Y2Kyoto: I Was Told There'd Be No Math

Why the sect of the interior would engage in such trivia is on the face of it an attempt to decieve his listeners into think wind power can displace coal power.

But like all deceptions when one takes a closer look the lie is very damaging to its proponent:

Even if the US was able to harness 10% of ALL the wind on ALL the oceans And if it only lost 50% of that power in transmission it still would only be one quarter of the power generated by coal which is only a fraction of the total energy demand in the US. Thus there is absolutely no chance that ocean based wind power generation will have a significant impact on coal fired generation demand in the US.

Sadly, the sect does not point that reality out to his audience.

I don't know about you but I think this Salazar has been drinking the Goracle's Kool-Aid. Talk about blowing wind up yer kilt...

And what about all those flying fish? Getting hit with propellers both above and below the water.

The massive piles of dead birds chopped up in all those windmills will provide counting fodder as he learns to do basic arithmetic.

quick math:


average commercial wind turbine produces 2MW of power, and costs $3.5million, installed. This is from:

http://www.windustry.com/how-much-do-wind-turbines-cost


So, you would need 500,000 wind turbines to produce 1 million megawatts. 500,000 turbines at a cost of $3.5million would be $1,750,000,000,000 or $1.75 trillion dollars.

On top of this, you'll need backup generation to provide for when the wind doesn't blow, so the cost would be much, much higher.

Trofim Lysenko.

OFF TOPIC, but an interseting Canadian/US event unfolding!!!

A student pilot has stolen a Cessna 172 from Thunderbay at approx. 2:30 pm.

The plane was intercepted by two F-16s at the Michigan-Wisconsin border. the pilot acknowledge the presence of the interceptors but was not making radio contact.

The Capitol building in Madison was evacuated as a precaution.

Last I knew the plane was over Illinois, headed toward St. Louis.

If not already, should be out of fuel soon.

http://www.waow.com/Global/story.asp?S=10139725

Did they allow the decrease from the windpower loss around Ted Kennedy's home?

So, you would need 500,000 wind turbines to produce 1 million megawatts. 500,000 turbines at a cost of $3.5million would be $1,750,000,000,000 or $1.75 trillion dollars.

Posted by: pete at April 6, 2009 8:23 PM

No sweat, pete: just wait until Porkulus II later this year.

mhb23re
at gmail d0t calm

UPDATE on stolen Canadian Plane:

If fueled up is good for 8 hours, 790 miles @ 141 mph top speed.

I calculate will be out of fuel approx. 10 to 10:30 PM. Should be near St. Louis.

Kate should get a really good headline out of this. Perhaps the pilot is running cigs to the states, or trying for Mexico. OR, doesn't know how to land the damn thing.

Homeland Security is pissed.

I'm wondering how it got all the way to Mi-Wi border before Air National Guard from Duluth got onto it.

People this is classic Green Math. It is used all the time, here are some examples...

If we all change our lights to CFLs we would save X electricity.
-- Never mind that electricity is produced at a constant rate in order to be available for changing and peak demand, so the reduction on coal emissions would be exactly ZERO.

If we ALL inflate our tires correctly we would save X gas.
-- Never mind that a recent DOT survey showed only 20% of drivers did not do this, so the real savings is 20% of what they calculated, and nobody can expect everyone to do this.

A square patch of desert 96 Miles wide could supply all the power America Needs.
-- Never mind that is 9216 sq miles of aluminum frames and tubing produced with what? Electricity from COAL. Plus add in all the mining and refining and transportation...

Here is some real math regarding this plan...
400 Acres in Nevada for Solar One used over 7 Million Pounds of Extruded Aluminum ( a 747 is 140,000 pounds of aluminum) and if my math is correct means 51 Million Tons of aluminum will be needed. Total US Output in 2003 ( last year I have data for ) was 3.8 Million tons including recycling.

Plus this array would need natural gas 50% of the time, the plan is based on the Solar One Array which is a Solar Assisted Natural Gas Power Plant. Without supplementary heating the fluid would lose all heat through the night and require several hours of sunlight to reach generating temperature.

As I mentioned here a few days ago, in the 30 years since 3-Mile Island, the US Government, under constant pressure to move towards "green power", managed to increase the use of wind power by 2% (and only because of massive subsidization). Meanwhile, the use of coal for electrical generation increased by 37%. I wonder why?

Kudos to Pete, above, for putting some numbers to the problem. In 2005, the US generated 2,012,873 GWh by burning coal. A 2 MW turbine operating 24/7 would generate 17.5 GWh/yr. However, as we see in Denmark (where wind power is more heavily used per capita than anywhere else in the world), the available capacity of turbines tops out at 22%. So the actual available capacity of a 2 MW turbine (the state-of-the-art turbines at Horns Rev in Denmark produce 2 MW) on an annual basis is 3.85 GWh. So in order to replace all of its coal-fired generation with wind power, the US would need to build 522,824 x 2 MW turbines.

At Horns Rev, the distance between turbines is 560 m. Call it half a km. So this many turbines would occupy a single line 261,412 km long. That's six and a half times the circumference of the Earth. But the length of the US east coast, from the tip of Florida to New Brunswick, is only 2373 km. That's only enough room for 4746 turbines lined up north to south, which means that the turbines would be stacked up 110 deep. At 500 m between turbines, the ranks would begin at the shore and stretch 55 km out to sea. I've got news for the greenies - 50 km off the east coast of North America, the seabed drops off precipitously (e.g., thousands of feet deep). That's too deep for tower foundations (the depth of the water at Horns Rev is 6-14 m).

Just think of it! A half-million wind turbines, lined up in ranks 100 deep, from Miami to Grand Manan. What a sight! Especially to migrating seabirds, or as they will henceforth be known, "a fine pink mist".

Think of this, too. Those turbines are only 500 m apart, with blades 80+m long. That means that there will only be 300 m between any two sets of 6.5 ton composite blades whirling around at up to 25 m/s. Any ship coming into port anywhere on the east coast of the US will have to run the gauntlet of a 55-km moulinex. The flight deck of the USS Ronald Reagan is 41 m wide. Supertankers get up to 70 m wide and half a km long. Imagine navigating THAT between whirling turbine blades for 55 km. Could make getting in and out of harbour a little tricky.

Most of these green schemes collapse pretty quickly when you start to apply numbers to them. The problem, of course, is that the press is so politically biased, professionally incurious, and scientifically illiterate that they accept this sort of spurious pabulum without ever engaging their critical faculties.

These wind/solar solutions do not pass even cashual scrutiny and yet these twits such as Layton continues to promote them, with his s**t-eating grin. When he does that he not only sounds insane he looks insane.
But then Layton looks like Lenin who said:

"A lie repeated enough become the truth."
"Useful idiots...."

This is great news. Now we can give free electricity to those 500 million Americans who lose their jobs every month.

And the other matter that never enters the Tree Huggers heads, what about the transmission lines ? and the Transformers ?. Not to mention the complete rewiring of the National Grid and the dropping in and out of Megawatts during the day. And the maintenance and replacement costs !!

The real problems is as suggested above, they do NOT want their lovely fantasy interrupted by maths - they were asleep in maths class - dreaming of 'My Little Pony'.

For those who did NOT sleep through Maths, Rudyard Kipling had it right in "The Sons of Martha"
"They finger death at their gloves' end where they piece and repiece the living wires. .....

They do not preach that their God will rouse them, a little before the nuts work loose."

Check out You Tube wind turbine failures videos. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqEccgR0q-o. Huge blades flying through the air and the rotor tower buckling as the (now) unbalanced rotor twisted the skinny rotor tower. I'm not too sure I want my house, place of work or my daughter's school within blade flying distance of a wind turbine.

I'm currently in Peru assisting with the construction of a hydro plant.

I've been in the energy business for over 40 years and I one thing I have managed to learn is that wind power produces secondary enery only.

It might be possible to firm up about 20% of the energy from the 350,000 turbines along the coast, which means you still need firm energy to meet the rest of the demand (unless, of course the strategy of reducing demand by destroying our entire economy is successful.

This is arrant nonsense of the first order and I'm fed up with fools who don't even try to understand the difference between power and energy and who thing that government subsidies don't impoverish the working, taxpaying minority in our western societies.

Sorry for the typos (perview is my fiend).

And thanks to KimW for reminding us of a rare and charming tribute to engineers

DN: Thanks for a post on this subject which uses the correct units for energy instead of the usual lazy reporting which just uses power units. As an EE, that always ticks me off.

Illiquid: Alcoa is sitting at about $6/share. Buy, Mortimer, buy!

Channeling Chevy (or his dead career)? It's cute that they can pick on Ford but you can't badmouth Jimmah...and that nothing's changed over three decades later.

Did Salazaar factor out the areas which will be unavailable because the Kennedys may want to sail there?

For a much more practical non-CO2 producing means of power generation the tiny nuclear reactors produced by Hyperion power generation are just the thing we need. (hyperionpowergeneration.com) This unit is 1.5 meters across and weighs about 10-15 tons. It utilizes hydrogen as a moderator and apparently uranium hydride breaks down at 800C at which point the nuclear reaction ceases. If the sealed containment vessel is punctured the H2 escapes and chain reaction stops. It uses 5% U232 and produces either 70 Mw of heat (ideal for the tarsands) or 25 Mw of electricity (just need to hook up some steam pipes and a generator). Cost/unit is estimated to be $25 million.

The unit is designed for small scale installations and will run for 5-10 years without maintenance. It would just be a matter of digging a deep hole in the ground, connecting some steam pipes and then pouring lots of concrete around it as a radiation shield. Assuming 100% availability it would produce 219 GwH of electricity/year. I'm not sure what the cost of the generator/steam system but if we assume $25 million also, then the cost of electricity over 5 years is a mere 4.48 cents/Kwh. After the fissionable material in the unit is exhausted, just dig up the old one and plug in a new one. Hyperion wants people to think of it as a really big battery.

Such units are already in operation and the only obstacle now is the AEC which will probably take years giving it approval since it is a completely novel reactor design. Hyperion is an offshoot of Los Alamos labs and I think those guys know a bit about fission.

Just think of the number of bird lives that could be saved if we went this route rather than idiotic, ugly and ridiculously low energy density windmills.

"When the wind blows."

Apparently they can already control the weather of our entire planet by means of taxation.
Surely conjuring the wind to blow at will is a mere bagatelle?

Who can doubt this?

loki;

I've been trying to sell the mini nuclear option similar to Japan's program to anyone who would listen. Canada should be positioned for just this sort heat/generating potential, especially to drop oil recovery costs from the tar sands.

"Japan's energy policy has been driven by considerations of energy security and the need to minimise dependence on current imports. The main elements regarding nuclear power are:

* continue to have nuclear power as a major element of electricity production.
* recycle uranium and plutonium from spent fuel, initially in LWRs, and have reprocessing domestically from 2005.
* steadily develop fast breeder reactors in order to improve uranium utilisation dramatically.
* promote nuclear energy to the public, emphasising safety and non-proliferation.

In March 2002 the Japanese government announced that it would rely heavily on nuclear energy to achieve greenhouse gas emission reduction goals set by the Kyoto Protocol. A 10-year energy plan, submitted in July 2001 to the Minister of Economy Trade & Industry (METI), was endorsed by cabinet. It called for an increase in nuclear power generation by about 30 percent (13,000 MWe), with the expectation that utilities would have 9 to 12 new nuclear plants operating by 2011.

At present Japan has 53 reactors totalling 46,236 MWe on line, with 3 (3300 MWe) under construction and 13 (17,915 MWe) planned."

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf79.html
and
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/analysis/nucenviss2.html

There's a lot of facts on this thread. In consequence, you-know who might come along and use the word 'fallacy'.

If you've been paying attention, you probably noticed, that the students in Canada were taught approximate calculation in grade 4 math, before they are taught precise calculation in grade 5 math. Some of them get an idea that by grade 5 they already know how to calculate and stop worrying about math altogether. If the parents are, like me, in full damage control mode for all 12 school years, the damage can be reversed. If not, we get Ken Salazar.

Aaron: you are assuming that Salazar actually believes that wind power is a feasible replacement for coal. I think he can do the math just fine - that what he is hinting a above is a lie. Worse than having poor math skills he is trying to defraud the American public.

I read somewhere that to power New York city with windmills would require the entire state of New Jersey filled to maximum capacity/minimum distance between each of them!
Of course providing that the wind is constant.

Maybe the wind cannot free flow enough. Too much obstruction from mountains and forests?
Get the dynamite and chainsaws out!

The left has hijacked talking about alternative energy, just by talking about it they are seen as more progressive. Never mind that ugly pesky reality thing.

Guess who else besides Iggy has a new book that he's trying to sell?

Dr. Fruitfly.......David Suzuki

I guess the donations to his foundation are drying up and he's got to be worried about the CCRA retroactively taking away the foundations charitable status, just like what happened to Greenpeace.

There are quite a few giant wind turbines in this state. Everytime I see them, the fact that beneath each tower there resides a block of concrete about the size of your local Walgreen's gives me pause. I read "monopole" describing the seabed installation but suspect it as well will be embedded in a block of cement the size of your local Walgreen's. Doesn't intuitively seem all that green.
http://www.leewindenergy.com/wind-turbine-foundations.php

Already, 100 people per year are killed in wind turbine accidents. What's the death-rate going to be like if we start harnessing wind to that extent? You didn't know that wind turbines explode with awesome force? Watch

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqEccgR0q-o

To "G"-

Can you contact me at imcqueen@nbnet.nb.ca I began writing a novel about Japan's fast breeder reactor program when I lived in Japan. I left in 1993 and have heard virtually nothing about MONJU since then and I'd like to get an update. If you read this, I would like to hear up-to-date information.

Ian in NB

I just received the following message. I have NEVER posted here before. What gives?
Ian M

small dead animals
Less Forrest Gump. More Team America.
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I just received the following message. I have NEVER posted here before. What gives?
Ian M [imcqueen@nbnet.nb.ca]

small dead animals
Less Forrest Gump. More Team America.
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