In reality, at the current time, most wind turbines in the USA are on farm land, either pasture or tilled. Not so big a deal with pasture, more of a problem with tilled. Each turbine takes out of production about the same amount of land than the average producing oil/well. The bases of these things are huge, producing oil/gas well is small. For both, you need access roads for maintenance. The biggest difference is that one producing natural gas well will produce as much electricity as dozens of wind turbines. The land use requirements for wind are huge. Grid scale solar is even worse.

You didn't address a word of what I said, and the argument right now is not solar vs gas, but solar/wind vs coal. Energy density is necessary for enterprises to keep their investments low, but it's a lot less of a priority for millions of consumers who would rather have cleaner air. On top of that battery technology will reduce future need for additional fossil infrastructure.

One thing about storage--You better have enough.

Coal will be and is being replaced as we speak-overwhelmingly by natural gas.

Wind/solar are but blips on the energy timeline and can never be more. The density just isn't there. They cannot produce enough energy to meet the world's needs.

As to transportation, if and when battery tech gets to point that it can deliver an affordable vehicle with a 300 mile range and 10-15 minute recharge capacity, we can transition from gasoline to EVs rather quickly. The electric motor is far superior to the internal combustion engine. EV's have always been a nonstarter for one reason and one reason only-battery tech could not give them the necessary range to be practical. If that problem is solved, they'll take over. That, of course means that demand for electricity will go up considerably.

What will generate all that electricity?

What you will likely see is one or two generations of natural gas power plants supplying most of the world's electricity. Following that, new tech fission using molten salt reactors will probably take over. Or, if you can dream a little--fusion-the REAL solar power.

My main problem with wind and solar is the amount of government subsidy, R&D, and infrastructure money going there when they cannot meet our needs. That money should be going to developing safer fission technologies and fusion.

Let's get some bank for our buck.

once again, energy density is exactly the problem that solar/wind+existing grid-battery technology solves. you no longer need extreme energy density to power homes. you only need to talk about energy density if you need an actor to be able to control all of it. in other words, you need the business interests to get their cut.

transportation is different, and the distribution of distances traveled is bimodal. there is a need for very short ranges, and another demand for far longer range. somewhere in the middle, around the limits of current electric vehicles isn't very common. still battery capacity and charge times are well within striking distance of 15-30 minutes for the short-range case.

you keep spinning this idea that oil/gas is the only way to go, but it's really not. they lack in three biggest areas of public interest. 1) free source of energy after installation and maintenance costs, 2) complete lack of emissions and excellent recyclability, and 3) a truly decentralized generation grid, with a robust number of batteries of all sizes, from 1 to 10,000's homes.

ETA: oh i just found an article about compact integrated turbines that get installed in city buildings. there goes your 50 acres argument. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.9ead5d6c068d .

The Eiffel Tower turbines are cute and all, but with all due respect, 10 MW will power a whopping 15 average households and only when operating at full capacity. Nothing left to store in a battery. And, the 15 households will be in the dark a large part of the time. If you want to store enough for a two day windless period--you can't power anywhere near 15, and you better hope that you don't have 3 consecutive days without wind.

This isn't opinion. It's physics. This article goes into both the supply and demand side. Significantly, on the demand side, it does not address directly address the increase in electricity demand that would be occasioned by wide acceptance of electric vehicles. Probably because it was written in 2013.

http://www.theenergycollective.com/r...ensity-matters

And, I'm have no great love of oil and gas. I've worked in the industry most of my life, but that's nearly over. What my time in the industry has given me is a keen interest in energy related issues. The world has gone from sail to steam to diesel. Only a fool would think that it will stop at diesel. At the same time, only a fool would believe that it will go back to sail. Wind has the same problem it had 400 years ago. Too little, and your boat is dead in the water. Too much at one time, and your boat is wrecked on the rocks.

The world has run on oil, gas, and coal for so long for one reason and one reason only--they all pack a ton of electrons into a relatively small, portable, reliable, and "on demand" package.

The only thing able to beat the incredible density of fossil fuels is nuclear, which it does by a mile.

The improvement in battery technology isn't exciting because it makes solar and wind feasible. It really doesn't. The improvement in battery technology is exciting because it may make nuclear produced electricity feasible for transportation through transition to electric vehicles. And, that would be a very good thing.

you keep saying renewables as a dead end even as technology has consistently broken through what previously were thought of as theoretical limits in novel ways. solar efficiency record is at 46%, whereas <20% was once thought of the achievable limit, and 33% is the theoretical limit for single-junction. and you are just willfully ignoring evidence to the contrary, and only judging renewables by a very subjective metric that literally only makes sense to a business, rather than the public.

you are also talking of some a narrow application of batteries in transportation, even when presented with evidence to the contrary. pumped hydro and liquified air store no electrons and are some of the most efficient batteries for surplus energy capacity. by virtue of storage, they can provide most of the density you need of any size.

molten salt reactors and fission are going to be great, but they won't come online for 20-40 years, so at present it absolutely makes sense to invest into the best technology we have to replace the worst (coal). that's not oil and gas. it's renewables.

here's my favorite old-is-new-again sail technology.

https://www.theguardian.com/environm...ankers-greener

Not even worth the effort of arguing because it's so not true. Renewables can easily supply all the electricity needs in the US and it's happening. What's slowing it down at the moment more than anything is that there's generally an overcapacity of power production and demand is still low.

Despite the huge amount of building and extraction in natural gas, solar is the largest source of new energy in the US.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...-of-new-energy

We are clearly on the path to renewables dominating, the question is only whether policy will help speed that along or hinder it.

If molten salt reactors are ready in 20-40 years, the best thing to do is sit tight and wait for them. In reality, maybe we get lucky and only have to depend on one generation of natural gas plants. You're grossly overestimating the potential of solar and wind.

Read this and the article above.

http://www.realclearenergy.org/artic...y__110221.html

lol what a flawed article. here's absolute drivel. it's fake news packaged as pseudoscience.

the policies have already driven costs of solar and wind below that of fossil fuels, but apparently in their view it was completely wasted and there will be even less progress going forward.

I wasn't necessarily going to read this article, but couldn't get past this idiotic graph.



There's no way anyone even remotely trying to be honest would include it.

I posted a lot about the prices of solar energy and it's not hard to look up. There are now 20 year contracts for solar energy under 3 cents per kilowatt-hour. There are bids for a facility in Saudi Arabia now for under 2 cents per kwh. And then look at trends - record price was 5 cents in 2015.

Really, not worth arguing. It's already a done deal, the question is just whether people push, resist or I guess remain neutral. Believing in global warming, poisoning of water supplies, fracking earthquakes, global conflict over fossil fuel resources, direct health impact like asthma, mercury in the air, spills and leaks, corruption of government.....etc, I think we should push.

It's troubling that people believe the garbage that the GOP/right wing spews about the environment, but what's really unfathomable is that people really seem to root against the environment. I don't get it. Is being concerned with the environment offensive to religious people? Some conservatives seem to understand some issues with local pollution, but anything that leaves one's immediate area is like impossible to believe or at least to do anything about. Is it that you think outsiders telling you what not to do is offensive to your sense of freedom?

It's definitely not objectively looking at the science.

You can bring in a very nice shale gas well now for $4-6 million. Once the well is in production there is very little cost. Depending on its liquid content, you may need a separator to separate the liquids from the gas and then a tank to hold the liquid. From there, the gas is in a pipeline and off to an electric plant or a liquefaction plant or wherever for end use. People think there is enormous cost in the production of natural gas. There isn't. The expense is upfront at the exploration stage which lasts not 1-3 weeks. Drill bit in, down to target formation out horizontally for up to a couple of miles, a frac, and then its done. The landowner gets a cut of the production pie, 15-20% usually after expenses and taxes.

Installation of a wind turbine costs about $1 million. There is more maintenance cost to a wind turbine than there is to producing gas well. Landowner gets $6-8K per year per turbine in land rental. Spacing is 50 acres per turbine.

Now you may say, aha, the turbine is cheaper. But you have to factor in what you can produce with each. The gas from one average shale well can produce more electricity than 20 turbines combined. 12 turbines--600 acres. Now that land isn't totally out of production. The permanent surface footprint of a gas well and a turbine are about the same. I've walked up to dozens of them. See them up close, both wells and turbines every day. They're a pretty good deal for the landowner. $6-8K annual in mailbox money is nothing to sneeze at.

You failed to cite what that graph represented-Here it is--Energy Produced Per $1 Million Of Hardware 30-Year Output: Barrels of Oil Equivalent (BOE)--The graph is accurate in my experience.

Modern wind turbines are incredibly efficient. They are bumping up against the theoretical limit of what you can squeeze out of moving air. (Betz limit). Again, this isn't opinion. It is physics. You really cannot have an informed opinion on energy without understanding density.

The only practical way now to get more electricity out of a turbine is to make the blades longer. The problem is that as you extend the length of the blades, your spacing requirements go up to 60-70-80 acres per turbine. And the additional electricity you get out of the longer blade is not proportional. Double the length of the blade and increase spacing requirement 100%, but you only get 65% more electricity. That is not good. You soon run out of available land. It is being done anyway, because it is cheaper to operate fewer turbines than more turbines, and with subsidies turbines are more profitable with longer blades even though they produce less electricity per foot of blade.

Science and mathematics, people!

If a source of energy is diffuse, unreliable and non-dispatchable, it doesn't matter what it costs. It is cr*p,

I'll go back to my original post on the subject, because it is the most concise:

To pass the grid scale electrical production test:

1.The source must provide large amounts of electrons (it must be dense).

2.The power must be reliable and predictable.

3.The electrons must be dispatchable (high or low amount must be generated on demand)

4.It must serve one or more grid demand elements(base load, load following and peak load).

5.The utilization of environment must be minimal and compactness is a must, or it is non-green and damaging the environment.

6.It must be economical.

There is a reason why "cost" is last of the six. If it fails the first four, cost doesn't really matter.

Science.......Mathematics.......

Long term contract price per kwh is the reasonable way to evaluate the cost of the energy, though of course that should absolutely include externalities like the costs associated with poisoned water, air, climate change, conflict, etc. But still, the cost per kwh is relevant, not the initial cost and then handwaiving about "Once the well is in production there is very little cost." If it costs so little to build and operate than that will be reflected in the contract price.

https://www.greentechmedia.com/artic...rices-in-Calif

This is from a little older article citing a solar contract for about 3.5 cents per kwh. Note the newer one I posted about was under 3 cents per kwh. Later in the article are numbers for contracts for natural gas combined cycle plants which run above 5 cents per kwh.

Now in 1 or 2 years when solar contracts are under 2 cents per kwh in the US and then a few years later when they are under 1 cent, well, there's going to be a lot of business building energy storage and super-high voltage long distance transmission lines.

and yet

so you are still spinning fallacies about electrons and densities even when presented with a scientific solution in the form of solar/wind+batteries.

CO2 concentration is also science and math, but you are willfully omitting it from your list.

Quick engineering quiz: Do spacing requirements go up if you extend the blades of a vertical axis turbine?

Like i said make him eat albacore tuna fish for every meal.

On the subject of storage, it will be interesting to see if the expansion of lithium extraction from the Nevada desert will change the attitude toward lithium-ion batteries. Until now, the process has been done almost exclusively in the third world, safely out of sight and out of mind of the sensibilities of environmentalists. Now, tens of thousands of acres of Nevada desert has been leased for lithium extraction. This involves a drilling process similar to oil/gas drilling to access brine with dissolved lithium deep below the surface. In the oil/gas industry, this water is called "produced water". The brine is then pumped into huge open air ponds to evaporate leaving behind the solids. The lithium is then separated from the other solids. This will be done on tens of thousands of acres of the desert very soon. We'll see if heads explode or not.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/featu...he-new-economy

As to the vertical-axis turbine, expanded blades shouldn't affect spacing, unless the expansion is so large as to radically disrupt wind flow, or more likely enough of an expansion to force you to expand the surface area encompassed by your stabilizing structures.

I have no idea if the graph is accurate or not, it's beside the point. The graph shows "Energy Produced Per $1 Million Of Hardware". Great. That's the cost of the hardware. What is the cost of unleashing those hydrocarbons onto the planet? What is the cost of using up non-renewable resources that have better uses than lighting them on fire? How can you even quantify the cost?

Your graph may show what it claims to, I don't know, but it doesn't even come close to accurately showing the total cost. Hardware cost? Who gives a **** about the hardware cost.

TLDR: Your head is up your ass. Remove it asap, before you run out of air.

This is pretty cool. The writing is on the wall. Not another fossil fuel electricity plant should be built in the Southwest and probably not anywhere in the southern half of the US. It would be obsolete before it could be completed.

http://www.utilitydive.com/news/upda...-45kwh/443293/

I'm driving from Portland to Denver and back this weekend and have seen a bajillion wind turbines in pretty much every state on the trip and don't understand how 50 acres per turbine is supposed to look. They seemed much denser than that.

50 acres isn't that much. There's 640 in a sq mile.

Besides the number is bull****. Many turbines live on mountain ridges

This is pretty cool!

That's what I mean, that Luddite guy was implying you could only put one every 50 acres or something and that does not match what I'm seeing in Eastern Oregon.

Yeah, thats not how any of this works.

I'm not sure what that guy is saying, but there was a story out recently that CA is producing so much excess renewable energy it's having to pay neighboring states to take some so that the electricity doesn't overwhelm its energy grid or whatever.