It’s the energy density, stupid.
If we take the American Wind Energy Association’s claim that 60,000 megawatts of wind-energy capacity can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by about 80 million tons per year, then simple math shows that if we wanted to stop the growth in global carbon dioxide emissions by using wind energy alone, we would have to install about 375,000 megawatts of new wind-energy capacity every year. If we assume each turbine has a capacity of two megawatts, that would mean installing 187,500 wind turbines every year, or nearly 500 every day.
How much land would all those wind turbines require? Again, the math is straightforward. The power density of wind energy is 1 watt per square meter [PDF]. Therefore, merely halting the growth in carbon dioxide emissions with wind energy would require covering a land area of about 375 billion square meters or 375,000 square kilometers — an area the size of Germany — and we would have to do so every year.
What would that mean on a daily basis? Using wind alone to stop the growth in carbon dioxide emissions would require us to cover about 1,000 square kilometers with wind turbines — a land area about 17 times the size of Manhattan Island — and we would have to do so every day. Given the ongoing backlash against the wind industry that is already underway here in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Australia, the silliness of such a proposal is obvious.
Send this link on to your MP. And your MLA. And your Premier.
It’s worse than that. Data from wind turbines around the world show that they seldom produce more than 20% of their installed capacity. Hydro dams and nuclear plants generally produce more than 90% of their installed capacity.
Like hydrogen and corn ethanol fuel, it’s a scam
north of 90
do you understand “ASSUME”
here’s references for the initial comment
Energy From Wind Turbines Actually Less Than Estimated
http://theenergycollective.com/willem-post/169521/wind-turbine-energy-capacity-less-estimated
Wind farms produce ‘fifth of expected electricity’
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/7492994/Wind-farms-produce-fifth-of-expected-electricity.html
anyone who knows how to use Google can find more
Taking a short drive from home here in Southern Ontario,knowing both sides of the “green” energy debate . One can only assume the new staging area, sub station,new transmission lines etc ….. must be the work of absolute loons and people just looking the other way.
North Lambton county was more or less free of turbines but it looks as if its a hurry up and get them up before people really get pissed.
You have to see it to believe it.
Bring on the consequences.
(written at 3 26 am at a timmies on snow call,while watching another snow squall pass through which when done should add another foot to the twenty inches from last week)
Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK367T7h6ZY
Yes, thorium nuclear is the energy source of the future. The Chinese and Japanese will perfect it and sell it to the world. For Canada, a country with decades of successful small scale nuclear reactors, it will remain just another insurmountable opportunity.
mugs, I didn’t get that snow call last night:-))))
Not to mention how much concrete is needed for the base of each turbine. Using hundreds of tons of concrete per turbine drives the cost up which makes houses more expensive to build.
N60 pretty much nails it here. There’s a big difference between capacity of a machine and the energy actually produced. Only one small quibble and that’s with hydro. Most of the best sites are already developed, so what remains is either 1. too remote, 2. too little head, or 3. too little water.
Canada’s CANDU reactors can use thorium fuel without modification, the only existing power reactor in the world which can do so.
Al, you’re right about the concrete. A wind turbine uses about 2.5 times as much steel and three times as much concrete per installed Megawatt as does a nuclear plant. The base of a wind turbine is approximately the volume of about five school buses. When you consider the actual energy produced, as N60 notes, it’s about four times those amounts.
Finally, the usefulness of wind tends to go down with each new increment that’s built. Not all wind sites are equal; some have better wind conditions than others. So in general the best sites get built first, meaning that each new increment tends to produce less than the previous one. Germany hit this performance wall about eight years ago, which is why they thought about introducing new increased feed-in tariffs for marginal wind generation sites.
Energy density is a racist concept created by dead white males. Also, using this term constitutes micro-aggression against those whose cultures don’t include mathematics. All that counts are feelings of what is best for Gaia and, given that reality is a social construct, by having the majority of people think “blow wind blow”, limitless energy will be the result.
Steven Den Beste, at USS Clueless pointed this problem out in 2002. Basically the only energy that can drive modern society is fossil and nuclear. There is not enough potential energy in any renewable or green energy to drive even a fraction of today’s energy needs.
Can renewable or green sources provide energy? -Yes.
Can renewable or green sources power our civilization? -No.
The only questions are, “How many poor people will die in the cold, how many eagles will be killed, and how many jobs will be lost before this green lunacy stops?
Excellent emulation of a Libtard English major, Mr. Loki sir. I gather from this you have the opportunity to observe them in the wild at close range.
As to Kate’s suggestion for sending the link to politicians… they already know this stuff. They can do simple math, they’re not stupid. They know it, and they’re doing it anyway.
What does that tell you?
In Ontario if you demonstrate against windmills or suggest publicly that you might like to, they send the OPP around to your house for a chat. That’s not hyperbole, they really did that and continue to do it. In case you might be a terrorist, y’know. Gotta check these things out, right?
There’s tens of billions of dollars in the wind here. Lots of Very Important People are making their life’s fortune in government cheese. Lots of brand new minted millionaires.
They aren’t going to quietly pack up and go home, if you catch my drift.
Something rarely discussed is the amount of energy that goes into making the raw materials used in making a turbine, and the energy used in subsequent construction. A whole lot of steel means a lot of iron ore and smelting. Same for the copper and rare-earth minerals. Then all the concrete, and the transmission lines. I seriously doubt if one of those monstrosities will ever produce the amount of energy expended in making one.
A read a similar view (maybe from Steven Milloy of JunkScience) about the amount of alcohol that the U.S. would have to produce to run its then-current number of vehicles on ethanol etc. and it would have meant cutting down every forested acre in the States to plant grain; and hugely increasing the number of distilleries. (I can’t recall at all a number figure for the distillery increase to guess at it; so I won’t.)
Let not your heart be troubled. Last night Lambton County Council
voted (narrowly) to approve a $20,000 expenditure to fund a Charter challenge against these evil windmills. A long way to go but these are baby steps. It may all come to naught but it will put the issue on the radar. It’s time we took a page out of the Indian industry playbook and raised a lot of hell.
It is important to keep in mind that the elitist enviro-marxist-fascists
intend to depopulate the world to such an extent that they alone will be
large consumers of energy and then the overall impact will be minimal.
This report is not news to any of us here, but the fact that a writer who is apparently a self-described Green is taking this position is news. Perhaps the scales are beginning to fall off the eyes.
“It’s time we took a page out of the Indian industry playbook and raised a lot of hell.”
I’ve got a couple tires you could burn. 🙂
Its a nice thought, but the truth is any -white- man pulling the stunts the Indians get away with around here would spend two years in jail.
Because: Liberal = racist.
Phantom, unfortunately there are a lot of people who believe the BS of people such as the moonbat English major university type who I was channeling last night. Just forgot to put in the part about “symbolic racism”.
The sad fact is that innumeracy is far more widespread than I could have imagined. There was a time when the average Canadian could do a few quick calculations and figure out themselves that bird blender power was a scam designed to enrich the crony capitalist friends of moonbat politicians. Now, it seems that even such simple operations as mental addition and subtraction are beyond the capabilities of a large portion of the population. Anyone with facility in mental arithmetic has run across totally innumerate cashiers who cannot understand why they’re being given a seemingly meaningless amount of money until the cash register shows them that they have to dispense a round numbered amount of change. It’s been at least a decade since I’ve had a cashier ask me if I had an extra 55 cents so she could give me less change.
As far as politicians, I would put the current premier of BC into the stupid category. The only positive thing one can say about her is “she has big tits”. She’s pushing a campaign of wind power (albeit not to the fanatic degree that Ontario is bankrupting itself) and refusing to change a policy which prohibits the construction of new hydroelectric projects. Hydroelectricity is the ultimate in green energy; it provides water in dry years, it buffers heavy rainfall to prevent flooding in wet years and the energy density of water is far far greater than that of wind power. (Calculation of the difference is left as an exercise for the reader).
Any sane province would be utilizing every potential hydroelectric site that existed since one is dealing with a mature technology so costs are known, one produces a vast amount of very cheap electricity once the dam is built and the additional benefits of flood control and irrigation make me wonder why BC has taken a lunatic approach to energy policy. Moonbats wail “what about the salmon” and my response to that is that there are ways to allow migratory fish and hydroelectric dams to coexist. I happen to enjoy salmon very much (preferably barbacued) and don’t mind spending money to ensure they get to their spawning grounds. I also like eagles and don’t like them being killed in bird blenders.
If Canada were a sane country, right now there would be new prisons being build for the corrupt politicians (sorry for the pleonasm) and their crony capitalist buddies who have fleeced the taxpayers of Canada, particularly in Ontario, of billions of dollars for bird blenders whose only function appears to be to enrich crony capitalists and please urban moonbats.
In BC “energy conservation” is pushed as the solution to increasing power demand and, presumably by sitting freezing in the dark, one can ensure that BC Hydro has no further need to build new dams and instead one gets highly intermittent power from bird blenders. As far as reducing the growth of population in the province, put together a young couple in a room that’s freezing with no light and likely the end result will be an increase in population as the couples find innovative new ways to stay warm and pass the time.
Cheap energy is the basis of a technologic society and this means building nuclear plants for the long haul. The ignorance of the public about radiation is appalling and recently had a patient tell me she didn’t want a needed xray because it would require exposure to radiation. When I asked her if there were any natural sources of radiation she stated there weren’t any and it was just xray machines and nuclear plants; I believe I may have irreparably damaged her weltanschauung when I told her the dirty truth about cosmic rays, granite counters, radon gas and K40 which she couldn’t get away from. When I started to get into radiation hormesis, she agreed to have the xray if I stopped terrifying her with all of the radioactive sources in the environment which she now had to avoid.
What is needed is a major push by the numerate to discredit moonbats at every opportunity and expose the political corruption that exists in the “green” energy kleptocracy. For those who take up this cause, be prepared to be called by every negative term moonbats can think of but they just can’t compete in the area of arithmetic.
Loki, blame the schools. Just as they created illiteracy by dropping phonics, so too have they created innumeracy by dropping basic arithmetic skills. People can no longer do basic arithmetic in their heads because the multiplication tables are no longer taught. Long division has become a lost art as well.
Now at one time, BC understood the need for thermal generation to supplement its hydraulic sources. BC Hydro had plans to build a nuclear plant in the future, but this was dropped with the end of the government of WAC Bennett. BC has a surplus of capacity, but a shortage of electrical energy, so it imports from Alberta and has been doing so for 30 years. So the BC environmentalists who oppose Site C are and have been simply encouraging the import of more coal-fired generation from Alberta, something they claim to oppose.
As for your poor patient, she would no doubt be even more horrified to learn that she’s being bathed in ionizing radiation coming from the sun every second of the day. And why is the earth’s core still molten? Because of radioactive decay from the countless billions of tonnes of uranium in the earth’s core.