Wind farms - are they really that bad?

Chai wrote:

Can net-like, highly visable barriers be put around the business end of these windmills?

A photo which I took recently before landing at our local airport.

Nets around that? And around the other 10 or so similar parks in a radius of 15 miles?

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no no....I mean around each windmill.

You could have a sphere of netting surrounding the top of each windmill, so animals couldn't get close to the blades.

Kinda like the table fans you have in your house.

Only the net could be like 5 or 10 feet from the blades, for safetys sake.

Jeez, they put lights on top of towers to warn planes off, why not a barrier to keep birds out?

http://www.brookstone.com/bs_assets/images/shop/large_300/492397_p.jpg

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Well, you might consider such in the USA or elsewhere where birds seem to be in danger by windturbines.

Seems a rather inpracticle idea for those built here and in Denmark (which makes nearly 100% of all produced worlwide).

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Chai wrote:

no no....I mean around each windmill.

You could have a sphere of netting surrounding the top of each windmill, so animals couldn't get close to the blades.

Kinda like the table fans you have in your house.

Only the net could be like 5 or 10 feet from the blades, for safetys sake.

Jeez, they put lights on top of towers to warn planes off, why not a barrier to keep birds out?

I think you'd find that a net of that sort would create a sail that would block the wind from getting to the rotors which would make the entire system much less efficent and it would turn the mill into an actual sai which would need significantly more struture to keep it upright.l

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I've been convinced the bird thing is overwrought. Altamont which IS on a flyway and was early implicated in bird deaths, now shuts down the system at specific migration times. Otherwise, the graphics (I think they were graphics, haven't looked at the links in a while) on some of the refutation links made a lot of sense to me.

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One of those commercial windmills cost about $ 2 million (installed)
and it will generate enough electricity for ca. 300 households per year.

A private, small unit for ones own consumption is between $ 5000 (less electricity) and $ 20,000 (to generate more electricity) Considering that the average homeowner sells and moves within 5 years, it's too expensive to install.

I am sorry, solar energy makes much more sense to me than windmill
parks.

As for the birds killed by wind turbines: I do think the number is higher
than they care to admit. However, the British have worked on different
designs of wind turbines to make it more bird friendly, such as this one...

http://www.ecogeek.org/images/stories/xco2tubrines.jpg

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fishin wrote:

Chai wrote:
no no....I mean around each windmill.

You could have a sphere of netting surrounding the top of each windmill, so animals couldn't get close to the blades.

Kinda like the table fans you have in your house.

Only the net could be like 5 or 10 feet from the blades, for safetys sake.

Jeez, they put lights on top of towers to warn planes off, why not a barrier to keep birds out?

I think you'd find that a net of that sort would create a sail that would block the wind from getting to the rotors which would make the entire system much less efficent and it would turn the mill into an actual sai which would need significantly more struture to keep it upright.l

I think we need to import some of those birds from Germany that are smart enough to keep their asses out of rotating blades.

All birds do here it seems is dive bomb my hair.

I guess putting those little fluttery things on the blades wouldn't help either.

We could give little kids pinwheels and have them run around, storing the energy in a device strapped to their backs.

That way we would generate electricity and take care of the fat kid problem all in one fell swoop.

Next case....

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Chai they don't rotate like a fan. The blades are very long and rotate pretty slowly.

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CalamityJane wrote:

One of those commercial windmills cost about $ 2 million (installed) and it will generate enough electricity for ca. 300 households per year.

A private, small unit for ones own consumption is between $ 5000 (less electricity) and $ 20,000 (to generate more electricity) Considering that the average homeowner sells and moves within 5 years, it's too expensive to install.

I am sorry, solar energy makes much more sense to me than windmill
parks.

Have you actually looked at the numbers for solar vs. wind generation? I ran a solar configuartion for my place a few months ago and the cost came up to just over $40,000.

Wind generation costs between $1,600 and $2,000 per Kw generated. Solar generation costs between $6,000 and $12,000 per Kw generated. (based on a New York State Energy Research and Development Authority survey of 150 solar systems installed between 2001 and 2003)

There is no way solar can currently compete on a cost-to-setup basis with wind.

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Swimpy wrote:

Chai they don't rotate like a fan. The blades are very long and rotate pretty slowly.

oh....well then the idea with the pinwheel kids is looking better and better.

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Swimpy wrote:

The blades are very long and rotate pretty slowly.

The new big windturbines have rotors with a diameter of 112 m - those in my pics about 70 - 90.

Division of WTs in size groups according to rotor diameter D and rotor area, with their
respective rated power value (figures are rounded)
[data for Germany, 30.06.2006]

At above date we had 18.054 windturbines in Germany.

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Yes your right fishin, it's cheaper to have a windmill in your yard

Equipment Costs
Wind Energy System:
Turbine (controller included) $3,300.00
Tower $3,000.00
Cable (325 feet) $ 715.00
Total $7,015.00

Solar PV Energy System:
Modules x 10 $6,200.00
Fixed Rack $1,570.00
Charge Controller $ 971.00
Cable (200 feet) $ 440.00
Total $9,181.00

Purchase Cost VS Cost per Rated Watts:
Wind System:
Total cost $7,015.00 divided by the factory rating of 1,000 watts equals $7.02 per rated watt.

Solar System:
Total cost $9,181.00 divided by the factory rating of 750 watts equals $12.24 per rated watt.

Source

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CalamityJane wrote:

Yes your right fishin, it's cheaper to have a windmill in your yard

Equipment Costs
Wind Energy System:
Turbine (controller included) $3,300.00
Tower $3,000.00
Cable (325 feet) $ 715.00
Total $7,015.00

Solar PV Energy System:
Modules x 10 $6,200.00
Fixed Rack $1,570.00
Charge Controller $ 971.00
Cable (200 feet) $ 440.00
Total $9,181.00

Purchase Cost VS Cost per Rated Watts:
Wind System:
Total cost $7,015.00 divided by the factory rating of 1,000 watts equals $7.02 per rated watt.

Solar System:
Total cost $9,181.00 divided by the factory rating of 750 watts equals $12.24 per rated watt.

Source

OK, so, using the numbers from your report extrapolate out a cost comparison of individual home systems to community systems.

The wind turbines I linked to earlier that are installed in Princeton, MA are 3.1 Megawatt turbines. Each cost $2.6 million and powers ~3,000 homes.

The cost to power 3,000 homes using the individual systems listed in your link @ $7,015 each comes out to $21,045,000.

The cost savings of communal systems is huge.

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Anyone (besides Walter, who has followed this stuff) looked at my link to other thread(s)? There is a fairly ugly building as an example of using turbines on roof tops, but that could be ameliorated by design; that is where I think I first brought up the bird bit, and learned more, from Walter to start, and then perhaps from other article(s) I cited.

Flyways can be, I gather, more problematic than the average place, but apparently windfarms can adjust, if that is so.

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I think they're rather beautiful:

http://www.iptv.org/iowapathways/images/a_000084_large.jpg

http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/coalvswind/pixillen/windmill.jpg

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I was thinking the same thing swimpy.

They're not an eyesore.

It's just that noise factor. What can be done about that?

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Location, location, location.

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I think the biggest disadvantage of wind turbines is that it takes a large number of them to generate an appreciable amount of power. Depending on their size & capacity, it takes about 1200 -2500 to equal the power output of a standard size coal or nuclear powerplant. The maintenance and access cost for such a large number of machines could be very high. And the wind doesn't blow all of the time. On the plus side, by distributing the locations of power production over a large area there might, under some circumstances be a reduction of power transmission losses that could partly compensate for some of the defects.

In the long term increased use of wind turbines is a likely beneficial thing at some level. However it is unrealistic in the extreme to believe that they could ever amount to more than 10% of the power needs of a modern country.

Solar power is even more costly and less efficient than wind power . Moreover, even in low latitudes, many hundreds of acres of land completely covered with solar panels would be required to match the power output of a single standard power plant -- and they operate only in the daylight.

Nuclear power is much cheaper, cleaner and more reliable. It is a great delusion to suppose that we can significantly reduce carbon emissions without a massive increase in the use of nuclear powerplants. However for AGW enthusiast that is porobably a small additional step after the even greater delusions associated with supposed catastrophic AGW itself.

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I don't think that anyone compared wind turbines to power stations.

They are just and only one quite efficiantly working natural source of energy.

Some A2K'ers stood recently in the middle of a bigger wind farm: the noise is really THERE = close to a turbine.

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Walter Hinteler wrote:

I don't think that anyone compared wind turbines to power stations.

They are just and only one quite efficiantly working natural source of energy.

I agree. However the fact is that wind power is frequently touted here as a major replacement for carbon derived energy, and that unfortunately isn't true.

Walter Hinteler wrote:

Some A2K'ers stood recently in the middle of a bigger wind farm: the noise is really THERE = close to a turbine.

I can believe that, although I don't have much direct experienced up close with them. I do have some experience with propeller and turbine noise, and know that the propeller on a small aircraft engine turning at 2,500RPM can be heard miles away. The much larger rotors on the typical wind turbines should generate a good deal of low frequency noise. However their rotational speeds are much less and a good deal of effort has gone into reducing the sound impact - though I don't know how effective that might be.

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Wind farms - are they really that bad?

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