[NUKELIES]

A comment from FirstClassSkeptic referred to wind energy farms as "dummy loads." FirstClass can you please elaborate, and anyone who knows anything about wind farms being used for ulterior purposes please add your thoughts.

I lived in Liverpool for a while, and there were scores of giant windmills off the coast of Merseyside and North Wales which never seemed to be on.

[rerevisionist]

'The Wind Farm Scam' by John Etherington is quite a good smallish book on this issue. I have to say I haven't checked it thoroughly; also I found it irritating that there are different types of problem lumped together (e.g. bird deaths caused by the rotating blades).

One of the characteristics appears to be that these huge windmills have gearboxes which need to turn fairly often otherwise something happens to the lubricant. In order to turn them, grid electricity is used. So not only do they often not turn, but, when they do, it may not wind that's turning them.

I like to hope however that countries with more competence than the UK and US, such as Germany and maybe China, are getting their power sources together. Let's hope so, anyway.

[FirstClassSkeptic]

There's one near me that runs constantly when there's no wind blowing. When the wind actually does start to blow a good breeze, they start shutting them down. Maybe only leave five or so running. They are supposed to run in winds up to about 58 mph, but they will shut them down when the wind gets about 20 mph.

[mooninquirer]

Personally, I believe that windfarms would work in principle, but the scam is that they are not cost effective, but just a government subsidy of an alternative energy. I believe nuclear power plants might similarly not be cost effective, but a government subsidized entity, even if they do produce electricity.

[FirstClassSkeptic]

I was walking along the road there the other day, and a man with a bit of land up there on top, past the wind farm, stops for a while and talks. He was in a Hummer SUV.

I pointed to the windmills, and said, they don't make any electricity. He says to me, "You just live in a different world." He points at one and says, "That makes power for 50,000 homes." But, I said, look the grass and trees, they are hardly moving. Then he goes into some lecture about how engineers use ball bearings to make things turn easily. "My wife could push this Hummer down a level road because it moves so easily." He said, those mills move in a wind so light you can't even feel it.

He says, "You come and look at my solar panel, and see it run the coffee pot and microwave oven, and you'll tell me that's a fraud also." Well, I said, I can see the sun is shinning.

I could see that because the man knew about ball bearings that he thought he knew engineering. It did seem that he realized that his wife couldn't push a Hummer up that hill, only on the level, but he didn't seem to realize that to hook up to 50.000 homes, and run the microwave and coffee pot in each one, is a load, and that the wind energy input would have to equal that load, plus some for loss.

It was interesting to me that a person could watch windmills turning with practically no wind, and think they were really making power.

I told him that it took fossil fuels to make the windmills, and he said, oh no; they were made overseas. No fossil fuels were used. I don't know why he thought that.

These particular windmills are Gamesa, made in Spain.

A characteristic of any of these mills is that they will turn in a wind of about 8 mph. But must get to about 12 before they will start. In other words, if the wind gets to 12, they will start turning, and keep turning unless the wind drops below 8. So what they do it, the engineers put an auxillary motor in there that gives them a kick start, so to speak, and gets them going so that they will run in wind from 8 to 12. The thing of it is, it seems to me, that they just use that motor to run them all the time. It doesn't make any sense to run them when the wind speed is consistantly below 8 mph, which is what they do constantly, and were doing right then.

The mills usually reach rated output at about 38 mph. That's a wind you can almost lean on.

The various wind speeds are different depending upon the rotor blades they use. There's a big, medium and small. The big picks up at lower wind speeds, but is more apt to come loose in a storm. I think these particular ones we were looking at have the medium rotor blade on them.

[EyesWideOpen]

Anyone can go buy a Wind Turbine for their own house. The technology is very simple and using wind for power has been around since Wind Mills and Sales on Ships were invented.

Not sure I understand this line of thought.

[NUKELIES]

Not sure I understand this line of thought.

It's not about the technology, it's about control - as you cited in your post about the nuclear industry. It is entirely conceivable and probable that utility companies in conjunction with governments manipulate energy supplies for financial, political, and strategic purposes. Wind farms, along with "nuclear plants," would be just parts of the matrix.

[rerevisionist]

[1] Welcome EyesWideOpen - we get an average of 6 spammers a day, promoting their naff links - pleasure to see someone serious.
[2] Jess is right. The view from the top is different, isn't it. It's strange how little there is in literature, philosophy, history, sociology trying to show what effect it has on people, being able to control many of the variables in a situation.
[3] The problem with wind is that it's spread out. I remember an article in New Scientist I think by Kapitza, years ago. If you want centralised power, i.e. huge output going to e.g. entire cities and factories, you need a highly intensive energy source. If nuclear power works/ed, it would fill the bill here. But wind is dispersed over a wide area. It's OK for small local uses, including small boats and windmills where a delay doesn't matter. But just a street of houses already uses more than a domestic wind source can supply. It's the same problem with solar energy.

Note that the total amount of energy from the sun is truly phenomenal. I saw a calculation for just the west coast of Britain. If you assume a 10 mph wind, and work out half mass-of-air times velocity squared, I seem to recall just a few seconds of that energy adds up to all the energy ever used by mankind put together. Same with solar power. The difficulty is collecting and storing it. It looks as though distributed collection even with a lot of wastage is a possibility which ought to be explored properly.

[FirstClassSkeptic]

Anyone can go buy a Wind Turbine for their own house. The technology is very simple and using wind for power has been around since Wind Mills and Sales on Ships were invented.

Yes, but would your wind turbine turn when there was no wind?

Back in the 1930's, some people built a huge windmill on Grandpa's Knob. General Electric made the generator. It was connected to the power grid, and was the first wind power turbine to be connected to the power grid. It ran for a few years, until one rotor blade came off. It generated up to about 2 megawatts, and ran in winds up to about 70 mph, so it was equivalent to today's wind turbines. It was in fact the prototype of today's wind turbines. If you search for 'wind power Grandpa's knob' you can find out about this turbine and some pictures of it.

They found out that it wasn't cost effective. The reason being that it was cheaper to make electricity from coal. At that time coal was like $1.50 a ton. So they calculated that when coal got more expensive, that this turbine would be cost effective.

Now coal is several times more expensive then it was in 1940, but the wind energy still can't compete with coal. Why?

There was a man that looked into this, except his interest was shale oil, I believe. He came up with a concept he called eMergy. Emergy means 'embodied energy'. He wrote a college textbook about it, and his concept is taught in some colleges, I think. But maybe not. You can search for 'emergy' and come up with many articles.

What the emergy concept explains is that as the cost of energy goes up, the cost of making anything using that energy also goes up, which it wouldn't seem you need a college degree to understand.

In the case of the wind turbine on Grandpa's knob: The tower was made of steel by a bridge company. Since most steel is made by the burning of coke, which is made from coal, guess what happens to the price of steel as the price of coal goes up? Well, naturally, it goes up also. So these guys were standing around Grandpa's Knob sixty years ago saying, If the price of coal goes up, then this will be economical to generate power from wind energy. But guess what? As the price of coal goes up, the cost of building that windmill goes up, and it becomes a cat chasing its tail.

Now these windmills near me have a tower that is covered with aluminum. How do you make aluminum? We were discussing this in another thread. It takes electricity to make aluminum, and lots of electricity. And how do you make the electricity? Well, in the USA, half of electricity is made from coal. In fact, coal is still the cheapest way to make electricity. So the chances are about fifty fifty that the electricity used to make this aluminum was made with coal power. It's doubtful to me that you could ever get enough electricity out of all those windmills, and get it reliably enough, to run an electric furnace in order to make the aluminum that covers them.

[EyesWideOpen]

I think you guys are stretching it on Wind Power. But hey, that is just my initial impression.

1. Wind is spread out but the Wind Turbines take that spread out area and CONDENSE it at the center to create electricity.

2. Price of coal has actually dropped in half since 1950

"Adjusted for inflation, coal prices in year 2000 dollars decreased from $31.40 to $16.84 per short ton between 1950 and 2000"
www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/coal/page/coal_pr ... review.pdf

3. Are Dutch Wind Mills a hoax as well? Wind power as been used for centuries if not millennia.

The first automatically operated wind turbine, built in Cleveland in 1887 by Charles F. Brush. It was 60 feet (18 m) tall, weighed 4 tons (3.6 metric tonnes) and powered a 12kW generator.

4. A turbine engine can use wind or water or coal or whatever.

[FirstClassSkeptic]

2. Price of coal has actually dropped in half since 1950

If that's the case, then why even bother with 'alternative energies'? Just burn coal. If wind energy couldn't compete with coal in 1940, then it doesn't stand a chance today.

[EyesWideOpen]

2. Price of coal has actually dropped in half since 1950

If that's the case, then why even bother with 'alternative energies'? Just burn coal. If wind energy couldn't compete with coal in 1940, then it doesn't stand a chance today.

It IS the case (inflation adjusted), that coal is half the price of decades ago.

Why alternative energy? Politics, the scientific LIE of Peak Oil and the lie that coal cannot be burned cleanly to produce electricity. Also, there is nothing wrong with experimenting with new energy technologies.

Keep in mind, alternative energies are important when one is off the grid and has no access to supplies of oil/coal. Personally, I still like the idea of alternative energies; whereby, each household has control over their own energy supplies.