I would love to hear some of the liberal site pests respond to this post. Any takers?

That was a bit of an extended overture; I’ll be in Washington tomorrow to cover the Heartland climate change event – and I’m sure that there will be plenty of fodder there for you. I’ll literally keep everyone “posted.”

GE’s 3.6 MW wind turbine for example only produces 3.6 MW at wind speeds in excess of 15 m/s.

The average wind speed in the US is less than 5 m/s. Of course there are a few locations where it is a little higher but not much. At 6 m/s the 3.6 MW GE wind turbine puts out only 0.4 MW.

http://www.gepower.com/prod_serv/products/wind_turbines/en/36mw/36mw_data.htm

And skanderbeg…*Most* excellent work!!

The wind blows, and it can spin a windmill – and with wires hooked up, electricity can come out. Great – free electricity!

You can put a panel out in the sun – and with wires hooked up, electricity can come out. Great – free electricity!

The problem of course (one non-obvious to most greenies – who slept through their high school science classes and then object to anyone who argues as you have that they are “prejudiced by prior so-called knowledge”) is that such things don’t scale up very readily. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of problems.

There’s always been a great hippie dream of putting a windmill up on the roof and rolling out a magic carpet in the backyard – and thus getting enough electricity to run your abode without even being on the grid.

Numerophobes….

Several months ago I set out to determine how many windmills over how much area would be required to match the output of the nation’s largest nuclear power plant, Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station just outside of Phoenix. It generates 3.2 GW nealry 24/7/365.

Using publicly available data on GE’s largest wind turbine, a 3.6 MW behemoth and information about average wind speeds across the US I determined that it would take approximately 8,000 of these turbines spread over an area of ~ 500 square miles, or a square ~ 22 miles on a side.

One of the major problems with discussions of green energy is that too many people have no idea how electricity is generated, the capacities of conventional sources, the level of current demand and demand growth, and the capacity of conventional sources vs. proposed alternatives.

I did similar calculations for solar and determined it would take 35,000 acres of solar panels to reach 3.2 GW. And of course that is only during the daytime and under extremely favorable conditions, i.e. in New Mexico at the height of summer.

DC power is very lossy over distances. It must be converted to AC power with a power inverter close by, and THEN STILL, each source of AC power must be synchronized with the available grid so that they don’t destructively interfere. A few large synchronized sources of AC are much more efficient and easier to maintain than a hundred little AC sources.

I’d be willing to bet that DC generators produce a lot more heating in the wiring, and that along with the obvious extra exposure to the elements could be the source of the electrical fire hazards that we are seeing. The fires are also fueled by any plastic parts and lubricants in the generator itself, (petroleum products) hence the pitch black smoke. Every time such a fire occurs, it’s a guaranteed total loss for that windmill, with the possible exception of the supporting tower, and must be replaced. That means getting the old one down and putting a brand new one up, every time.

In short, Windmills Blow.

The silicon tetrachloride thing’s a bit off. The stuff they are dumping is all the chlorinated soil by-products that came away from the silicon tetrachloride after distillation (they wouldn’t dump the stuff they just bothered to purify). The sad thing is that that material could be hydrolysed and the hydrochloric acid largely recovered, but it’s expensive compared to buying more HCl. Proof positive that the Chinese really know how to keep their costs down, and stay competitive on the world market, eh?

You know, I think most of this fraud the greens perpetrate would disappear if high schools required a year of chemisty, a year of physics, and a year of biochemistry. I know it’s asking too much, but a populace with a decent education in the material sciences would shut down all these half-cocked ideas for once and for good.

The environmental movement is simply a new way of imposing anti-business, anti-capitalist, collectivist regulation on the economy, in the name of saving a planet that they can’t actually prove needs saving.

Good intentions do not obviate bad results – as physics has this strange habit of always winning.

Truer words could not be spoken. Imagine if the greenies had started up 100 years ago. We would all be sitting in caves, hunting by moonlight and basically just getting along. The greenies would have bashed Einstein, Bell, Ford and all the other scientists & inventors. I am not saying we should stop research into better ways to power our homes & factories. But we should not slow or inhibiate the sources that we know work.

Well, on this one point I disagree no more.

I’m going to read this on a LOT I think.

thanks!

Great work, Skanderbeg!

As a second note, if you know it’s not possible to convince such people that the policies they support result in precisely the inefficiencies elucidated here, you might still have luck converting them to favoring a carbon tax — which has none of the problems of gaming the system and which is to some extent justifiable on air quality/congestion negative-externality grounds and on geopolitical grounds (in that the effect of instituting such a tax is to shift some of the burden of the tax to the oil producers, themselves not particularly likable even if one eliminates pure-environmentalist reasons). Better still if you can convince them to make the tax revenue-neutral to avoid the pork such a tax’s revenues will create, but I haven’t figured out a way to coherently integrate that into an appealing argument.