New Jersey follows Delaware and Rhode Island in approving offshore wind power. This project will be 16-20 miles offshore, both far away from squealing Nimbys and also out where the wind is steadier. They plan to install 96 turbines capable of powering tens of thousands of homes.
In ten years there could be thousands of offshore wind turbines steadily producing renewable power for the Northeast.
Japan is definitely thinking big, and out of the box. Real big. Like 2km x 800m. These floating renewable energy platforms will also power underwater lights to grow seaweed thus attracting fish and plankton in an effort to replenish dwindling fish populations. Wow.
David McLellan at SolveClimate crunches the numbers and shows that wind is closing the gap with nuclear in cost per kilowatt. Further, the price of proposed nuclear plants keeps soaring, sometimes doubling or tripling, while the cost of wind doesn’t.
However, the primary reason for the gap closing is that nuclear plants take many years to get permits for, then build, and the money must be borrowed.
The average financing costs of the nuclear plants [described in the article] is 71% of the pre-financing price.
Bottom line: Nuclear and wind energy right now — from a purely financial perspective — seem to be about neck and neck, but increasing capital costs and unknown disposal and security costs are quickly going to put nuclear energy out of reach if present trends continue.
The demand for wind technicians, those who can service a wind turbine, is so strong that colleges have trouble keeping students in class until they graduate - because wind companies keep hiring them after just a few months of school.
A NASA satellite has located areas in the ocean where massive floating wind farms would be most efficient and generate the most power.
Combine that with the fast-growing field of wave power technology, and it seems clear that much of our power could be generated in and under the oceans. All that’s needed is the will to do it.
Triple Pundit explains why being able to store renewable energy is crucial. It’s cost effective, as it can allow electricity to be released during peak hours when it’s needed and the price is higher. Also, it increases energy autonomy and also stabilizes the grid.
They have links to government sites explaining how such storage works.
Compressed air storage
Off-peak electricity is used to pump air into underground caverns, then released as needed to generate electricity.
Pumped hydroelectric
Pump the water uphill during off-peak hours, storing it in a reservoir, then release it to power hydraulic turbines.
Solar thermal energy storage
There are multiple methods for storing heat from teh sun to be used to power turbines.
Bob Morris @ Jun 5th 2008 11:30 - Category: Wind turbines ;
National Wind’s Community Wind Model: We form an actual legal business partnership with property owners. We create a joint ownership structure for each wind project with the landowners and community as a partner. Landowners have an opportunity to influence the project and have their voices heard. The community ultimately receives a large portion of the profits.
This is quite different from standard agreements where the utility owns everything, keeps most the profits, and pays the landowner at flat rate or small royalty. This is community-based wind power with joint ownership. Everyone wins.
They will have 260 ft. blades and be attached offshore to giant spar buoys thus eliminating many environmental concerns since they are not anchored to the sea bottom.
In just a few years, wind power has gone from the fringe to the mainstream, as witness Windpower 2008, with 10,000 expected participants and GE and BP as their “tera-watt” sponsors. It’ll be held next week in Texas where T. Boone Pickens recently ordered $2bn of wind turbines to make the biggest wind farm ever.
Bob Morris @ Mar 30th 2008 01:31 - Category: Wind turbines ;
From EcoGeek comes news of a new wind turbine design from FloDesign. It’s smaller, more durable, safer, and produces up to four times more power. Their video explains how it works.
Denmark has so much wind power that needs ways to offload and store the power. A utility company there plans to build a nationwide grid to use that power to charge electric cars.
SoCal Edison just announced a plan to put solar photovoltaic panels on commercial buildings throughout southern California with the eventual plan of generating enough power for 162,000 homes. The owners of the buildings will be able to buy power at a rate less than normal while the rest of it goes into the grid.
It’s amazing how fast renewable energy is going mainstream.
“There is enough onshore-accessible wind for about 100 percent of our electricity requirements. In terms of our accessible resources, the biggest and most successful so far is wind.”
Ireland gets considerable wind, more than continental Europe. So, wind turbines sited strategically across the country could provide massive amounts of power with gas as backup. Development continues on ways to store power so it can be used when the wind isn’t blowing, such as batteries and hydro (use excess energy to pump water uphill, then create energy in non-peak hours by having it flow back down, powering turbines.)
Texas is getting increasing amounts of power from wind. But a cold front stopped the wind, traditional power plants failed to make up the difference, and blackout nearly happened.
That’s why storage of unused power and interconnected grids of renewable energy are increasingly important. Solar can store heat in molten salt to create power at night, and wind can create hydrogen that can be stored. We will see more of this as renewables go mainstream.
Taped at Davos 2008. Google is in the forefront of working to remediate global warming and is spending lots of money to do so, including their nonprofit, Google.org, which targets other issues like poverty too. One of their primary goals is to make renewable energy cheaper than coal, with an initial emphasis on solar thermal, deep geothermal, and high altitude wind.
“It was the third record year in a row for the wind industry; Except 2007 was a ‘blowout’ [fantastic] year with 5244 megawatts of new electrical generating capacity added by the wind industry, which is more than twice as large as the largest prior record established in 2006.”
The City of Los Angeles just broke ground for the largest city owned wind plant in the US and expects to have 20% renewable power by 2010. That means a whole lot of coal and petroleum-based products won’t be burned to create electricity.
The speed at which municipalities, business, and governments are moving towards renewable power is accelerating, a welcome trend indeed.
A German university has shown that renewable energy can meet Germany’s power needs round the clock wihout using nukes or coal. They do this by linking wind, solar, hydro and bio-gas plants together in a grid to maintain steady power. The grid can also store power. Methane produced from bio-gas is used when needed to create power while excess wind energy is used to pump water uphill into a reservoir where it then can be released to power hydro.
The experiment provides enough energy to meet 100% of the annual needs of a small town with 12,000 households. Says Professor Jürgen Schmid of the University of Kassel.
Too many environmentalists say they want clean, renewable energy yet continually block attempts at such. At heart, I think some are Luddites, wanting to banish all that newfangled technology so we can get back to the purity of nature and ride horses for transportation and burn wood for fuel and heat. Oh wait, if billions of people did that, the environmental consequences would be catastrophic - forests would be denuded and horse manure would be everywhere.
“They say they don’t like the looks of the wind turbines, I always ask them if they prefer the look of coal plants belching smoke into the air,” he said. “That argument really is starting to die down.”
From Greenpeace UK comes the absolutely dazzling and informative EfficienCity, a Flash animation of how a town could be designed to create renewable, clean energy. You can drill down to various sections of town, see how the grids work, then view videos detailing specific methods of power generation and more. Bravo!
