NASA Images of Oil Slick
earthobservatory.nasa.gov
earthobservatory.nasa.gov
But with respect to simple energy, I agree it's a matter of motivation and diversion of funding that keeps us from utilizing solar, wind, etc. energy efficiently.
In the meantime, we need oil. We should understand what went wrong here, and try to prevent it from happening again.
Logically, the best course of action would be to switch energy sources as soon as feasible to preserve as much oil as possible for such fabrication, to give us time to find a replacement for that as well. Or, buy us time to figure out a good way to recycle 100% of plastics.
A perfect example of this is the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant on Long Island in the 70's. LILCO (local power company/monopoly) spent around $6 billion building a nuclear power plant that could generate 820MW of power on the edge of the Long Island Sound.
And then decommissioned the plant without so much as generating any commercial electricity. Why? NY Governor Mario Cuomo refused to approve any evacuation plans. Reason for that? To prevent the plant from opening due to public pressure after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
Result of all this? $6 billion in building costs passed off from LILCO to the public. And instead of generating its own power, Long Island had to lay out a 330MW submarine power cable to obtain extra power from Connecticut after that big blackout a few years back. And a 100MW Gas Turbine plant was built on the site instead. Also after the blackout.
Oh. And can't forget about the 50 kilowatts of power generated by the two 100ft wind turbines were built. Really.
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/ex-microsoft-sci...
I'm strongly in favor of adding more nuclear power too - both for its large generation capability, and because the US badly needs to recover erstwhile technological and industrial lead in this area. South Korea recently snatched a big contract to build a nuclear station in the Middle East, and it's a depressing fact that the world's only steel plant capable of manufacturing the large single-unit containment chambers for a reactor is in Japan.
see: http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_u...
I used to be a big supporter of the local green party but since they've gone against windmills due to the 'visual pollution' I've turned away from them.
They're now effectively causing the deployment of more nuclear power in the mid to long term. Meanwhile the Germans have outdone the rest of the world in both deployment of solar and wind power.
Wind power is there now on average 6.5% of all energy produced, in Sachsen-Anhalt (sp?) it is over 40%!
The sad thing about this oil spill is that is is a double whammy, not only ecologically is it a disaster of enormous magnitude, it also hits the region that is still recovering from the hurricane disaster only a few years ago.
Of course, if we had fusion we could easily solve this problem, but that's a good 40 years away.
Pardon me, but I'm a liberal and I support nuclear power.
(Not that it's not the right choice, of course.)
Inconvenient truth spokesman Al Gore's home uses twenty times as much energy as the average. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/02/28/politics/main25228...
I take it that George Bush and Al Gores houses will not be that far apart in total energy consumption.
Al Gore should be ashamed of himself and his energy footprint, but that goes for every joker that went to the climate summit by plane.
If there was one place where they could have shown that they were serious about the subject matter and invest a bit in video conferencing that was it.
Just to clarify, do you mean grid energy consumption? Unless I read incorrectly, George Bush's Crawford ranch house is twice as small as Al Gore's house. Does that not matter much in terms of total consumption?
I believe Bush owns a huge home in Dallas, and it seems obvious that the ranch was a PR vehicle, so I doubt his combined personal energy footprint is worth talking about, but based on the article above his Crawford ranch is impressive.
The amount of money spent on the installation and insulation of the property is the big factor, and I suspect that if grid power was available where that farm is located that it is nowhere near cost effective.
The house I built was to learn, not to save, just to give you an idea of how inefficient going off the grid if grid power is available is.
If grid power is not available, in other words if you do not have any other options then it is a totally different matter.
The total cost of a 10 KWh/day installation in the Northern latitudes of Canada was 5 years ago about $CAN 60,000, probably in Texas where you have much more sunshine the cost will be significantly lower, but you still have to factor in stuff like the cost of charging / discharging batteries, which alone already costs more than using the grid...
It's not that easy!
You'd think people would realize that while nuclear, or wind, or solar, are imperfect, each one is better than fossil fuels.
Now, if you can show me that migrating to wind or solar or nuclear will be much much easier, cheaper, simpler and more efficient if we do it 10 years from now instead of next year, then it might be a good idea to wait.
I'm not sure if Fusion would be much better than fission (which isn't to say that it's not good, just that it doesn't seem nearly as much of an improvement as some would want us to believe (many of those people writing grant proposals)):
http://www.rationalfuturist.com/writings/fusion.html
What I'd really like to see is a liquid-fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR). Check out this Google Tech Talk about it:
EX: H - H fusion in our sun is a vary slow and stable process. But that's simply based on the conditions of our sun, under other conditions H - H fusion can be extremely fast.
EX2: Under specific conditions the Uranium in a fission power plant can generate an explosion equivalent to a similar mass of TNT. It's not what we think of as a nuclear explosion but it's not exactly peanuts either. The basic problem is creating a film of boiled water see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjsMV1MglA4&feature=relat... for some simple related experiments.
EX3: Lithium isotopes are either stable or far to short lived to be radioactive. At worst your dealing with a half life of 840.3 ms which means it does not accumulate in the reaction chamber and within 1 minute of shutting down the reaction it's hard to detect.
It's not clear what nuclear power costs[1] and so it's difficult to say if it's a better investment of public resources than wind, solar, geothermal, etc.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_...
Funny, I've heard people tell me that's what they said 40 years ago.
On a side note, there's not much potential for wind turbines in most places, the wind just isn't strong enough: http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/map_wind_national_lo-res.jpg http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/map_wind_national_hi-res.jpg
Windmills are portrayed as 'bird slaughterhouses', the reality is that while bird killings do occur they're nowhere near as frequent as the FUD would have you believe. If it were the blades would be dripping blood, and a good place to shop for dinner would be at the foot of a windmill tower.
I've had a 5 meter (15') very fast running (600 RPM) mill up for well over a year and not a single dead or injured bird was found near it. Big windmills rotate a lot slower (even if the tip speeds are roughly identical) so are easier to spot as obstacles, the small mills turn so fast the blades are visible only as a blurry disc.
As for the side note, that's 30% of the total landmass of the continental united states usable, that's not 'not much potential', that's enormous potential.
(Note: I'm no expert and maybe there is some glaring oversight in my quick calculation.)
Also, wind power is not delivered in cross section on a surface parallel to the ground but on one at a right angle to the ground.
There are other forms of renewables besides wind, such as hydroelectric dams, geothermal power and solar. A combination of those would be called for anyway.
And since it is much cheaper to save a Watt-hour than it is to make one conservation is where it all begins, currently the US uses about double the amount of energy per person compared to the rest of the developed world.
I'm fairly sure the US could increase its 7% in renewables to a much more significant fraction without any breakthroughs in technology, say up to 20% or so. That alone would be a major relief.
Right now there are iirc about 35GW of installed power in wind turbines in the US, that's about 25,000 turbines.
I've been out of the wind energy scene for 5 years now, I was mostly interested in the smaller scale anyway, but there is a surprisingly large amount of energy in wind power and we are using only a very small fraction of it.
Keep in mind too that the total energy consumption of a country is used to power lots of different stuff, transportation is going to be the hardest to convert, but anything that runs off the grid is fair game for being powered by renewables, and in all those per-capita energy uses all those different categories are lumped together.
Also, maybe you can give me some numbers so I can plug them into this formula. What is the wind conversion efficiency for a turbine? What is the typical rotor diameter? And how many turbines per unit area on a typical wind farm?
energy generated per turbine = efficiency * (power per unit area) * area * time
total energy generated = (available area) * (turbines per unit area)
Then I can redo my calculation using 29 PWh as the total energy consumption for the US (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States). Just curious now, don't want to start an argument or anything.
The practical upshot of that is that you can't slow the air down to a standstill, and hence you can only extract so much power.
The next step is the difference between the theoretical maximum and the actual rotor used to extract the energy, this will always be a compromise, but real world rotor efficiencies of about 50% can be reached. Then there's the generator/alternator (depending on the type of machine) losses and gearbox losses if a gearbox is used (there are very large direct drive models, specifically the Enercon series).
After all is said and done figure about 35 to 48% of the wind 'input' energy can be extracted and applied to do something useful, assuming the wind is blowing at 'rated speed' (when the machine produces its maximum design power).
If the wind goes over that speed you will lose power because the blades will be 'furled' to take them out of the wind to limit the rotor speed to something safe, and to avoid burning up the powertrain or wrecking the gearbox.
Then there are still transmission losses but we can leave those out because they apply to any power source connected to the grid.
Typical rotor diameters for 2MW machines are in the 80 to 90 meter range depending on how efficient the machine is.
There is no 'typical wind farm', it all depends on the effects of the terrain and the windmills on each other and the amount of investment.
A single bladed rotor is the most efficient design, and a single windmill has the best extraction efficiency, multiple blades (usually 3, but 2 is reasonably common in smaller machines (even though it suffers from 'tower thump'), and there are some experimental large machines using only 1 blade), terrain details, local variations in wind consistency, wind shear and a whole bunch of other factors including humidity and so on play havoc with any simple 'back of the envelope' calculations.
A 7 meter per second wind in the desert versus a 7 meter per second wind at sea level can make a huge difference.
If you really want to dig in to this I'd advise you to go and read the http://www.awea.org/ site as well as a community for homebrew wind enthousiasts called fieldlines (http://www.fieldlines.com/), I used to be an active member of the second but since I've left Canada I have not worked on anything renewable energy related.
I spent a good 2 years studying this stuff before being able to make a very small machine, the forces involved in even such a 'toy' (2.4 KW) machine are very impressive and the amount of knowledge you need to pull it off was far beyond what I ever had expected.
Windmills for power generation are right at the crossroads between many different disciplines, including aerodynamics, magnetics, electrical theory, semiconductors and structural engineering, coupled with a very powerful and unpredictable adversary, the wind.
If anything that journey taught me great respect for the people that design those large machines and one the whole get it right most of the time.
When they mess up it looks like this:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/event.php?id...
Is it possible that the pipe could have been detached from the platform and this leak prevented? Or can future designs have this capability?
It seems like there was time to act to prevent this from happening. And even if there weren't, perhaps future designs can be built to detach safely when an explosion has occurred.
For example, there are doubled lined tankers, why not a pipe within a pipe? One highly flexible not very good at maintaining pressure for pumping to handle accidents, but surrounding one that is optimized for normal operation.
Valves that automatically shut off when a pipeline's management system can no longer sense parts of the pipeline would also be good.
I realize that I do not understand the physics of how these systems work and welcome explanations of it. But certainly there is room for innovation in this area, especially considering the high costs of these disasters.
I'm sure there will be lessons learnt from this incident.
More info here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8651333.stm
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/04/katrina-of-smell-new...
"Drill baby drill," indeed.
[1] http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/05/01/gulf-oil-slick-triples-... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia
This is an epic environmental disaster. A similar marine rig spill in Australia^ last year took two months to alleviate by drilling a relief well and pumping mud into it; as with all drilling, several attempts are usually necessary to hit a suitably high-pressure part of the field. And the largest estimate for the output of the Montara spill was only 2000 barrels/day; this one is thought to be leaking between 3-5000b/d (1 barrel/~40 gallons).
And that spill was considerably farther from shore, with a continental shelf limiting the amount of oil that reached south-east Indonesia. The Mississippi Delta, on the other hand...I don't like to think about the damage.