Wind power: Even worse than you thought

theregister.co.uk

12 points·edcobb··8 comments

Interesting article. I hadn't heard of the UK's ROCs (renewables obligation certificates) before. That sounds like a fairly convoluted and silly system. Wind power is a bad idea IMHO.

I suggest skipping The Register's diatribe and going stright to the PDF. Not that The Reg is miscommunicating anything per se, just that it's annoying.

http://www.jmt.org/assets/pdf/wind-report.pdf

All this article says to me is that the efficiency claims are not realistic (what's new in marketing?) and that Wind can't be use for baseload power due to it's variability.

The second point is not new knowledge, so any article trumpeting these claims in red and bold is sensationalist and suspect.

Couldn't they just strap solar panels all over the surface or on top of the wind mills to mitigate some of the inefficiencies? On a related note, whatever happened to the spray-on solar material using nanotechnology?

I don't think the top surface area of a typical wind turbine is even close to being large enough for that to pay back.

The largest turbines (Enercon E-126 [1]) are rated at 7 MW of wind power. The largest photovoltaic solar plant (Sarnia [2]) in the world is rated at 80 MW, i.e. about 11 of the largest wind turbines. The cell surface area of that plant is 966,000 square meters.

Again, I don't think the surface area of the top of a single wind turbine's gondola quite suffices.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine#Largest_capacity [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarnia_Photovoltaic_Power_Plant

Solar power? In Scotland?

Insert molten salt battery between erratic power source and grid.

Nobel prize please. outstretched hand

So the beta sucks?

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