http://www.hydro.com/en/press_room/news/archive/2005_11/hywind_en.html

These are what are needed in the Cape Wind situation.   Anchored a few more miles offshore than the present site,they would not interfere with the residents who object to it.

By scaling the size of each machine up, the extra cost of cables to transport the power would not increase the cost per kwh.  Larger machines that will not be visible from shore are preferable to smaller machines that are.

And by adding a toroidal wave power generator the power would be even less expensive, it could double the amount of kwh produced by each platform.

From a discussion here:

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/1/23/233434/091#11

Capacity factor measures how many kwh (kilowatt hours) a system produces in a given time period compared to how many kwh that the rated power of the system would produce in that same time period under continuous operation.

A coal fired plant typically produces  80% of what it's rated power running continuously would produce.  The site says nuclear is 90%, but what about downtime for maintenance?

Does cutting that 28 foot square opening in containments and replacing inner workings  take months or years?

Wind and solar are typically 30% due to variability of the energy source. 

So what does this mean?  It means that cost per watt of generating capacity tends to be difficlt to compare between generating  systems.

So it is easier to compare kwh per year, rather than power ratings or capacity factor.  That is how wind power contracts are negotiated and verified.

A typical home uses about 10,000 kwh per year.  A 12 foot wind generator operating in 12 mph average winds will produce about 3,000 kwh per year.  That solar panel on the New Jersey home mentioned on my blog produces about 7000 kwh per year.

His panels have an 8.5 year payback period in energy bill savings.  The wind generator would be similar in payback and most of the average home's power use could be obtained from a dual system of this type.

 With solar cogeneration heating domestic hot water and helping a geothermal heat pump provide home heating and cooling, the whole system would produce enough of a surplus of electric power to charge an electric vehicle for household use.

Wind and solar can be scaled up to provide commercial transportation, manufacturing, and heating/cooling energy by installing it on roofs, over parking lots, farms, and industrail sites.

The largest wind machine kwh production levels indicate that the generating capacity needed to power half the present capacity of 600,000 mega watts  (the equivalent of 600 typical nuclear reactors), 300,000 megawatts, could be provided by 15,000  1,000 foot wind machines.

The 15,000 square miles that these machines would be distributed on would constitute less than 2% of the very high windspeed area in the nearly deserted northern great plains.  And 98% of that land area would not be used, only rudimentary roads and the tower bases would be actually used.

Nuclear plants come in at 2,3,4 dollars per watt of generating capacity.  Who knows how high the cost will go, given the fact that new plants are so far impossible to site and finance in the wake of Cherbobyl, Three Mile Island, and revelations about widespread radioactive contamination at various government owned, nuclear industry contractor run, sites like Hanford, Oak Ridge, Rocky Flats ...and on and on.

The equivalent generating capacity per watt from wind (factoring in the 30% versus 80% capacity factor for wind versus nuclear) is at 2 dollars (in the newest, most efficient wind machines)and dropping.  With the mass production of 15,000 units the cost would drop signifigantly. And wind has no fuel or waste.  Cost of wind on that scale would be about 2 cents per kwh.

Half of national  electric power could come from home and commercial building installations of solar and over  parking lots, and the installation of small to medium wind systems.

The other half from these large wind machines.  Nuclear is just not necessary.  And it is far too expensive and dangerous.

That's all without even considering the waste, which could add up to a dollar ( or even more) per kwh generated over 10s of thousands of years of secure storage, not to mention transportation, processing, and  nuclear plant decommisioning.

Maybe all this infighting in the environmental community has produced a compromise on siting wind and solar power projects. 

No industrial renwable power in natural areas, unless those installations are temporary and a portion of the energy generated goes to remediate land around the wind farms already devestated by agriculture and industry... actually returning destroyed areas to a natural state.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/1/18/105422/981#2

  How much earth destruction does a particular human activity entail?  

Modifying a human  activity (such as home heating or transportation) to conserve energy should have the same (or maybe a greater) emphasis as powering that activity with green energy.

Most up to date comparisons indicate that the initial cost of wind is higher than coal or natural gas fueled generation capacity.  An independent, unbiased scietific study (with no industry funding or control)of the latest projects ought to be done.  

I think that otherpower.com, the do-it-yourself home wind power builders have attained the lowest intial cost and cost per kwh, with good old fashioned low tech cooperation between friends and neighbors.

As you say the main advantage to wind is zero fuel input.  Wind and solar are nuclear powered, but the reactor, the fuel, and the waste are 93 million miles away, in the sun, where they belong.

An antique Jacob's wind electric machine, running since the 30s, is probably the cost per kwh leader.  (Too low to meter...as the nuclear industry used to tout in the 50s.) Due to the advantage of not needing fuel decade after decade, all that free wind adds up.

It looks like solar panels that simultaneously generate elecricity and heating/cooling capacity covering the average sized home roof, parking area, and southern exposure coupled with a small wind system (under 12 ft in diameter) can produce enough power to equal the per capita personal energy use of the average american.

And enough capacity to power public and commercial buildings, manufacturing, and commercial transportation can be obtained with solar and wind installed on public buildings,at commercial, farming, and industrial sites and over parking lots.

No wilderness land need be utilized.  

In fact an environmental  program ought to be adopted that establishes a 40 year permit for industrial wind that includes remediation of the land around wind plants (don't call 'em "turbines", "plants" are bird friendly).

 If farming or industrial uses have destroyed it, the 40 year time period could be used to restore  the cropland around the machines into a nature conservation area.  In the case of industrial pollution, extra peak wind energy that would normally go to waste can be used to operate compressors that could power filtration systems that would trap and eventually eliminate toxic waste.

A small tax on the wind powered electricity ought to be reserved to retire and recycle the wind machines and the site after the 40 year period is up.  Then that remediated land can stay a natural area.

And no wind machines need to be installed where they interfere with  natural vistas like the ones near the Cape Cod area.  There is more than enough area already devestated by human abuse to meet our energy needs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/business/yourmoney/15view.html?ei=5070&en=8015c341d2572446&ex=1137560400&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1137397543-X1j9/0+ZrKUvmlkFPpTkZA

Mr. Nordhaus is the economist who put the subject back on the table with the publication of a prescient prewar paper that compared the coming conflict to a "giant role of the dice." He warned that "if the United States had a string of bad luck or misjudgments during or after the war, the outcome could reach $1.9 trillion," once all the secondary costs over many years were included.

That is the equivalent of adding 2 dollars per gallon to the cost of gasoline, diesel, and heating fuel over the next 20 years.  But since a gas tax will not be imposed to pay for these oil wars, that debt will be compounded instead.

Lowering the standard of living and gutting the financial health of the USA. 

On the other hand, a national  policy to replace oil with renewable energy would revive our failing manufacturing sector, lower and stabilize energy prices, and instead of raising the national debt to astronomical levels as these oil wars are doing..  actually pay off the debt incurred by this korporate kleptocracy disguised as the bush administration.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/011306Z.shtml

What had long been understood to be protocol in the event that the NSA spied on average Americans was that the agency would black out the identities of those individuals or immediately destroy the information.

    But according to people who worked at the NSA as encryption specialists during this time, that's not what happened. On orders from Defense Department officials and President Bush, the agency kept a running list of the names of Americans in its system and made it readily available to a number of senior officials in the Bush administration, these sources said, which in essence meant the NSA was conducting a covert domestic surveillance operation in violation of the law.

If this could be proven, the Bush administration should be history.

But with a GOP majority in the legislative branch that can't happen.  Can this assault on the US Constitution be halted in the 06 election cycle?

If it comes down to actual impeachment will neocons get their friends in Saudi or Syrian intelligence  to stage a minor  terror incident to bolster the president?  After all, they did stage the WMD, flowered greeting, and Saddam connection with al qaeda big lie campaign to justify the invasion of Iraq.

To save their administration would they at least be willing to let a terror attack occur?  Just a little one? 

This recent disposable cell phone terrorism story sure seems staged.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/1/13/111914/405/#6

If the urgency of global climate disaster impells the use of wind power over any local objections, why does that same emergency not impell us to simply drop controversial projects like this that delay the build out of wind power for years.

With the time and money wasted arguing and litigating over this one wind farm....how many times the power capacity could have been installed where there are no NIMBYs?

And given a wind farm many times the size of the Cape project, that could have already been up and running on the northern great plains, how much closer would we be to the meaty 10% level of the exponential growth curve that chatacterizes the adoption of a new technology?

Investment on a national scale, instead of getting tied down in endless bickering over one wind farm.  Rather than fighting a diversionary battle, move forward with the real home front effort to win these energy wars.

10s of thousands of 1000 foot scale wind machines are needed to really win this battle. North Dakota,South Dakota, Montana, Minnesota...  all welcome wind energy development.

If this green energy revolution is really that vital, and I believe it is, build capacity out where it is actually wanted first.  Then as that 10% level is approached and passed the momentum created will get projects going in places like Cape Cod, without blunting the leading edge of this important movement.

Only 3000 of these very large wind machines across the northern great plains would get US to the level of 10% of total electric power generated by wind.

And last but not least of the reasons to at least modify the Cape Wind project as RFK jr suggests?  

The time and money spent in endless litigation  would be better spent on moving the whole project further offshore, possibly on floating platforms.  That would open up the entire coast line of the US to offshore wind, wave, and ocean current power generation.

If NIMBYs can't see them from shore, it makes everything so much easier.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0111/p01s03-sten.html

This design features the harvest of biodiesel from the algae that is used to soak up the CO2 from the coal combustion.

a further ptoduct after the biodiesel is natural gas, which can then be stored and burned instead of coal, or better yet run through a catalytic fuel cell to produce electricity directly.

Multi-fuel plants like this that store wind and solar power, in the form of natural gas, can cleanly buffer the times when wind and solar power does not keep pace with grid demand.  And the use of coal can gradually be phased out, but without idling the expensive turbines and generators, they can then burn mainly natural has from algae production.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/1/6/193649/7888/#12

Projections
Those pessimistic projections tend to move us all closer to ...  the ultimate pessimism.  Death.

Human energy is  better invested in hopeless causes, like this green energy revolution, than in really hopeless causes, like living out self fullfilling disasters, one oil war, climate shift, and terror attack after another.

Break the cycle.

Was the idea of producing millions of ships, planes, aircraft, tanks, trucks, guns  ...and the atom bomb (talk about looking impossible!!) in a few short years, to win WW 2, impossible?

We are in a downward spiral, a cold/hot war over energy.  And there are extra WMDs out there that anyone can buy for the right price.

This production of green energy revolutionary "war" machines needs to be approached as WW 2 war production was.  This is global survival at stake, not just national.

Build the millions of solar panels and geothermal heat pumps, like duuhbya has at his ranch, and millions of wind machines from home size all the way to 1000 foot industrial scale.  And the millions of electric cars, buses, trucks, trains, and yes even aircraft.  

We can win these series of neverending cycles of oil war with a massive war production effort.

No more need for oil, no more oil wars and climate disaster.

All over the news channels!

The same old rummi line.  Repeated by various cable news talking head retired military experts.

These middle managment military retired colonels are spewing this point. 

 If you wear more body armor and have uparmored humvees the bad guys will use bigger bombs...and get you anyway.

They are protecting their friends and relatives, administrators in the pentagon who bought into the neoconman war on the cheap plan. 

Someone has to pay for the mistake of not supplying the very best armor to US troops.  This has been delayed for YEARS! 

And is public knowledge.  The pentagon has finally ordered the new body armor?  Just recently.   Ass covering needs to be done.

All kinds of excuses are being made, but this is the main one.  Repeated over and over..it started with rummi in Iraq. 

Rummi  told the guardsman who asked about the missing armor upgrades, after riding from the airport in a specially super uparmored halliburton vehicle (I bet that one transport contract would have paid for body armor for all of US troops and uparmored humvees!), that fatality in combat is fate, armor does not matter.  If one has your number on it, your time is up.

The more the armor the bigger the bombs the enemy will use.

One aspect of that lie is true...the insurgents have unlimited quantities of explosives.  The shock and awe march to baghdad, neoconman war on the cheap strategery, left saddam's huge ammo dumps full of explosives unguarded.

They were looted, and those explosives provide a practically unlimited supply of improvised explosive devices, IEDs to kill US troops.

The level of criminal negligence in the conduct of these oil wars does rise to the level of prosecution and impeachment.  The fact that this can't and won't happen, makes it clear that the US government has been subverted by a coup.

The US constitution has been suspended since the 2000 appointment of Bush/Cheney.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/1/6/172045/7999#6

"limit the amount of energy that any household or company may use.  A rational cap would be the amount that could be produced at the site added to what is produce within the political boundary"

An interesting and unique idea.

Personally I think small scale solar, wind, and water power would power my idea of balance, humankind living within it's means in symbiosis with the natural world.  

Enough EXTRA power could be conserved and generated, over and above local needs, to make those areas already blighted by industrial and agribizz destruction provide enough space for industrial energy uses.  

Land devestated by chemical agriculture is many, many times the area needed for wind and solar on land.  And offshore installations can be justified from an environmental stance by their prevention of the use of pond nets that are destroying life in the ocean.

Would it be possible to achieve that state of grace given the virulence of the human infection?  

I say we go for it.  Prove the concept works and fight the hopeless poltical and cultural odds to make that the new norm.

Is there any better hopeless crusade to join?  Nope.  Onward!

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/1/8/03856/17905#2

Biofuels (from anything but the waste stream or possibly algae grown in solar collectors)are a titanic waste of scarce capital that ought to be going into electric cars powered by wind, water, and solar power.  

As well as a waste of the natural world in the form of agribiz monocrop, genetically modified, pesticide/herbicide eco-suicide.

Biofuels still require combustion to yield useful energy.  And infernal combustion vehicles are inherently inefficient.

In a world at war over oil, it is imperative that a viable alternative be produced.  

That alternative is electric battery power, charged up with green power.  These cars are being kept off the market by the present capital allocation monopoly that favors infernal combustion at all costs.

The agribizz biofuel movement is a scam.  It uses oil, coal, and nuclear power to produce huge government subsidies for nothing but a feel good solution.

Nuclear power (from the sun) charging battery powered vehicles through wind, water, and solar power systems is the safe, economical alternative that is needed to end oil wars and global climate disaster.

And since the cost of electric transportation is about one dollar for an equivalent amount of power provided by one gallon of oil or biofuel energy, merely removing the subsidies from fossil fuels and nuclear and applying even a fraction of that wasted capital to kick start this green electric revolution, will have 5 major problem solving effects.

1.  Jobs.  Manufacturing jobs will return along with the buildout of green energy.  Millions of electric cars, heat pumps, solar and wind installations, and electric vehicles woll need to be manufactured.
2.  Global climate change from CO2 greenhouse gas due to fossil fuel combustion will be halted.  The costs in terms of storm damage and lost economic growth may be the biggest hidden expense of ALL from fossil fuelishness.  100's of trillions, Katrina's costs are rumored at 2 trillion now?
3.  The US economy will boom without the endless oil wars and ever increasing oil prices draining effect.  Stable energy prices for decades to come will dispell fear of fear itself and restore investor, consumer, and business confidence.  Fear of terror over oil has a huge negative effect on confidence in the economy.
4.  Standard of living.  Having ones own solar panels, wind generator, and electric car will be like owning ones own home instead of renting.  Buying increasingly expensive energy from corporate monopolists is like renting and having the rent double every few years, natural gas, heating oil,gasloine, and diesel all doubled in recent years.

And that "rent" money is GONE!  Money invested in solar, wind, and electric vehicles just keeps on yielding higher and higher dividends over the years, restoring the standard of living lost to job outsourcing and soaring transportation and heating and cooling costs.

5.  Quality of life.  All life on planet earth will benefit from an end to the devestation that fossil and nuclear power wreak upon nature.  We are all a part of the natural world, as inseparable as our individual breath from the breath of mother earth.

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2005/11/hydro_develops_.html#comment-12614499

These large floating platforms can have wave power generators built into the base in order to double the power output per platform. And tidal current generators extending below them.

For energy storage try this idea, electric plugin cars, trucks, trains, buses... as a national distributed battery. Each home or business with plugin vehicles would also have it's own emergency power ... grid outage due to increasing weather volatility is a very signifigant fact eroding economic health.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2005/12/19/1455214.html.html

Floating platforms are also further offshore where NIMBYs will not see them. And placed in the path of pond net fishing fleets could save the national fisheries from this destructive industrial fishing that is scouring the seas of life... killing off 1000s of species in order to harvest a few to extinction for short term bottonline considerations.

No other solution...negotiation, threats.. have been effective in stopping this grave threat to all ocean based life.

The more selective, careful fishing techniques of responsible fishermen, regulated by environmental laws, will then protect a stable, sustainable food resource.

These smaller operators are being shut out by the illegal pond net fishing.

Posted by: amazingdrx | Jan 6, 2006 2:57:13 AM

http://msmith.typepad.com/smithelectricco/2005/07/one_year_lets_r.html

A huge part of this quick payback is the New jersey policy of letting homeowners sell their own clean energy credits.

Serious campaigning needs to be done to get this incorporated into every states energy policy for green energy.

Here in Wisconsin the power company gets those credits, but are they the ones who pay for the system?  nope.

It's little details of public policy hardly even noticed by legislators that make the difference to a green energy revolution.  Our representatives do not even read the legislation they vote on.  So maybe a public campaign that makes them stand up and do the right thing might help.

Almost all legislation is written by industry lobbyists, that's the sad truth.  Corporate "citizens" are the only ones represented by politics for hire.  And they are not even real citizens.

Has a corporate "citizen", like enron or halliburton, ever been sentenced to prison?  That's impossible right?

So why do these "citizens" have more rights than the rest of US?  A perrmanent get out of jail free card.  No wonder they steal the mega sums they do.