284 comments on Advice to Pres. Obama (# 4): Go for Wind Power, Seriously
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
284 comments on Advice to Pres. Obama (# 4): Go for Wind Power, Seriously
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
User login
Personnel
Editors
Contributors
Peak Oil Primers
Archives
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- March 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- March 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- March 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
- July 2006
- June 2006
- May 2006
- April 2006
- March 2006
Vital Trivia
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
GAIA Host Collective
As any politician would, I am sure that President Obama, Governors and Mayors everywhere would love to see the kind of positive benefits that wind power will bring as far as jobs are concerned. And as noted here and elsewhere, energy and resources (not money) are what drives economies. Wind power = energy.
What are the opportunities for rural/suburban wind vs urban (rooftop) wind vs "offshore" wind in the Atlantic or on retired Santa Barbara oil rigs?
After the oil runs out, this seems like an excellent re-use of any old-school oil rigs on land in the Bakersfield-LA metro area.
The key question is "who will pay for it?", along with NIMBY/safety concerns. Berkeley and SF have subsidy and 3rd party financing programs for solar installation which seem to be applicable here.
Here's a map of how much wind power is already installed:
http://www.awea.org/projects/
Texas is way ahead, California is 2nd. Pacific Northwest states, Minn, Iowa, Colorado and Illinois round out the rest. Nothing shows up for AZ or the deep south, which makes sense if you look at a wind power potential map of the US:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_States
The banksters ought to be forced by the Obama administration to fund wind power with their ill-gotten TARP money (our taxes)... they are partly nationalized as it is.
Realistically, would you really want to build state-of-the-art wind turbines on rusting, derelict oil rigs?
Maybe geothermal is more suitable for oil rigs. The basalt ocean floor is relatively thin; drilling through seawater is easier than drilling through granite. And drilling is what the rigs are designed for (albeit a rather different type of drilling). They aren't designed to have 5 MWe turbines attached.
But probably not anytime soon. Offshoring is expensive by nature so there's a challenge, and every rig that works reasonably well to be potentially used for geothermal, is needed for producing oil.
Having never been involved off shore oil rig construction I am not presenting but the most general construction view.
All modern designs have a certain life expectancy, an overbuild safety factor and weak points with minimum overbuild. Old oil rigs may or may not have a reuse potential for any thing more than subsurface sheared anchor points for marine habitat.
It could also be that drilling rigs will be specifically designed and new built for geothermal offshore drilling. If the costs can be reasonable.
Offshore wind capacity accounts for almost 1,170 megawatts worldwide, roughly 1.2 percent of the 94,100 megawatts of installed capacity at the end of 2007; while this is a small share of the total, it is up from less than 0.3 percent in 2000. Europe is projecting 50GW of offshore wind by 2020.
The largest wind turbines are 5 MW (a few are bigger but they are a small segment so far.) Avg wind turbine size is 2MW.
So 600 wind turbines to make up the 1170MW for as of 2007.
10,000 avg sized 5 MW wind turbines for the 50GW for 2020.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_offshore_wind_farms
North America has about 70 offshore rigs.
http://www.wtrg.com/rotaryrigs.html
There are a few hundred offshore oil platforms worldwide.
The rigs are going to be used for at least a couple of more decades even if there is peak oil. Only one of the big wind turbines can fit on an oil rig. Look at the picture in the article leading this thread of the size of the wind turbines.
bottom line: converting a few hundred offshore oil rigs to each one large wind turbine is meaningless.