From: steinly@topaz.ucsc.edu (Steinn Sigurdsson)
Newsgroups: sci.environment
Subject: Re: --UCS Offers New Energy Policies
Date: 14 Oct 92 19:05:41
Organization: Lick Observatory/UCO
NNTP-Posting-Host: topaz.ucsc.edu
In-reply-to: tgray@igc.apc.org's message of 14 Oct 92 19:43:00 GMT

In article <1466601811@igc.apc.org> tgray@igc.apc.org (Tom Gray) writes:

   <responding to Steinn Sigurdsson>

       SS1>Wind is never going to be more than 10% of capacity on US scale
       SS1>demands (ie some small countries may use it for greater fraction
       SS1>of capcity)

      TG1>But of course you cannot say this.  It's like saying nuclear
      TG1>reactors can never be made safe.

     SS2>No, it is a quite different argument. I know the power available
     SS2>in the airmass over the continental US and I know the current
     SS2>power consumption of the US, I then estimated what fraction of
     SS2>the land area could be dedicated to wind power and what the
     SS2>turbulent mixing scale (vertical) is in the atmosphere.

    TG2>Fine.  If you'll provide some numbers, I will run them by Pacific
    TG2>Northwest Laboratory's experts.  PNL is the national lab that
    TG2>released a study in 1991 stating that US wind potential totals
    TG2>approximately 10.7 trillion kWh, using 13.5% of available land       TG2>area.

   SS3>I contend that using 13% of the available land area for wind
   SS3>power production is completely insane. Realistically you're
   SS3>not going to allocate more than 1% of the area.

   Hmmm.  This seems more like theology than reason.  Why did you
   remove the part of my answer that bears on this very issue?
   It's hard to have a meaningful discussion if you censor the parts of
   what I write that are inconvenient for your argument.

I truncate posts because nobody reads several hundred line followups,
I try to do so retaining context and mark the deletions. Anyone
bothering to read the followups should have access to the original.

   Here is what I actually wrote, with the part you omitted in caps:

   PNL is the national lab that released a study in 1991 stating that US wind potential totals approximately 10.7 trillion kWh, using 13.5% of
   available land area.  (NOTE: MOST OF THIS LAND WOULD CONTINUE TO BE
   AVAILABLE FOR AGRICULTURE, GRAZING, OR OTHER USES.  THE TOTAL AMOUNT
   ACTUALLY OCCUPIED BY WIND TURBINES WOULD BE MUCH SMALLER.)

   I don't agree that the national lab study is insane, although the amount
   of windpower it projects is certainly very ambitious and unlikely to be
   realized any time soon.  Still, utility-scale wind turbines are already

The study is not insane, what is insane is accepting the implications
of the study, namely that to extract the potential requires 13.5% of
land area. I assert that this untenable and that the availability of
the land for other uses is overestimated.

   <material omitted here>

      TG1>A good, credible study of wind in the UK done a few years ago
      TG1>by Michael Grubb, who is now with the Royal Institute of
      TG1>International Affairs, found that approximately 1/3 of
      TG1>that country's electric power could be supplied by wind before
      TG1>penalties to the rest of the grid became unacceptably high.

     SS2>If I remember the UK figure on lots of off-shore wind plant,
     SS2>it is also relatively exposed and has reasonable wind potential.
     SS2>Try the same calculation for Germany or northeastern US.

    TG2>It's true that the UK's wind potential is greater per unit of land
    TG2>area than that of the US.  However, the US still has many areas
    TG2>with excellent wind potential.  I agree with you that wind's
    TG2>potential in Germany and the northeastern US is limited, given
    TG2>currently available storage and transmission technology.  I don't
    TG2>agree that its potential for the entire US is limited to 10% of
    TG2>electric power capacity, which is essentially your original   
    TG2> statement.

   <material omitted here>

     SS2>Grid variability is not the only factor. Also note that the UK
     SS2>is pretty much a single grid, the US is much bigger and less well
     SS2>tied in.

    TG2>Certainly, but this is back to the "never say never" issue.  I
    TG2>don't think it's reasonable to say that these technical limitations
    TG2>will forever constrain wind energy's potential, any more than it is
    TG2>to say that nuclear reactors can never be made safe.

   SS3>Sorry, I was under the impression we were considering realistic
   SS3>scenarios for the next few decades, note that for example that in
   SS3>principle far more hydro power could be tapped if you were willing
   SS3>to damn every sizable stream - some several times - and manage
   SS3>runoff, there is enough power there, however to do so is simply not
   SS3>practical.

   First, your original statement was "Wind is never going to be more
   than 10% . . ."  No time scale was specified, which is one of the
   reasons I said your original statement was insupportable.

Sorry, I'll try to make my assumptions more explicit. I took it
for granted that projecting energy production beyond a century
or so is fantasy.

   Second, wind is far less site-specific than hydro.  As I mentioned in
   a previous post, most of the state of North Dakota (and South Dakota
   also) has annual average wind speeds high enough to produce
   commercially exploitable windpower.  There is no site of comparable
   magnitude or flexibility for hydro.

   Third, it's clear that all-out development of hydropower will be
   unacceptable to the environmental community.  There will be
   environmental objections to large-scale wind development also, but I'm
   betting they will be much less intense, because wind energy's
   environmental impacts are much less severe.

This is, to use your words, theology. It is not clear to me
that wind power has less environmental impact (per GW or kWh)
than hydro. Certainly it could be less than fossil impact, probably
comparable with solar thermal, less or more than nuclear, depending
on your religion...

   <material omitted here>

    TG2>But at present, if you're willing to go along
    TG2>with 1 trillion for wind, I'd be inclined to accept.  Hardly a
    TG2>trivial power source.  At that level, it would be producing about
    TG2>four times what nuclear is producing today.

   SS3>so would you use it to retire nuclear plants or fossil plants?

   You bet.  Let us say that Grubb's study turns out in fact to be

 ??? Which, you're still missing 500GW or so even give 30% wind
capacity which I think is generous. Somehwat of a moot question as
I personally think fossil plants will have to be retired, what
do you propose a base capacity, coal, fission or magic?

   roughly applicable to the U.S. also, and that, say, it turns out that
   20% of our electric power can come from wind without running into
   grid stability/economics problems.  At that point, we could conceivably
   retire, what, 120,000 MW of conventional power?  It seems to me that
   the net environmental benefit of such a change would be substantial.
   I think there is probably enough wind close to enough population centers
   to make this possible, although I haven't looked at the PNL study in
   detail.

   SS3>Wind power clearly has a contribution to make to grid supply,
   SS3>I think however you vastly overstate your case for how much
   SS3>us readily available or can be put online on reasonable time scales,
   SS3>particularly if you want to penetrate the market far enough that
   SS3>you need to reconfigure the grid to match demand and supply.

   This is an interesting contention, since you haven't pinned me down to
   any time scale yet -- you said "never" and I disagreed.

   But I can live with the projections provided by five national labs --
   Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory,
   Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and
   the Solar Energy Research Institute (now National Renewable Energy
   Laboratory) -- in the March, 1990, Interlaboratory White Paper prepared
   for the National Energy Strategy deliberations.

   The White Paper forecast that if a 2 cents/kWh incentive were provided
   for wind energy, wind generation in the year 2030 would slightly
   exceed . . . 1 trillion kWh (or more than 30% of current total U.S.
   electricity consumption).

$20 billion per year, probably doable, and only requires
about 1% of US land area, that would help. 

   SS3>I'll happily grant wind 10% of the grid, although I'm not
   SS3>convinced that it's cost-effective beyond 1-3% and it really
   SS3>irritates me that environemntal concerns are dismissed with
   SS3>a "the land will still be available for agriculture", never
   SS3>mind bird kills and the fact that windmills are big&ugly.

   Steinn, again you are not being fair.  You did not raise environmental
   issues in your postings, so why would you expect me to address them in
   responding?

This is sci.env!!! I presumed the discussion of energy generation was
predicated upon environmental impact considerations!

   Bird kills appear to be  a problem at one location in California.  There
   is no indication they are a problem elsewhere, and until there is some
   hard evidence to suggest they are, I don't regard them as a serious
   constraint.

No, no, no. Doesn't work that way. You get us an EIS showing
that migratory birds will not be impacted and local populations
will not be endangered.
BTW outside the two big ones in Ca how many other places are
generating from wind on multi MW basis? Little 200kW single 
turbines in isolated locales don't count.

   I agree that windmills are big, but I don't agree that they are
   necessarily ugly, and the little evidence that is available from
   public opinion surveys suggests that most people don't think so

Well, the ones down by Palm Springs are hideous (IMHO)

   either.  How wind turbines look is something that can be addressed
   by styling and by spacing, but to me they mean clean power, and that's
   an attractive idea.

Hmm, spacing is dictated by how efficiently you want to
extract the energy, styling is aerodynamically limited.
How clean is it? What's the indirect impact of building
1000 200kW turbines + infrastructure as compared to 1 200MW
turbine. It's a lot of metal. If you want to use storage
you have to factor in that impact to...

   <material omitted here>

*  Steinn Sigurdsson   			Lick Observatory      	*
*  steinly@lick.ucsc.edu		"standard disclaimer"  	*
*  I know people whose idea of fun				*
*  Is throwing stones in the river in the afternoon sun		*
*  Oh let me be as free as them					*
*  				- BB 1986			*



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