Over the past few years, Texas has spent about $17 billion on wind turbines. And that doesn’t include the transmission lines.
Consider the afternoon of August 2, when electricity demand hit 67,929 megawatts. Although electricity demand and prices were peaking, output from the state’s wind turbines was just 1,500 megawatts, or about 15 percent of their total nameplate capacity. Put another way, wind energy was able to provide only about 2.2 percent of the total power demand even though the installed capacity of Texas’s wind turbines theoretically equals nearly 15 percent of peak demand. This was no anomaly. On four days in August 2010, when electricity demand set records, wind energy was able to contribute just 1, 2, 1, and 1 percent, respectively, of total demand.
The real tragedy? There are no telephones in Texas, dashing hopes that someone might call our own energy minister to warn him.
And last winter when all of Britain was blanketed by snow for two weeks straight, their turbines didn’t work either.
The story could have “Ontario” instead of “Texas” and be just as true.
That’s what chugging the Greenie Kool-Aide gets you.
Are reducing expenditures on green energy boondoggles even on the debt reduction horizon?
Jim mentioned “green energy boondoggles”. Exactly!
It was a good thing the AGW fraud believer Federal Conservative Jim Prentice resigned. http://www.ckom.com/content/prentice-pushed-cap-and-trade-alberta
I am a retired airline pilot, and one of the things I did on long legs was to look at the various wind farms. There were a few that seemed to be turning most of the time, including one in Texas, but most had numerous idle units. Some were often entirely inactive. There is a huge farm in the Palm Springs area, placed to take advantage of winds through the pass, which seldom had more than a few in operation.
And people wonder why the brass at BC Hydro have no problem coming up with the idea of doubling hyrdo rates in 5 years. That would take them to what $0.22/kwhr? They know that wind power back east is costing over $0.70/kwhr! I cannot even understand that as the wind generators in Maui are billed out at $0.32/kwhr to my knowledge.
Bottom line is that the public let these jokers get away with it year after year. Where is out ‘tea party’ movement. Oh, I forgot we led the pack with ‘Reform’ but that didn’t sell back east. The watered down version is certainly having questionable effectiveness. The Cannon cross-fertilization process is on going.
The progressive plan is not working, why is it producing any power? The system should be sucking power from the grid 24/7 ….Fix those suckers so they run backwards on a 60/40 duty cycle.. It’s a high priced dummy load hidden (in your face) in a critical system…
The Wind System will fail on-line, and if the grid is in a period of high demand , the whole system will flat-line… Max damage to the Grid and to Consumer equipment…
Wait for it!
Ken; the real reason Jim (the magic climate fairy) Prentice resigned and went to the CIBC was actually a study by CIBC realizing very few who worked for CIBC wore skirts anymore. Jim was hired on the spot to up the numbers on skirt wearers at CIBC. Good riddance Jim Prentice aka Joe Clark lite.
Our electricity rates in B.C. are going up every year precisely due to the windmill building boondoggles Gordon Campbell contracted for. B.C. Hydro was required to buy power from private windmill power companies at three times the current energy price.
As a punishment for his sins,the Liberal former Premier was made Ambassador to Britain by our Conservative government.
We have the illusion of democracy,we’re held in thrall to political elites that don’t give a damn how they piss away our money.
Under our shiny new Premier,we’re still subsidizing windmills,with lots more to come,and our rates are going from the lowest in the Country,to among the highest in the next few years because our politicians are tilting at f’ing windmills.
Instead of rioting in the streets like the fools in Britain, we old timers should riot in the country and burn those goddamned windmills,but with Harper’s new “get tough on crime” approach, we’d undoubtedly never get out of prison in this lifetime, and I DO want to go moose hunting again in a few weeks. 😉
This is from the head of the NASA Goddard Institute, James Hansen – perhaps the world’s most influential greenie:
Can renewable energies provide all of society’s energy needs in the foreseeable future? It is
conceivable in a few places, such as New Zealand and Norway. But suggesting that renewables
will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.
This Easter Bunny fable is the basis of ‘policy’ thinking of many liberal politicians. Yet when
such people are elected to the executive branch and must make real world decisions, they end up
approving expanded off-shore drilling and allowing continued mountaintop removal, long-wall
coal mining, hydro-fracking, etc. – maybe even a tar sands pipeline. Why the inconsistency?
Because they realize that renewable energies are grossly inadequate for our energy needs now
and in the foreseeable future and they have no real plan. They pay homage to the Easter Bunny
fantasy, because it is the easy thing to do in politics. They are reluctant to explain what is
actually needed to phase out our need for fossil fuels. Reluctance to be honest might seem
strange, given that what is needed to solve the problem actually makes sense and is not harmful
to most people.
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110729_BabyLauren.pdf
political junkie,so what did Hansen actually say?
Ya but in BC we are subsidizing aboriginal(aka Early Asian Immigrant) owned windmills.
And that makes it much better.
Twenty years from now, broken down wind farms will be everywhere. They require a lot of expensive maintenance and can not exist without government subsidies. As our bloated welfare states wither and die, green energy will be one of the early casualties. I suppose a little industry will spring up to scrap them out (green jobs?), or we could just leave them as monuments to human stupidity.
Kate?
In your travels, have an eye on US 30 just inside the Ohio/Indiana line.
Massive turbine farm has gone up since April (when I first saw it) and last week I saw the turbines are turning now. I counted at least 50.
There’s another one I spotted from I-65 south of Indianapolis. It’s far enough away from the I that I couldn’t get an accurate count.
Texas? I thought they were smarter than that down there…
Texas was unduly influenced by T. Bone Pickens…..who somehow expected to reap a windfall from wind power….by building wind farms but having somebody else finance/build the transmission lines.
Problem 1…neither the state or the utilities could justify the cost…it would be much cheaper to build NG generators near the load.
Problem 2….the wind didn’t blow…….
Soccermom: You fail to understand. It’s all about the subsidies. When money’s falling from the skies, Texans’ big hats are useful — and Pickens has a bigger hat than most.
I do have a modest proposal on the matter.
Regards,
Ric
ct @10:47am
– Where is out ‘tea party’ movement. Oh, I forgot we led the pack with ‘Reform’ but that didn’t sell back east.
As I recall, the Reform vote split in the east with the PC vote and gave the Liberals their great big majority they didn’t earn or deserve.
The proof is the proof is the proof!
Did rid most of the federal PC’s though as a added bonus. ++
makes me sick when I think of what Dalton McSpendy is doing in this province, he’s a one man Giant Fan wrecking crew, sickening.
Spike 1,
Hansen supports cleaner renewables and conservation. But Hansen thinks that nuclear power is the only practical alternative to coal, especially as fast-growing Asian economies ramp up their electricity demand.
Wind and solar just won’t make a significant contribution.
This is not a widely shared view among the greens.
I think that real fairy tale that the politicians have adopted is not the Easter bunny, but chicken Little. They have bought into the sky is falling fairy tale advanced by the likes of Al Gore, David Suzuki and countless fake climate scientists and as dmorris said our politicians are tilting at f’ing windmills.
Texas outperformed Ontario where during the heat wave this summer the wind farm efficiency was a whopping 12.5%.
Campaign on that Dalton.
Spike 1,what Hansen said is this:
Hansen supports cleaner renewables and conservation. But Hansen thinks that nuclear power is the only practical alternative to coal, especially as fast-growing Asian economies ramp up their electricity demand.
Wind and solar just won’t make a significant contribution and the politicians who say that they will are lying to us.
if this can be made workable and scaled up to power plant size, gore’s going to go broke…which is a good thing
http://wardsauto.com/ar/thorium_power_car_110811/
Small blocks of thorium generate heat surges that are configured as a thorium-based laser, Stevens tells Ward’s. These create steam from water within mini-turbines, generating electricity to drive a car.
A 250 MW unit weighing about 500 lbs. (227 kg) would be small and light enough to drop under the hood of a car, he says.
Jim Hedrick, a specialist on industrial minerals – and until last year the U.S. Geological Survey’s senior advisor on rare earths – tells Ward’s the idea is “both plausible and sensible.”
Because thorium is so dense, similar to uranium, it stores considerable potential energy: 1 gm of thorium equals the energy of 7,500 gallons (28,391 L) of gasoline Stevens says. So, using just 8 gm of thorium in a car should mean it would never need refueling.
Stevens’ prototype systems generate electricity within 30 seconds of firing a laser. This can feed power into a car, without the need for storage…
…If his technology were to become successful on a commercial scale, one advantage would be that thorium is fairly common throughout the world…
…The U.S. Geological Survey’s estimated thorium reserves in 2010 shows the U.S. leading with 440,900 tons (440,000 t)…
Well thorium based power comes from fission so it definitely isn’t viable to be used in vehicles. But the potential for thorium based reactors is definitely something that needs more attention. Too bad the disaster in japan gives an excuse for anti-nuclear fear mongering.
Tower Of Power
There have been many recommendations as to reducing the “carbon footprint” left by the use of coal and petroleum products, especially as to the generation of electrical power. Some of these proposals are: Nuclear fission plants (What to do with the radio-active waste products?); Wind driven turbines (Apparently OK except off the shores of Senator Kennedy’s estate; But, otherwise limited in other locations by terrain, average wind flow, bird migration patterns, etc.); Geo-Thermal “heat wells” (Drilled at a very high cost and requiring water supplies often not readily available in the proper geological areas); Solar reflector arrays with photo-electric cells (VERY expensive) or closed circuit hot fluid-to-steam turbines (One of the better ideas, but dependent on sunshine-per-year amounts and availability of vast spaces); And, some others I cannot recall.
Yet, there is one proposal about which little has been written or, as far as I can tell, considered. That is the use (Especially in desert areas) of a “tower of power”, being a very tall (1000′) chimney (As used in many coal fired electric power plants or ore refining facilities; Some still existing without current use), having about it four-to-ten air intakes above the ground effect level (20′-plus), using the heat rising effect to draw in air from the surrounding area and passing it through moderate-to-slow turbines at each such intake or one large, multi-stage, turbine in the stack, all to generate electrical power.
By experiment, gates could be installed to open in the eye of any wind to increase air flow.
I suspect that this type of devise would work best in the hot and dry environment of a desert (eg Southern California, Arizona, parts of Australia, Israel) where the power produced would vary as the day’s heat (Which would assist in providing power during the high-demand, air-conditioning, parts of the day).
Of course, we might “go to the source” and erect such a tower over the Capitol Building in Washington (DC), EU headquarters, the UN (Useless Nations) HQ AND, of course, so many academic buildings.
Here in Alberta we’re also chasing the wind but the biggest waste is the proposed overbuild of the grid which will triple power rates, while transfering several billion dollars to Quebec company SNC Lavelin, the parent company of Altalink. Waste and graft know no bounds
Channeling my inner progressive I have concluded that wind towers just have an image problem. Better PR, that’s the ticket.
While driving on the TransCanada last week and passing many of these fine (and misunderstood) bladed beasts in SW Sask, it occurred to me that what they need is a make-over. White (subtle racism?), rarely moving … BORING. Bring on the corporate sponsors/advertisers. Think John Deere Green, Monsanto, Greenpeace, the Toronto Star, etc. If the towers cannot produce electricity at least they can bring in ad revenue.
There is also great opportunities for the pretentious, big-government crowd – art grants. Nothing pedestrian like daisies or smiley faces but real Art, the type no one but government would pay for. Gaia’s Piss Christ kinda thing.
I’m not sure the US is ready for it yet but what it needs is a truly national president. Bachmann is nowhere near the caliber of candidate the US needs to recover its past glory with her constant recitation of Republican talking points. Sorry Michelle but that just aint gonna cut it. The US needs a president that can rise above party politics without being cast a lunatic. Ron Paul won’t work because of his perceived loony ideas not carrying weight with the other elected officials. The candidate must be able to take the media broadsides and with a laugh dismiss them. This is an art that Sarah Palin has yet to master. Finally the candidate must have some proven track record of having actually accomplishing things while in elected office. This narrows the field down to one, Rick Perry.
LC,perhaps Margie Gillis can be hired to do an interpretive dance,”the windmills”.
…Well thorium based power comes from fission so it definitely isn’t viable to be used in vehicles…
actually, this particular use of thorium doesn’t rely on a self-sustaining fission reaction at all…and the particles emitted by thorium are stopped by tinfoil…remember, when we talk radiation, alpha and beta particles are stopped by your skin, it’s only gamma rays and neutrons that aren’t and those aren’t present in the thorium heat cycle…the same is true of the ‘atomic batteries’ currently in development for domestic power supplies…but since moonbats don’t want ANY sources of power to exist and only want government subsidies for no tangible result, they’ll protest against the ‘nuclear’ aspect..even if it isn’t there.
try reading the whole article…and related ones
…The key to the system developed by inventor Charles Stevens, CEO and chairman of Connecticut-based Laser Power Systems, is that when silvery metal thorium is heated by an external source, it becomes so dense its molecules give off considerable heat.
Small blocks of thorium generate heat surges that are configured as a thorium-based laser, Stevens tells Ward’s. These create steam from water within mini-turbines, generating electricity to drive a car…
Tear them down & buid real power plants. Create jobs while doing it. he Chinese don’t play like Obama & his kittens the coy game. When your more communist than the communiss you have a problem.
JMO
They forgot to point the fans at Washington DC or the closest university.
James Hansen is of the worst AGW demagogues, and any statement he makes is suspect. Much easier to just speak directly to experts in the power generation field on matters of power generation, rather than listen to Hansen, and then cross check with the experts.
the best idea I’ve heard so far, and I forget where I saw it, it might even have been here, was…
“build a nuke plant nearby, wire the giant fans to run backwards and cool off the countryside…no more ‘global warming’ ”
My blood pressure goes up every time I see wind turbines, but then again, I’m for the birds.
It’s a possibility, dmorris but that would only interest those who are already True Believers.
Somehow our moral and intellectual superiors have to get their message to the average bumpkin traveling in their gas-guzzling SUVs during their daily commute from the suburbs. A hammer and sickle on the blades, perhaps. Of course, lollipops, unicorns and other fairy tale creatures near urban centers to provide pleasing, reassuring backdrops for those who have no concept of the reality of electricity production.
Personally, I’d like to see Big Oil and Big Coal buy ad space that explains “This Windmill cost taxpayers $$$$ and provides only X MW about 15% of the time” and “Coal/NG/Nuclear cost $ per MW and has an 80% plus availability rating”
Bemused
Wanna buy a bridge?
I read the article and the proposal was “A 250 MW unit weighing about 500 lbs.” IOW 300,000 hp….that’s how well written the article is….
This concept is loonier than cold fusion…the physics is beyond stupid….there is NO power from Thorium without fission….and it is Uranium isotopes converted from Thorium, in the reactor, that fissions.
It’s not just the concept of a nuclear powered car that resembles the flying cars of the 50’s-60’s………The closest Thoreum has come to practical is a German experimental reactor that produced no power and was a maintainence money pit.
@sasquatch
I don’t claim to be a nuclear physicist but I have learned over the years not to say something can’t be done unless I’m an expert in the field or I read something, preferably several things, from a few sources who are…I agree that the 8 grams seems a little bit on the low side and 250Mw seems a bit on the high side by an order of magnitude or two…but the fact still remains that thorium can produce heat, heat boils water, boiling water makes steam and steam drives turbines to make electricity…I believe the 250Mw was transposed by the author from the miniature thorium plant Toshiba is designing for domestic use and that a more realistic need for a car would be 25Kw or so, about 10,000 times less…and I think you should maybe read up on the thorium reaction noted in the article which, if you read it carefully, doesn’t rely on fission…much the same way that the brilliant white light generated by the thorium found in the gas mantle of a coleman lantern doesn’t and it takes a little heat for that reaction to begin firing too…so I’ll wait for the scientists with credentials in the field to decide if this process works or can be made workable…and if you’ll notice, at least one already has… quote–Jim Hedrick, a specialist on industrial minerals – and until last year the U.S. Geological Survey’s senior advisor on rare earths – tells Ward’s the idea is “both plausible and sensible.”–unquote
If you’ll notice, in my first post I said quite clearly at the beginning “IF, (put the emphasis on ‘IF’) this can be made workable…” and anything that stills the moonbats and stops them from handing money to the oil sheiks or the wind barons and ‘electric car’ shysters that pull up stakes when the government subsidies disappear like they did everywhere else, instead of developing other resources we already own, has my attention…until it’s proven one way or the other…that’s what peole like ‘bama count on…others being too afraid to look at anything that doesn’t have the goracle’s seal of approval. Sure it might not work, or it might even be a complete fraud, but the facts are that thorium has some interesting properties, it has a low radiation signiture and until recently, man couldn’t build anything out of carbon except charcoal briquettes and pencils so I’ll wait and see…I owe our ingenuity as a species that much.
“Personally, I’d like to see Big Oil and Big Coal buy ad space that explains “This Windmill cost taxpayers $$$$ and provides only X MW about 15% of the time” and “Coal/NG/Nuclear cost $ per MW and has an 80% plus availability rating”
Ummmm, big oil loves things as they are. Fact is much of the financing for “alternate” energy is provided by big oil. The more expensive “other” energy is, the easier it is to sell over priced oil products at HUGE profit margins
==========================================
Bemused
there are a few in here whom are expert on everything EXCEPT understanding their own limitations of their own understanding:-))))
That nonsense about the thorium power plant was dissected recently on wattsupwiththat.com
And it is nonsense. There is no way you can get that kind of energy out of the metal without using nuclear fission. The energy is purported to come from some sort of transition from one crystal form to another, denser one. Even if such a transition exists in thorium (as indeed it does in many crystalline materials), the energy involved is quite small, and it’s a one-time thing: you can’t get any more unless somehow you pump the material back up to a higher energy level by inputting energy from outside the system.
Simply reading Charles Stevens’ press releases causes the needle on the old BS detector to peg out in the red.
Meanwhile back at the “GIANT FANS” scam…it seems Ontariario is paying $0.60-$0.80/kwh for wind power which it then sells for $0.059 to $0.099…..the math I picked up in the one room school says buying something and selling it for 1/10 don’t make for profits.
Just as well the “GIANT FANS” produce little power or it would be worse…small mercys…..
I have heard that the smaller “consumer” units are viable but also noted that after 2-3 years they are monuments or just plain ghandi….
Then there is the insane notion that such installations will take you off the grid…good luck…Hydro One will bill ya $30+/month anyhoo for “service”…….whether you use hydro or not.
It was a scam from the getgo. And all the politicians knew it.
Just like the light bulb and Freon fraud.
.
Sgt Lejaune nails it in a nice neat concise paragraph.
So Rick Perry’s Texas government spent $17 Billion on turbines and just this Saturday when Perry declared, he was talking about the tough cuts he had to make to balance Texas’ budget and yet he was gov’nah for the last 12 years and spending on this foolishness?
Get outta town, someone tell me this is a mistake.