Wind doesn't work.....
Some interesting evidence that wind doesn't work....
However, according to the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, the agency that oversees the state’s major alternative energy rebate programs, the small wind initiative was canceled because the turbines it has funded are producing far less energy than originally estimated.
An MTC-sponsored study released earlier this summer found that the average energy production of 19 small turbines reviewed was only 27 percent of what the installers had projected. The actual production for the 19 turbines, which received nearly $600,000 in public funding, ranged between 2 and 59 percent of the estimates.
A $75,663 turbine at Falmouth Academy that received $47,500 in state money, for example, has produced only 17 percent of the projected energy in the year since its installation. Another, smaller device in Bourne is producing only 15 percent of the originally estimated energy.
The MTC blamed the underperformance generally on inaccurate information provided by manufacturers and poor siting of the turbines, as well as inaccurate wind speed estimates and inefficiencies in wiring and other equipment.
posted by GayandRight @ 12:56 PM
3 Comments:
There is one of these windfarms just outside of Swift Current, SK. You can see it for 30 or 40 miles. The last two times I have been by there, from the time we saw it to the time we could see it no longer, well over an hour, there was not enough wind to turn the turbines. this means if we were to rely on these for base power, there would have to be a coal-fired or gas-fired system on standby to take up that slack. You cannot start these from a standstill; they would have to be fired up and hot, ready to be put on line in less than one minute, when the wind failed. this makes sense?
Until we have overcome the storage challenge, both wind and solar are of marginal value only.
Wind power works much better offshore or in remote coastal areas. However, I think solar and nuclear fusion power are the way to go in the future.
You cannot use wind and solar to power an electrical grid, they're only useful as supplements. Nuclear, coal, hydro, oil, or geothermal are steady generation methods that can be supplemented with wind and solar. But solar makes no sense because of the cost with current technology.
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