Plan Unveiled For World's Largest Wind Farm In Illinois

[hatrack]

ARROWSMITH - "It will be more massive than anything the world has ever seen - 22,000 acres, dotted with up to 267 wind turbines, towering 405 feet above the rich McLean County soil.

Zilkha Renewable Energy, a Texas-based wind farm owner and developer, is unfolding plans for a 432 megawatt wind energy project about eight miles east of Bloomington - scattering the vast agricultural landscape from just west of Ellsworth to Saybrook.

If Arrowsmith Wind Farm comes to fruition, it would produce more than 100 megawatts more energy than the largest current farm, which is situated on the Oregon-Washington border. Reports say that project currently is the largest land-based wind farm in the world.

EDIT

Wind farm developers long ignored Illinois, believing the state did not have enough wind to sustain a utility scale wind project. Within the past several years, however, technological improvements in the wind industry and the creation of new wind resource maps revealed there were a few select pockets with significant blustery conditions to make wind power profitable. Eastern McLean County was one of those identified areas, and even Gov. Rod Blagojevich has committed $4 million toward the development of wind energy projects in that region as part of his Opportunity Returns economic development proposal."

EDIT

http://www.pjstar.com/news/topnews/b2ka8kdv030.html

[Catfight]

1. Finally, good news! eom

[No Mandate Here.]

3. We have four wind mill clusters here

in Somerset County PA, and there is a growing backlash to them. Claims include noise, ice throws and killing migrating birds. Some of those who oppose them are conservationsists. The county has a bond on each tower to cover the cost of removal if it isn't done by the companies.

[amazona]

10. yes they are destructive to migratory birds

An ornithologist stated in the early 1990s that we would see the end of migration in our lifetimes, and I'm afraid he's right. There is always something more important, it seems. Wind farms aren't the only thing contributing to this, of course, it's everything from cell phone towers on down. Most discouraging.

[NickB79]

29. I believe they've redesigned the windmills to rectify this problem

From what I've read, the original blades were smaller and designed to spin at high speeds. This meant they were very hard for migrating birds to see when the winds were strong, and subsequently they became McNuggets on impact. The newer versions are supposed to have larger blades designed to spin more slowly. This makes the blades visible to birds flying by, and they can then avoid them.

[GreenGreenLimaBean]

18. please provide us with links to back up your claims

????

[displacedtexan]

2. Arrowsmith? I lived near there (in Bloomington/Normal) for 20 years.

Yes, that's the Normal in Hughes' book title.

The wind blows up to 80 MPH a lot of the time there. Perfect for a wind farm!

[jean]

4. Wonderful news - I just wish it would be an IL based developer...

[madrchsod]

5. we have 30+ windmills

here in lee county,illinios. there were plans to develope another farm but the planners couldn`t find anyone to buy the power. there was another planned but it is in doubt for now. biggest problems the developers had were the zoning and leasing rights and payments. there were to be at least another 30+ windmills built but with all these problems it doesn`t look like they will in the near future. there`s no demand for electric power at the present time....

[PATRICK]

6. call me an impractical sourpuss but

Having these nightmare behemoths, creating windy Niagara Falls hither and yon is still putting renewable energy into one corporate basket. Sure having your own neighborhood or house self-sufficiency(horrors! say the beautiful people of the housing associations)is not as "efficient as massive centralization and wonderful gazillions of wire grids in the hands of a bloated energy overlord, but isn't the goal of REAL energy independence also something to strive for? (No terrorist target or profit gouging!)

The Chinese shovel pig poop into their own methane units- something a lot more dangerous. Yet put up a twenty foot windmill which can sell energy to the grid slaves and you had better be on a secluded farm. Frankly, I'd not only like to be independent of the Arabs but of their American counterparts as well. The conservationists or whatever other "people" blocks there are to renewable energy devices seem to have strangled the little guy(already barred from obtaining these resources by large corporations) and now are unable to contend with these monster consolidations.

We USED to have new homes pushed with tax credits to include solar panels. Mostly now they are reduced to skylights. One township here took over their own utilities(Fairport, NY) and have benefited wildly from cheap prices. No one was allowed to imitate THAT dangerous trend. No, better to keep bailing out our local rusting nuclear elephant(which never safely produced cheap energy with any reliability).

And now wind farms. It's like confiscating all your Brita water purifiers and constructing a massive unit, ten stories high to add on to your local pure waters plant which has been probably allowed to decay anyway to enable some mega entrepreneur to "rescue" us.

[NNadir]

7. Great news. n/t

[cprise]

8. Who makes the turbines?

The article doesn't say.

[DrWeird]

9. 267 turbines is the biggest in the world?

Why not stick thousands of them in some uninhabited part of the canadian prairie? Hire and train unemployed locals for maintenance.

[Viking12]

16. Infrastructure

One of the obstacles to mass-developing windpower turbines is the necessity to develop parallel delivery infrastructure. The wind doesn't necessarily blow where people live and work so you have to get it there somehow. Significant addtions to the grid will result in unfeasible cost/kwh.

[AngryAmish]

11. Potential wind power problem

I support wind power, but I could imagine some problems with a large % of power created by wind. There are real problems with large scale storage of electricity (batteries do not work.) The windmills only create power when the wind is blowing. When creating a power system a utility must ensure power all the time. The infrastructure must be there to ensure 24 hour power. So just as many power plants must be built notwithstanding the wind power. I also know that modern gas turbine plants can get started and started cranking out power on little notice to cover potential shortfalls due to lack of breeziness. But wind will not lower infrastructure costs (or labor because the plants have to be staffed, needed or not on a particular day.) It helps with greenhouse gasses but cost wise it may not make the most sense.

[jpak]

12. Use the wind turbines generate hydrogen by electrolysis

Store the hydrogen temporarily in low pressure tanks then use fuel cells to generate baseload and peaking power.

This would buffer variations in power output from the wind farms and match (fuel cell) output to grid demand.

This scheme has already been demonstrated ...

http://www.humboldt.edu/~serc/trinidad.html

[evworldeditor]

14. You only want to make hydrogen from surplus wind power

There's a study that was done a couple years ago in Illinois on this very question and one of the conclusions was that you want to make hydrogen only after you reach the point where you have surplus electrical power on the grid. Simmons also said that as natural gas supplies dwindle, wind power isn't going to be able to keep up with the demand.

http://www.evworld.com

[GreenGreenLimaBean]

19. why not use flywheel technology to store the excess.

I believe this technology is already available and would
be much cheaper then conversion to hydrogen and back.

[AngryAmish]

21. Wouldn't the flywheels have to be huge?

[Bdog]

22. Smart Energy 25 kWh...flywheels

http://www.beaconpower.com/products/EnergyStorageSystems/SmartEnergy25kWh.htm
The Smart Energy 25 is an advanced energy storage solution that provides unique power quality benefits for demanding telecom and utility applications. The system is built on field-proven, environmentally friendly technology. Its long-life, low-maintenance design and highly cyclic capability can outlast and outperform battery systems in the harshest environments.
And thanks to innovative modular architecture, a series of Smart Energy units may be configured in a Smart Energy Matrix to provide megawatts of reliable and responsive stored energy for minutes or even hours.

[Bdog]

23. Compressed Air Energy Storage A Viable Alternative

http://unisci.com/stories/20013/0802016.htm

The idea of storing energy by compressing air in underground mines may sound like science fiction, but it's already being done in Alabama and within a few years residents in Ohio will have their own compressed air plant.
"The world's first compressed air energy storage plant was in Germany," says Lee Davis, plant manager for the Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) Power Plant in McIntosh, Alabama. "The Alabama
CAES plant was the first in the United States when it opened in 1991."

The Alabama Electric Cooperative CAES plant works like this: On nights and weekends, air is pumped underground and compressed, using low-cost electricity, at pressures up to 1,078 pounds per square inch. (Average air pressure at sea level is 14.7 pounds per square inch.)

During the day, at peak times, air is released and heated using a small amount of natural gas. The heated air flows through a turbine generator to produce electricity.

In conventional gas-turbine power generation, the air that drives the turbine is compressed and heated using natural gas. On the other hand, CAES technology needs less gas to produce power during periods of peak demand because it uses air that has already been compressed and stored underground.

[AngryAmish]

15. I never thought of that

Maybe that is why it is a good thing I am not in charge of such things.

Now some another questions I don't know the answer to: What is the heat loss in changing water to O and H and back to H2O? Can large scale fuel cells be efficient (or do they even exist)?

[jason_au]

27. Wind power & energy storage

The wind generally blows during the day and some time into the night, and then quietens down between around midnight and 5 am (that's an average scenario, BTW). As it happens, this corresponds to around the same times of day when people most use electricity.

The other thing is the because the wind isn't blowing constantly, you need to have a very large production capacity of turbines installed to meet peak demands, regardless of the wind blowing. This excess capacity is called the "spinning reserve" - it's the same with coal, nuke, whatever power plants, as they occasionally need to be taken offline for maintenacne.

Anyway, long story short, is what this all means (assuming current wind turbine economics) is that you can't have 100% of a nation's power produced by the wind - in reality, it starts to become uneconomic once 10-15% of a nation's power is from wind power.

But even that would be great in terms of what it could do for the environment and deterrence from embarking on colonial oil wars.

Cheers from down under,

Jason

[evworldeditor]

13. Global Windpower 2004 in Chicago

Last week I attended the Global Windpower 2004 conference and exposition at the McCormick center in Chicago. During a press conference on the last day, Matthew Simmons made an interesting final comment. He said that environmentalists found wind turbines a good idea until they actually started to be built, then they have come to hate them as much as natural gas. He said that someday, Americans will have to grow up.

I am running a survey this money on EVWorld.Com asking peopel if they object to having wind turbines visible from their homes. Right now, about one in three say they would object.

Regarding building those turbines on the Canadian prairie or the Dakotas, the challenge is getting the power from where it is to where it's needed. The wind energy would prefer to have their turbines where they can't be seen, but to do so, we need to completely redesign the power grid into what Ed O'Connor -- the head of Ireland's Airtricity -- calls a "super grid." This would let wind turbines be connected across a wide geographic area that would improve the overall capacity of the system, because the wind is usually always blowing somewhere.

Offshore wind farms are another way to get power to the populated coastline cities, but the cost of going offshore adds -- I am told -- at least 50% to the cost of the project.

http://www.evworld.com

[NNadir]

17. Yes indeed, someday Americans will have to grow up.

Personally, I think wind farms are an excellent idea, but I was depressed by the NIMBY opposition to the Cape Wind project.

It is true that any form of energy, not only electricity, suffers from losses (both economic and environmental) the longer the distance shipped is.

[GreenGreenLimaBean]

20. Is Wind Power Perfect? No

but it beats the hell out of anything else out there
currently. The issue is Global Warming people, not a few
thousand dead birds or who owns the generators. I can
care less if enron owned the fucking wind farm as long
as its reducing the use of fossil fuels. We must act now
before its too late!

[NNadir]

24. Wind power is growing explosively, as well it should, but...

this project, the largest ever, will provide less than 0.1% of US electrical demand, roughly 420,000 MWe.

This is a drop in the bucket, not a panacea for the crisis we face NOW.

[jpak]

25. US wind power capacity in 2002 was 4685 MW

with ~1,800 MW expected to be added in 2003.

Wind power will add the equivalent of a large nuclear power plant each year for the foreseeable future.

In addition, homeowners installed 40 MW of PV capacity between 2000 and 2002 (~20 MW per year).

US PV production capacity expected to grow to 800+ MW by 2005 and could produce generating capacity equivalent to a large nuclear power plant each year for the foreseeable future.

No nuclear plants have been ordered in the US since 1978.

If we decided today to build a 1000 MW nuclear power plant - how long would it take to get it on line? Five years? Ten years?

So is nuclear power panacea to our current "crisis" - I don't think so...

[NNadir]

26. Oh jeeze....

What do you guys do on days when the wind doesn't blow. When there's doldrums of weeks on end? Do you sit on flywheels and spin on dreams? Pray for wind? Do a wind dance? Build air compressors the size of Sweden?

No nuclear power plants have been built since 1978, mostly because of abject stupidity on the part of people with less than high school understandings of energy. (The other factor was that we did not have, as we do now, experimental data on the relatively safety of nuclear power plants: People were able to make unfounded but believable suppositions about danger that were not borne out by experimental data.)

In any case what is the claim for this silly 'no plants built since 1978' mantra: That having been fools in the recent past justifies even more foolishness in the future? You chant that solar energy, which your "impressive" figures show being built slower than demand increase is a viable option. By the anti-nuclear criteria you advance, can you name a major solar installation built anywhere that has equalled even one nuclear plant anywhere in the world? Even the Sahara desert where the sun shines constantly? In spite of thirty years of blather about PV potential the fact remains that there is no country in the world that has even 2% of it's total energy needs met by PV. Go ahead, contradict me by naming one such country.


It happens, because of improved operations, the growth in output of nuclear power has been, since 1980, the single largest growth area for US electrical energy production, even though the number of operational nuclear plants has actually decreased. This is because the capacity load factors for nuclear plants have risen from about 60% in the 1970's (when nuclear power was still working out operational bugs) to well over 90% in most plants in the early 21st century.)

A pebble bed reactor, such as will be built by countries where people actually think, that would be South Africa and obviously not the US, can be built in about two to three years time. (That's because they're essentially big bins attached to a heat exchanger.) Moreover such reactors are modular. In France, a typical reactor was turned around in three years, but only because there was no abject stupidity on the part of people who understand zero (as in zip) about the most rudimentary, most primitive basics of risk analysis. I.e.: It is almost infinitely more dangerous to drive one time to a nuclear protest than it is to live 50 years right next door to a typical Western nuclear plant happily running your appliances. (To assess the reality of this situation, one only need compare the total traffic deaths in the United States with the total deaths from nuclear power, the latter number being zero.)

One single nuclear plant can produce all of the 800 MWe that so impresses you for a nationwide advance of wind power in every part of the country. Moreover, one can build simultaneously (as was shown the early 70's, nuclear plants to address capacity needs almost as quickly as one needs them.) Further, the energy break even point, the point at which the energy invested in building the plant is recovered, is a factor of several hundred times greater for a wind plant than it is for a nuclear plant, meaning that a massive wind power program would necessarily inject hundreds of times more greenhouse gases (for the short term) that a comparible capacity buidout via nuclear means. This is because the reduction of iron to make steel requires coal (coke) as a reductant or the use of coal generated heat to recycle already reduced steel. (Note: This completely ignores completely the material cost of building storage systems, considerably higher in both material, environmental and greenhouse costs than the wind plant itself.) The amount of steel required, watt for watt, is vastly higher for a wind farm than it is for a nuclear plant with similar capacity, although some people seem to feel that the only type of plant requiring carbon dioxide to build is a nuclear plant. (This latter claim is the most ridiculous of all anti-nuclear activists, but there's no appealing to education with the uneducated.)

All this said, I support wind power, and I hope that PV can someday meet the undelivered promise I've been hearing about for some three plus decades with very little real result. Wind and solar have definite niches as peak load demand systems, although they have poor properties for constant load demands. The fact still remains that no one but rich college freshmen (in their fantasies anyway) can afford a PV system that will produce "free" energy day and night. Almost all PV plants are highly subsidized by tax breaks. (Oil of course is subsidized by blood and treasure, whereas coal is subsidized by our aveolar and neural tissue.)

The fact remains, no matter what you hear at high school meetings of "future Greenpeace protesters of America," it would be extremely dangerous (and frankly stupid) to abandon the lowest risk and best proven form of energy available: Nuclear energy.

BTW, you didn't go to the same high school as another prominent nuclear objector on this site, did you? I mention it only because you seem to have the same level of understanding, which is to say, an extremely poor understanding, of the basic issues in energy development.

[jpak]

28. I had the opportunity to observe wind turbines in operation in Denmark

(rich high school freshman future Green Peace protesters of America field trip - LOL!!!!!)

Over a 3 week period I never once observed any of the turbines NOT spinning - even when surface boundary layer winds were zero.

Well sited turbines rarely experience winds below their minimum cut-in wind speed.

Life cycle greenhouse gas emissions from wind and nuclear power are similar...

Wind = 3-14 kt CO2 equivalent / TWh generated

Nuclear = 8 - 17 kt CO2 equivalent / TWh generated

(note: nuclear emissions estimated for CANDU fuel cycle - emissions from US light water reactor fuel cycle are several times higher due to coal consumed to generate electricity for U enrichment).

The energy payback period for wind turbines is ~3 months - what is it for nuclear plants?????

BTW: the marketplace rejected nuclear power - get over it.

[NickB79]

30. But low wind speed still makes a difference in energy production

You can't claim that even though the mills are still spinning in zero surface layer wind speed that they are producing anywhere near the same amount of energy they did when wind speeds were high. The fact the blades still turn doesn't dismiss the problem of varying electrical power availability based on weather conditions that many are concerned about. Further, seaside weather conditions are hardly comparible to the conditions found throughout the rest of the US. Windspeeds along the ocean coasts are typically faster and more consistant than those found inland away from the coast. To replace a significant amount of fossil or nuclear power with wind in the US, you would have to establish a large number of turbine stations along the coast to take advantage of these higher winds. However, a large area of the Eastern coast of the US is in an area prone to hurricanes and tropical storms (something I doubt Denmark engineers have to take into account). A single large hurricane could have the potential to knock out electricity to millions of homes for a very long time if it damaged any of the windfarms.

[Bdog]

31. Renew ables don't have to meet 100% of demand all of the time.

When energy storage systems & conventional power generation are used together what you have is a hybrid energy system...similar to a hybrid car...using or storing energy in the most efficient way possible.

Flywheels can store and level out short term energy variations.

Long term...as in seasonal differances...can use compressed air as storage. The compressed air can be used in a gas turbine. Two thirds of the energy used in a gas turbine is used to compress the incoming air. Drawing off a compressed air reservoir greatly increases the efficiency of a turbine.

http://unisci.com/stories/20013/0802016.htm

[Bdog]

32. Hybrid Power Plant Opens in Baja California

http://www.aps.com/general_info/newsrelease/newsreleases/NewsRelease_34.html
June 6, 1999

Phoenix, AZ - One of the largest hybrid power plants in the Americas will open Friday June 11 in a remote fishing village in Mexico. Arizona's largest electric utility and Mexico's national utility, Comision Federal de Electricidad (CFE), will dedicate the plant in San Juanico, Baja California Sur, Mexico. The governor of Baja California Sur, Gov. Leonel Cota Montano, will attend.

Arizona Public Service Company (APS) and CFE agreed to upgrade an existing diesel generator-based system in the village in 1997 to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and help Mexico achieve its goal of rural electrification, said Edward Z. Fox, APS vice president of environment, health, safety and new technology ventures.

San Juanico, a remote fishing village about 350 miles north of the southern tip of the Baja peninsula, attracts visitors from southern California and beyond for its world-class surfing. Previously, the village of 400 residents had electricity for only three hours a day.

The cost of fuel to operate San Juanico's diesel generator prohibited the villagers from using more electricity to further develop the community's commercial fishing, including ice for preservation of the daily catch, and tourism business ventures, Fox said.

The new plant will provide energy derived primarily from wind and solar. With the new plant, the community will have power 24 hours a day, allowing preservation of the daily catch, as well as improved food storage in residents' homes, he said...

It is expected that at least two-thirds of the power generated will come from renewable resources, reducing carbon dioxide emissions by approximately 80 percent compared to the emissions from full-time diesel generator use, Fox said.

[jpak]

33. There are several wind farms under development in the North Sea

off the UK and Ireland.

Storms in the North Sea with sustained winds approaching hurricane strength are not uncommon.

The multi-MW turbines used in these offshore wind farms are engineered to withstand these storms (they sort of thought about this).

With the exception of the southern Texas coast, wind regimes along the Gulf Coast and Eastern Seaboard south of Cape Hatteras are not optimal for wind farm development. These are the US coastlines most likely to experience major hurricanes.

check out the map in this link...

http://zebu.uoregon.edu/2001/ph162/l12.html

Potential wind turbine capacity in New England and New York coastal waters is estimated to be ~5,200 MW

http://www.jxj.com/magsandj/rew/2003_03/us_offshore_wind.html

These waters rarely experience hurricanes and the vast majority of these storms are Category 1 (minimal hurricane strength).

Nor'easters are more common in this region and can be violent (i.e. The Perfect Storm), but again the multi-MW turbines proposed for these wind farms are robust and designed to withstand them (minimal hurricanes and Nor'easters).

There is a lot of potential for wind farms in the Midwest particularly in areas that regularly experience tornadoes. Real world experience with small domestic wind turbines (~10 kW) indicate they can withstand near hits by intense (F5) twisters...

http://www.bergey.com/Tornado.htm

Although storm damage is a real possibility for any offshore structure, the probability of catastrophic storm damage to large modern wind farms is low.