Featured comment by Eric Anderson;
SaskPower’s Centennial Wind Power Facility
• 83 “Vestas-V80” with a potential capacity of 150 megawatts of power on 30 km2 or 11.7 mile2
• 2nd largest wind facility in Canada when opened in 2006
• But, in SK they generate about 40% of this potential or 60 megawatts (see Saskatchewan Legislature Hansard, January 2007, page 794)
• They require a minimum wind speed of 14km/hr to operate and reach maximum power at 50km/hr
• They do not work at temperatures below -30 Celsius
• Footprint is thus 2 MW/km2 or 5.13 MW/mile2
• Each unit;
• is 351 ft tall , or 107 meters, or over 30-stories
• weighs 222 tonnes or 489,510 pounds
• has 3 x 39-meter blades, with tips moving at speeds up to 256kms/hr
Footprint of Wind vs. Nuclear is 1,440:1
• Bruce Power proposal for AB and “eluded to” for SK is, for example;
– 2 Areva EPRs
– 3,200 megawatts from a 250-acre facility (1 km2 or less than ½ mile2)
– Operates 90% of the time at full capacity or 2,880 MW
– Footprint is 2,880 MW/km2
• To get 2,880 MW from wind, at same scale as the Centennial project and efficiency (0.72 MW/turbine) (2 MW/km2), it would require;
– 4,000 turbines covering 1,440 km2
– or, a wind farm over 4.6 kms wide, stretching from Regina to Prince Albert (or 1 km wide from Regina Victoria, BC)
– The total weight of 4,000 turbines themselves (mostly steel, and without the concrete pads they sit on) would be 888,000 tonnes or 1,958,040,000 lbs (a lot of GHG).
• The Centennial Project was placed in the best wind producing area in the province (south of Swift Current) so its abilities cannot be reproduced elsewhere, so the farm would need to be even larger than described.
• See this link for wind averages/resource in SK
http://generationprocurement.saskpower.com/pdf/SPD_80m_021403.pdf
Nuclear capitol costs are less than wind
• The Centennial Project cost $275 million to generate 60 MW (see Saskatchewan Legislature Hansard, January 2007, page 793 for costs); that is $4.5833 million/MW
• A nuclear complex generating 2,880 MW would thus have a comparable cost allowance of; $4.5833 million/MW x 2,880 MW = $13,199.99 million
• A will-reported Finland reactor complex being built by Areva had a budget of $3,300 million that is now 50% over budget at $4,950 million. However, even at $4,950 million this reactor facility has less than half the capitol cost of wind, on a per MW basis.
Justthinkin..or are you?
That may be your opinion, but it seems more emotion and wishful thinking.
Your opinion suggests the world has gone mad because all major economies are going EV in a big way except for Canada.
If you are not aware of that, I’m not surprised.
Ooops That happened while away at another site. Took a looong time.
A few facts, TG. There is no subsidy for nuclear power. There is only the research grant provided to AECL for the Chalk River Laboratories.
The cost of future waste disposal is built into the price of electricity. In short, if you’re getting some of your electricity from nuclear power now, you’re also paying for future waste disposal.
Now you claim to be a big supporter of electric vehicles. So let’s just look for a minute at where the electricity is to come from.
Assume that all of Ontario’s 5 million cars are Volts. With a 111 kW engine, they have a battery capacity of 16 kWh, of which 8 is usable.
That means the average car will consume 8 kWh a day or about 2.9 MWh annually. Let’s call it 3 MWh, meaning that the entire vehicle fleet in Ontario needs 15 million MWh or 15 TWh annually.
So where do you get it? Well, 5 TWh is the typical output of a nuclear reactor, so three of them supply the load. For wind, allowing for its capacity factor like we did for nuclear, we need 8,000 of them to supply the 15 TWh.
In material contents that means the nuclear plants require 60,000 tonnes of steel and 285,000 cubic metres of concrete. The windmills however require about 3.7 million tonnes of steel and roughly 6.2 million cubic metres of concrete. I’ve excluded any inclusion of the cost of backup power supply for the wind system.
Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I;
yet every time the public tit takes a hit,
the wind goes bloody dry…
Hmm. Needs work.
CGH .. play all you like, but back it up!
Won’t PHEVs require us to build
even more power plants?
Not at first. PHEVs will be programmed to
charge at night, when electricity demand is
low (and cheapest). You simply plug the car
in when you get home, and the car will know
when to charge.
The U.S. Department of
Energy’s labs (Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory) concluded that “73% of cars,
pickup trucks, SUVs, and vans could be
supported without modifying the existing
grid infrastructure”3. This is made clear by
the chart below (from the Electric Power
Research Institute4 (EPRI), a utilityfunded
lab).
http://my.epri.com/portal/server.pt?
EPRI.. Utility based research Institute.
From the Horse’s mouth, so to speak. . .
Top of your head…or Utility Engineers.
Who shall I trust?
TG, it’s apparent that you do not understand the difference between energy, generation capacity and transmission capability. My comment was on electrical energy; the EPRI report comments on transmission capacity.
Until you learn these differences and are capable of understanding, don’t bother debating these issues again.