T Boone Pickens abandons wind farm plans

[REWahoo]

We had a number of discussions about this a year or so ago when oil prices went through the roof. At that time I thought Pickens' plan had a lot going for it. Then came the drop in oil (and natural gas) prices and action by the Texas Public Utilities Commission to build new transmission lines in an area bypassing Pickens' planned wind farm...

Pickens Scraps Giant Windfarm Plans

 

[Notmuchlonger]

Guess it was just a bunch of hot air.

 

[ziggy29]

Energy policy is tough. On one hand, no one wants to build anything that isn't currently cost-effective. On the other hand, if a crisis hits in conventional supply, it could take 5-10 years to build out what we would need in terms of an alternative supply.

 

[NW-Bound]

I guess Pickens will have to wait until the economy recovers and we have a few brown-outs and black-outs before his plan can resume.

 

[clifp]

What is scary to me is we are seeing even the most economically viable large scale alternative energy plans get scrapped. T Boone plan may not have been perfect, but the guy is too smart a businessman to spend the money he did on a real hare-brained scheme.

Instead what we are seeing is a lot of talk, very small pilot projects, and dumb things like personal windmills. Things that make people feel good, but add up to virtually nothing. The equivalent of unplugged your phone charger which saves as much energy as not driving your car for 1 second.

 

[mickeyd]

Guess it was just a bunch of hot air.

There's a lot of that going around now.

 

[Zathras]

Clif, don't be scared
The article mentions that new transmition lines are being planned. Just for the Midwest, not for much of Texas. The new lines will be capable of carrying another 12,000 MW (3 times more than the lines proposed by Pickens).
If Texas won't reap the rewards of that much wind energy projects, I am sure Iowa, Minnesota, and the Dakotas will be happy to step up to the plate.

While I agree personal windmills are much less efficient than commercial sized wind generators, even personal windmills are definately not just the equivalent of unplugging your phone charger.

 

[freebird5825]

This was done on a pretty large scale north of where I live.
Maple Ridge Wind Farm - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Transmission lines were already in place nearby. The location is very remote and nowhere near housing.
I couldn't find any ROI data.

The wind turbines are very cool to watch in action.

Wind power status, nationally...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_States

 

[ERD50]

Energy policy is tough.

I'd turn that phrase a bit, and say that it is the lack of an energy policy that is tough.

Congress passes some subsidy, but it is good for only X years - not enough time for companies to really gear up for it - too much uncertainty if it will be extended or not. Odds are the policy would be stupid anyhow, but from an economic perspective you need some certainty in order to expect much investment. There are already risks, no one wants to jump in where Congress's willy-nilly policy making as the major risk.

Like we have discussed before, if we really, really want to push renewables and/or conservation, there needs to be a tax on fossil fuel to set a floor on it. It needs to be published, steadily increasing until the goals are met. We could even delay the tax so we don't hurt the economy now. If people knew the tax would start in 2012, the would think more about the mpg of the car they buy in 2010 or 2011.

But, reading the section on renewables in that "without the hot air" document is quite sobering.

-ERD50

 

[ERD50]

While I agree personal windmills are much less efficient than commercial sized wind generators, even personal windmills are definately not just the equivalent of unplugging your phone charger.

The only way to know that is to know the net energy gain over their expected life. Got some numbers?

And the second way to think of that, since it seems clear that personal windmills are so much less efficient than large scale ones, is that the energy used to build the personal windmill was "wasted", because that limited resource could be used on something that provided better payback.

As an example with made up numbers:

If it takes 20 tons of steel to make as many personal windmills as needed to generate the same amount of energy as 5 tons of steel produces when used to build commercial windmills, isn't that a waste of 15 tons of steel? How is that doing the environment any good?

-ERD50

 

[Zathras]

The comparison was in energy saved by unplugging phone chargers vs using a residential sized windmill.
As I stated in my response, commercial sized wind generators are more efficient than residential sized generators.
The point I was contesting, is the unplugging a phone charger is equivalent to using a residential wind generator.
As an example of the comparison in question:
A residential skystream wind generator is rated at 2.4Kw.
If we assume that you are only generating 10% efficiency on average of that (extremely conservative) you are generating 240W each hour, or about 2.8Kwh per day.
I don't have the numbers on phone chargers. But if they come anywhere close to using 240 watts each hour (assuming full charge needed at all times to make it easy) I would be very shocked.
In conclusion, I sumbit that using a residential home generator is not equivalent to unplugging a phone charger.

 

[Arif]

We had a number of discussions about this a year or so ago when oil prices went through the roof. At that time I thought Pickens' plan had a lot going for it. Then came the drop in oil (and natural gas) prices and action by the Texas Public Utilities Commission to build new transmission lines in an area bypassing Pickens' planned wind farm...

Pickens Scraps Giant Windfarm Plans

I guess I won't be seeing those 18 wheelers hauling windmill parts on HWY 1604 any more. Maybe I just don't understand how wind power works but how can it not be cheaper than coal or any other fuel?

 

[ERD50]

The comparison was in energy saved by unplugging phone chargers vs using a residential sized windmill.

...

The point I was contesting, is the unplugging a phone charger is equivalent to using a residential wind generator.
As an example of the comparison in question:
A residential skystream wind generator is rated at 2.4Kw.
If we assume that you are only generating 10% efficiency on average of that (extremely conservative) you are generating 240W each hour, or about 2.8Kwh per day.
I don't have the numbers on phone chargers. But if they come anywhere close to using 240 watts each hour (assuming full charge needed at all times to make it easy) I would be very shocked.
In conclusion, I sumbit that using a residential home generator is not equivalent to unplugging a phone charger.

But that is not the correct comparison.

Unplugging the phone charger is a (admittedly small, tiny) savings, but a savings period. No extra energy is utilized to unplug it*, and it was already manufactured. All the energy saved while unplugged is a 100% actual savings.

Now, in the case of a windmill - that has to generate enough electricity to first overcome the energy it took to produce it, ship it, install it, and maintain it. Until you overcome that there is no savings, only expenditure - waste. So if the average life of the thing was less than it's energy payback period, we would be better off without it. We need those numbers to know that.

Here's the numbers form the "w/o the hot air" reference - he estimates and has measured 1/2W for a typical charger. Let's compare to a personal windmill that lasts 20 years. The unplugged charger saves .012Kwhrs/day * 356 days/year * 20 years = 87.6KWhrs.

That personal WM cost $4,500 retail (plus installation) and they claim it will generate ~ 1,500 KWhrs/year (they claim lots of things though). But when does it start "saving"? We could take a guess, and say half the cost of it reflects embedded energy cost. $2,250 will buy 22,500KWhrs of electricity. Hmmm, 22,500/1,500 = 15 years... 3x longer than the warranty.

I admit, the embedded energy figure may be way off - but until you have a better number, you can't claim it is saving anything at all.

edit/add - In conclusion, I conclude that we need more numbers before we can say which is better.

-ERD50

* of course, if you wore out the plug, or the cable broke from all the extra handling, you would expend more energy manufacturing and shipping a replacement unit than you ever saved.

 

[ERD50]

Maybe I just don't understand how wind power works but how can it not be cheaper than coal or any other fuel?

Here 'ya go:

Ch4 Page 32: Sustainable Energy - without the hot air

He estimates wind at ~ average 2 watts per square meter (about a square yard) of land area. A night light is 7 watts. So you need to cover a LOT of land area (pay farmers for use/access) with those tall towers, which are not cheap to make or install. And then you get the energy on Mother Nature's schedule.

So like solar, the "fuel" is free, but the cost of getting it to do what you want is high. Coal plants aren't cheap to build either, but they generate on demand, 24 hours a day, and produce much more (I'll leave the numbers to someone else) energy per acre than wind.

-ERD50

 

[Zathras]

Here you go ERD, some numbers for you:
http://www.uvm.edu/~ikubisze/site/Kubiszewski_2009_wind%20EROI.pdf
Looks like coal has a EROI averaging about 8.
Wind has one averaging around 18, HOWEVER that is the commercial sized stuff.
The residential stuff is lower. As a matter of fact, it looks like anything below 10Kw (about) system drops below the average coal plant.
So if the comment I replied to was referring to EROI, I stand corrected.
If it was referring to the amount of energy saved, as I originally thought, then I stand my my position that the amount of energy produced by a residential sized generator is magnitudes greater than the amount of energy saved by unplugging phone chargers.

...dumb things like personal windmills. Things that make people feel good, but add up to virtually nothing. The equivalent of unplugged your phone charger which saves as much energy as not driving your car for 1 second.

My apologies Clif if I misunderstood your statement.

 

[GoodSense]

I work on utility-scale wind farms. The wind turbines we use are 2 to 2.4 MW each. Each takes up about 0.75 acre of farm land including access roads, and produces on average enough electricity for 600 households. It's pretty efficient use of land.

Also, referring to the earlier comparison between a 15-year payback and 5 year warranty, the useful life of a product is often many times more than the warranty period. New construction homes are only warrantied for 1-2 years on everything except for structural elements. That doesn't mean the home is only good for 1-2 years.

 

[Ed_The_Gypsy]

"The roads must roll."

 

[Nords]

"The roads must roll."

Might be a little too obscure for this crowd!

And where the heck are our personal gyro-stabilized unicycles, anyway?!?

 

[clifp]

Here you go ERD, some numbers for you:
http://www.uvm.edu/~ikubisze/site/Kubiszewski_2009_wind%20EROI.pdf
Looks like coal has a EROI averaging about 8.
Wind has one averaging around 18, HOWEVER that is the commercial sized stuff.
The residential stuff is lower. As a matter of fact, it looks like anything below 10Kw (about) system drops below the average coal plant.
So if the comment I replied to was referring to EROI, I stand corrected.
If it was referring to the amount of energy saved, as I originally thought, then I stand my my position that the amount of energy produced by a residential sized generator is magnitudes greater than the amount of energy saved by unplugging phone chargers.


My apologies Clif if I misunderstood your statement.

No neither you nor ERD misunderstood my statement and in fact this is exactly the type of the discussion that I think is useful and if we could extend to beyond an analytical crowd on the forum even better.

I do think that total energy output on a lifecycle basis is really important to look at when comparing any energy saving device We should take advertised claims (sadly it seems especially in the case of alternative energy) with a large dose of salts, since they are very hard to measure.

SE has a couple of numbers for house mounted turbines finding that in urban environments they typically only generate .2 KWH/day = 73 KWH annually, a tiny fraction claimed by their manufacturer. And he quotes one study saying this.

They advise that roof-mounted turbines
in towns are usually worse than useless: “in many urban situations,
roof-mounted turbines may not pay back the carbon emitted during their
production, installation and operation.”

So in this respect they maybe worse than unplugging phone chargers, especially because Uncle Sam doesn't fork over $1500 in tax credits for unplugging your charger.


On the other hand, commercial wind farms I think (hope) do make sense.
So I'd be very interested in getting more information from GoodSense on how many KWH the farm is producing per turbine. If those 2-2.4 MW turbines are getting anything close 25% to 33% utilization than they are generating 600-800 KWH/day in a area of only 3,000 M^2 or roughly 100x, the books calculation for average wind KWH/M^2. This is encouraging.

What is discouraging when I looked at the history of wind power projects in Hawaii is how often I see project reports like this.

The Lalamilo Wind Farm, which was originally built in 1985, is still operating and is now owned by Hawaii Electric Light Company. The output of the wind farm has gradually been declining as the small Jacobs turbines -- (39) 17.5 kW turbines and (81) 20 kW turbines, originally -- have been wearing out. The capacity of the wind farm in 1995 was 2.3 MW. Capacity in 2006 was estimated at about 1.2 MW.

One doesn't see the capacity of other energy plants drop in 1/2 in 20 years. I am also curious to see how labor intensive maintaining wind farms is.

 

[Rambler]

I think there is a place for both mega scale wind generation as well as for distributed generation (such as the skystream or the other whirlygig we saw on here a few days back).

Do I have the numbers? No. But, consider the amount of copper that has to be smelted in order to carry the electicity from the wind farm to the end users as well, please, if you are going to compare the embedded energy and the resultant output of wind farms vs home scale generation. If you produce electricity, by any means, there have to be transmission lines. Wind farms are typically in the middle of nowhere, so transmission lines have to be built to get that electicity at least to the existing grid. With home scale generation, your distribution lines are shorter and the existing grid can be utilized much easier.

I'm not saying home scale generation is for everyone. Its not. If you don't have a reliable wind resource and you install wind genny you are wasting your own resources as well as valuable natural resources and tax subsidies (if utilized) that should not be wasted. On the other hand, if you do have the wind resource on your property, and transmission lines are already there, the genny can in fact save you and the government money, and natural resources.

One more note: I was in the San Francisco airport the other day killling time while waiting for my flight and struck up a conversation with a engineer from Montana, who was heading for Mongolia on some assignment for her engineering firm. In the course of the conversation, she mentioned something about GE more or less owning the market for the wind gennies at the big wind farms, but that they were hard to keep in commission...always breaking down. I know they are complex machines, but if Goodsense or anyone has any insight into this, I would love to hear about it. I had noticed many times on the Altamont in the SF Bay area where there are big wind farms that typically less than half of the huge machines are turning...even though there is sufficient wind. Is it because they are broken down? or is it because they hae been stopped because the natural gas and coal plants were providing enough. If the latter is the case, then we do have a problem with energy policy...

R

 

[Zathras]

No doubt, wind generators placed in areas where there isn't much wind is a loss.
And as everyone has pointed out (myself included) residential wind generation is less efficient than commercial. That is part of the reason I didn't go the wind route and buy wind generated energy from my utility.
Few people will jump on a 5k to 15k investment without some research. However, there are always exceptions.
When calculating the costs of wind vs coal, do we also include the cancer, heart disease, and asthma caused by coal plants vs the annoyance of the sound of wind generators?
I ask not to be a smart ass I ask because there are lots of costs we don't consider. Rambler brought up an excellent point of the cost of transmition lines. What other costs are we not considering?

 

[Texas Proud]

One more note: I was in the San Francisco airport the other day killling time while waiting for my flight and struck up a conversation with a engineer from Montana, who was heading for Mongolia on some assignment for her engineering firm. In the course of the conversation, she mentioned something about GE more or less owning the market for the wind gennies at the big wind farms, but that they were hard to keep in commission...always breaking down. I know they are complex machines, but if Goodsense or anyone has any insight into this, I would love to hear about it. I had noticed many times on the Altamont in the SF Bay area where there are big wind farms that typically less than half of the huge machines are turning...even though there is sufficient wind. Is it because they are broken down? or is it because they hae been stopped because the natural gas and coal plants were providing enough. If the latter is the case, then we do have a problem with energy policy...

R

I wonder about that also... while in Hawaii (and someone else mentioned about one wind farm in Hawaii)... we were going to the southermost part of the US... and there is a wind farm there.... and NONE of them were turning even though there was a stiff wind... most looked old and rusted, but there was another section in the distance that looked new...

SOOOO, if you have a wind farm, I would think that this would be your FIRST source of energy if you want to be green...

 

[ERD50]

Here you go ERD, some numbers for you:
http://www.uvm.edu/~ikubisze/site/Kubiszewski_2009_wind%20EROI.pdf
Looks like coal has a EROI averaging about 8.
Wind has one averaging around 18, HOWEVER that is the commercial sized stuff.

Thanks for that ref, very interesting stuff. So, it is encouraging to see the EROI looks good on commercial windfarms. Looks like that personal windmill from the other thread is ~ 2KW plate model, and the chart drops steeply going from 10Kw to 5Kw. You probably can't extrapolate with any certainty, but I wouldn't be surprised if the EROI on that thing was near unity, so one may never get it's energy content out of it before the thing is scrapped.

So if the comment I replied to was referring to EROI, I stand corrected. If it was referring to the amount of energy saved,...

My point is, EROI is *all* that matters on something like this. You can't just look at the "savings" w/o looking at the "investment". If it takes 1MWhr to make a windmill, I have not saved a single watt hour until after that thing has produced its first 1MWhrs.

Same with a hybrid car - that extra battery and motor are an energy expenditure (investment) - we initially have used more energy to make those things, and we don't "save" anything, until they hit their EROI break even point. If we never hit it, it was an energy waste, not an energy saver. If someone does not drive a lot, buying a hybrid is very likely an environmentally bad decision. Now, calculating the actual EROI is a complicated process, but I think that using economic payback is a reasonable proxy. That is one reason I am skeptical of anything that does not show a good economic payback.

-ERD50

 

[ERD50]

I work on utility-scale wind farms. The wind turbines we use are 2 to 2.4 MW each. Each takes up about 0.75 acre of farm land including access roads, and produces on average enough electricity for 600 households. It's pretty efficient use of land.

Can you put this in numbers that we can compare more easily?

I assume that the 2-2.4MW rating is a plate (max power) rating - what do they actually produce in kWHrs annually? Electric usage of 600 households could vary wildly - A/C, electric water heat, etc.... how about kWhrs?

The 2 watts per square meter from the "w/o the hot air" ref was an average wind power in UK. So select spots in the US may be much higher, esp considering the cube effect of wind speed versus power generation. Also, I'm not sure if you are talking about the maximum density of the windmills ( 1 per .75 acres), or the land that one uses. In the ref, he is talking about trying to get a large % of power from wind, which means you need to space them as closely as possible. At some point, they start to interfere with each other and the output diminishes. That is different than saying one can be placed on .75 acres (or maybe they *are* the same, but I can't tell from your wording).

But, if an average of 2 watts per square meter sounds small, remember that that is: 2 watts *24 hours * 365 days = 17.5kWhrs annually per square meter. .75 acres ~ 3,000 square meters, so that is 53MWhrs annually from .75 acres. Again, this could be much higher if the average w/s is greater than the UK average (it probably is).

How many kWhrs annually does your home use?

Also, referring to the earlier comparison between a 15-year payback and 5 year warranty, the useful life of a product is often many times more than the warranty period. New construction homes are only warrantied for 1-2 years on everything except for structural elements. That doesn't mean the home is only good for 1-2 years.

Of course. I didn't mean that the 5 year warranty equates to the useful life, but a single homeowner with a single windmill would be on the hook after that - it is a consideration. My real intended point was that we need all those numbers before we can say it makes sense or not.

EROI calculations should be included in any "energy" bill in Congress - it is the real measure of what good the bill might do. I'd be willing to bet that most of them are less than unity (the "cash for clunkers" bill)....

-ERD50

 

[ERD50]

I work on utility-scale wind farms. The wind turbines we use are 2 to 2.4 MW each. Each takes up about 0.75 acre of farm land including access roads, and produces on average enough electricity for 600 households. It's pretty efficient use of land.

A more concise way to put my Q: Are you saying you could put 100 of these 2MW windmills on 75 acres?

A little googling brought up the "wind park effect".

Wind farm - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wind power in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Note: 50m Potential capacity is based on 10D by 5D spacing (D = rotor diameter) of 50 m high turbines in class 3 or better wind with moderate exclusions.

Where land area is sufficient, turbines are spaced three to five rotor diameters apart perpendicular to the prevailing wind, and five to ten rotor diameters apart in the direction of the prevailing wind, to minimize efficiency loss.

Looks like 2MW turbines have a rotor D of ~ 300'. So with 3Dx5D spacing, 900'x1500'=1,350,000 sq feet = 30 acres per turbine; and about 100 acres per turbine with the 5x10D spacing.

So the .75 acre per is not the whole picture. Of course, the windmills are shared with farmland, so it's not just a simple add-up either.

I've seen goals of 20% wind power... with the uneven nature of the wind, doesn't that mean storage (cost, space, waste) or just wasting the peaks? Can other generators respond quickly enough to go from 80% to 100% back to 80% output in a short time?

I guess what really amazes me is all this talk and investment in what is now ~ 1% of our energy supply. We could conserve 1% w/o hardly batting an eye. It is almost a rounding error in our usage. Certainly easier than building, installing, siting, maintaining all these wind turbines. And most of those conservation methods would have an immediate payback - no investment required to turn off a light or adjust the thermostat, for example.

-ERD50