America's Wind Energy Future Looks Seaward | Hacker News Reader

America's Wind Energy Future Looks Seaward

nrel.gov

51 pointsph0rque28 comments

The US has a ludicrous amount of sparsely settled farmland in the interior. Why not just build more windfarms there? That dramatically reduces the cost and technical challenges. Yes, there are transmission losses to factor in, but at least based on the wikipedia article it seems like those aren't necessarily dealbreakers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Lo...

Is there anyone with expertise in the subject that can weigh in?

Ocean wind is much steadier, if not stronger, and it happens to be right near the various coastal cities.

You get more wind but that doesn't justify costs. Cost per kwh is still much lower on-shore. And while you can create a steadier load, that's also possible by having wind farms across the US.

They are. In fact, earlier this year, for a while in the early morning, 50% of the plains were powered by wind.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-13/wind-on-t...

The Fully Charged Show presented by the guy from Red Dwarf certainly can weigh in:

https://youtu.be/yaC1qgXaRvE?t=5m55s

So it seems like Americans are ambling along with prototypes, meanwhile, in Europe, there is Statoil putting wind farms in very deep water off Scotland, not as some prototype but fully for profit.

Regarding why not use the vast American interior, really it comes down to quality of wind. Exceptional this may be in Wyoming (it is), the winds out at sea are four times more productive if the aforementioned episode of Fully Charged is to be believed.

Quite a few recent episodes of aforementioned show have been about wind, check the Orkney special, parts 1 and 2, as in Orkney there is population of 22000 and too much renewable energy flowing in. So what do you do with it? This show answers that plus all of the usual pertinent points about storage and how there really is no need for a baseline of coal/nucular if we get the car batteries and powerwalls in place.

They are also making hydrogen from wind and sending that off to the mainland, compressed and in usable quantities.

Allegedly the wind off the U.S. Eastern seaboard is good enough to power the whole world.

In a township I lived in, that is admittedly a marginal wind resource, opponents to wind screamed bloody murder and the investor shrugged and moved on.

(pop. density of ~30 people/square mile)

Energy created in unequal bursts is highly inefficient to transport long distances - those sparsely populated places are not necessarily where you need to be getting _to_. Getting those bursts of electricity intermittently is not ideal and utility companies wouldn't be running towards the opportunity

True, but to be fair, it's possible to clean it up by running the power through storage first and have the consistent energy on the other side of the storage. No different than using a UPS to clean up electricity with a lot of spikes in it (something that will kill most pc power supplies over time).

Is it, though? China built some high capacity long-distance transmission lines for wind with relatively low losses. Obviously costs are higher if the line is only used for 6h a day but that doesn't mean that transmission isn't efficient.

I should have specified that I meant economically inefficient. It may be technically efficient, but the low load factor (I would be surprised if wind is more than around 20-25% operational) would make transmission line that much more expensive to install than a similarly sized facility with a higher load factor

Larger wind farms can be directly connected to the high voltage tranmission network which is designed to transport energy efficiently over long distances.

There's a lot of Nimbyisam about onshore wind power going from the experience in the UK - though the UK has much less area than the USA.

One issue you have with land based installations is there is a size limit on how big they can be. From what I have been told the limiting factor is how big the blades can be and be transported over our existing roads. The blades could be bigger but we couldn't physically transport them given our current infrastructure. Were as if they are build at a seaside port and put on a large freighter the size limitation is lessened.

This is very true - of the top 10 largest wind turbine designs in production, only one is land based (due to segmented blades): http://www.windpowermonthly.com/10-biggest-turbines

Note, the largest has blades of 80 meters, for rotor diameter of 164 meters. That's roughly a rotating 50 story building.

I've seen that Enercon machine up close during construction and it is absolutely amazing.

As always, "kinda". In "well to do" areas, for sure [1]. But it rural areas, farmers get a chunk of cash each year as a lease payment from turbines cited on their land. I have yet to meet a farmer who wasn't a fan of wind farms cited on their property, and even know of two cases where farmers fought each other to have a wind project developer put the project on their land.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Wind#Controversy

Interesting, I don’t talk to many farmers, in fact I’d say I’ve talked to 2 in the last year about wind farms. Both had the opportunity to be apart of wind projects & declined.

Largely due to similar responses everyone else had “shadow” & construction/maintenance disruption to their land.

I talk to a lot of farmers, most likely where the bias comes from.

> Why not just build more windfarms there?

They are. Indiana is being filled with wind farms. A break of the visual monotony during the day, annoying by night.

Why annoying at night - mandated lighting?

Dozens of blinking red lights. Pray you never live next to them.

Noise.

Really? There are a lot of wind farms in densely populated areas in Europe and noise hasn't been an issue since they stopped building them directly next to buildings. Given Indiana's population density it shouldn't be an issue to keep them 1/2 mile or so from settlements. Wind farm noises are annoying but typically don't transmit that far. Shadowing is by far the bigger problem but can also be solved with minimum distances to settlements and advanced modelling.

Is there a reason why solar arrays wouldn’t be a better investment in the same regions? Or a hybrid approach?

It depends on how much reliable sun the location gets, and how much wind. Wind is often cheaper. Wind also keeps going at night.

We could build solar-thermal plants that melt salt during the day and run off stored heat in the night. They're a bit more expensive than photovoltaics I believe, which is why they're currently not very popular (the storage problem is not so bad while we're stilling using fossil fuels for base load).

A lot of interesting engineering research into floating offshore wind is being done at University of Maine. They have some prototypes producing power. Understanding the characteristics of the carbon composites has, AFAIK, been the major limiting factor in their more widespread production.

https://composites.umaine.edu/offshorewind/

They desperately need to get a proven production model into the water. There are working fields already deployed: https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/10/first-floating-wind-...

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