It is Global Warming Comrade!!

[Lightbringer]

You really can't dismiss the $8 Billion. What the hell good are $17 Billion of Wind Mills... if they aren't plugged in to anything?

Anyway, Yes, there were all sorts of subsidies. I don't have the details, but T.Boone Pickens was all over the place pushing this crap about 5 years ago, and I recall that that was what he was after. (subsidies)

May I ask you a question Fool? What in God's Smelly Armpit is the point of spending billions and billions and billions of dollars for some optional crap that only works when it isn't needed, and requires Natural Gas Power plants to be online and idling (at a much higher "carbon footprint") constantly in case the wind dies down? You basically have to have an entire power grid complete and independent from the wind power stuff... and then you can plug in to the wind when it is convenient for Mother Nature... and INCREASE the amount of Carbon you are spewing into the atmosphere! (Scroll up for a story about Britain's windoggle and how Nat Gas plants pollute more when on standby) What is the point? Less pollution? X Wrong! Save money? X Wrong! I could list another ten "talking points" for Wind Power and put a big red "X" next to every single one of them.

Like every single other Green plan, this is just another way for Government to grow, and Crony Capitalism to make scumbags rich.

-Light

(Re-Post of the British Windmill stuff below.)

[Lightbringer]

I know!!! We'll build wind turbines!

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/arti ... farms.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/colu ... mills.html

Centrica and other energy companies last week told DECC that, if Britain is to spend £100 billion on building thousands of wind turbines, it will require the building of 17 new gas-fired power stations simply to provide back-up for all those times when the wind drops and the windmills produce even less power than usual.

We will thus be landed in the ludicrous position of having to spend an additional £10 billion on those 17 dedicated power stations, which will be kept running on "spinning reserve", 24 hours a day, just to make up for the fundamental problem of wind turbines

Two things make this even more absurd. One, as the energy companies pointed out to DECC, is that it will be amazingly costly and wildly uneconomical, since the dedicated power plants will often have to run at a low rate of efficiency, burning gas but not producing electricity. This will add billions more to our fuel bills for no practical purpose. The other absurdity, as recent detailed studies have confirmed, is that gas-fired power stations running on "spinning reserve" chuck out much more CO2 than when they are running at full efficiency – thus negating any savings in CO2 emissions supposedly achieved by the windmills themselves.

The policy on which our national energy strategy is now centred is a ludicrously expensive, self-defeating joke, which will achieve no benefits whatever – even if you are among the diminishing number of people who still believe that man-made CO2 is causing catastrophic climate change.

A nicely concise description of the whole religion... A ludicrously expensive, self defeating Joke.

-Light

[Lightbringer]

... Oh, btw... We have twice as much Arctic Ice today as we used to. Global Warming? ...or Encroaching Ice Age!!!?!?!?

Writing in the journal Science, the team found evidence that ice levels were about 50% lower 5,000 years ago

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-envir ... print=true

-Light

[tkobo]

an excerpt from the investigation into the polar bear scam....

May said they are examining the “wrong numbers,” “miscalculations” and “scientific misconduct.”

“Well, that’s not scientific misconduct anyway,” Monnett said. “If anything, it’s sloppy.”

Gee,he didnt reach all those wrong numbers and conclusions on purpose ! He didnt !Just ask his wife who "peer reviewed" his work......

This whole episode has by the way helped get an investigation started into "endangered species".You see ,monnett was supposed to be doing work on a type of whale at the time he came up with this polar bear crap....And there is a paper coming out very soon on the whole endangered species program.Peeks suggest a very unflattering view into it...

[fool]

You really can't dismiss the $8 Billion. What the hell good are $17 Billion of Wind Mills... if they aren't plugged in to anything?

The reason I dismissed it was that the comparison was with capacity costs, which I'm fairly sure don't include the costs of the power lines. It's a bit like comparing the cost of a new computer w/ monitor to one without.

Anyway, Yes, there were all sorts of subsidies. I don't have the details, but T.Boone Pickens was all over the place pushing this crap about 5 years ago, and I recall that that was what he was after. (subsidies)

Would that work like a deduction of the real cost as it's displayed in the state budget?

May I ask you a question Fool? What in God's Smelly Armpit is the point of spending billions and billions and billions of dollars for some optional crap that only works when it isn't needed, and requires Natural Gas Power plants to be online and idling (at a much higher "carbon footprint") constantly in case the wind dies down? You basically have to have an entire power grid complete and independent from the wind power stuff... and then you can plug in to the wind when it is convenient for Mother Nature... and INCREASE the amount of Carbon you are spewing into the atmosphere!

It saves fuel while it's running, the reserve generation may well be less efficient than when it's at full capacity, but you still need less fuel than you would for plain gas if you have a reasonable amount of wind generation going on. I read the article before, but it doesn't really demonstrate that having reserve generation uses more fuel than full time generation (unless by that you mean it is less efficient). That's a pretty ludicrous position when you think about it. Might well be impossible, actually. For the record though... I don't like wind power. So maybe you should try asking someone who's genuinely enthusiastic about it.

(Scroll up for a story about Britain's windoggle and how Nat Gas plants pollute more when on standby) What is the point? Less pollution? X Wrong! Save money? X Wrong! I could list another ten "talking points" for Wind Power and put a big red "X" next to every single one of them.

Of course they don't save money, or nobody would bother bringing the government into anything. They'd just replace everything because they're cheaper than everything else. Less pollution? Sounds about right to me, if by that you mean CO2.

[tkobo]

Retractions of scientific papers have surged in recent years' -- 'Retractions related to fraud rose more than sevenfold between 2004 and 2009'
There were just 22 retraction notices that appeared in journals 10 years ago, but 139 were published in 2006 and by last year, the number reached 339. Through July of this year, there were a total 210 retractions

[Lightbringer]

@Fool...

The other absurdity, as recent detailed studies have confirmed, is that gas-fired power stations running on "spinning reserve" chuck out much more CO2 than when they are running at full efficiency – thus negating any savings in CO2 emissions supposedly achieved by the windmills themselves.

What part of "chuck out MORE CO2" is not computing? I'm not talking about quantity of Nat Gas burned. We have centuries of supply underneath our feet as soon as we decide to get it. The Turbines are designed to operate at certain high speeds. "Idling" them like a car at a stoplight is decidedly NOT what they were designed to do. Think "Formula 1 car" in stop and go traffic.

Anyway, I am unsure of how the cost appeared on the State Budget, but I would imagine that whatever the Feds subsidized would not appear as part of the cost. Drawing attention to the total cost if the Feds ceased the subsidy would be more likely to scare off support.

Oh... and as for assuming that infrastructure for new gas plants and new wind farms being identical? Wind farms are set up hundreds of miles out in the boonies. Way the hell out in West Texas (or even further into the boonies... Oklahoma!). Infrastructure is brand spanking new and pretty much 100% nonexistent beforehand. Nat gas? You build the plant 20 miles from a major city and pretty much just plug it in. I'll cede your point about it being a separate expense, but it is an expense that is NOT involved with most conventional power plants. You don't just run some lines, you have to build dozens of major stations to get the juice over that long of a distance.

-Light

[fool]

Culture stuff, again. I'm used to everything being fairly close together, didn't think of that

The Turbines are designed to operate at certain high speeds. "Idling" them like a car at a stoplight is decidedly NOT what they were designed to do. Think "Formula 1 car" in stop and go traffic.

Yes, it'd be a terrible waste of fuel most likely. But am I supposed to believe that the f1 car would use more fuel than it would in a race?

They could just let the turbines spin all the time, like they do normally... but as long as they're not being used to generate power, there will be less... resistance, let's say, on the turbine, and it will require less fuel. I just can't see that not producing power could use more fuel than producing power. If it's really not about the fuel at all, how exactly is CO2 being emmitted? Where's it coming from exactly?

[Lightbringer]

Fool, what I'm saying is that we are not even close to running out of natural gas. The CO2 isn't about fuel costs, or fuel shortages. It is about the FACT that wind turbines are 100% a fraud. Windmills aren't supposed to create any CO2... except they are useless without natgas plants to back them up, which throw out MORE CO2 idling on backup than they do creating power. Sure, we burn less fuel idling Natgas turbines than producing power with them... but we had to build two complete sets of power plants to do one job. At something like $4 per million BTU for natural gas, you would have to save an awful lot of it for an awful long time to pay for the Windmills, which do a spotty job that you could have just done with the natgas power plants in the first place.

Instead of building two sets of power plants to do one job... why not build one set that we know works 100% of the time? In case you didn't notice, there is a global debt crisis. Do you really think governments and people (higher utility bills) have extra cash to spend on useless crap?

-Light

[fool]

Well, technically it doesn't have to be natgas plants backing them up, that just happens to be the easiest option. One of the main reasons is that they are very cheap (capacity that is, the fuel is the main expense). So the 'two sets of power stations' thing isn't as much of an issue. Another thing is that if you have more distributed wind power you're the whole thing's going to be somewhat more reliable, because it's more likely for there to be wind somewhere in general than somewhere in particular. As for the natural gas... fuel security is somewhat of an issue here. That said, dirty nuclear enthusiast as I am, I'd prefer just a new batch of nuclear reactors. Reliable, a lot safer than people think and pretty safe from fuel fluctuations (most of the cost is in building the station).

[Lightbringer]

Well, if you help us twist the EPA's arm a bit, I'm sure Texas would be happy to sell you Natgas for the next 100+ years. That being said, I don't disagree with the Nuke option either.

-Light

[SGTscuba]

Personally I think that once they have got Fusion working, the energy crisis should be easier to solve (the first 2 fusion plants are under construction (I think 1 is in the UK, the other in France))

[iuvart]

Personally I think that once they have got Fusion working, the energy crisis should be easier to solve (the first 2 fusion plants are under construction (I think 1 is in the UK, the other in France))

Efficient fusion power is decades away. All fusion plants currently in production are experimental or proof-of-concept reactors, none of which will produce electricity for the general grid.

The first planned reactor to produce energy as a power plant (in Europe) is the DEMO [1]. It's supposed to be finished sometime in the mid-2030s and construction hasn't even started yet. And it might take another generation of fusion power plants (so up to 2050) until it's commercially viable and can be used as means for producing electricity in an efficient manner.

So unless there are some pretty big breakthroughs in one of the many research projects towards fusion power, don't expect to see it before 2030/40-ish.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMO

[SGTscuba]

you read wikipedia, you should really read IET magazines as thats where a lot of new and future techs are put out before they go general, as the IET is the general engineering community in the UK.

[iuvart]

you read wikipedia, you should really read IET magazines as thats where a lot of new and future techs are put out before they go general, as the IET is the general engineering community in the UK.

I know it's not the perfect source of information, especially on scientific topics and current research. But it is a decent first stop. Especially if you do not feel like paying $ 20 or more for an article that that will pretty much just confirm what I said, only in a lot more words. And I'm not from the UK anyway, so getting IET magazines might be rather expensive. I'll stick with the magazine of the DPG for now.

And I am actually hoping for fusion power to solve our energy problems myself, I just don't think it's "just around the corner" or anything close to that. My only objection was with the possible impression that there were actual fusion power plants (not research reactors) in construction right now.