Norway to Build the World’s Largest Wind Turbine

[Takedown3]

that image is what needs to be done honestly

[archibaldcrane]

I'm pretty sure electricity doesn't have nearly the "range" that that photograph suggests. You can't send that shit 3,000 miles from the source with any efficiency.

I wonder what solar they are talking about? Photovoltaic panels are not particularly workhorses - maybe they're talking about building armies of solar "power towers" like they have in Spain - these things are so fucking cool looking.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...er_tower_2.jpg

[Takedown3]

regardless if the transmission of the electricity generated by the image above is not pratical, it still shows the required area that is necessary to power the earthly needs of our civilization in 2030.

they could split up those area's and make transmission a reality

[Gwynplaine]

Aren't eco-friendly in what way? Don't tell me you're actually taking up a similar position to the rich folks out on Martha's Vineyard & Nantucket who complain that a wind turbine obscures the view of their yachts.

No, I'm restating the position of environmentalists themselves. Wind turbines aren't acceptable to them because they blight the environment and kill birds and bats. In the same way they are also against solar power. There's many other examples like those. I bet if you poke around hard enough you could find a group of environmentalists that is horrified by this giant turbine project. That thing must be a "blight" tyrant.

Committed environmentalists want "green" energy, which means, energy created in a way that won't leave any impact whatsoever on the earth, has no bi-products or effects, and isn't placed anywhere in nature. (read: the kind that can't actually exist) You can't get any greener than a nothing.

[Woozie]

Right now much of the renewable sources of energy are supplemental. This is due to them being sporadic. The wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine. So we are stuck with some form of electrical generation that will fizzle out in a few hundred years. If that pie chart is correct, we are still getting 90.6% of our energy from non renewable sources(nuclear is non-renewable, it'll last a lot longer than coal or gas, but it is still in a relatively finite supply.) So, until we perfect fusion or matter-antimatter collision power plants, were going to deal with the risk of having our energy supply run out.

With today's technology we could meet global energy needs by 2030 with nothing but solar power.
[IMG]http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y160/bigrougabagel/AreaRequired1000.jpg[IMG]

Are you kidding me? Why aren't we doing this? I must be missing something here.

Edit:

I'm pretty sure electricity doesn't have nearly the "range" that that photograph suggests. You can't send that shit 3,000 miles from the source with any efficiency.

I wonder what solar they are talking about? Photovoltaic panels are not particularly workhorses - maybe they're talking about building armies of solar "power towers" like they have in Spain - these things are so fucking cool looking.
[img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/PS10_solar_power_tower_2.jpg[img]

I assume the purpose of the map was to illustrate the amount of area required, not to necessarily show how the plants would be distributed. In fact, I think that's what the second bullet point was stating.

[Mojo]

Should be obvious why it's not being done - the energy density per dollar of coal is higher than that of solar. Until that changes or until we're forced to rely on solar energy to meet our needs, then it's just going to be whatever is the most cost efficient at the time. Geothermal is actually the more likely candidate to take over our energy production needs.

[Cantih]

image

That reminds me of another picture. It was on landfill area. Went along the lines of, if you concentrated all the landfill space the US has and needs for the next few hundred years, then quadrupled it, it was a hardly noticeable square, that you could stick in Fuckwherever, Dakota.

I'm pretty sure electricity doesn't have nearly the "range" that that photograph suggests. You can't send that shit 3,000 miles from the source with any efficiency.

And that's why transmission efficiency is just as important an area to seek improvements in.
I remember one of Buckminster Fuller's ideas of linking up the world's power grids, and using the solar power of the day side of the globe to power the other.

edit: also

I assume the purpose of the map was to illustrate the amount of area required, not to necessarily show how the plants would be distributed. In fact, I think that's what the second bullet point was stating.

Actually, if you note where some of the squares are. The US desert, the Sahara desert, the Arabian desert, western Australia. I think the amount of sunshine those areas get does have a bit of bearing on placement.

[Mojo]

... room temperature super conductors!?

[Kyreth]

Awesome

I hate the fact that everything you said here is true. We always here talk about how we need a non-polluting source of energy, but we already have one (nuclear). We need some sort of public education campaign for nuclear energy, though I don't know how successful that would be. It's just so retarded the way people perceive nuclear energy.

Mostly, it's because new plants are 1) expensive as hell and 2) nobody wants to finance them.

They'd rather have cheaper short-term solutions vs. more effective in the long-term expensive ones. America will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into large-scale nuclear energy production.

[aru]

I'm pretty sure solar PV's also use rare metals so building enough panels to cover the area shown in the diagram physically might not be possible.

[Plow]

Spoiler: show

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y16...quired1000.jpg

I wonder what that level of solar energy being absorbed would do to the climate.



Also, I still lol about the people complaining about the turbines, the one cool thing driving through all of Kansas on I-70 is the massive stretch of wind farms, I don't even know how long it is, but it's freaking huge, it's prob 30ish miles long and they're pretty much stretching as far as you can see through the whole area. And, they're freaking huge, probably most about 200 feet. It's almost kind of intimidating, but yeah they're pretty amazing to see.

[thetruepandagod]

With today's technology we could meet global energy needs by 2030 with nothing but solar power.
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y16...quired1000.jpg

False, this would be assuming that not only america's energy grid is not dated as shit but also the rest of the worlds. For example, as of now the power from a wind turbine can't be delivered more than 50 miles away from the actual cluster of turbines in most cases.

Nuclear is really the best overall source of power this is obvious, its roughly 1 square acre for a power plant where as it is 255 square acres for the same amount of power(not accounting for weather not cooperating)

The government should be focusing on changing the populations attitude towards nuclear energy while simultaneously boosting interest in solar on individual levels, every house should be out fitted with ways to take advantage of solar panel to lighten the load of focusing solely on nuclear a little.

edit: also overall upkeep of the turbines over time generally becomes more costly then keeping a power plant running in the long term.

[Kerberoz]

The government should be focusing on changing the populations attitude towards nuclear energy while simultaneously boosting interest in solar on individual levels, every house should be out fitted with ways to take advantage of solar panel to lighten the load of focusing solely on nuclear a little.

This x1000. Solar just isn't viable on a large scale, but it's great as a supplementation, when placed on homes/businesses/utility poles, etc. Also, we would eventually run out of fissile material on Earth, but it would take several thousand years, in which time we'll probably have better solutions and bigger problems (population) than energy.

[Kryssan]

We are not going to 'run out' of nuclear fuel. Need I really go into the concept of what a breeder reactor actually is? We will run out of certain types of fuel, specifically those related to thermal fission which is what the majority of reactor plants are currently using. Thermal fuels are difficult to come by - most are not available naturally occurring in nature and must be 'enriched', which is what people almost always think about when they think 'nuclear'. Thermal reactors vs fast reactors are an interesting case in short term gains vs long term losses, as I've discussed in other threads in the past.


Fast fuels are available in abundance, in nature and in our own nuclear 'waste', and the reactors that use them can be designed such that they make their own fuel. These reactors are typically referred to as 'breeders', because they make their own fuel by operating; that is to say that while the reactor is operating and producing energy for power, it is making more fuel than it is consuming in the process of doing so. This fuel can be extracted then to fuel other reactors, making it a 'renewable' energy source. However, people don't like breeders because you can take that excess fuel and with a little effort turn it into weapons-grade material instead of reactor-grade. While the fears of proliferation and thermal fuels still exist in large enough quantities, the potential benefits of breeders will be lost in the eyes of nuclear holocaust.


Also, it should be noted that fusion is also technically a non-renewable source of energy. There is a finite amount of fuel available; the difference is that like a breeder reactor for fission, the source of fuel is virtually limitless as far as the human race is concerned.

[bigrougabagel]

I dont think the infrastructure would be built in 20 years to actually produce a solar array that vast and effective. It is more of a showpiece to explain that something like that is possible. The cash to MW ratio is still in favor of coal. That will change over the years as they can only demolish so many ecosystems in eastern kentucky before theyre all gone. Google earth and set it over southeastern KY, look at all the gray, that is a strip mine. Shudder.

Again, we need the LHC to get on the sticks with the matter antimatter deal. I am afraid that it may be another pipe dread like the cold fusion weve been promised since the 50's. I dont know enough about quantum mechanics to make a proper diagnosis of its potential as an energy source, but at the moment it costs more energy to produce the material than we can get out of it. It is however the most efficient source of energy in the universe. 100% conversion of matter to energy with no biproducts other than fucking awesome.

[Elesirdur]

No, I'm restating the position of environmentalists themselves. Wind turbines aren't acceptable to them because they blight the environment and kill birds and bats. In the same way they are also against solar power. There's many other examples like those. I bet if you poke around hard enough you could find a group of environmentalists that is horrified by this giant turbine project. That thing must be a "blight" tyrant.

Committed environmentalists want "green" energy, which means, energy created in a way that won't leave any impact whatsoever on the earth, has no bi-products or effects, and isn't placed anywhere in nature. (read: the kind that can't actually exist) You can't get any greener than a nothing.

As someone who's worked for a wind energy developer in the past, I've certainly seen this argument before. Yes, wind turbines do pose a risk to avian species (although bats are far more at risk), but best practices for proper site development and research will locate turbines away from migratory patterns.

As for the deaths caused by wind turbines, opponents are generally misinformed in two ways:
1) A lot of data on avian deaths is based on very obsolete wind turbine designs. Think of those old 250 kW turbines out in California that are spaced super close together. Nobody could ever get away with building a wind farm like that anymore as the environmental impact on avians has been well noted. More recent data for modern wind farms in Europe has proved that birds are actually very good at avoiding the turbines and their spinning blades. Bats? Well not so much, but for offshore sites bats are a non-issue and good research will help find turbine sites that mitigate the impact to bats.
2) Do you know what the number one man-made killer of birds is in our modern world? Telephone wires? Wind turbines? Car windshields? Nope, it's buildings. Skyscrapers to be exact. Skyscrapers and other buildings kill something in the order of 10,000 times more birds per year than wind turbines. The data I remember using in community relations work from wind energy industry groups stated that feral cats in the US alone pose a greater threat to birds and other avians by an order of magnitude than all the wind farms in the entire world put together.

But, the environmentalists are absolutely correct that wind energy is not impact-free. But wind energy is a source of energy that produces no pollution, emissions, or byproducts when generating electricity. Yes, the construction, transportation, and install processes to create CO2 and other emissions and impacts, but once those blades start spinning there is only clean electricity being produced.

Compared to hydroelectricity, the ecological and environmental impact of wind energy is absolutely minuscule (headwater pond flooding acres upon acres of land eh?), and makes it a great part of a clean energy system. Wind energy isn't the world's end all and be all answer for electricity, but it's a great way to supplement always-on electricity generation systems to reduce pollution from GHG-producing systems.

[Kuya]

So what i am getting from this thread is that supplements are rad.

[Cantih]

So you're telling us you will start using them?

[Leif]

I don't understand.

Why not let the free market decide? If it truly is in the interest of society to switch to solar panels, windmills, and hamster wheels to power our cities, won't we naturally be forced to switch to these other sources?

Since it is an undisputed fact that the free market is the only way to achieve the highest level of economic growth possible, why not juice the Earth for all it has before shutting down the world economy? If the crazy "Go Green" people honestly think we're going to run out of all this stuff, why don't we live like cavemen only when we have to?

[archibaldcrane]

I don't understand.

Why not let the free market decide?

How do I, as an individual consumer, choose to use nuclear power in the free market?

It's not like there's a switch inside everyone's house that lists the current kWh rates for all the varied methods of electricity production, and they just get to pick what they want to power their apartment.