Japanese breakthrough will make wind power cheaper than nuclear
mnn.com
mnn.com
I won't say that it will never work, but the list of failures is so long that anyone who mentions shrouded wind turbines without mentioning their history of failure should be suspected of being clueless. Inventing a new name for them, like "wind lens," makes them even more suspect.
For a weak census of recent attempts, see Google Image Search: http://www.google.com/search?q=ducted+wind+turbines
1868, Ernest Bollee in France: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89olienne_Boll%C3%A9e
1926, Dew Oliver, San Gorgonio Pass in California, USA: http://books.google.com/books?id=7M9C1Adp0yQC&pg=PA46...
("The abandoned [Oliver] turbine remained at the top of San Gorgonio Pass for almost two decades until it was dismembered for its scrap metal during World War II.")
2005, Enflo turbine, still trying in 2011: http://www.enflo-windtec.ch/
2007, FloDesign: http://fdwt.com/ $56M in funding so far.
2008, Marquiss Wind Power: $1.3M Series A in 2008, now dead: http://www.marquisswindpower.com/
To be fair, Enflo and FloDesign haven't failed yet, or at least their websites are still up.
Wind power seems to be an area where the usefulness inversely correlates with spreading of a piece of news.
3 times the power of a conventional turbine? Albert Betz would like to have a word with these Japanese inventors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betz_law
If anybody's interested in improving wind turbines, they should look at what is costly in current turbines. It's surprisingly the steel tower that's the most expensive part.
I worked for a time on shrouded propellers for ship propulsion and studied ducted propellers for aircraft. These are more efficient than unshrouded propellers - but in each case the difference is under 10% - this is combined gain from reduced losses and larger apparent diameter. With turbines, things are a bit more complex, because with a well designed duct you achieve an effective diameter actually larger than the duct itself, and capture the additional wind energy from that extra area. Taking things to absurdity, I am fairly sure (without doing the math...) that you could have a relatively small turbine inside an enormous duct, and achieve 3x the power of an unshrouded turbine of that diameter. But this is a poor solution, because the large duct will surely cost a lot more than a larger conventional wind turbine.
Please correct me if I am wrong, but it seems to me that as long as the shroud or "wind lens" costs less than the price of building a second tower, it would seem that a 2x or greater increase in power output would be preferable to building a second tower, once you have increased the blade and tower height to the maximum efficient length.
Look, it's a simple cost trade - currently the most economical turbines are in the 1 to 3 megawatt range and roughly 100 m rotor diameter.
Tower cost is probably exponentially related to height for example. so the things balance out at that point.
Exponentially? So that every additional 50 feet, say, doubles the cost? I seriously doubt it. I would expect a quadratic relationship: the incremental cost to make it taller is proportional to the current height. Maybe I'm missing something and the relationship is cubic, but it's certainly not exponential.
(I know, maybe you didn't mean "exponentially" literally. But we're engineers here :-)
Consider the function
f(x) = x ^ 2
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
0 1 4 9 16 25 36 49 64 81
Now consider this function:
f(x) = 2 ^ x
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
1 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256 512
In very practical terms, the difference between a "power law", as functions of the form x ^ k are called, and an exponential, of the form k ^ x, is massive. I grant that the terminology may be a little confusing, but this is not a pedantic distinction!
Anyhow I don't think "50 more and double the cost's" is exponential?
// And I still would not think exponential is impossible function for the cost's. When you get about one kilometer high, the stuff just gets shit expensive. I mean humankind-scale expensive.
cost(height) = reference_cost × 2^((height-reference_height)/50), cost(height) = k × 1.01395948^height.dweight/dheight=weight, dweight/weight=dheight, ln weight = height + c',
weight = c*exp(height)
Let's say you need 1000 kg for 10 meters of tower supporting another 1000 kg of load. A mass ratio of 2.
To extend that another 10 m, you need to support the above 2000 kg, so you need more beefy stuff for the next 10 m below, 2000 kg of tower.
Now you have 4000 kg to support for the next 10 m so you have to use 4000 kg of tower, 8000 for the next etc.
That's exponential.
Of course, in reality the base is less than two every 10 meters, steel is stronger per weight than that.
Though yes, on the other hand, the bending moment grows linearly only with height, and different buckling things are only power things. I don't know then if structural frequencies etc start coming in at some point.
Energy startups fail primarily due to a lack of appreciation for the intensive capital required to make renewable energy work.
This is an industry where every project will cost millions of dollars, hundreds of millions, or even a billion for truly large-scale operations.
And that is EVERY project. You do not just come up with a design, test it, then repeat it 500 times. Each site has its own unique properties, each turbine need to be manufactured and shipped, connected into a grid, operated and maintained.
So you need a permanent source of massive amounts of cash to operate. Your standard VC firm normally is not an option because the ROI is likely to be 10 years out, and that is too long for most investors.
When the ROI does come in, it is massive. But this is a high-risk, long-term play, and it just doesn't match the interest of most VCs.
We have built our first production units, field tested them, and are ready to roll, but have spent the last 3 months lining up finances because we do not want to be another failed company added to the list.
I'm not in the field, so I'll naively ask: Is the US government, or any government for that matter, doing anything about it?
Yes, I am aware of subsidizing R&D but that has diminishing returns too, and given the amount already poured in around the world and the rather dismal returns, I'm underwhelmed by the proposition that pouring even more in will turn things around. You can always claim that if you just keep pouring the money in it'll all turn around; it's a null argument when it comes down to it. (We'd almost certainly be better off pouring equal funds into getting nuclear going instead.)
Extractive energy production where you can dump negative externalities onto the public or hide your subsidy in a part of the budget that is not directly traceable to you (e.g. Marines in Iraq and destroyers in the straits of Hormuz) is surely one of the purest wealth producers, but if forced to actually compete on its own the equations would look a bit different...
Wind and solar both generally barely break even or barely above if you take a full accounting of their energy inputs and costs, biofuels are often a net loss (depends on the crop, but I think the balance of the argument has corn ethanol as a net loss, cane sugar seems to be a net gain, but...), and the problem is they're competing with things that easily get tens of times of returns on energy expended with the fossil fuels and nuclear power.
One of the things you rarely see correctly computed is what it would truly take to power our entire society with renewable energy, including the sudden new energy expenditures necessary to keep our purely-renewable infrastructure maintained with replacement gear. As the net energy benefit of the average piece of gear approaches 1x, the necessary expenditures approach infinity. Replacing 10-25x sources with 1.5-3x sources requires yet again far more resources than the naive multiplications and divisions would imply, if you don't make the mistake of assuming free infrastructure that never decays, or one-time-cost infrastructure that never decays.
(Incidentally, this is why cheap solar, in the sense of truly cheaper without government subsidy solar, is exciting. A solar panel that can make back 5-10x the expenditure to make and install it, and isn't a massive expenditure of metal and glass and silicon is a big deal, it makes things practical that weren't before. Or a solar installation consisting of lots of cheap reflectors concentrating the energy on a centralized station. I still think we might be able to go both net positive and practical on solar. Wind I'm less optimistic about, it's difficult to see what we can cut out of our wind generators and still have wind generators the way we can cut down on the mass/energy footprint of a solar installation with clever engineering. In the limiting case, a reflector is a sheet of foil and an amortized central station; a wind generator is an entire wind generator.)
If I were John Boehner (leader of the US opposition), I'd take money from corn and oil subsidies and use it to fund more R&D, but I'm not (or at least I won't admit to being him in this public forum).
This financing problem reflects a real economic problem. Risk -- cash flow variability -- is a real economic quantity. Failure to manage it causes real economic hardship and loss. If 50% of the power supply is wind, and it's down due to weather, someone on the grid is going down. Economically, the financing problem signals the importance of addressing that contingency. So this isn't just bankers being mean.
What I don't understand is that these areas they refer to as natural wind resources are incidentally the areas that have had the highest instances of major tornadoes and hurricanes. I'm sorry, but erecting a structure purposefully designed to maximize wind drag in a storm zone is pretty stupid.
Nuclear power is the only viable method to go carbon-neutral before we hit the next century. It's also not likely to colossally fuck up our environment (see: Weather response to management of a large wind turbine array.), IE warning that it could shift the movement of cyclones in the atlantic.
http://www.energyscience.org.au/FS02%20CO2%20Emissions.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_nuclear...
As we are in the midst of funding talks, we don't have much public info to share on a blog right now. Once we close on funding, I intend to increase our social communications.
http://news.discovery.com/tech/lens-wind-turbines-magnify-po... is marginally better (and more brief), I'm sure there are further sources.
EDIT: Or, consider the transmission costs from areas where such land is available.
Unfortunately, wind doesn't hold up very well under such examination for a variety of purposes, and I seriously doubt this changes any significant aspect of the analysis. But that's not the "evil's" fault, it's just engineering.
Naturally this would have to be scaled based on power output (maybe?), and of course it would be harder to find the bodies and determine cause of death, but it's not like these other sources of power are clean compared to wind as far as birds are concerned. I guess it's just easier to guess what killed a bird whose body is next to a turbine...
Think of it this way, each turbine supply’s enough energy to meet the needs of several households. On average far fewer birds die from the turbine than the households whose energy comes from that wind turbine and that does not change as you scale up the wind turbines. Now the exact numbers depend on the type of turbine and their placement but 5+MW wind turbines are far less dangerous than their smaller and less efficient counterparts that started the whole issue. If the total energy generation needs of the US where met from large wind turbines there would still be negligible impact on birds.
PS: If you look at small turbines the blade spins so fast hit’s hard to see, if you look at large turbines the blade easy to see because huge and moving though a much larger area.
1,000,000,000 birds. I hope that puts "green" technology's impact in perspective.
http://www.fws.gov/birds/mortality-fact-sheet.pdf
http://www.birdsandbuildings.org/index.html
And that's just in the US.
Wind's got two big problems. The power isn't where you want it in time and space. The wind doesn't blow all the time, so wind turbines need to be supported with "peaking" power plants which will almost certainly burn natural gas. Any effort to store power is likely to be as expensive as generating it. Another problem is that good wind resources aren't close to demand, so a large network of new power lines need to be built to get power into cities. Power companies aren't excited about this, because the power isn't available at the times they want it, and NIMBYism makes it quite hard to acquire new rights of way for power lines.
As for a comparison to nuclear, that's a comparison that can come out any way you like. Nuclear fuel is almost free, compared to the capital costs of building the plant. When you try to charge that cost to a kWh of electricity, it all depends on the lifetime of the plant and the cost of capital. For a while it seemed that nuclear plants have a longer life than we anticipated they would, which lowers the cost of electricity a lot. The Fukushima accident will probably cause people to give up on older BWRs, which hurts the economics.
In the past, the construction of nuclear plants has proven to be risky and unpredictable -- often nuclear plants cost many times more to build than originally planned. If the industry is going to have a future, it's going to need to answer this problem through technology (small modular reactors) and management (project management, quality control.)
Short answer: 50 times more lead than exists in known deposits, and $25 trillion dollars.
That's probably an overly pessimistic estimate. He assumes that we have to handle the wind stopping all over the country for a week (or, equivalently, going down to 30% for ten days). But I think it makes the point that renewables can't take over until we figure out scalable storage.
I did see one interesting idea: go someplace with lots of solid granite bedrock. Carve out a giant plug and store power by using hydraulics to raise the plug. http://www.solarserver.com/solar-magazine/solar-energy-syste...
That article says claims that "an analysis of a future of renewable energy shows that a mix of wind and solar energy needs, at least, a two day storage capacity." With that assumption, two plugs of 500m radius and 1km deep could handle all of Germany, at a cost of half a euro per kWh.
On the other hand, my ex-geologist brother was fairly sceptical of this idea.
http://www.riam.kyushu-u.ac.jp/windeng/en_aboutus_detail04.h...
"Wind power is proportional to the wind speed cubed. If we can increase the wind speed with some mechanism by utilizing the fluid dynamic nature around a structure, namely if we can capture and concentrate the wind energy locally, the output power of a wind turbine can be increased substantially. At wind energy section of Kyushu University, a new efficient wind power turbine system has been developed. This system has an diffuser shroud at the circumference of its rotor to embody the wind energy concentration. The diffuser shroud is now named "Wind lens". To apply the wind-lens structure to a larger size turbine, we have developed a compact collection-acceleration device"
Add to this the costs of reworking the power grid to distribute power from the new turbines across the country, and decommissioning all of the existing power generating facilities.
I doubt the turbines could ever recover their costs before they get worn out and need replacement.
You also need the right kind of wind patterns. It's not as easy as buying 1/4 of Alaska. You need to look at the wind speed distributions over time and pick a certain set of conditions to make it work.
20% of the size of Alaska is roughly the size of two or three full Midwest states. 20% of AK is about 132K sq miles, equivalent to about 80% the size of California (total ~164K sq miles).
http://www.google.com/search?q=alaska%20size%20compared%20to...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alaska_area_compared_to_co...
One of the insights from the video (and not mentioned in the article) is the option of using ocean area for wind collection, rather than doing it on land.
Does "nuclear" strictly mean operating costs? Or does it include the billions of government capital investments? How about storing waste for a period of time longer than recorded human history?
This material can also be 'downblended' (the opposite process of enrichment) or simply mixed in with sea water in very small concentrations. Being long-lived radioactive sources also means the relative radioactivity (per volume) is low.
It will cost many billions of dollars to develop infrastructure to "downblend" waste products, build thorium reactors, litigate, etc.
How about naturally occurring uranium? Isn't it just as unsafe as nuclear waste, it radiates too you know. You just need lot's of it to be dangerous.
Now let's assume that we have 1 sievert natural occurrence of uranium. Then let's assume we have ten times as bad pile of nuclear waste, so it emits 10 sieverts. Now, let's bury that waste in ten different locations, and it's no more dangerous as natural occurrence.. Am I right?
Let's then wind 100 years to the future. Unsurprisingly the natural occurrence radiates somewhat less than it did. And any one of our ten hideouts of radioactive waste radiates less than the natural hideout, because they originally had relatively big percentages of isotopes with half-lives less than 30 years.
If you just put the waste back where you took it in the first place what's the problem? (there are abandoned coal mines and mineral mines too, so there should be enough places).
That parenthetical comment, dismissed with the lead-in "Of course..." is actually itself a huge technological hurdle that is decades away from reality.
Luckily wind-turbine building and maintenance is not dangerous...
"Of course, this assumes the concurrent deployment of a nationwide Smart Grid that could store and disburse the variable sources" -> the price is extreme and not calculated. Furthermore, you would still need 100% backup in traditional sources.
"it will create lots and lots of permanent jobs" -> therefore badly increases the price of the power generated
"projected growth in electric vehicles" -> thus further increasing the demand for electricity
"One downside often cited by advocates of coal and gas power is that wind turbines require a lot more maintenence than a typical coal or gas power plant. But in a lagging economy this might just be wind power's biggest upside — it will create lots and lots of permanent jobs, sparking a new cycle of economic growth in America."
He thinks the fact that they require more maintenance and are less efficient is good for the economy. Unbelievable.
Anything that increases the cost of energy will decrease the ability of a civilization to advance.
How much does it cost to put nuclear power generation in a house? You can't. So therefore wind power is infinitely cheaper than nuclear.
If you put a wind turbine on the side of a building where that side forms a wind tunnel, then you can generate power very cheaply - if you only count the cost of the generator and the batteries. If you count the cost of the building that makes the natural wind tunnel and repairs it is more.
Same with nuclear - you need to count other costs. The cost of a rare accident is billions or trillions. The cost of cleanup, ruined nearby industries ( and even not so nearby industries (Wales farmers)) can be massive.
Wind power can be used without storage depending on what needs to use the wind power. Like the article mentions, car batteries are quite useful to store the power in. There are many uses for electricity that do not require continuous electricity. Likewise it can be used as a complementary source of renewable energy. There are communities that generate 100% of their energy from renewable sources, and part of that is from wind.
Wind is also a cheaper investment. Nuclear costs a lot of money initially, and on an ongoing basis. At a small scale, I can buy a portable wind generator for my ipod for under $30. At a large scale, some communities have farms that generate 5 gigawatt hours a year.
How do you price the cost to the environment of wind farms? Noise pollution, and visual pollution. The cost of safety - that is damage to human and animal life. Wind power causes the lowest amounts of death to humans, but apparently causes bird deaths.
It's all very complicated, but wind power does have some clear cost advantages. From scale of investment required, to safety cost advantages, to reduced environmental cleanup costs, to reduced tourism and land price effects.
I think this is also a great example for startups. When things don't go as planned (nuclear disaster) don't give up innovating.
Still, I'm all for these sorts of technologies. I hope it works. Now we need to work on STORING this energy efficiently.