Wind has its own unique set of pros and cons like everything else...and I see it as a vital component to a sustainable and balanced energy portfolio for the world. Unfortunately, wind's geographic distribution and intermency make it difficult to integrate into electrical grids whose cost and stability are based on distances to load centers and schedulability of the generating resource...neither of which wind is particularly great at...some say that wind can provide up to 10-20% of a control area's generating resource without causing load-resource balancing problems (electrical control areas are "balanced" every two seconds to maintain 60 hertz, any deviation is typically corrected by electrical units on Automatic Generating Control, i.e. units that have the reserve capacity to almost instantaneously increase or decrease output to keep the system balanced). What geographically remote and highly concentrated wind is good for is to generate the electricity needed for the electrolyis of water into hydrogen...if we are moving to a hydrogen economy, we have to cleanly make hydrogen...making it from fossil fuels and/or nukes is not the suistainable solution though probably the most likely one.
Kim >>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 05/15/03 03:10PM >>> Problem with storage. The energy is there but not all the time. Kirk -----Original Message----- From: Bryan Brah [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, May 15, 2003 12:58 PM To: biofuel@yahoogroups.com Subject: RE: [biofuel] Wind Power -- a European Success Story Small-scale wind power utilization is definitely NOT the trend in the US. Installed capacity here generally consists of 80 - 300 MW farms of hundreds of 1MW + turbines. There is great popular support for wind in the US as evidenced by the fact that consumers are willing to pay a premium for wind-generated electricity. Additionally, many political jurisdictions are mandating that a percentage of electricity production come from renewable sources. There is definitely a market for wind power, but the biggest obstacle to wind development is economic. While turbine designs have evolved, in order for them to be cost effective over their 20 year life-span, they still need fairly constant wind blowing at 15 meters per second. Most of these prime wind resources are located in sparsely populated areas, where the electrical infrastructure is either far away or too small to support the added load. This forces developers to build and/or reinforce transmission lines, which adds expense to the project and makes wind power more expensive than federally subsidized fossil fuel. We are almost to the point of price parity, so every penny increase in oil makes wind more attractive to investors, developers, and consumers. As a finite commodity, the price of oil can only go up, which means that eventually wind will be cheaper. When that happens, there will be an explosion of wind development in the US. It is estimated that with current turbine technology, all of our (US) electrical needs could be met by the wind resources in Texas and the Dakotas alone. -BRAH Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://archive.nnytech.net/ Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Get A Free Psychic Reading! Your Online Answer To Life's Important Questions. http://us.click.yahoo.com/aM1XQD/od7FAA/uetFAA/FGYolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://archive.nnytech.net/ Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
