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Forums - General - Wind Energy- a viable alternative to fossil fuels now?

 

Can wind farms and other alternative green fuels replace power plants?

Yes, as the technology improves 11 26.83%
 
Maybe 0 0%
 
No, nuclear is the future 10 24.39%
 
No way 7 17.07%
 
Fossil fuels are still more efficient? 4 9.76%
 
Don't know 0 0%
 
Maybe, with other forms o... 9 21.95%
 
Total:41
Cobretti2 on 13 February 2013
drkohler said:
SvennoJ said:
I wonder if we could have a fusion plant up and running already if all the money spend on wind turbines had been poured into fusion research.

You got that backwards. If all the money that was wasted on fusion generators had been invested in other things (like tidal power plants etc), we would have no need for this discussion.

Also the problem of solar/iwind energy production is not the production, it is the (large scale) distribution of the energy. Occasionally, wind energy producers in Europe have TO PAY per kWh to get their energy into the European grid (the grid is not strong enough yet, and storage options are limited currently).


In Australia you get paid the net energy generated into the grid.

Where I live we get paid the same rate you are charged for using the electricity from the grid. So like 27cents per kWh.

 However new installations (or new customers moving to a house with solar on it) will only get 8cents per kWh as the national solar scheme has ended. 



 

 

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irstupid on 13 February 2013

i love how nature people throw a huge fit over like a pipe to carry oil in Alaska, yet they love this having thousdands upon thousands of acres dedicated to these god aweful looking wind mills.



dallas on 13 February 2013

http://www.jouleunlimited.com/why-solar-fuel/overview

Here is a more efficient way.... $2.00 per gallon of biodiesel, full-scale production starts soon. These guys won awards from the Wall Street Journal, MIT, World Economic Forum, etc. And it can feasibly fix the limited supply of oil, well as far as fuels go, it still wont replicate things like plastics or petrochemicals ( or even oil as a base product) but it's a start.

Click on the link i just put up, talks about costs , sustainability, etc



Mnementh on 13 February 2013
SvennoJ said:
I wonder if we could have a fusion plant up and running already if all the money spend on wind turbines had been poured into fusion research.

It's a good alternative for remote places, provided you add some hydrogen fuel cell tech to store surplus energy for when you need it. For big cities you need plants than can provide peak power on demand
What happens in Spain on a hot day with no wind? It would be bad over here with all the ACs.

I don't know much about wind turbines, but my gut says the less moving parts the better. Having thousands of wind turbines for power must require a lot of maintenance. Solar power might be better in the long run?

Well, we invested a lot of money into researching fusion energy. Really a lot. So far it is a big moneysink. It might be a good option in the future, but don't think it will be ready in production in noticeable levels before 2050. the ITER-projects ends 2038, and that is a research-reactor. We are far from commercial use.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER



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Mnementh on 13 February 2013
TheJimbo1234 said:
 


Windfarms are utterly useless, overpriced crap because;

a) Don't run all the time

b) Need huge maintenance.

c) Variable power supply. This means you need a smart National Grid which is impossibly expensive.

d) Vast area of land needed.

e) Offshore turbines are 10x more expensive than Nuclear due to the infrasturture needed to get the electricity from the shore inland.

 

All in all, a waste of time and money.

Windfarms work very well here in germany and made us to a net exporter of electricity (before wind-power took off, we sometime imported, sometime exported electrical power, but it was always around zero).

a) We have an energy mix from different sources and a national energy grid (point c), that can transport power to the place they need it.

b) Really? Compared to nuclear power plants and coal the maintenance cost are really low.

c) Yes, we in germany do have that national power grid. and even more, the european countries are pretty well connected. Yes I know the US has an inferior power grid. Time to become a 1st-world-country in that regard.

d) Well, it is true. But if you look at coal from Open-pit mining it is not worse than that.

e) Offshore-turbines have no real power-output in germany. We work mostly with onshore-turbines.



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TheJimbo1234 on 13 February 2013
Mnementh said:
TheJimbo1234 said:
 


Windfarms are utterly useless, overpriced crap because;

a) Don't run all the time

b) Need huge maintenance.

c) Variable power supply. This means you need a smart National Grid which is impossibly expensive.

d) Vast area of land needed.

e) Offshore turbines are 10x more expensive than Nuclear due to the infrasturture needed to get the electricity from the shore inland.

 

All in all, a waste of time and money.

Windfarms work very well here in germany and made us to a net exporter of electricity (before wind-power took off, we sometime imported, sometime exported electrical power, but it was always around zero).


But that doesn't change anything I said. For exmaple, making nuclear plants would have been a better option and Germany would have been able to export more power constantly.



Mnementh on 13 February 2013
TheJimbo1234 said:


But that doesn't change anything I said. For exmaple, making nuclear plants would have been a better option and Germany would have been able to export more power constantly.


Actually France (>90% power from nuclear plants) was in dire need of electricity the winter. They paid 2€ per kWh. We exported everything we could, but the cables weren't big enough, so the UK also got money out of France.



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NintendoPie on 13 February 2013

I feel like Solar Energy is a much better option, still. This means that everyone and their grandma is able to power (some of) their own house and it takes up a lot less room than Turbines.
Down in Florida we could really benefit from Solar Power.



megaman79 on 13 February 2013
dallas said:
http://www.jouleunlimited.com/why-solar-fuel/overview

Here is a more efficient way.... $2.00 per gallon of biodiesel, full-scale production starts soon. These guys won awards from the Wall Street Journal, MIT, World Economic Forum, etc. And it can feasibly fix the limited supply of oil, well as far as fuels go, it still wont replicate things like plastics or petrochemicals ( or even oil as a base product) but it's a start.

Click on the link i just put up, talks about costs , sustainability, etc

Because somebody in oil and gas is making money from the production of biodiesel, and there are still emissions.



“When we make some new announcement and if there is no positive initial reaction from the market, I try to think of it as a good sign because that can be interpreted as people reacting to something groundbreaking. ...if the employees were always minding themselves to do whatever the market is requiring at any moment, and if they were always focusing on something we can sell right now for the short term, it would be very limiting. We are trying to think outside the box.” - Satoru Iwata - This is why corporate multinationals will never truly understand, or risk doing, what Nintendo does.

megaman79 on 13 February 2013
spurgeonryan said:
Our natural environment is still so cheap in America that we would need some more motivation to really get some worthwhile change.


fixed for truth, buying amazon rainforest to offset carbon emissions is what you should be doing.



“When we make some new announcement and if there is no positive initial reaction from the market, I try to think of it as a good sign because that can be interpreted as people reacting to something groundbreaking. ...if the employees were always minding themselves to do whatever the market is requiring at any moment, and if they were always focusing on something we can sell right now for the short term, it would be very limiting. We are trying to think outside the box.” - Satoru Iwata - This is why corporate multinationals will never truly understand, or risk doing, what Nintendo does.