How Many Windmills EQUALS One Nuke Plant

Actually it isn't the Sierra Club that is throwing a fit about using the desert for solar facilities, it is the Native Americans (Indians). Lawsuits currently going on over at least two planned locations.
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Siemens Energy of Germany has a nacelle facility in Kansas. This is a clip from a news article. "The nacelles that are made at the Hutchinson facility will be used for the company's reliable 2.3-MW wind turbine product family. Initially, the factory's planned annual output is approximately 650 nacelles - or 1,500 megawatts (MW)."

One can use the MW and the size of the nacelle units to get an approximation to % of actual output.

With lots of units vs. 1 nuclear facility a lot of extra wiring is needed to get the electricity to the grid. Just something more to consider.

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My family---bEI

When we were in AZ, I asked someone once why weren't there were wind turbines on the mountains all around the valley.

"What!! And ruin our beautiful view!"

I asked them if they didn't think those dirt dauber houses crawling up the mountainsides, looking for all the world like a virus, didn't ruin the 'view'?

There is a lot of Bureau of Land Management land in AZ, couldn't that be used?

As for the Sierra Club, or any other environmentalists, I never had a lot of respect for it, but when they refused to even get concerned with all the damage done to the plant life and the tons of trash left by the illegals - they lost me completely.

Just me, but the idea that environmentalists are keeping alternative energy from being put in place, I'm thinking they are playing along with the charade. The oil/coal companies don't want alternative energy and if they can blame it all on the environmentalists, it makes the 'green' people look more powerful than they really are, and no one is blaming the ones with the real money in the game. So they are getting to pretend 'they bad' and doing nothing at all.

Or tsunamis?

I am aware of the structure of the grid. It is interconnected. I used to buy power from ECAR for a company in MAIN all the time. They have tried to compartmentalize the grid for better management, but the fact is that the entire thing is interconnected.

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...to be a rock and not to roll...

While I like the idea of alternative energy...it should also be done intelligently.

There is a lot of very nasty chemistry involved in all these millions of panels, batteries and loads of electrical equipment that regulates and delivers it. Just look at the set up in a house that has it in a robust manner?

All of that means waste, constant new parts and failure rates that are still not up to par with our standard grid.

And the prices have gone up in relation to the amount of interest the government has in forcing it.

If you can do it, why of course you should. But nuclear power doesn't have to be wasteful and new plants are safer than ever.

Some will be anti - anything. Everything shouldn't be discounted when it probably has it's place.

And here's a consideration. The reason we don't just turn the desert into one shining mirror is the same reason we don't just pile the desert up with nuke plants and send the power all around the country.

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Christy
Growing Human
http://growinghuman.blogspot.com

When wearing narrow lenses of hate and ignorance, is it any wonder one finds it difficult to see clearly? - Me

Why are we even discussing the idea of 'one large solar generating station'??? That is not a very smart way to go about this. The beauty of solar panels is they can be installed anywhere there is a clear view of the sun. In other words, those MILLIONS upon MILLIONS of rooftops just baking away in the sun everyday.
And Christie, once again you use the old argument about 'piles of waste' from solar, while ignoring the 'piles of waste' produced from every other form of power generation. Not to mention the waste from every other industry mankind engages in. But that doesnt stop us from buying toasters, TVs, tennis shoes, new cars, etc etc, now does it? The 'waste' issue from solar panels is a diversionary tactic from those who are grasping at straws trying to come up with any reason to say 'it wont work'.
As for your other argument about 'all the parts needed for solar', once again, you are missing the obvious point that nuclear, coal, oil, gas, are all highly dependent on constant maintenance, and still we manage to make them work. A solar panel has NO moving parts, and requires very little maintenance. I'm not buying the argument that 'solar' somehow has higher failure rates or maintenance needs than other forms of power. It simply isnt true.
And your argument about 'nasty chemicals' in solar panels is also a false comparison, considering you are advocating nuclear power, which has thousands of times the radioactive waste problems of solar panels.

Prices for solar panels have actually declined dramatically in recent years.

Yuppers lets cover the entire earth with Nice Bright Reflective panels.
Reflect ALL the "heat energy" back into space. Lets turn the earth into a giant snowball again.
Here in the North we can tell when we have snow cover the temperature is a lot lower then if it was bare ground. And now that the snow cover is about gone our temps are getting higher each day.
Makes sense now to make even the desert into one gigantic reflective mirror so the heat goes back into space instead of being absorbed into the ground to be let back out at night making the earth a habitable place to live.

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Oh my, dishes yet to wash and dry

See My Pictures at
http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/0903/arabianknight/

Before we start thinking about generating power we should be thinking of reducing the need for it. Of course, that would require some lifestyle and engineering changes. If you build a house with a thick insulation envelope and enough thermal mass inside, once you heat the house up to a certain temperature you might not need to heat again for two or three days and certainly not overnight. This would make solar a little more viable because you wouldn't need to heat at night and if you got a couple of cloudy days, it would be no big deal.

Do laundry during the day when the sun is shining. Might not work for everybody but it's how we operated up until electricity was invented and allowed us the convenience of doing things after dark.

Solar water heaters require no electricity although if you run out at night you wouldn't be able to heat more water until the next day. Again, convenience and a lifestyle change.

As people who live off grid know, it's quite a lifestyle change to reduce dependence on electricity to a certain level. Unfortunately, these modern generations aren't likely to give up any conveniences we've become accustomed to.

No, I actually agree with you. What I'm saying is that this ranting and raving about nukes will destroy the universe is just as silly as saying it would be easy to create a solar powered world.

Nothing we have done to create power has yet been perfect and without waste. By claiming that solar saves the day in a perfect green manner, we're ignoring that it still has a LONG way to go in order to be all that it CAN be. It is still wasteful, requires a whole lot of machine chugging away and the parts for the various support stuff are still less reliable than I believe they can eventually become.

I'm not an advocate for any specific system. As it stands right now...balancing dollars already spent and getting our money's worth and leveraging technology and investing in the future....almost everything we have going right now has it's place.

It is an absolutely reasonable position that we should continue to increase the power share percentage in solar, wind..etc. It isn't reasonable to simply eschew everything that currently exists...and castigate those who understand it is still needed...while hypocritically turning on lights, computers, fridges and tv's to use the power.

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Christy
Growing Human
http://growinghuman.blogspot.com

When wearing narrow lenses of hate and ignorance, is it any wonder one finds it difficult to see clearly? - Me

If the nuke plant became inoperable, it could be replaced by the wind from a sparrow fart, with power to spare.

Very well said! And just the right attitude...I sure hope it spreads!

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Christy
Growing Human
http://growinghuman.blogspot.com

When wearing narrow lenses of hate and ignorance, is it any wonder one finds it difficult to see clearly? - Me

I agree with some of your points, but you are still hyping claims that are exaggerated. I'm still trying to figure out why it is you find solar so 'wasteful'? It has already been shown that a photovoltaic panel produces 5 to 10 times more power than it took to build it over its lifetime. And that is a conservative estimate, because it only assumes a 25-30 year lifespan, whereas there are panels much older than that.

ttp://www.energybulletin.net/node/17219
As far as 'unreliable support stuff', not sure what you mean by that. Equipment used in producing and regulating solar energy are just as reliable as any other electronic equipment. Probably more so, since most of it is engineered to work in extreme outdoor conditions and harsh climates.

Jena, you are correct. The regional grids are interconnected. The problem is the limitation of the interconnections. There were two proposals to construct transmission lines across WV to feed power from coal fired plants on the Ohio River to PA and MD to feed the PJM interconnection that serves 13 states and DC. WV is not part of PJM. Both T.R.A.I.L. and P.A.T.H. proposals are in disarray.

Probably the biggest factor is that 25% of the nation's electrical generation capacity is natural gas fired combustion turbines. Much of that has been installed since the early nineties. A unit can be built in about two years. They use tremendous amounts of natural gas. On a percentage basis they are the largest users of gas. One advantage of a combustion turbine is that it can be "turned on" from a remote dispatch center and operated to meet peak electrical needs or operated as a base load plant just like a coal or nuclear power plant.

When natural gas prices went up because of the added demand form those turbines, utilities simply used the plants less. That ability combined with the huge oversupply of natural gas in this country has caused the drop in the price of natural gas. With the large surplus added by shale gas, the oversupply will continue into the near future.

Of course the drop in natural gas pricing makes the cost of electricity produced by a combustion turbine cheaper. The plans for the two transmission lines began during a time of high gas prices. It was an attempt to provide access to cheaper electricity produced by a coal fired power plant. With the drop in natural gas prices the economic justification for building the transmission lines is gone. It's not a surprise that two utilities that were going to put up the billion dollars required for one of the transmission line abandoned the project.

Unless a project to build a transmission line makes sense economically, it is not going to get over the hurdles to get built. Both projects proposed in WV met heavy opposition. What does that mean for solar power? For transmision over long distances. It requires that the construction of new transmission lines be added to the costs. That may mean that in the near future solar power is useful within a regional grid. But moving it between regions will not be economical.

Another consideration is that the nation's grid of natural gas pipelines effectively enable energy transmission over, in many cases, thousands of miles. That means a combustion turbine can be located locally for electrical power but be suppied by natural gas from thousands of miles away. Those are in direct competition with electrical transsmission lines. That was the factor that doomed the P.A.T.H. and T.R.A.I.L. projects. It is also a factor that will weigh heavily on the construction of large scale solar power plants.

Cost to build a nuclear power plant is between $5000 and $8000 per KWe. Approximately 10% of that is the cost of decommissioning the plant at the end of its useful life.

Years ago, I worked in a facility that did the ticketing for the airlines. They had one whole building that was nothing but Storagetek tape drives for data storage. They were 3 Terrabyte towers that would not fit in your house. I now have a 3 terrabyte hard drive sitting on my desk top

Whoa!, too much common sense going on there. We'd rather kill ourselves whole destroying the earth before we turn the AC off or stop doing 10 loads of laundry a week. Don't you know it's our Freedom you're talking about?

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"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self confidence"
Robert Frost

I think a better question is: how many wind turbines does it take to poison a water table, and poison an area for a few thousand years?

I'm not an advocate of wind power. Given the choice between doing things by manual labor or poisoning myself, my children, and future generations, suddenly it seems like I have a lot more time.

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"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist"- Archbishop Camara

The Mad Luddite

I just get tired of the same old discussions about fixing the symptoms of the problems when fixing the problem would take care of most of the symptoms. We're trying to round up the horses when we should have made sure the barn door was closed in the first place.

We scramble to build new power plants, threaten brownouts and complain about the cost of electricity when we waste so much power it's sickening. If we managed our power in a more frugal manner we wouldn't have to build new power generating capacity for decades.

Take garbage for example. We are filling up our landfills and then scrambling to find new ones to take our growing avalanche of garbage. Here's a thought.... reduce the garbage! Then we don't have to be so concerned about where to put it.

Debt is another one. We are drowning in it and whether this current generation survives that remains to be seen. However, the real issue is education. Children need to be taught fiscal responsibility and the value of a dollar as young as possible. We have to turn the notion of easy credit on it's ear.

Health care is another one. Everyone is crying about the skyrocketing cost of health care but ignoring the fact that we have an obesity problem in North America. If everyone ate better food and got enough exercise health care costs would plummet. The majority of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancers are mostly preventable (80-90%) by lifestyle changes. We can't pack down Big Macs and sit around watching TV all day then complain about the cost of health care picking up the pieces.

We don't have freedoms, we have complacency. Freedom takes hard work, self discipline and personal responsibility and those are in short supply right now.

Sorry about that... just kinda spilled out.... back to regularly scheduled programming....

That's what fascinates me when people continue to say, 'it can't be done'. I have more faith in human ingenuity than that.

TruckinguyYes, we certainly do need to make changes in our lifestyle - there is no doubt about that. Waste has always bothered me.

A couple of years ago, I was at the Free Trade Zone on the Texas/Mexico border. One of the warehouses was full of used clothing - I mean just piled to the top. What really got my attention, was the huge, really huge dumpster, that held the 'rejects'.

We would probably disagree on the popular idea today that obesity is the main health problem we have. It is not a good thing - but thin people have heart disease and diabetes as well. I fear accepting the notion that only obese people are ill, will keep us from looking into what exactly is in our food and how is it affecting us.

Some years ago, there was an article about Mexico being alarmed at how many of their people, returning home, had heart disease and diabetes after living here and eating the American diet for a while.

Just a thought ----

We will always need some energy, however, and we truly need to find some other sources - we will have to at some point in time - why not start now.