Re: Wind and Solar vs Coal, Gasoline, Nuclear
Posted: Jan 08 2019 10:00am
Good comprehensive post! Russian trolls hired by fossil industry won't be happy

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Good comprehensive post! Russian trolls hired by fossil industry won't be happy
That highlights a problem i was talking about a year ago, but never managed to convince anyone it was problematic.Hillhater wrote: ↑Jan 07 2019 9:26pmAnd remember , the only consistent temperature measurement records available for the past 100+ years is ALL Northern Hemisphere..predominantly North America with a minority of European records.....
.... So hardly a "Global" reference.
BUT also ..all that data has been "Corrected/ Processed" ..more than once... Resulting in the oldest measurements being LOWERED by more than 1deg from their original raw records.
Bit of an omission to disclude China in that graph..
It is not about Country x vs y, but about the trend in energy consumption.
What's happened in Germany is pretty interesting and indeed contrary to what fossil fuel hawks believe.Cephalotus wrote: ↑Jan 08 2019 11:09amIt's far from perfect or even good, but at least this level of reversing growing energy consumption is quite easily achieveable and "high energy prices" do neither hurt the industry, nor your competitness nur does it need to affect your public budget.
It also shows that shutting down nuclear power plants is an option if you like to do that.
Thanks for your very insightful and detailed post. I am not against solar and wind as it must seem but I am pro math and feel compelled to keep the discussion straight so that we can know what is coming at us if we don't make a massive, all out change. It will not be as easy as most people have been led to believe.
CSP is the environmentally unfriendly kind of solar.sendler2112 wrote: ↑Jan 08 2019 6:54pm50 MW concentrated solar being built? Why bother with CSP for only 50 MW?
Yes, electricity generated from burning coal is quite cheap in comparison.I pay less than half of that for my electricity delivered and taxed to my meter.
Whateversendler2112 wrote: ↑Jan 08 2019 7:19pmNY state has 0 coal. 3/3/3 gas, hydro, nuclear.
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https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=co ... Code=US-NY
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Why ?
When PV users get energy from the grid, they're paying for it like everyone else, and then additional costs like additional meter charges and insurance premiums. But of course I should have asked you first what exactly were you comparing.
That's why we try to harvest wind at 150m now in regions with less wind energy potential...sendler2112 wrote: ↑Jan 08 2019 11:35am
The wind map I posted was for 100 meter data. Which even for a 5W/ m density in the red still requires more than the area of orange and red to be fully populated with turbines in order to make the 1/6 of current energy that you have forecasted that will be needed assuming a 3:1 efficiency gain and 50% of that as onshore wind.
In 2021 feed in tariffs for our oldest solar rooftops will end. I hope that they will not get any feed in tariff after that and are able to feed in to the grid for exactly 0 ct/kWh.
Cephalotus wrote: ↑Jan 09 2019 6:34amYou may argue that wind power plants still are not pretty, but streets aren't so nice, too, and those already cover 4,57% of our country. That's a real cover with tarmac instead of soil. Streets you can use only for traffic, for nothing else...
So. To make 1/2(from onshore wind) of 1/2(efficiency gains from full electrification) of Germany's total energy (0.44 TW currently) with these tall turbines needs 0.1 TW total from onshore wind.sendler2112 wrote: ↑Jan 09 2019 8:52am178 meter tall tower topped by 3.4MW turbine with a predicted 35% capacity factor.
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https://electrek.co/2017/11/02/worlds-t ... n-germany/
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Enercon E141 is a 4,2MW wind power plant built to use and transport onshore. There are newer designs where rotor blades are transported in more than one piece. Towers are already segmented.sendler2112 wrote: ↑Jan 09 2019 7:14pm3.4 MW turbines on 170m towers is apparently about as big as it gets due to limitations of transporting larger nacelles or blades over roads.
Your numbers are not so different from mine...35% CF is predicted. Which is 10% higher than the current world average for onshore wind due to the extremely tall towers.
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This would be 83,000 wind turbines in total.
Your number is a bit higher, because you use a bit higher energy consumption, a bit less powerfull wind power plants and a bit lower capacity factor. This cumulates to the difference.Cephalotus wrote: ↑Jan 07 2019 10:22am
For 1,500TWh anual electricity production...
54,000 wind turbines with a average lifetime of 20 years would translate to 2,700 onshore wind turbines every year.
This is where we have differnt numbers and this happens because we calculate area consumption from wind parks differently.5 rotor diameters spacing between each one to avoid dominoes from a tossed blade, and to reduce wind shadows is 1 per km2.
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83,000 km2 is 24% of the land area of Germany fully populated with wind turbines. But 24% of Germany is not all of adequate wind resources.
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squeezing them to 3 rotor diameters spacing gets it down to 50,000 km2.
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14% of the total land area...
We already have 29,000 wind power plants.To build them all in 20 years so that we can start rebuilding them all over again as they wear out is 11 per day. And then start over with rebuilding them all continually at 11 per day forever. For 1/2 of 1/2 of Germany's current energy.
But you will not have farms with only 5 turbines there will be dozens to a hundred at each location. So you must also include the area of all of 4 of the 5 turbines (except for those at the perimimeter which will still have a similar safe zone from any building or roads). So you must increase your calculation of area times 4.Cephalotus wrote: ↑Jan 10 2019 8:05amSimplified you can put 5 wind power plants into such an Ellipse, not just one, see:
more details: http://www.windenergie-im-binnenland.de ... brauch.php
If you calculated simplified with that 5 wind power plants = 1 ellipse and caluclate only the area inside the ellipse as area consumption. For r=126m this would be 10,7ha for 1 wind power plant, so for r=141m I used 13,4ha =0,14km² for one wind power plant.
Multiplied with 54.000 wind power plants this would translate to 7236km² which is 2% of Germany. For this scenario (100% energy, not only 100% electricity) I wrote 3-4% instead of 2% because sometimes wind parks are larger, wind over forests needs more room and to have some reserve in the calculation.
Typical size of windparks in Germany is just a few turbines per park. Large parks are very rare.sendler2112 wrote: ↑Jan 10 2019 8:20am
But you will not have farms with only 5 turbines there will be dozens to a hundred at each location...
A few notes:Cephalotus wrote: ↑Jan 10 2019 8:05amTo produce 750TWh/a (or 850TWh/a from your numbers) alternativly you would need something around 70 modern large and super expensive nuclear power plants at 1,4GW each (at 7500h/year). Those would be much less visible, but there is no strategy how to get the fuel for those (if this would be a world wide strategy) and at the history of failure rates with an major accident every 10.000 reactor-years would translate to a risc of a catastrophic widespread contamination (which would cost more than the entire energy transition if it hits major populated areas) to 0,7% per year or 30% over 50 years.