Good news, Wind power cost dropped from 2.5 cents/kwh to 1 cent/kwh

Wind power as the technology advances becomes cheaper to produce.
So when Peak Oil hits there may be some reasons for hope.

Wind Power - Up and coming blow By Megan Buettgenbach, September 14, 2004

The cost for wind power is more expensive than other options, but the cost has recently decreased.
The price used to be 2.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, but as of June it dropped to 1 cent per kwh.

www.collegian.com...

Add to that that with Wind there are no political source insecurites, transportation or clean up costs and darn it's a pretty sweet deal.
*and that's not all just from all the hot air here on ATS either. (my own included)*

Thats a good size drop in cost.
I wonder what improvements have been made to make it
that much cheaper? Any idea?

we have a company up in NY who wants to build windmills around the shoreline of lake onterio.... I'm just waiting for the evironmentalists to shoot it down.....it will kill the seagulls...

Wind turbines are a good part of the mix to alternative energy, but you gotta understand that it's not all milk and honey.

First, wind turbines are complex machines, with lots of moving parts: the turbine itself, the assembly which swivels to meet the wind, the shafts, linkages, and finally the generator itself. Moving parts are the bane of the engineer and just another opportunity for something to go wrong.

Second, wind turbines only generate power when there's wind blowing, so if you want to have on-demand power, you'll need a storage system, which could be either lots of expensive deep-cycle lead-acid batteries or the grid system itself. It's true that you can hook into the grid and sell them power back at their avoided cost, but if you're hooked up to the grid and the grid goes down, so does you wind turbine power -- which pretty much eliminates any self-sufficiency-in-case-of-an-emergency scenario.

Third, wind turbine engineering is pretty difficult. Generated power varies as the cube of wind speed, i.e., if a wind speed of ten mi/hr will generate 10 Watts, a wind speed of 20 mi/hr will generate 80 Watts, 40 mi/hr will generate 640 Watts, and so on.

But a wind turbine strong enough to stand and extract energy from a 40-mi/hr wind won't work very efficiently with a 10 mi/hr wind, and a wind turbine light and efficient enough to extract usable energy from a 10 mi/hr wind would be too fragile to operate in a 40 mi/hr wind.

This isn't to say that wind turbines are no good; they can be very good indeed. But you have to have a good site, you have to size your turbine system carefully, you have to figure out a way to store that wind energy so you can have electricity when the wind isn't blowing, and you have to spend a lot of money.

Maybe that's one of the reasons that you usually see wind turbines as a part of a hybrid system, usually paired with photovoltaics.

SApacedoubt says:

"Thats a good size drop in cost. I wonder what improvements have been made to make it that much cheaper? Any idea?"

1. A lot of work has been done recently in making the blades more efficient; Fuji Heavy Industries, in Utsunomiya, Japan, has a huge wind turbine outside its Apache helicopter plant that had a different blade configuration just about every week.

2. We have a much better data base on wind locations than we did fifteen years ago, so we can site the wind turbines more accurately. Remember yo can have two areas a quarter mile apart with completely different wind speed and dirrection configurations, and putting the wind turbine in the right place can generate huge savings.

[edit on 17-9-2004 by Off_The_Street]

Australia is looking at installing a lot of wind farms at the moment on it coast line but the biggest problem is the local communitys and there not in my backyard attauide. There all for them as long as there not in site of there towns.

I saw them in use in Palm Springs, California. I noticed that they have a number of different sizes -- apparently there's quite an art to placing them.

Wind power is something that should be investigated. The Street has given us some valid reasons to be careful with the installation of this power source, though. Another to consider is the aesthetic and audio implications of this form of electricity. You may scoff at this, but would you want a turbine located in your backyard, screaming day and night in the wind? That's not very likely, and locating these can be a very touchy subject. But, as I said, it is an energy source that I don't think we consider often enough.

Is there any environmental implications to them? I mean if you place millions of these things across the United States could they not take enough energy out of the atmosphere to cause certain weather or climate changes? Seems like everything seems good at the time and then once it gets going a bunch of problems turn up. Just a thought.

Originally posted by dwh0
Australia is looking at installing a lot of wind farms at the moment on it coast line but the biggest problem is the local communitys and there not in my backyard attauide. There all for them as long as there not in site of there towns.

Damn straight. Who would want a wind farm in thier back yard or town? Noone. Throw them somewhere where hardly anyone will see them, and they can still get good wind... Wind farms are an Eye-sore. They want to put them down the beautiful great ocean road....

Have you ever been down there? It's beautiful. Put an eye-sore down there. Get stuffed.. No way. Hell no. I'm not a protestor. Never done protesting at an event in my life. Not for anything. But if a protest gathers to protest those wind farms... I sure as hell will be there.

Originally posted by greenkoolaid
Is there any environmental implications to them? I mean if you place millions of these things across the United States could they not take enough energy out of the atmosphere to cause certain weather or climate changes? Seems like everything seems good at the time and then once it gets going a bunch of problems turn up. Just a thought.

ya, they kill birds, or at least that is what they are complaining about up here......

Originally posted by dawnstar

Originally posted by greenkoolaid
Is there any environmental implications to them? I mean if you place millions of these things across the United States could they not take enough energy out of the atmosphere to cause certain weather or climate changes? Seems like everything seems good at the time and then once it gets going a bunch of problems turn up. Just a thought.

ya, they kill birds, or at least that is what they are complaining about up here......

The bigger they are the slower they have to turn to produce the same amount of power = less bird kills. It's the smaller ones that are hazardous to birds but the BIG ones have a cap of around 60 RPM because any faster and it would shake itself apart eventually.

www.ec.gc.ca...

EDIT: They also got Whisper Turbines now that produce about 30 Db at 10 m/s(meters per second) windspeed

[edit on 18-9-2004 by sardion2000]

TANSTAAFL!

One of the most important things an engineer learns is the concept of TANSTAAFL -- an acronym for "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch". What this means is that for every approach to an engineering problem that you try, there will be tradeoffs.

The first thing you have to consider is:

how long it will take for us to do your job,
how well we will do it, and
how good of a job it is.

We say: "Quick, Cheap, and Good: Pick Two." If you want your job done right and right away, be prepared to pay a lot. You want to save a lot of money, don't expect a great job -- or a fast one.

And the next thing is that there is no perfect engineering solution.

If you want large scale electric power, you are going to have to put up with some uglies, whether it's pollution, spent uranium fuel rods, windmills clacking around and killing birds, PV panels covering up square miles of land, dams that won't let the salmon back up to spawn, and so on.

If you want your power cheap, you will have to put up with one set of Other Bad Things, including bending over the pool table to a bunch of malevolent and greedy Saudi and Venezolano hicks. And even that option will go away when these thugs run out of their oil.

If you want your power clean, you will have to pay tremendous amounts of money for it and you still won't ever get it "clean" -- it'll just be "less dirty".

Power generation is second only to access to potable water and food as the largext worldwide crisis we face today. If we fail to address the issue, there will be a power infrastructure failure, and I believe the aftermath of that failure will kill off at least half of the humans on the Planet.

The sooner we learn the basic facts about power generation and how to do it properly, the better chance we and our descendants have of surviving the 21st century.

The company I work for has installed a dozen large 'state of the art' windmills within a mile of my workplace. Over the past 2 years since their installation, I can vouch for their 'high maintenance' in that they are shut down as much as they are running.

Problems varied from bearing replacements to cracked bases, even though they were installed by the manufacturer.

I'm not saying that they wouldn't be a good hedge against other forms of generation...all I am saying is that the science supporting windpower is still not complete.

Before we go spending umpteen billions on installing millions of wind turbines across the North American continent, I believe we should go slow and work out the bugs first.

Besides, has anyone even tried to figure out how many of them would be needed to replace nuclear/gas/coal generation?

The problem with energy generation today is that it is all centralized. Power generation, if done correctly, can be effecient on a more individual level. It does require an intitial investment and not everyone is in a situation where it would even be practical, but there are still countless situations where using renewable energy would lessen, if not replace dependancy on the "grid" and the polluting fuels that power it.

For some really good information, try Home Power Magazine. You can see the current state of the art in renewable energy technologies.

One of the hardest things to overcome is not the technology, because it's there, but is the attitudes of people and wasteful energy usage. You can live comfortably while using much less energy, perhaps even little enough to provide it for yourself, but you have to give it some thought. You have to learn about your own power requirements and find ways to be more efficent with the power you use.

No, a small windmill on your house isn't going to let you disconnect from the grid, but let the sun heat your water and power what it can through photovoltaics while letting a windmill add to that and you can certainly reduce your dependancy. If everybody that could, would do it, it would add up to a lot of energy saved.

Ambient Sound's ideas make a lot of sense, but there are some things I'd like to amplify upon:

"The problem with energy generation today is that it is all centralized."

All centralized is not necessarily good, but there are two good things to think about:

1. You can make lots of electricity cheaper using a nuclear reactor or a big hydroelectric dam than you can in your back yard -- and remember, we already have the distribution infrastructure (power lines, transformer stations, etc.) in place and amortized.

2. Having actually worked for a photovoltaic engineering/manufacturing house, I have some idea of the difficulties involved in maintaining your own power system. Remember, if you have your own hybrid (grid interconnect, photovoltaic, wind turbine, and solar hot water) system, you have now applied for and been given a brand new job as power system integrator and manager.

This is no pay, in addition to all the other chores and honey-do's that make up your life, and if you screw up, you run out of a lot of Real Cool Things, like electricity and hot water.

For a lot of people, it just might not be worth it.

Wind power is one of those hoaxes that is so big, no one can believe it really is a hoax. Not a single coal plant in the world has ever been shut down due to displacment by wind energy. It is so ineffiicient and expensive, it is a joke.

Where on earth is wind power cost at 1/cent kwh? Here in Ontario, they are paying them 13.5 cent/kwh...twice the going rate that we pay now. Solar is being paid 42 cents/kwh.