And their feed would likely need to be supplemented with corn and corn is needed for mandated ethanol blend use.
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Wind Energy in Iowa...Your Thoughts
- Thread starter Beernuts
- Start date
And their feed would likely need to be supplemented with corn and corn is needed for mandated ethanol blend use.
Link please?
As of 10 years ago, we we’re still losing topsoil and farming methods haven’t changed since then at all
Christ has it been that long!? I admittedly haven't looked at that market in years but my response was the same internal debate I've had with any subsidized market. I knew plenty of people who were trying to buy into ethanol producers and convincing me to do the same. I just didn't see the numbers.
JFC man, just because you think it's unrealistic and impossible to accomplish doesn't mean it's a "hoax", that's nowhere near the definition. Good lord.
Reality seems to have some disagreement with your assessment.
https://world-nuclear.org/informati...eration/plans-for-new-reactors-worldwide.aspx
Go to courthouses and ask to see manure management and fertilizer plans. Very few people can do them themselves now. R factors and soil disturbance for each pass factor in.
BTW, when NRCS ran my data 15 years ago, I was building then AND you are so wrong when you say methods haven’t changed.
When I used to work in the industry we would figure one major brake down (ie, gearbox or generator) and you could recoup the costs in a 20 year lifespan but any more than that and you would lose money.
I always thought that larger turbines in large farms posed a bigger problem as 100 1.5MW turbines if a few go offline due to problems it causes a smaller grid fluctuation than say the same number of turbines going off line in a 50 turbine 3MW site.
And yes turbines do use some energy in the startup process so when the winds are hovering between 2-3 meters per hour the turbines are actually using energy and not producing due to trying to excite the rotor in the generator and pitching the blades and the yaw system (turning the machine to face the wind) without actually coming online or online at minimal operating wind speeds.
We are almost 100 posts into this thread and every one of them miss the most important thing about wind project economics and wind's role in utility planning --
Wind is most active at night and in the winter.
Demand at night is slack, while most demand is during the day (and increasingly in the evening when people come home, turn on electronics, and turn on the oven).
Demand is also highest in the summer. Wind is almost exactly counter-cyclical to demand.
That is on top of the generally intermittent nature of renewable power, requiring your typical backup from a dispatchable thermal, nuclear, or hydroelectric unit.
Solar at least has the good sense to be most active when demand is at its highest during the day and in the summer, though it misses that evening spike most of the time.
Wind is just not that "useful" and, as you will see below, it is badly placed relative to demand.
Wind might be very useful in some hypothetical future where people are charging electric vehicles overnight, where mass, utility-scale storage (either chemical, mechanical, or just pumped hydro) is available and needs be "charged" overnight before it is needed the next day. These would "smooth" load on the system out between the hours of the day and make the night owl wind plants more useful than they are right now to charge stuff up rather cheaply.
Wind is always going to have a geography problem, though.
There is just not a lot of population or demand in that "wind alley" from the Texas Panhandle up through the Dakotas. Some high demand nexuses -- data centers, particular types of rather energy-intensive manufacturing plants, etc. -- are moving there, but those are not that much compared to Chicago or New York. Transmitting power from western Nebraska to a load center in Atlanta is not technically feasible. It is going to stay a niche product.
There are some excellent offshore resources, but those are heinously expensive compared to the land-based variety. And if a small population of Iowans does not like looking at them (and I have no idea why, not like cornfields look like the natural tall grass prairie that came before them, just another human modification to the land for economic purposes) in what are mostly deserted rural areas, just imagine what tens of millions of people on the East Coast and West Coast think about it near beaches and over the ocean. They take some exception.
You have the same problems with the Great Lakes, which are really just inland seas.
I don't agree with this part...wind is driven by the sun so the windiest part of the day is typically after the most intense sun...so late afternoon.
This is also why I try to ride my bike early in the morning because there is little to no wind. If I wait until 5pm that is usually when the wind is most intense.
I think alarson's assessment probably dealt primarily with development in the U.S. China is a different story, entirely.. the fact that there doesn't have to be an immediate ROI on EVERYTHING is one of the few benefits of their economy. If the government decides they want something to be done, it gets done. China has a massive pollution problem and needs more energy yesterday. India, although a different economy than China, is probably in another position where capacity is the biggest driving factor.
I only took a quick glance, but there's what.. 1? plant in the U.S. in that list? So he's not exactly wrong..
I haven’t filled out a manure management plan since 2008. So if that’s the only method of analysis, I’m not doing that.
And seeing fall tillage every where with brown dirt covering snow drifts in the ditch, tells me all I need to know
Nope. Wind is driven by differences in atmospheric pressure.
One area cooling (while another is still warm) is going to cause the needed airflow.
Now, to be fair, there is a ton of variation between individual wind locations, regions, different months, different days, and just natural variability between days.
The net effect is, however...
-- wind is best at night
-- wind is best during the winter
...when demand is at its lowest.
I could quote a million sources here, but I will keep it simple from LLNL...
https://www.llnl.gov/news/power-generation-blowing-wind
The team found that wind speed and power production varied by season as well as from night to day. Wind speeds were higher at night (more power) than during the day (less power) and higher during the warm season (more power) than in the cool season (less power). For example, average power production was 43 percent of maximum generation capacity on summer days and peaked at 67 percent on summer nights.
"We found that wind turbines experienced stable, near-neutral and unstable conditions during the spring and summer," Wharton said. "But daytime hours were almost always unstable or neutral while nights were strongly stable."
That article also brings up another point I forgot to mention -- wind at night is fast and steady, which makes it easier to run a power system, while it tends to go more in fits-and-starts during the day, which taxes your backup and transmission resources more. Having that on top of the typical demand fluctuations during the day can be challenging.
California is weird, though, in the sense its wind is better in the summer. That is sometimes the case with offshore wind, but it is not the case on the Great Plains.
Here is a chart for Texas, which has a lot more wind and wind potential than California...
Wind being better at night is just an engineering fact -- not a "stick your head out of the wind and tell me when you think the wind is blowing at the highest levels."
Not a wind hater here -- the engineering around it just make it an awkward fit into the system on the fundamentals. You have to work around them. Some of these awkward things could turn into long-term benefits, however... providing cheap, steady power at night when you need to charge storage assets... in the long-term. We are just not there yet.
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The difference is this one is suppose to help save the environment.
Not the only method, but the easiest. NRCS will preform them for watersheds also. You need to know every single thing you do and every detail of it, such as angle and style of blades on a vertical tillage tool. Depth you plant, kind of sprayer all adjust it. I deep sample and core my souls every two years. If you are going off dirty ditches where you drive, we might as well not discuss this any further.
Electricity can be “efficiently” transferred great distances via HVDC, HVAC, and uHVAC lines. Problem is the infrastructure isn’t there.We are almost 100 posts into this thread and every one of them miss the most important thing about wind project economics and wind's role in utility planning --
Wind is most active at night and in the winter.
Demand at night is slack, while most demand is during the day (and increasingly in the evening when people come home, turn on electronics, and turn on the oven).
Demand is also highest in the summer. Wind is almost exactly counter-cyclical to demand.
That is on top of the generally intermittent nature of renewable power, requiring your typical backup from a dispatchable thermal, nuclear, or hydroelectric unit.
Solar at least has the good sense to be most active when demand is at its highest during the day and in the summer, though it misses that evening spike most of the time.
Wind is just not that "useful" and, as you will see below, it is badly placed relative to demand.
Wind might be very useful in some hypothetical future where people are charging electric vehicles overnight, where mass, utility-scale storage (either chemical, mechanical, or just pumped hydro) is available and needs be "charged" overnight before it is needed the next day. These would "smooth" load on the system out between the hours of the day and make the night owl wind plants more useful than they are right now to charge stuff up rather cheaply.
Wind is always going to have a geography problem, though.
There is just not a lot of population or demand in that "wind alley" from the Texas Panhandle up through the Dakotas. Some high demand nexuses -- data centers, particular types of rather energy-intensive manufacturing plants, etc. -- are moving there, but those are not that much compared to Chicago or New York. Transmitting power from western Nebraska to a load center in Atlanta is not technically feasible. It is going to stay a niche product.
There are some excellent offshore resources, but those are heinously expensive compared to the land-based variety. And if a small population of Iowans does not like looking at them (and I have no idea why, not like cornfields look like the natural tall grass prairie that came before them, just another human modification to the land for economic purposes) in what are mostly deserted rural areas, just imagine what tens of millions of people on the East Coast and West Coast think about it near beaches and over the ocean. They take some exception.
You have the same problems with the Great Lakes, which are really just inland seas.
He is not wrong that constructing a new asset means a lot of emissions -- plus the emissions related in the supply chain to create the turbine, rotors, and the like.
You just have to net that out with avoided emissions from a thermal plant.
You also have to net that out with the avoided emissions of (1.) thermal plants are run less with wind or solar around, which can be good because (a.) fewer miles on those tires or bad because (b.) constantly starting and stopping them can wear them out faster, meaning they need replaced sooner, and (2.) while you do need a backup for intermittent renewable plants, utility planners (depending on brave they are) do let wind and solar count for their security constraints to a small degree, maybe reducing the number of thermal plants you need to have in the future, at least until large-scale storage is available out there.
Building a few wind towers is not much for emissions compared to running a coal plant, however, so you are usually going to net out very far ahead.
Indeed -- that is what I meant by it.
The ROW issues, NIMBY fights, and trillions of dollars in capital investments you'd need to build the transmission infrastructure from the western Midwest/Great Plains states to the major load centers in the eastern part of the country... well, it wouldn't be cheap or easy. Going over the Rockies to the major load centers on the West Coast might be worse (somehow).
Even what you discuss has its limitations, however.
Somebody had the bright idea in the 1960s or 1970s to build some really huge nuclear plants (and I am talking like 50+ GW, just some stupid amount) in Alaska, the Yukon, the northern wastes of the Northwest Territories, or northern Quebec... all the power you would need and in "safe" place if anything ever goes wrong and very easy to secure... but the whole plan fell apart because you could not effectively transmit that power to anywhere it would be useful.
Even if you tried, the super-lines from Yellowknife to Chicago would be easy "bomb here" targets.
