Here's some facts about what it takes to make a so called green power windmill. 400 tons of steel 100 tons of virgin copper for the wiring as you can't recycle copper pure enough for wire. 50 tons of composite materials for the blades. And approximately 500 gallons of lubricant oils and grease to keep it moving. That's just for the windmill itself and doesn't include the base and the cement and reinforcement steel used in it. Or the fuel needed to haul them into place the transformers needed to convert the power. It's been said that most windmills barely pay for themselves in terms of actual carbon footprint needed to create them. Yet they are loved by the environmental wack jobs in the world. Just remember that to create that steel requires either a massive amount of electricity to remelt the scrap steel or melt create new steel from materials mined from the earth. A copper mine that used acid to wash the ore almost makes a lithium mine look good.
Shadow the Cats ownerHere's some facts about what it takes to make a so called green power windmill. ...
Great, now how much steel, copper and concrete does it take to build a thermal power plant?
Shadow the Cats owner It's been said that most windmills barely pay for themselves in terms of actual carbon footprint needed to create them.
Who said that? Also, how much coal will be burned over the life of a coal fired power plant?
MidlandMike Great, now how much steel, copper and concrete does it take to build a thermal power plant?
A single 710-8 can generate as much power on an annual basis as the wind turbine described in STCO's post. We're not even taking into account the materials needed for the energy storage needed to allow a wind turbine to approximate dispatchable generation.
With coal seams as thick as in the Powder River Basin, the amount of coal under the land taken up be a 3 to 5MW namepate capacity wind turbine would generate about as much energy as would be generated by the wind turbine.
My personal take is the most benign form of very low carbon energy would be nuclear for baseload with rooftop solar for daytime peaking.
As usual, the trucker woman is spreading non-factual information that has a political basis.
charlie hebdo As usual, the trucker woman is spreading non-factual information that has a political basis.
Analogous to this situation, my teaching assistant from Iran was leaving her position at the university because she was completing her PhD studies. When "visitors" to her PhD defense were asked to leave the room while the professors on her committee were finalizing their deliberations, I engaged her husband, also from Iran, in conversation about their plans. Both accepted jobs at Ford Motor Company -- she as an Electrical Engineering PhD in Machine Learning was going to work on self-driving cars, and he who was completing a Mechanical Engineering PhD in automobile engine combustion was going to work on high-compression gasoline engines offering much higher fuel economy.
I asked him whether improving the fuel efficiency of gasoline-powered automobiles had a long-term future, especially with the progress made on electric cars. He responded that electric cars have their own limitations. Whereas petroleum is a limiting resource for the operation of gasoline and diesel-powered automobiles, in his opinion, the manufacture of electric cars uses a number of scarce resources in their batteries and motors.
I listened respectfully to what he told me, that perhaps progress in making more fuel-efficient gasoline or even hybrid automobiles is an alternative, parallel track to addressing both Peak Oil and Climate Change and that plans to mandate pure-electric cars should be evaluated in terms of a bigger picture.
I will let someone else craft an alternative reaction to those remarks that includes the terms "Iranian", "legacy automobile company", "oil producing state", "non-factual", "Middle East", "woman", "political basis" and "denier."
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
So, enlighten us - what is the correct information?
Larry Resident Microferroequinologist (at least at my house) Everyone goes home; Safety begins with you My Opinion. Standard Disclaimers Apply. No Expiration Date Come ride the rails with me! There's one thing about humility - the moment you think you've got it, you've lost it...
tree68So, enlighten us - what is the correct information?
Paul Milenkoviche who was completing a Mechanical Engineering PhD in automobile engine combustion was going to work on high-compression gasoline engines offering much higher fuel economy.
Then renember why this is relevant:
https://res.mdpi.com/d_attachment/materials/materials-12-00350/article_deploy/materials-12-00350.pdf
Incidentally, although this has become massively 'depopularized', gamma-valerolactone is supposed to be nearly as good a solvent for SRC as n-methyl pyrrolidone, and good SRC (or equivalent from renewable feedstock like torrefied biomass) is one of the keys to effective CO2 segregation from combustion exhaust... supposedly Europeans are gearing up to produce GVL in mass quantity as a 'green solvent' with economic significance possibly comparable to d-limonene...
Yes or no what just happens to the windmill blades when they retire them. They're buried in a landfill not even recycled. I've got friends who work in the local area wind farms and the laugh when people call them a great green source for energy. One of them called windmills the biggest scam ever fleeced onto the market for environmentally friendly people he calls electric cars the second one.
Overmod Paul Milenkovic he who was completing a Mechanical Engineering PhD in automobile engine combustion was going to work on high-compression gasoline engines offering much higher fuel economy. Think very carefully about what this implies, and then extend the concept to larger compression-ignition or promoter-enriched engines. Then renember why this is relevant: https://res.mdpi.com/d_attachment/materials/materials-12-00350/article_deploy/materials-12-00350.pdf Incidentally, although this has become massively 'depopularized', gamma-valerolactone is supposed to be nearly as good a solvent for SRC as n-methyl pyrrolidone, and good SRC (or equivalent from renewable feedstock like torrefied biomass) is one of the keys to effective CO2 segregation from combustion exhaust... supposedly Europeans are gearing up to produce GVL in mass quantity as a 'green solvent' with economic significance possibly comparable to d-limonene...
Paul Milenkovic he who was completing a Mechanical Engineering PhD in automobile engine combustion was going to work on high-compression gasoline engines offering much higher fuel economy.
Think very carefully about what this implies, and then extend the concept to larger compression-ignition or promoter-enriched engines.
You lost me on that last post.
The PDF you link to describes butanol, an alcohol with a longer carbon backbone than ethanol and hence with an energy density closer to gasoline. I am familiar with butanol because a chemical engineering professor at UW-Madison has conducted research into it.
Essentially, biofuels such as butanol may be an alternative to storage batteries as a carbon-neutral energy source for transportation, not only cars and railroad locomotives but potentially aircraft, for which batteries are a long way off as a solution except for very short "hops."
Your remarks about GVL gamma-valerolactone are "woosh" over my head, but I think you are talking about exhaust treatments from the combustion of carbon/hydrocarbon fuels that can remove the CO2, to be "sequestered" in geologic formations.
I am hard pressed to see how this would help with a locomotive let alone an automobile, but maybe this would be effective for stationary power plants?
Butanol is significant as an oxygenate fuel that can be transported in the existing hydrocarbon-fuel pipeline distribution infrastructure.
NMP was one of the premier solvents for extraction and purification of carbon from coal or other feedstock. That represented in the 1970s an attractive processing choice to remove ash and other contaminants without expensive aftertreatment, baghouses, etc. -- of course that was still in the era that CO2 was regarded as a neutral product of combustion. SRC is still potentially attractive if full post-combustion segregation is to be practiced as in some 'clean coal' approaches, as there are few contaminants in the combustion gas.
The GVL is apparently a reasonable solvent or cosolvent for SRC as well as one of the potential 'green fuels' that can be synthesized at what today is a competitive delivered price.
A different track for a second. Is it true that many of these Electricity recharge stations that have been popping up use diesel fueled generators to produce the electricity people are charging their cars with?
Gramp A different track for a second. Is it true that many of these Electricity recharge stations that have been popping up use diesel fueled generators to produce the electricity people are charging their cars with?
I can only go with what I've seen - any such station I've observed appeared to use power off the grid.
I would opine that any location that would use a genset would be one that cannot get the necessary line power for the job.
Unless, of course, it's cheaper to use Diesel fuel than pay the KWHr rates.
tree68 charlie hebdo As usual, the trucker woman is spreading non-factual information that has a political basis. So, enlighten us - what is the correct information?
The quantity of copper stated by STCO sounds high (ISTR 10 to 20 tons), but the weight of steel and composites is close to figures I've come across for a wind turbine with a 5MW nameplate capacity. Another figure I've run across is that the wind turbine industry uses about a half billion dollars worth of lubricating oil per year in the US.
Note that the best capacity factors (power production averaged over a long period of time, typically 1 or more years, divided by the nameplate capacity) for land based wind turbines may at best be 33%, versus 90% for a nuclear plant and quite frequently may be less than 25%.
GrampIs it true that many of these Electricity recharge stations that have been popping up use diesel fueled generators to produce the electricity people are charging their cars with?
There was some discussion that, in order to provide 'national' coverage for electric trucks (and perhaps to expand it for cars) some islanded local power generation and storage might have to be provided. I'd expect at least some of this to be natural gas rather than diesel and perhaps even GTCC at scale, but something like B100 is a perfectly 'thinkable' zero-net-carbon renewable alternative.
Gramp, Regarding recharge stations, it's possible as a way to offer the service and not pay the power company a hook up charge and a minimum monthly purchase of electricity for the capacity required. Here's what I do know, base load is carried by hydro and thermal (coal, gas, petroleum). Wind and solar are not dependable in most places so they are used for peaking power when conditions are favorable. The real back up is diesel and gas turbine peaking plants.
From Nov 1964 Trains "Born at Beloit"
“Standing in a neat row on the property of the Nevada Power Company at Las Vegas are 11 blue and white objects slightly resembling diesel locomotive hoods. They are “peaking plants”, diesel-electric power plants which handle swings in the electric power load of the region”
This one plant was almost 40,000 horsepower. Why use diesels or gas turbines? Because they can respond almost instanteously when needed, where other forms of plants take a considerably longer time to be brought on line. As example, I was in the hospital last year. Late one afternoon, in the midst of a thunderstorm, our feed from the grid failed. My room was on the same side as the diesel powered emergeny generators, which started with an almighty crash and were fully operational so quickly that the lights barely flickered.
Shadow the Cats owner Here's some facts about what it takes to make a so called green power windmill. 400 tons of steel 100 tons of virgin copper for the wiring as you can't recycle copper pure enough for wire. 50 tons of composite materials for the blades. And approximately 500 gallons of lubricant oils and grease to keep it moving. That's just for the windmill itself and doesn't include the base and the cement and reinforcement steel used in it. Or the fuel needed to haul them into place the transformers needed to convert the power. It's been said that most windmills barely pay for themselves in terms of actual carbon footprint needed to create them. Yet they are loved by the environmental wack jobs in the world. Just remember that to create that steel requires either a massive amount of electricity to remelt the scrap steel or melt create new steel from materials mined from the earth. A copper mine that used acid to wash the ore almost makes a lithium mine look good.
I'm not a windmill builder and neither are you. I spend my weekends in an area where they are building lots of new wind towers. You'll never convince me that it take 2+ semi loads of copper to build a wind tower. I'd guess you are probably just pulling info off the internet without considering if it sounds plausible or not.I edited this because I see that I fogot the part where I was quoting Shadow the cat's owner. What I'm questioning is whether she's supplying numbers that are realistic or numbers pulling out of air.
Thanks to Chris / CopCarSS for my avatar.
Murphy SidingYou'll never convince me that it take 2+ semi loads of copper to build a wind tower.
I was taught an interesting story back in the '70s when I studied statics and was learning about the domino section and mushroom-headed concrete construction. Seems there was a warehouse built with monolithic mushroom-headed column and floor construction, and during WWII someone noticed peculiar spalling patterns on the ground-floor columns, not a sign of poor construction, but apparently massive overloading, for which no obvious source could be initially identified. Inspectors started going floor-to-floor to try to identify the problem... what they found was that someone, as I recall on the eighth floor, had been warehouse-stockpiling little tin ingots. Piled 'em up across the floor, then started stacking a layer on top, then another layer on top of that...
Apparently they had worked up to about 3' depth of little tin ingots, and said to the inspectors there was plenty of room in the floor-to-floor for more.
We've discussed how some cargoes weigh out before they cube out and vice versa. This was a dramatic example of misassessing the former.
If you were actually interested in the components of wind turbines, the data shouldn't be hard to find. My principal complaint with them is that they were billed, at least tacitly, as a permanent solution, or at least one with a service life longer than fixed power plants. And that, as a nominally 'green' solution, they were designed with recyclability in mind.
I waited with bated breath for cheap 93% pure silicon to come along for many years -- that being billed (amusingly enough, by Stanford) as a 'gateway' to inexpensive-enough solar generation. Of course the premise was that you put up the solar panels and got your free power indefinitely happy ever after. I was actually astounded that vacuum solar panels had a relatively short life before they 'leaked' or their faces got damaged. It remains to be seen whether more modern fabrication and construction translates into more lifetime for the doubtless much increased distributed installation of PV and combined solar that will be expected before 2040.
I'm with Eric; aside from blue hydrogen with segregation, I don't see a renewable solution that's better than nuclear. What's going to be more than usually comical will the the shucking and jiving that occurs after the first few massive weather events taking out offshore wind farm equipment. You read it here first.
OvermodI'm with Eric; aside from blue hydrogen with segregation, I don't see a renewable solution that's better than nuclear. What's going to be more than usually comical will the the shucking and jiving that occurs after the first few massive weather events taking out offshore wind farm equipment. You read it here first.
I agree with Eric that much of the solution will be with nuclear.
Your last statement shows an ignorance, willful or otherwise, of the many North Sea wind farms in operation for years. Winds and wave conditions there in winter particularly are very harsh, yet I think few have had the catastrophic damage you predict so glibly for here offshore.
I don't believe you gave a straightforward answer to Tom about the copper. The answer I found was:"Generators use 1,900 pounds of copper in the 1.5MW Wind Turbine." An additional amount would be used for the cable to the ground, grounding rings etc. A 53' trailer can handle 35,000-40,000 pounds.
Per Wikipedia Copper in renewable energy - Wikipedia
The amount of copper in each wind generator, however, may not be in multiple tons
"A single 660-kW turbine is estimated to contain some 800 pounds of copper."
Becore claiming vindication in this revelation:
"The copper usage intensity of renewable energy systems is four to six times higher than in fossil fuel or nuclear plants. So for example, while conventional power requires approximately 1 tonne of copper per installed megawatt (MW), renewable technologies such as wind and solar require four to six times more copper per installed MW. This is because copper is spread over much larger land areas, particularly in solar and wind energy power plants,[16] and there is a need for long runs of power and grounding cables to connect components that are widely dispersed, including to energy storage systems and to the main electrical grid."
charlie hebdoYour last statement shows an ignorance, willful or otherwise, of the many North Sea wind farms in operation for years.
I'm certainly of the opinion that we should build them, and lots of them, if governments are willing to put up the money and game the environmental regulations to get them there. Same for harvested tidal power and even thermal difference extraction. On the other hand, I also think we made a mistake not building powersats, and continue to make a mistake not working toward them...
I don't believe you gave a straightforward answer to Tom about the copper.
I don't care for polemics, which is largely what I think STCO drew her numbers from. It's relatively easy to get objective information on the design and provision -- and service life and disposition -- of wind turbines if we don't choose to have some preconceived ax to grind about them.
Incidentally, Paul can check this, but I think a considerable reduction in copper has resulted from the adoption of high-strength magnets in the turbine generator design, at the cost of some high-wind operability.
Paul Milenkovic "The copper usage intensity of renewable energy systems is four to six times higher than in fossil fuel or nuclear plants. So for example, while conventional power requires approximately 1 tonne of copper per installed megawatt (MW), renewable technologies such as wind and solar require four to six times more copper per installed MW. This is because copper is spread over much larger land areas, particularly in solar and wind energy power plants,[16] and there is a need for long runs of power and grounding cables to connect components that are widely dispersed, including to energy storage systems and to the main electrical grid."
The figures that STCO posted for steel in a wind turbine was about what I remembered for a 3 to 5MW wind turbine. Plugging the numbers in for a 3MW turbine (1 x 3 x 5) yields 15 tonnes. I was SWAG'ing 10 to 20 tons of copper for a 5MW turbine.
I remember being surprised at how much copper was used in a wind turbine when searching for data on the amount of material used.
The other eye opener is the amount of concrete used (recollection was 1200 tons) for the above turbine. Having looked over foundation data for self supporting (i.e. unguyed) radio towers, this was no surprise. A wind turrbine mast would make for a more than adequate support for a full sized 160M rotary dipole antenna.
Overmod Incidentally, Paul can check this, but I think a considerable reduction in copper has resulted from the adoption of high-strength magnets in the turbine generator design, at the cost of some high-wind operability.
I'm not too sure about that, NdFeB magnets are good for about a Tesla or so. MW class alternators usually run over a Tesla, so the savings in copper would be in the rotor windings. A supercon magnet sigificantly reduce the aount of copper needed, but even 77K HTS would be impractical in a wind turbine.
An article that appeared on the Electronic Design website about a month ago stated that the doubly fed generator was the most common as it allowed for a +/-30% variation in rotor speed while still maintaining synchronism with the grid. A doubly fed alternator is effectively a Scherbius drive operated as a generator instead of a motor.
Well the numbers I found from some copper manufacturers trade group are clearly much lower than the numbers the engineering folks show. I would tend to trust the figures of the people directly involved. Others may not.
I wonder if Class I railroads might consider electric if they continue on the path towards being only long haul railroads, shedding branch and short haul activities to shortlines.
In such a scenario I could see the mains being electricified while the feeder lines from shortlines continuing to be diesel or battery powered.
That all said, with so many perfectly functional diesels sitting idle, I also don't see this happening any time soon, if ever.
That is based on the premise that the Class I's will shed every last branch line, either to abandonment or shortline operators. Mixed fleets (electric and diesel) lead to underuse of power.
charlie hebdo Well the numbers I found from some copper manufacturers trade group are clearly much lower than the numbers the engineering folks show. I would tend to trust the figures of the people directly involved. Others may not.
Oh yeah? You're also eating pizza from the wrong end. Check out this You Tube where John McEnroe shows mild-mannered Pete Sampras how this is done.
Pizza Hut Stuffed Crust Pizza Large $9 99 - Bing video
By the way, you don't trust the numbers from the Wikipedia article? The world's most reliable information source?
charlie hebdoI would tend to trust the figures of the people directly involved.
https://docs.wind-watch.org/Copper%20use%20in%20wind%20farms.pdf
where he estimated roughly ⅓ of a metric ton per MW for the generator, but only slightly less for the interconnection cables within the tower, and three times that for the transformer capacity.
If this is taken as reasonably accurate proportion, then a wind turbine (taken as an installation, not a machine) with 800# of copper in the generator might have considerably more copper necessary for the turbine 'as a whole' to be placed on line. This (as also noted in the thesis) does not involve the copper necessary to connect wind turbines in a farm to 'the grid'.
I had thought, naively, that wind turbines did not attempt to 'natively' synchronize to grid frequency, and that the AC from the alternator was transverted and filtered (perhaps with large inductors to keep current constant) using the powerline as the frequency and phase reference. That in part was why I thought permanent-magnet excitation was a major component of turbine design. It does seem attractive to me that, for control and stability of generated frequency well inside what a control system for blade feathering or braking would provide, a Scherbius drive would be appropriate, even if it requires a wound rotor structure.
CSSHEGEWISCHMixed fleets (electric and diesel) lead to underuse of power.
As noted, the 'real' use of the FLXdrive locomotive is not as a pure battery-electric, but as a component in a hybrid consist. I think it makes sense that, for early electrification stages, it makes sense to add catenary/third-rail capability to such units, and run the resulting hybrid consists as dual-mode-lite with boosting.
The next-stage alternative would be to implement dual-mode-lite conversion of some of the AC fleet, taking advantage of the marked economies over what dual-mode-lite conversion entailed in the early '80s. This requires only a stable and clean provision of DC-Link wattage to a locomotive's traction inverter system, with the remainder of the 'investment' in control, computer, and other equipment remaining as it is, and suitable for electrified or standalone operation... and tolerant of necessary interruptions in electrical infrastructure (e.g. the low-bridge issue for OHLE or the long-frog issue for conventional third rail) or power provision.
An advantage in this scenario is that zero-net-carbon (via B100 biodiesel) is a near-immediate benefit, and conversion of existing locomotives to hydrogen fuel-cell generation 'slots right in' to most of the operating paradigms of dual-mode-lite (as well as permitting seamless consists of hydrogen and combustion power that benefit from intermittent electrification).
Another way of doing "zero" net carbon would be ethanol in either a large mixture engine (anyone have a spare Wasp Major lying around?) or a gas turbine. With the latter, having batteries on board would help as the turbine could be run flat when running with power not needed for traction used for recharging the batteries. A turbine would also allow for more battery weight.
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