4 Comments

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  Duder 1/23/2010 12:08:49 PM

  @tewalker--You are incorrect. This article's primary focus is utility scale wind farm integration. If you have read the entire report, which I have, you will note that the discussions surround the wholesale transmission of wind power. Distributed generation, because of its size, is connected to the retail distribution system. These two systems are very different. The federal government does not have jurisdiction over retail rates and has very limited jurisdiction over generators under 20 MW that are connected to the distribution network. If the study were to focus more exclusively on distributed generation the number of turbines necessary to get to 20% would be significantly higher. I encourage you to look for NREL's wind maps at 50m to see where the high wind speeds are in the US. You will see there is typically fewer wind resources around load centers. As such, you would need more turbines in those load centers to equal the amount of energy you can obtain from utility wind farms located far from load in high wind areas. Transmission costs may be lower for distributed generation, but it would raise a whole host of other questions.
  
  @phil...including the regions electric bill is not as simple or easy as you may think, are you interested in the residential retail bills or wholesale prices? Retail prices vary by state according to Utility Commission rulings, wholesale prices are traded, on the eastern interconnect, through a variety of wholesale markets operated by: PJM, MISO, NYISO, ISO-NE and SPP. You can find information about their prices at their respective websites.
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  tewalker 1/23/2010 8:49:52 AM

  @Linford: You're talking about centralized wind power plants - turbine farms. That's clearly not what this article is about. Its about distributed wind power - which would correct the problem you cite with unreliability. That would be the "smoothing out" you missed in the article. Your "record of never standing on its own without government support" is a blanket dismissal of the past methods and approaches in one country, a pretty piss-poor way to judge the effectiveness of /other/ approaches. Its like saying "steam cars are unsafe - lets not try to develop the gasoline powered internal combustion engine." And your data on turbines is woefully out of date, as well - modern turbines automatically shut down when the wind velocity reaches higher speeds which could damage them. Try reading the article, and updating your knowledge, before dismissing this. Arguments from ignorance are not helpful. I'm not disputing that there are strong, legitimate arguments to be made against this approach - I'm just saying you haven't made any.
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  Linford 1/22/2010 12:08:35 AM

  Wind power is already overdeveloped in the USA. The power delivered by the wind is not only unreliable for anything greater than 10% of the total power in the grid, but since the power delivered to the turbine by the wind is proportional to the cube of the wind velocity, weather extremes can kill turbines. Thus, a ten fold increase in wind velocity means a thousand fold increase in wind power. Wind power has a record of never standing on its own feet without some form of government support. The money would be better spent building gigawatt scale cryogenic fuel injected inertial confinement fusion power plants fusing D/T into helium such as those designed by industrial consortia for the DoE back in the 1990's--the technology is ready for further engineering development to go beyond the National Ignition Facility.
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  Phil 1/20/2010 2:42:20 PM

  It would be helpful to include the region's present day electric bill, in dollars, to more easily assess the feasibility of the proposed project