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[Wayward Device]

OK, I think I've tracked down the source of that.

It's a real effect and it's in bats. The low pressure zone is only in a small area around the blade tips (that's what was making me incredulous) and it seems bats are somewhat attracted to these areas. A lengthy section of a relevant paper has been copied here. It seems this is only a problem with fixed speed turbines (variable speed ones slow during low wind periods when bats are active) and in the areas with high bat populations.

Thanks! Nice to have that cleared up (although part of me wishes what I had said was the accurate truth  ).

EDIT: I'm actually in favor of wind and other renewables in combination with nuclear (with our radioactive friends doing the heavy lifting and the renewables pitching in as and when they can), until such time that we get reasonably cheap fusion (my personal belief is that this'll happen about the same time I'm ready to retire, in the next fifty years or so). 

Nuclear may be more efficient then green at round the clock generation but green is more efficient at peak hours generation.  So unless you are proposing to start building 500 nuclear power plants tomorrow and shut off every coal power plant when they are done in 5 years, green energy is a more cost effective addition to our energy portfolio at the current time.  Only when we get to the point where we start phasing out coal for nighttime generation (I would be delighted if we reached that point in 30-40 years) do we have a niche for nuclear emerge, baseload generation.  But nuclear will certainly no longer be the best baseload source when we reach that point.

Fusion is 50 years away and has been 50 years away since 1946.

That's exactly what I meant about round the clock/peak generation. A nation could theoretical go, say, all nuclear or all coal, but it would be a pointless misuse of potential, different techniques are good at providing different things in different ways and we should obviously be taking advantage of that. To clarify, I'd like to see more nuclear power stations built and as well as more *insert appropriate renewable source for you local here* as older stations come offline (be they coal, gas or whatever). I'm not calling for 500 hundred new nuclear stations or anything like that. Just to be even more clear, because after your post I've been worried that I'm not explaining myself very well, I'll use a (not very good) analogy. If we were living in the 15th century and were discussing these damn matchlocks everyone seems to have started using, the equivalent of my position on power would be "we should make more guns, gunpowder and ammunition" as opposed to "throw away all your bows and arballasts right now! We need to make guns!" And I realise that fusion has been 50 years away for 50 years, it's just my personal conservative estimate. Who knows, it could turn out that its impossible to get profitable fusion (in the sense of how much power you can get out of it) with the materials humans are capable of producing. But part of me wants to live to see a world where we can harness artificial sunfire for peaceful purposes.       

[Jelle]

Seems like a very uncontrolled method to me. Where's the cracks going to form and is it going to mess things up? Who's  to say!
Still if it's there you might as well make use of it, but as many have already said depending further on fossil fuels isn't really the best idea. If not for the limited supply then for the environment.
Nuclear fission untill fusion is safe and ready for use I say!

[mainiac]

That's exactly what I meant about round the clock/peak generation. A nation could theoretical go, say, all nuclear or all coal, but it would be a pointless misuse of potential, different techniques are good at providing different things in different ways and we should obviously be taking advantage of that. To clarify, I'd like to see more nuclear power stations built and as well as more *insert appropriate renewable source for you local here* as older stations come offline (be they coal, gas or whatever). I'm not calling for 500 hundred new nuclear stations or anything like that. Just to be even more clear, because after your post I've been worried that I'm not explaining myself very well, I'll use a (not very good) analogy. If we were living in the 15th century and were discussing these damn matchlocks everyone seems to have started using, the equivalent of my position on power would be "we should make more guns, gunpowder and ammunition" as opposed to "throw away all your bows and arballasts right now! We need to make guns!" And I realise that fusion has been 50 years away for 50 years, it's just my personal conservative estimate. Who knows, it could turn out that its impossible to get profitable fusion (in the sense of how much power you can get out of it) with the materials humans are capable of producing. But part of me wants to live to see a world where we can harness artificial sunfire for peaceful purposes.       

To clarify my critique, we already have baseload capacity in excess.  About 100% surplus of our needs IIRC.  When we build more power plants, we are building for our peak needs, not our baseload needs.  And given how enormously difficult it is to restart a power plant in the day if you shut it off at night, it's not like the nuclear can provide the baseload while leaving the coal to take the peak.  So if you say you favor building nuclear for our baseload needs you are favoring either:

A) replacing existing capacity outright (very expensive!)
B) wait until we have baseload needs above our peak need (i.e. when half our energy is solar, a very long time )
C) building for peak needs now and use that capacity for baseload need in the future when existing baseload becomes expensive to maintain and/or baseload needs grow beyond our current capacity (30+ years)

So while nuclear is a very good source for baseload capacity, we don't actually need any baseload capacity now and won't for a while.  By the time we actually do need nuclear I suspect it's going to be obsolete.  Moore's law coupled with high voltage power transmission means that solar power could render it obsolete in a couple decades but I suspect there will probably be a cheaper answer then that by the time we actually need the baseload capacity.

None of this actually factors in market inefficiencies and government subsidies though.  Nuclear energy could become profitable to build this decade if the government subsidizes construction, as countless legislators seem inclined to do.  It seems like the "centrist" approach though IMHO centrist is a synonym for "bad" when it comes to energy.

[Wayward Device]

That's exactly what I meant about round the clock/peak generation. A nation could theoretical go, say, all nuclear or all coal, but it would be a pointless misuse of potential, different techniques are good at providing different things in different ways and we should obviously be taking advantage of that. To clarify, I'd like to see more nuclear power stations built and as well as more *insert appropriate renewable source for you local here* as older stations come offline (be they coal, gas or whatever). I'm not calling for 500 hundred new nuclear stations or anything like that. Just to be even more clear, because after your post I've been worried that I'm not explaining myself very well, I'll use a (not very good) analogy. If we were living in the 15th century and were discussing these damn matchlocks everyone seems to have started using, the equivalent of my position on power would be "we should make more guns, gunpowder and ammunition" as opposed to "throw away all your bows and arballasts right now! We need to make guns!" And I realise that fusion has been 50 years away for 50 years, it's just my personal conservative estimate. Who knows, it could turn out that its impossible to get profitable fusion (in the sense of how much power you can get out of it) with the materials humans are capable of producing. But part of me wants to live to see a world where we can harness artificial sunfire for peaceful purposes.       

To clarify my critique, we already have baseload capacity in excess.  About 100% surplus of our needs IIRC.  When we build more power plants, we are building for our peak needs, not our baseload needs.  And given how enormously difficult it is to restart a power plant in the day if you shut it off at night, it's not like the nuclear can provide the baseload while leaving the coal to take the peak.  So if you say you favor building nuclear for our baseload needs you are favoring either:

A) replacing existing capacity outright (very expensive!)
B) wait until we have baseload needs above our peak need (i.e. when half our energy is solar, a very long time )
C) building for peak needs now and use that capacity for baseload need in the future when existing baseload becomes expensive to maintain and/or baseload needs grow beyond our current capacity (30+ years)

So while nuclear is a very good source for baseload capacity, we don't actually need any baseload capacity now and won't for a while.  By the time we actually do need nuclear I suspect it's going to be obsolete.  Moore's law coupled with high voltage power transmission means that solar power could render it obsolete in a couple decades but I suspect there will probably be a cheaper answer then that by the time we actually need the baseload capacity.

None of this actually factors in market inefficiencies and government subsidies though.  Nuclear energy could become profitable to build this decade if the government subsidizes construction, as countless legislators seem inclined to do.  It seems like the "centrist" approach though IMHO centrist is a synonym for "bad" when it comes to energy.

Ah, I assume that when your talking about baseload capacity currently available, you mean specifically in the US (from your avatar and profile I'm gonna assume you are an American)? I'm from the UK, and without going into some hard statistics, we have a slightly different distribution of power types than our break away child country grown monstrously powerful once free of our clutches the US. Basically, even with all the massive government sponsored wind turbine building going on over here, we are still very over dependent on imported natural gas (stupid 90's economic forces, cheap gas put us in a real tricky spot). We do have some nuclear facilities (16, currently, with a few in the tortuously complex planing stages), but nearly all of these are either small, ready to be decommissioned or should have been decommissioned 20 years ago. Hell, we even import power generated by a nuclear station in France. What I'm really trying to say here is that I favor a broad range of options for power and want to move away from fossil fuels (which will only get more expensive with time) as much as possible. I fully realise that these are big, long term things. Hell, we (that's a UK we, as opposed to a humanity we) have coal reserves to last for 200-300 years, even taking into account predicted population growth. But, very expensive carbon capture or no, I don't think anyone is suggesting more (conventional) coal plants as a recipe for a Brighter Future, but its nice to know that the option is there.

At the end of the day, these are huge, complex issues with countless facets. As you said, none of this real deals with government involvement/subsides in choices about what types of power we use, let alone the politics of the damn thing. Complex, but fun to discuss.

Ps I've enjoyed reading your posts, always nice to have a bit of back and forth with someone who obviously really knows what they're talking about, as oppossed to me, who just has a keen interest in the subject.

 

[mainiac]

Ps I've enjoyed reading your posts, always nice to have a bit of back and forth with someone who obviously really knows what they're talking about, as oppossed to me, who just has a keen interest in the subject.

All I have is a keen interest in the subject and google.

Looking in the UK situation, I see that baseload looks like more of a concern then in the US.  In the US we have a lot more coal then natural gas so natural gas doesn't often get used for baseload.  In the UK you have more natural gas then coal so nuclear and coal are only a little more then 50% of your energy needs (you have almost no hydro, unlike the US.)  So yes, in your case I could see the need to continue to build nuclear plants in order to meet the baseload needs of the coming decades without needing to turn on the natural gas power plants at night.  I'm not sure about the expense though, so it's harder to make a recommendation for the UK since it involves tradeoffs between expense, carbon footprint, construction schedules and uncertainty.  It's not like the US where the best course for the next decade would be to build every watt of green energy possible.

[palsch]

One other factor in the UK is that EU regulations are starting to push up especially coal but also oil and gas prices to represent their externalities.

Nuclear power has all costs rolled into the plant price, including regulatory, insurance and potential health costs. There are then subsidies, but these are hard fought. Coal has existed without incorporating anything like the actual health costs into it's unit price, let alone climate and other environmental factors. 'New' (in the last decade) regulations are pushing those prices up both for new and existing fossil fuel plants. Add to that the increased costs for oil and gas plants and carbon emitting baseload isn't an option a decade or so into the future, purely from an economic standpoint.

This isn't really news though. It's been known for at least six years now. Greanpeace lead opposition to nuclear plants has blocked efforts to actually get anything done, which suggests to me that the UK is going to have to eat both the financial and environmental costs of more coal plants in the future. We simply can't build nuclear at the scale or rate required to meet demand and there is absolutely no way to do the same with renewables. There isn't enough land in the UK suitable (see that TED talk and associated calculator I linked before) and they aren't dependable enough for base load. Not to mention that the National Grid (especially since privatisation) isn't suited to intermittent transmission associated with renewables.

[RedKing]

The irony of it is, fracking is likely to be a net loser for the gas industry, because after years of pushing to increase traditional production means, supply is now massively outstripping demand. The end result is that natural gas prices have plummeted about 80% in the last five years. Great news if you're like me and have a gas furnace for the house, but bad news for an industry that sank billions into ramping up production. The demand is relatively inelastic, until someone devises practical LNG-powered cars or subzero winters become the norm across North America.

[FearfulJesuit]

Surely you can power cars on natural gas fairly easily?

I mean, the fact is, if we wanted to kill our dependence on middle eastern oil at the pump, we could- you can run a car on kerosene, and you make kerosene from good old homemined coal. But I do not suggest that as any sort of a solution.

[mainiac]

The demand is relatively inelastic, until someone devises practical LNG-powered cars or subzero winters become the norm across North America.

Well not quite.  The cheaper natural gas gets, the slower it gets replaced by green energy.  OTOH the cheaper it gets the faster we replace old coal plants with natural gas plants.

[Il Palazzo]

It's that damn word, nukular.

Is that you, Michael Douglas?
What was wrong with that film anyway? I simply don't believe it was made by a bunch of people that all just so happened to not know how to pronounce the word.

[alway]

Surely you can power cars on natural gas fairly easily?

I mean, the fact is, if we wanted to kill our dependence on middle eastern oil at the pump, we could- you can run a car on kerosene, and you make kerosene from good old homemined coal. But I do not suggest that as any sort of a solution.

The US oil dependency is a myth at this point. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-29/u-s-was-net-oil-product-exporter-in-2011.html

If you remember that Keystone XL pipeline proposed to be built, its purpose was primarily to move oil from the Midwest, where supply exceeds demand, to ports from which it could be exported.

[Virex]

To anyone saying that nuclear power is the power of today, remember that it usually takes 10 years from the first moment it's decided to build one till it's up and running.

Here's an interesting fact about the dangers of wind power: wind turbines can kill goats by collapsing their lungs. This happened to a bunch of goat farmers in Spain. Basically, if you build a wind turbine a a location like a hill or ridge with plenty of regular wind (the type of land goat farmers are likely to have) then it'll both produce steady power and a really loud but deep "wump...wump" noise. Once the goats get used to this, they seem to like it and start sleeping underneath the turbine. But what are essentially 60 ft  2 ton continuously spinning prop blades tend to do things to the air pressure around them, even more noticeably so if you are at a high altitude. This can give you an area of low pressure directly under the blades and if a herd of goats likes to sleep under such a settup...well, -1 herd of goats.

Erm, you are aware that that is complete bullshit, right? Wind turbines cannot create a pressure lower than the low pressure area the wind is going to (second law of thermodynamics). Goats don't die in droves when the weather is bad, so it's impossible that they'd die due to wind turbines.

[scriver]

Did you read the rest off the posts on that air pressure tangent, Virex?

[MaximumZero]

It's that damn word, nukular.

Is that you, Michael Douglas?
What was wrong with that film anyway? I simply don't believe it was made by a bunch of people that all just so happened to not know how to pronounce the word.

Maybe it was inspired by Jimmy Carter?

[mainiac]

The US oil dependency is a myth at this point. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-29/u-s-was-net-oil-product-exporter-in-2011.html

That's refined petroleum products, not crude oil.  In terms of crude oil, the US is nowhere remotely close to self sufficiency.  It's like how the UK is a net exporter of chocolate candies despite being a massive importer of the products those chocolates are actually made from.

What's happening is that we are importing middle eastern oil, refining it in the southeast and gulf coast then re-exporting, mostly to Latin America, IIRC.  Oil refineries aren't exactly cheap to build and the middle east isn't well known for be a safe place to invest in.  So the historical US oil refinery industry has stuck around, just importing crude oil to replace american crude.