity????

Japan's doing it...

http://www.earthscan.co.uk/news/article/mps/UAN/350/v/3/sp/332930698688342940220

http://www.oja-services.nl/iea-pvps/isr/31.htm

Blue states like Maine can do it.

Red states are going to have to step up...

:)

[phantom power]

7. Sure, but who's buying it?

[jpak]

8. Not Republicans

I know you're not one....

:hi:

... that's a comment on GOP energy policy.

If Japan can rapidly build its (profitable and soon-to-be unsubsidized) PV industry - so can we.

But it won't happen with ChimpCo in charge...

[phantom power]

9. The economics of it all will force changes of some kind.

Oil and natural gas are several times more expensive than they were five years ago. Barring any massive new discoveries of either (which absolutely nobody with any credibility is predicting), it seems very safe to say that the cost will continue to trend upward from here on out.

If we buck history and display some consideration for the future, that pretty much leaves solar, wind or nuclear to take up most of the slack. My biggest fear is that we happen to sit on large deposits of cheap coal. Anything is better than that, but it may very well be what Americans turn to, in search of a quick fix.

Trees and hills, Vinculus? When did you last see a tree or a hill? Why don't you say that magic is written on the faces of dirty houses or that smoke writes magic in the sky?
--Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel, by Susanna Clarke

[jpak]

10. Agreed

Unfortunately we saw this coming three decades ago (and did nothing about it).

[NNadir]

11. Japan produced less than 2% of its electricity by wind, solar and

geothermal energy combined. It is not easy to find out how much of this is represented by solar electricity, especially in units of energy. One can find breathless accounts of peak "watts" however.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/Japan/Electricity.html

If one includes burning garbage and wood, Japan's 2003 renewable output was 27.85 billion kilowatt-hours out of a total electrical production of 1017 billion kilowatt-hours.

This is a country on the ring of fire with active volcanoes, which should, one supposes, make geothermal energy attractive. For some reason though, it's not.

http://hakone.eri.u-tokyo.ac.jp/vrc/erup/erup.html

I would agree that Japan is far more advanced than most countries on earth on the solar score, since most countries are far closer to zero. According to Solarbuzz, Japan installed 331 Mega"watts" of solar electricity in the period between 1994-2001, where we are referring to magical solar peak "watts" and not physicist watts in more than 58,000 homes. Even if one represents magical peak "watts" as being equivalent to physicist watts, this is not the equivalent of a single smallish coal or gas fired plant.

Electricity in Japan is some of the most expensive in the world, since the bulk of the electricity there is produced using imported fossil fuels. Therefore it should be the country where solar generated electricity should be going gang-busters.

http://www.solarbuzz.com/FastFactsJapan.htm

For some reason though, actual production is very small, certainly much less than the 2% that includes wind and geothermal. Many people like to use electricity at night, I guess. I know I do.

Everybody keeps crowing about the fantastic success of the solar industry, except when you look for it, one really can't find much energy (especially when one notices that the SI unit of energy is the Joule, not the Watt) produced so much as it produces enthusiastic websites, posts and a string of promises stretching endlessly through the decades back to the 1950s, to 1954 when the first photovoltaic was announced by Bell Labs.

No country dominating the solar industry is mentioned as being the next Saudi Arabia.

Japan has not really invested as much government money in photovoltaic research as had the United States, at least as of 1999.



http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/solar.renewables/rea_issues/fig1s.html

No amount of investment since the mid 1980's has produced, in any country as yet, much in cost reductions for solar cells. The price per magic solar "watt" has remained fairly flat since the mid 1980's and is now rising. This would seem to contradict the frequently made prediction that when solar cell production increased the prices would fall, as loudly cheering people are always noting - at least in percentage terms when compared to itself, if not in impressive amounts of energy produced - how rapidly the solar industry is growing.



http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/solar.renewables/rea_issues/fig1s.html

www.solarbuzz.com

Most industries are considered mature after 40 years. The solar industry, however, is perennially "emerging."

[jpak]

12. LOL!

The cost of domestic PV electricity in Japan is ~$0.11-0.15 per kwh as opposed to $0.21 per kwh from the nuclear/fossil Japanese grid.

The global rise in PV module prices last year was due to a huge increase in demand that was not met by supply. This was especially true in the US as domestic PV manufacturers increased exports to the lucrative EU PV market and curtailed supplies to US dealers.

German and Japanese PV manufacturers are rapidly expanding their production capacities and will soon be able to meet the exponentially growing demand for PV in the EU and US. Once this happens, the cost of PV modules will continue their historic decline. PV cell and module prices are expected to drop to <$1 and <$2 per peak watt, respectively, in 10 years.

*FYI* peak PV watts are "physicist watts" (a stupid moniker to say the least) and any claims to the contrary are just plain laughable nonsense.

And yes, Ronald Reagan, Bush 1 and the Corrupt GOP '80's Congress (who hated Greenpeace, despised solar energy and were rabidly pronucular BTW) cut US PV R&D by from ~$130 million during the last year of the Carter* administration to less than $40 million a year. They eliminated federal solar tax credits to homeowners as well. US PV R&D increased modestly during the first Clinton/Gore administration but was again slashed by the Gingrich Impeachment Congress (who hated Greenpeace, despised solar energy and were rabidly pronucular).

* President James Earl Carter, Jr. (D): a real engineer who easily grasped the concept of PV module nameplate ratings.

Thanks for pointing out the political affiliations of those support solar energy and those who don't.

[NNadir]

14. Really? Reagan determined the fate of the Japanese solar industry?

This IS a surprise.

I suppose that in an imperialist way, we could attribute the near non-existence of the Japanese solar industry to Ronald Reagan.

I suppose we should also suppose that an industry that cannot meet a tiny demand is in a position to address global climate change.

I also note that the Japanese renewable production is NOT mostly solar energy. The solar fraud, 58,000 homes worth (no million solar roofs here), is buried in the total renewables market, which includes the far more workable geothermal industry. If we subtracted geothermal from the Japanese "renewables" budget, what exactly would that budget be in units of energy. For a picture of scale, one should not that the Japanese population is 129 million not 129 thousand.


Personally I have grown old waiting for the promised affordability and competitiveness of solar electricity. Shit, I used to spout these predictions myself back in the 1970's when - to my undying regret - I opposed (successfully) the Shoreham nuclear plant. "Solar energy will be competitive in ten years," I used to loudly pontificate.

If the solar industry put up instead of focusing on blab, well, no one would even be talking about building nuclear power plants, or gas fired power plants or coal fired power plants, would they?

The entire solar PV industry remains exactly what it was then, talk, talk, talk and more talk.

Meanwhile the seas rise, the glaciers melt and people die.

My Governor elect, John Corzine, was asked about the Oyster Creek nuclear plant license extention and said simply "we need the energy," which of course is true. Doug Forrester, Repuke moron, opposed the license extention.

Of course, the mindless approach to decisions about energy is to use logical fallacies as I point out frequently, the one being used here, being known as "guilt by association." It is the (dubious) claim that saying "Dick Cheney supports nuclear energy" means that nuclear energy is evil. I note that Dick Cheney makes his living at nuclear scare mongering though. You didn't hear me scream "uranium! uranium! uranium!" like Colin Powell or Dick Cheney to justify the murder of human beings in service to an excuse to steal yet more fossil fuel.

But no matter.

The big powerful solar industry can stop other forms of energy by competing with them, part of competition including the production of energy, the SI unit not being "magical solar peak 'watts'" but joules, as in exajoules. Until then it's just talk.

There is no Japanese renewable miracle. Renewables are 2% of electrical production Japan, in spite of all the good will and propaganda expressed to and by various Japanese toward solar and other renewable forms of energy. This, obviously, is not because renewable energy is economical. If it becomes economical, so much the better, but it is not, nor has nearly 50 years of saying renewable energy will be economic someday made it so. Over promising and under delivering is bad business. Everyone wants more renewable energy, but no one wants it so much that they are willing to freeze to death or live in darkness with no access to food, health care, and even entertainment. That, unfortunately, is how the matter comes down, though. Solar energy is a rich toy for rich boys.

Meanwhile, in spite of lots of loud mouthed posturing and prediction (also decades old) of the imminent demise of the nuclear industry, the world capacity for nuclear energy is about to increase rapidly, not only in percentage terms, but also as measured in exajoules produced. Most people are aware of global climate change and are rather tired of the empty promises of solar fetishists and their absurd cataloging of every loose bolt in every nuclear power plant. Global climate change is an emergency, not a game for petulant children.

Annual nuclear energy production increased from 2.5 exajoules to 9.0 exajoules from 1980 (the year after Three Mile Island famously "sounded the death knell of the nuclear industry") until 2003. It did this while many people, myself included for a while, were agitating against it.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/table27.xls

The solar PV industry has yet to produce a single exajoule in its entire existence, never mind annually.

No nuclear advocate every tries to shut down the solar industry because it is more dangerous than the nuclear industry, although that it is so, is measurable. www.externe.info (click on results.) I have never, for instance, told someone not to install a solar system because I believe that solar power is bad for the prospects of nuclear power. In fact, I have occasionally written the opposite. I have noted that solar PV, were it affordable, would represent an excellent peak load system, since nuclear power plants as they generally exist now are poorly suited for meeting peak loads, a limitation I freely confess.

Thus I am pleased when someone installs a solar system: It's no skin off my back. This is not the same as saying, however, that I think solar power is an alternative to nuclear power. It is not. My view is that a possible plus for solar power is to replace peak gas capacity, natural gas being an extremely dangerous and dirty fuel. This is because natural gas powered electrical generation is widely used to address peak loads, peaks that often occur when solar electricity would theoretically be most available, on hot sunny days. Were it actually viable, the solar industry would be able - because of poor public education - to shut the coal industry, the gas industry, the oil industry and the nuclear industry simply by becoming what its advocates keep promising it will become. (If you don't have to deliver on them, why not make BIG promises.) Because the public is so scientifically illiterate and can't do simple risk analysis, because the solar industry is so tiny that its environmental impact registers as poorly as its production, the world is screaming in favor of the solar industry - until at least the costs register in simple dollars and cents. In other words, the solar industry, if it wants to stop any other energy industry only need deliver. And that's the problem. The solar industry can't deliver, not now, historically, not ever.

I note that when there are no fossil fuels being used anywhere on the earth, I will be happy, thrilled in fact, to discuss the relative merits and demerits of the replacements.

My chief concern is not to prevent the wider use of solar energy. It is to arrest global climate change. If people can do use solar energy to slow global climate change, I say, "Mazeltov!" Good for them. For those who claim that solar energy is ideally suited for ending global climate change I also say, "Just shut up and do it, then! Produce!"

The truth is that global climate change represents the greatest risk humanity has ever collectively faced. This is not because it could happen but because it is happening. Global climate change not going to start in ten years, when it is claimed, in a kind of tedious redundant chant, that solar PV power will suddenly be competitive. It is happening now.

The fact is that the risk of global climate change dwarfs, by far, any risk associated with the use of nuclear energy, real or imagined. The risks of global climate change and the continued use of fossil fuels obviate completely the truth:

There is no such thing as risk free energy. There is only risk minimized energy. That energy is nuclear energy.

[jpak]

15. As of 2004 there were 169,000 Japanese homes with PV not 58,000.

Domestic PV in Japan is already more than "competitive" with nuclear/fossil electricity from the Japanese grid.

At current the current rate of growth, there WILL be a Million Solar Homes in Japan in under 10 years. By 2030, 50% of Japanese homes will be equipped with PV - half the population.

The "near non-existence" of the Japanese PV industry???? LOL!!! It's an exponentially growing profitable multi-billion business that produced >600 MW of PV cells in 2004.

The comments on Corzine and Oyster Creek are GOP talking points that Corzine discredited during the last election...

http://www.corzineforgovernor.com/press/view/?id=240

The outgoing Democratic governor of New Jersey also opposed Oyster Creek's relicensing.

Anybody opposed to relicensing Oyster Creek is a "moron" whether they be Democrat or Republican????? Petulant children indeed.

The War in Iraq and the new nuclear power plants that will be financed by US taxpayers under the outrageous so-called "Energy Bill" passed last year are the direct results of Cheney Administration policies that I oppose.

Dick Cheney's office was equipped with a revolving door to accommodate all the nuclear industry lobbyists that threw millions at the GOP to get those plants built.

Anyone that supports the policy responsible for the construction of these plants supports GOP/ChimpCo energy policy - period.

PV manufacture more "dangerous" than uranium mining, milling and enrichment????

That's one for the Lounge.

Please tell us about the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act....

http://www.usdoj.gov/civil/torts/const/reca/about.htm

Then tell us all about mortality and morbidity at US PV manufacturing plants...

....and *shhhhhhh* we won't even mention Chernobyl or ChimpCo's I-ain't-got-no-war-plans-on-my-desk plan to attack Iran's "peaceful" nuclear infrastructure....

:rofl:

[NNadir]

16. Is it even 1% of Japanese homes? Has it stopped global climate change?

No and no. In fact the biggest risk of solar PV power is it's inability to address global climate change. It's teeny, as anyone who knows how to measure energy knows. The main risk of solar PV energy is that people will be lulled into complacency about global climate change by thinking that solar PV energy has delivered on its promises, or can deliver on its promises.

Apparently it can't.

Now I will address the dubious claim that ignoring risk is the same thing as providing safety.

The solar industry is too tiny to measure any health and environmental effects, except in Germany, which has been done in the ExternE reports, but I note that the related semiconductor industry has not been a beacon of environmental thrills.

In Germany, the only country with a solar PV industry of a scale that can be measured, the European Union measures the PV health impact in costs as 0.45 eurocents per kilowatt-hour. The corresponding cost for nuclear power is 0.17 eurocents/kw-hr. In greenhouse gas avoidance costs, the cost for PV is 0.33 eurocents/kw-hr, exceeding nuclear's 0.03 cents/kw-hr by an order of magnitude.

http://www.itas.fzk.de/deu/tadn/tadn013/frbi01a.htm

Tough shit. It's data.

Of course, when people die from handling chlorosilanes, or get cancer from them, the world media doesn't run around screaming. When waste manifests from solar manufacturing plants are improperly filled out, millions of breathless internet comments are not posted.

But no matter.

Solar PV power, while it is not as safe as nuclear except in the imaginations of those who are preternaturally uninformed, is safer than coal, oil and natural gas. Thus when someone shells out bucks for such capacity, it is a good thing.

But by and large, when measured in units of energy, the SI unit of energy being a joule and not a magic peak solar "watt," the solar PV industry has not produced anything of significant scale. Promises of delivery are not the same as delivery, especially when they've been going on for 40 years.

When the world has stopped using fossil fuels, I will happy to discuss the relative merits of the technologies that replaced them. However, again, global climate change is happening now, not when solar PV power becomes competitive or has reached a level of an exajoule per year or even an exajoule in its lifetime.

Actually the biggest risk in the crisis is doing nothing. Measured in terms of delivery the solar energy industry - even including good technologies like solar concentrator plants - has done next to nothing. My suggestion for solar advocates is to do what the nuclear industry does: Deliver. Again, the unit is exajoules.

The world has recognized the nature of the global climate change problem, and unobstructed now by useless commentary from the crowd of useless and poorly educated people, it is committing big time to nuclear energy. It is necessary to produce energy that people know how to produce with minimal environmental impact.

People like to pretend that if they find some web site here or there that says "so and so" has been injured by something involving nuclear energy, that they have established that nuclear energy is worse than it's alternatives. This is absurd. If every energy industry were shut every time some "so and so" were injured - even if a full website were dedicated to every single case, say, where a person fell off a roof installing a solar system - there would be no energy, after which many people would be injured stumbling around in the dark and having nothing to eat, no health care, no educations, no lives. (In Nigeria the per capita power demand is 8 watts.) Useless people would not be able to fly off to Antarctica, dragging oil drums with them, to have themselves photographed on the pack ice pretending to be important.

The reality is this: There is no such thing as risk free energy. There is only risk minimized energy. That energy is nuclear energy.

[JohnWxy]

13. Study concludes Wind Energy potential for U.S. equals 1.5 times current

total demand!

Wind Energy Potential in the United States

Estimates of the electricity that could potentially be generated by wind power and of the land area available for wind energy have been calculated for the contiguous United States. The estimates are based on published wind resource data and exclude windy lands that are not suitable for development as a result of environmental and land-use considerations. Despite these exclusions, the potential electric power from wind energy is surprisingly large. Good wind areas, which cover 6% of the contiguous U.S. land area, have the potential to supply more than one and a half times the current electricity consumption of the United States. Technology under development today will be capable of producing electricity economically from good wind sites in many regions of the country.

Energy<span lang="en-us"">Wind ENergy untapped resource

[JohnWxy]

18. You are right.

All you have to do is convince this administration and the Republicans to stop listening to their Oil, Gas and Coal lobbyists and aggressively promote wind power.

Wind piower is now cheaper than coal or Natural Gas but you can't get Republicans to recognize it exists.

If wind farms were financed the same way utilities finance Coal, and Natural Gas fired plants the cost of wind power electricity would go down 40%.

Fuel -----------------Levelized costs (cents/kWh) (1996)
Coal ........................4.8-5.5
Gas .........................3.9-4.4
Hydro ......................5.1-11.3
Biomass ...................5.8-11.6
Nuclear .....................11.1-14.5
Wind (without PTC) .... 4.0-6.0
Wind (with PTC) ..........3.3-5.3

http://www.awea.org/pubs/factsheets.html

The cost of natural gas has increased since 1996, so that the levelized cost of gas–
fired power plants would now be considerably higher. In January 2001, the cost of
natural gas generated power was running as high as 15 cents to 20 cents per kWh in
certain markets <3>. The cost of wind power, meanwhile, has declined slightly.
Four additional points about the economics of wind energy should be considered when
estimating its relative cost.

First, the cost of wind energy is strongly affected by average wind speed and the size
of a wind farm. Since the energy that the wind contains is a function of the cube of its
speed, small differences in average winds from site to site mean large differences in
production and, therefore, in cost. The same wind plant will, all other factors being
equal, generate electricity at a cost of 4.8 cents/kWh in 7.16 m/s (16 mph) winds, 3.6
cents/kWh at 8.08 m/s (18 mph) winds, and 2.6 cents/kWh in 9.32 m/s (20.8 mph)
winds. Larger wind farms provide economies of scale. A 3-MW wind plant generating
electricity at 5.9 cents per kWh would, all other factors being equal, generate electricity
at 3.6 cents/kWh if it were 51 MW in size.

Second, wind energy is a highly capital-intensive technology; its cost reflects the
capital required for equipment manufacturing and plant construction. This in turn means
that wind's economics are highly sensitive to the interest rate charged on that capital.
One study found that if wind plants were financed on the same terms as natural gas
plants, their cost would drop by nearly 40%. <4>

Third, the cost of wind energy is dropping faster than the cost of conventional
generation. While the cost of a new gas plant has fallen by about one-third over the
past decade, the cost of wind has dropped by 15% with each doubling of installed
capacity worldwide, and capacity has doubled three times during the 1990s. Wind
power today costs only about one-fifth as much as in the mid-1980s, and its cost is
expected to decline by another 35-40% by 2006. <5>

Fourth, if environmental costs were included in the calculation of the costs of electricity
generation, wind energy's competitiveness would increase further because of its low
environmental impacts. Wind energy produces no emissions, so there is no damage to
the environment or public health from emissions and wastes such as are associated
with the production of electricity from conventional power plants. Wind energy is also
free of the environmental costs resulting from mining or drilling, processing, and
shipping a fuel. <6>