Subsidy-free offshore wind farm will move ahead in the Netherlands
https://www.treehugger.com/renewable-energy/subsidy-free-offshore-wind-farm-will-move-ahead-netherlands.html
Subsidy-free offshore wind farm will move ahead in the Netherlands
Earlier this year, we reported on several promising developments pointing to subsidy-free renewable energy. Even more remarkably, one of those projects was an offshore wind farm. Now Business Green reports that The Dutch government is confirming that several bidders have come forward to bid on rights to develop the wind farm, and will receive a permit but zero state subsidies.
This feels like a very big deal. Offshore wind has been shattering cost reduction goals recently, but due to the complications of developing wind energy in harsh offshore conditions, it's still significantly more expensive than onshore wind.
So if subsidy-free wind is now possible offshore, imagine what other technologies are reaching such tipping points. Given the recent political successes of anti-renewables forces in the US, at least, the prospect of subsidy-free renewables is more important than ever. Because once clean energy can compete without government support, it will be significantly harder for the forces obstruction and predatory delay to throw a spanner in the works.
That said, I would personally argue that we need to keep subsidizing renewables regardless. Given the dire threat that climate change represents, the faster we transition to a zero carbon economy, the better off all of us will be.
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I categorically deny being the origin of it.
The entire wind industry is wishful thinking.
The turbines lasted 18 years, which is longer than most of the wind turbines in that oil and gas drilling hellhole, Denmark last, according to an analysis of its database of wind turbines, which I've analyzed many times.
The database is here, in both English and Danish: Key figures, Danish Wind Agency
I analyzed this database some time ago. It took a lot of work to do it, and I'm not going to update it for yet another cheer leader for the failed and useless wind industry, but I'm convinced the data hasn't changed much since 2014:
The Danes – and we will see that despite all the hoopla that has surrounded their wind program their actual energy production from wind energy is very small, even compared to wind capacity in other countries like the United States, Germany and China – keep an exhaustive and very detailed database of every single wind turbine they built in the period between the 1978 and the present day.[29] If one downloads the Excel file available in the link for reference 29 one can show that the Danes, as of the end of March 2015, have built and operated 8,002 wind turbines of all sizes. Of these, 2727, or 34.1% of them have been decommissioned. Of those that were decommissioned, the mean lifetime was 16.94 years (16 years and 310 days). Twenty-one of the decommissioned wind turbines operated less than two years, two never operated at all, and 103 operated for less than 10 years. Among decommissioned turbines, the one that lasted the longest did so for 34 years and 210 days. Among all 2727 decommissioned wind turbines, 6 lasted more than 30 years.
Of the 5,275 turbines still operating there are 13 that lasted longer than 34 years and 210 days, the longest, having operated (as of March 31, 2015) for 36 years and 303 days. The mean age of operating Danish wind turbines is 15.25 years, 15 years and 92 days.
Sustaining the Wind
As for Ecelenergy's standing in the gas apology industry, whoops, I mean the wind industry, being the NUMBER 1 SUPPLIER OF WIND ENEGY is completely meaningless, since the entire wind industry on the entire planet is meaningless.
As I frequently point out, the rate of climate change driving dangerous fossil fuel waste increases is now at the highest rate ever observed.
Despite this obvious dire fact, the proponents of the wind industry plod happily along declaring victory, sort of like Richard Nixon declaring victory in Vietnam.
The wind and solar scam combined, after soaking trillions of dollars out of the world economy doesn't produce even 5 of 570 exajoules of energy that humanity generates and consumes each year.
As of Christmas Eve 2017, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 407.24 ppm. Ten years earlier it was 384.11
The words "dynamite" as in "blow up" and landfill both appear in the link I provided.
Going Trump on this basic truth will not make it into "recycled like cars."
The car industry, as I've pointed out many thousands, if not tens of thousands of times over the years is an environmental disaster par excellence, the nature of so called "distributed energy" writ large.
Go full Trump if you wish to defend the indefensible, but frankly, I abhor for example this picture of "recyclable" stuff:
Let's be clear on something, OK?
Recycling is an energy intensive process, particularly on systems with a very low energy to mass ratio, which is exactly what the failed, expensive and useless wind industry is.
In any case, as pointed out in something called the "primary scientific literature," the metal and concrete demands of the wind industry are enormous even among people who applaud this quixotic adventure, a gamble played with no demonstrated progress with the lives of every member of every future generation:
Eventually, renewable energy is likely to come to the fore, with benefits in terms of reduced greenhouse gas emissions and radioactive waste production. However, this transition will also cause much additional global demand for raw materials: for an equivalent installed capacity, solar and wind facilities require up to 15 times more concrete, 90 times more aluminium, and 50 times more iron, copper and glass than fossil fuels or nuclear energy (Supplementary Fig. 1). Yet, current production of wind and solar energy meets only about 1% of global demand, and hydroelectricity meets about 7%
Olivier Vidal, Bruno Goffé and Nicholas Arndt, Nature Geoscience 6, 894–896 (2013). The source references for the calculations are found in the supplementary information for this paper.
Now, I often argue for the recycling of nuclear fuels, but as I showed elsewhere, a centenarian consuming twice the per capita average power consumption of a human being on this planet would be responsible for generating 100 grams of fission products in their entire life time.
Current World Energy Demand, Ethical World Energy Demand, Depleted Uranium and the Centuries to Come
Nuclear power plants have been built that operated for more than half a century, using technology developed in the 1950's and the 1960's. One nuclear power plant in the State of California produces more energy each year than all the California bird grinding wind turbines in the state do, this while assholes with poor educations rail endlessly against nuclear power while promoting this lipstick on the gas pig, wind power.
The wind industry is garbage. It didn't work. It isn't working. It won't work. And in saying this, I am considering "working" being arresting climate change.
So what's you theory on how much metal we should mine, and concrete - one of the largest contributors of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere outside of fossil fuels - should we mine to chase this "renewable energy" chimera that has foolishly dominated the conversation about our environment for almost half a century?
Is another 50 ppm OK with you so long as we churn out more "distributed energy" crap that does not last 25 years? 100 ppm?
If you want to call me a liar, I suggest you provide something called "data."
You haven't. You're just chanting, like the rest of the "renewables will save us" crowd, who don't seem to give a shit that the climate situation is not getting better; it's getting worse.
If you're here to promote the mining industry, you're doing a great job. If you're here to worry about the environment, you're not making sense.
Have a nice evening.
Last edited Thu Jan 4, 2018, 02:24 PM - Edit history (1)
Your evidence for the claim that this useless crap will be better is what? A specious reference to an equation? Do you have any data on rotor weight vs bearing wear vs material types or any other engineering concept that proves this crap will suddenly last 40 years?
It hasn't. It isn't. It won't.
A glib assertion about one equation without reference to the hundreds if not thousands of calculations that go into any engineering project, is just pure silliness.
You "imagine" most of it gets recycled? Your imagination doesn't impress me. Like I said the world atmosphere is collapsing at the fastest rate ever observed, despite half a century of propaganda about so called "renewable energy."
Here's the graph from the Mauna Loa observatory:
As for this tiresome stupid claim about 10,000 years and so called "nuclear waste" perhaps you can point to a single loss of life from this allegedly "poisonous" stuff about which you apparently know very little.
Got one? Allegedly "poisonous" used nuclear fuels have been stored in this country for more than half a century. Where are the deaths?
In my computer, over 30 years, I've accumulated, according to my most recent back up data, 676,407 files, the vast majority of which are scientific papers. I'd estimate that at least 90% are PDF's of scientific papers, and I'd also estimate that at least 15 to 20% relate to the chemistry and physics of fission products, all of which, in my opinion generated over decades of research, are extremely valuable materials and would be utilized as such if it weren't for idiots running around generating scare stories about them.
What you call "nuclear waste" been accumulating for over half a century. During this half a century air pollution deaths - which have not been in anyway halted by the wind energy scam - have killed tens of millions of people, at a rate of about 7 million deaths per year, half from "renewable biomass," and half from dangerous fossil fuels.
A comparative risk assessment of burden of disease and injury attributable to 67 risk factors and risk factor clusters in 21 regions, 1990–2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 (Lancet 2012, 380, 2224–60: For air pollution mortality figures see Table 3, page 2238 and the text on page 2240.)
In what kind of moral universe do people who know very little science carry on about some number pulled out of their hats about "10,000 years" while ignoring what is happening to human beings right now?
A famous scientist, has calculated the number of lives saved by nuclear power:
Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)
The numbers of lives reported saved therein in this much cited and widely read paper would have been much higher were it not for people who have never opened a science book in their lives to find out anything at all about the fission process. What characterizing them is nothing more than ignorance, pure simple ignorance.
They think that's its perfectly OK to let tens of millions of people die each decade because they don't "believe" nuclear power is perfect enough. Nuclear energy need not be perfect; it not be totally without risk to be vastly superior to everything else. It only needs to be superior to everything else, which it is.
I have before me a copy of the World Energy Outlook for 2017.
I'm an old man, who's lived too long in the presence of too much ignorance to be able to die in peace, because my generation screwed all future generations. In this long life, I've heard half a century of cheering and wild claims about so called "renewable energy."
The figures from the table 3.4 of page 144 give the energy breakdown of all kinds of energy for the year 2016, again more than half a century into the mindless cheering of anti-nukes for wind and solar energy. I note that they don't give a shit, usually, about the tens of millions of deaths every decade from dangerous fossil fuels - the use of which is increasing and not decreasing - but attack nuclear energy endlessly.
The world energy demand in 2016 is reported in table 3.4 on page on 144 at 13,760 million tons oil equivalent. This translates into 576.1 exajoules. Fossil fuels are reported as providing 81% of that energy. Nuclear energy - weighed as it is by continuous appeals to fear and ignorance - provided 678 MTOE, or 28.4 exajoules of that energy.
Neither the solar nor the wind industry are broken out in this table, because the are singularly too trivial to count, but the reported figure for "other renewables" (not "traditional" biomass, hydro or "modern" biomass) figure is 225 MTOE or 9.4 exajoules.
("Traditional biomass" is responsible for about half of the 7 million air pollution deaths each year.)
We spent on this planet, more than 2 trillion bucks on this garbage in the last ten years, more than the gross domestic product of India, a nation with well over a billion citizens.
You know what the result of all this agitation for the bird grinding wind industry and the future electronic waste represented by the solar industry is?
Well, I'll open the 2015 World Energy Outlook Report and refer to Table 2.1 on page 57. We see that dangerous fossil fuels provided 80% of the world's energy supply in 2013.
Thus in the "percent talk" rhetoric that advocates of the failed, expensive and useless so called "renewable energy" scam use to obfuscate and obscure the failure of their horseshit, we see that in purely percentage terms, the use of dangerous fossil fuels, which kill roughly half of the seven million people who die each year from air pollution is increasing not decreasing.
That, and the fact that dangerous fossil fuel waste concentrations in the planetary atmosphere are rising faster than at any time observed in human history is the real result of this vast hand waving ignorance.
The so called "renewable energy" scam didn't work; it isn't working; and it won't work.
It's nothing more than a marketing ploy to allow the fossil fuel industry to increase it's destruction of not only all future human generations, but the generations of many other forms of life on this planet.
It's a crime of unimaginable ethical proportions and it tightly tied to the vast human capacity - the toxic human capacity - to lie to oneself.
Have a nice evening.
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It is what comes to mind for me when I read some of the responses to my posts.
