Windfarms.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Illinois has a rather impressive wind farm on I-55 southwest of Chicago.

[Tyrannical]

Pursuing wind power is a distracting waste of time, it will never be anything but a small niche source of power. Wind power isn't steady, so overall turbine efficiency is very low when factored over a 24x365 operating period, and you need large arrays of batteries for energy storage. Then there are the maintenance issues, it is a large low fault tolerance moving structure exposed to dirt and the elements after all

Solar power is another big waste of time. Remember, Solyndra went out of business because it couldn't make a profit installing solar roof panels on huge warehouses located in a desert.

Yes there are some geographic locations where wind power or solar could make sense, but not enough to base an energy policy on.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

The Illinois windfarm goes straight to the grid, no storage. It takes the load off the coal fired and nuke plants when the wind is going, and uses very little resources when it isn't blowing. The land around the turbines is still farmed.

[Hermit]

Yes there are some geographic locations where wind power or solar could make sense, but not enough to base an energy policy on.

South Australia manages quite well. Sourcing 20% of its electricity requirements from wind constitutes a significant saving of fossil fuels and carbon emissions.

Solar power is also being developed in our area.

Whyalla will have the nation's largest solar power plant within three years.

In total, 300 parabolic dishes will collect and concentrate solar energy, producing enough electricity to power 9500 homes and reduce greenhouse gases by 60,000 tonnes a year - equal to taking 17,000 cars off the road.
more here

The funding for the $230 million project has been finalised last week, most of it coming from the private sector.

[MiM]

Tyrannical&Zilla are both right.

Seraph. Can the area with 20% wind trade power with other areas? e.g if you get an occasional day of calm (how often does that happen down at the rolling50's), can they buy from outside, or do they have reserve effect to cover it themselves?

[Ronja]

Red, Fukushima was very much the result of really bad planning - overoptimistic engineering to put it bluntly. Japan has had several tsunamis up to 10 meters (30 feet) and even a couple reported to have been 30 and 100 meters (100 and 300 feet, respectively) high during the last thousand years, so the assumption that 5.7 meter (19 feet) seawall should be enough to protect the plant site was just plain wrong.

Wikipedia even claims that the leadership of TECPO was warned about this risk by an internal report in 2007, but the link they cite has gone dead, so I'm not sure about that.

Additionally, the reserve generators were placed at the lowest level in the cellars, so when the tsunami breached the seawall, it drowned the generators and thus all emergency power sources on site were lost, at the same time as the plant's connection to Japan's electricity grid was also severed by the earthquake. And that - the prolonged lack of electricity - is what lead to the partial core meltdown in Dai-ichi. Emergency shutdown due to the earthquake worked exactly as planned - but without electricity, the residual heat from the stopped generators could not be lead away, and thus a problem escalated into a crisis.

So there were at least two grave design mistakes that lead to the Fukushima disaster. Even with these serious mistakes, radiation from the accident has thus far caused zero deaths, though a lot of costs, due to evacuations and cleanup work. Still, the earthquake and the tsunami were a at least two orders of magnitude more devastating catastrophe for Japan, but for some reason most of the media frenzy that I have seen has been centered on the nuclear aftermath. Personally, I find that strange.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Tidal generators will be viable when they get a few bugs worked out, like how to submerge electronics for years at a time still have it working. Slack tide is the only time the generators would be idle, and places like the Bay of Fundy would be great for this.

[Hermit]

Red, Fukushima was very much the result of really bad planning - overoptimistic engineering to put it bluntly. Japan has had several tsunamis up to 10 meters (30 feet) and even a couple reported to have been 30 and 100 meters (100 and 300 feet, respectively) high during the last thousand years, so the assumption that 5.7 meter (19 feet) seawall should be enough to protect the plant site was just plain wrong.

Wikipedia even claims that the leadership of TECPO was warned about this risk by an internal report in 2007, but the link they cite has gone dead, so I'm not sure about that.

Additionally, the reserve generators were placed at the lowest level in the cellars, so when the tsunami breached the seawall, it drowned the generators and thus all emergency power sources on site were lost, at the same time as the plant's connection to Japan's electricity grid was also severed by the earthquake. And that - the prolonged lack of electricity - is what lead to the partial core meltdown in Dai-ichi. Emergency shutdown due to the earthquake worked exactly as planned - but without electricity, the residual heat from the stopped generators could not be lead away, and thus a problem escalated into a crisis.

So there were at least two grave design mistakes that lead to the Fukushima disaster. Even with these serious mistakes, radiation from the accident has thus far caused zero deaths, though a lot of costs, due to evacuations and cleanup work. Still, the earthquake and the tsunami were a at least two orders of magnitude more devastating catastrophe for Japan, but for some reason most of the media frenzy that I have seen has been centered on the nuclear aftermath. Personally, I find that strange.

Also, when all is said and done, the fact remains that nuclear energy creation has caused fewer deaths and injuries per megawatt than any other form of energy production, and that includes radiation deaths.

Still, nuclear energy is not the saviour for our energy needs. Uranium reserves are expected to run out in about thirty years. And then there is the unquantifiable problem of what the waste may do in the long term.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Table-top fusion reactors.

[MiM]

Still, nuclear energy is not the saviour for our energy needs. Uranium reserves are expected to run out in about thirty years. And then there is the unquantifiable problem of what the waste may do in the long term.

Come on Seraph. Nobody believes that. Currently known economically viable and accessible ores will last longer than that. And there is more to find. Finland, as an example, is going almost self-sufficient on uranium, as one nickel mine is starting to extract uranium from very low grade ore as a by product of nickel mining. As the ore is mined for nickel anyway, this is profitable business.

And if uranium gets scarce, we have the possibilities of using fast breeder reactors, thorium or uranium extracted from sea water. All of these are possible (although not necessarily commercially) with the technology we know today. And every single of these techniques can extend the lifetime of the nuclear era with thousands of years.

[Atheist-Lite]

Geo-thermal. It is the only way to get a lot of energy fast enough before climate change eclipses the minute window humans have to get off a planet, which with 6C+ temperature rises is very likely to become unihabitable and inhospitable to higher forms of life quite rapidly.

[Tyrannical]

The Illinois windfarm goes straight to the grid, no storage. It takes the load off the coal fired and nuke plants when the wind is going, and uses very little resources when it isn't blowing. The land around the turbines is still farmed.

Wind generation is viable on farms in decent wind locations I'd think. You have a high farming area to put the mills, but an overall low energy usage density.
But any long term mass power solution must be nuclear in nature because nothing else can generate the needed power.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

The Illinois windfarm goes straight to the grid, no storage. It takes the load off the coal fired and nuke plants when the wind is going, and uses very little resources when it isn't blowing. The land around the turbines is still farmed.

Wind generation is viable on farms in decent wind locations I'd think. You have a high farming area to put the mills, but an overall low energy usage density.
But any long term mass power solution must be nuclear in nature because nothing else can generate the needed power.

So what you're saying is we shouldn't build windfarms where they won't work? I'll pass that along.

[amused]

Austin Energy has some windfarms in west Texas. I was involved in some of their facility design meetings in Austin, and mentioned the windmills to one of the engineers in the meeting. He said that they were then studying a power loss issue. The windmills slowly became less efficient over the early months of operation. When they went up to inspect the blades, they discovered that the blades were coated by the hardened remains of thousands of bugs. The texture that the bugs added to the surface of the blades was enough to slow them down enough that it showed up in the energy output detection equipment.

[Horwood Beer-Master]

Apparently Scotland prodcues a lot of wind.

And that's just Salmond.

...Unless of course we go more and more down the nuclear road, which my generation in particular I think feel very iffy about.

I can't speak for my generation (not sure I'd want to either), but I feel a whole lot more iffy about continuing to pump carbon into the atmosphere than I do about the nuclear option.

The hysteria of the overindulged baby-boomers has caused us to drag our feet far too much on the nuclear issue.