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47 comments on Thomas Friedman: "Green is the New Red, White, and Blue"

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george in vermont on January 9, 2006 - 9:48am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
In response to a query of mine last month, someone did "do the math" here with respect to wind and estimated that it would take a windfarm 1600 square miles in size to meet the energy needs of New York City alone.

And what about heat? The excess heat produced by a nuclear power plant built within 30 miles of the city could be piped in and used to keep New York City buildings warm. Wind and solar aren't going to do that.

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george in vermont on January 9, 2006 - 10:31am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Had to look for that post, here it is. Thanks to Tom Deplume:

If we assume an average of 1kw electricity use per capita then New York city would need 8 to 10 Gw supply. At a typical 30% duty cycle that comes to 25 to 40 Gw installed. Using 5MW turbines that works out to 5000 to 8000 turbines spread out over 1000 to 1600 square mile. 1600 sq mi is 40 miles per side.

Tapping into the powerful ocean currents along the east coast maybe the most reasonable option for the the tens of millions who live there. Being under water means "out of sight out of mind."

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apsmith on January 9, 2006 - 5:13pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
1600 square miles sounds like a lot of land. But if we take your upper-bound estimates, at 10 million people NY City has 1/30 the total population of the US; so total area requirements by those criteria to power the entire US would be 48,000 sq miles. The United States has a land area of about 3.5 million square miles, so 48,000 is about 1.4% of US land area - about the same as the current artificial "impervious surface area" of the US (roads, parking lots, buildings). And as anybody who's been near a modern wind turbine knows, it's way up high in the air so you can do pretty much anything you want with the land underneath - farming, manufacturing, commerce, etc.

Wind may well not be the ultimate solution - I don't personally believe it is, but throwing around numbers like "1600 square miles" is meaningless without context - are you just trying to scare people, or yourself?

As I mentioned in another reply here (probably was thinking of your post) - electricity can easily provide heating very efficiently through ground-source geothermal (geo-exchange) technology - typically the heating provided is equivalent to 4-5 times the electric energy supplied. Much better than piping hot fluids from neighboring nuclear plants, I would think!

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george in vermont on January 9, 2006 - 5:58pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I'm neither anti-wind nor anti-solar, but too often I find people believing that these will be a realistic replacement for the amount of fossil fuel we consume. Wind and sun are inconstant and unreliable. If we have an option to replace existing fossil-fuel powered plants with something that will provide constant, reliable electricity, I believe this will be the foundation of a new energy economy. There will be plenty of room for both wind and solar as well, but they will be marginal compared to the other more reliable source.

I used to live in Holland so I have plenty of experience of being around wind turbines.

There was a lengthy discussion recently about the merits of nuclear versus other alternatives, here.

I would appreciate any information you could provide about the electricity-to-heat technology you describe.

See additional comments linked to your post below.

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apsmith on January 9, 2006 - 11:03pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Ah, the issue of constancy is definitely an interesting one. The short-term solution is stabilization through the grid; fossil fuel plants can be limited to running only when the wind and sun aren't available (nuclear plants have a harder time turning on and off, so aren't really suited to that sort of stabilization role), but that adds to capital costs and means we are still relying on fossil fuels.

There are three long-term solutions: one is to greatly improve electric transmission so inconstancy is averaged over a larger area (ultimately Buckminster Fuller's idea of a world grid). The second is greatly improved (and cheper) energy storage - enabling electric vehicles provides some other incentives for that too, and may actually be part of the solution.

The third long term solution is to go where the sun does shine constantly - off-planet. Space solar power in various forms has been seriously proposed for almost 30 years now, with some minor demonstrations of transmission feasibility etc, but not much real research effort. The Japanese are spending a few million dollars on it right now though - there's a suborbital experiment on zero-g robotic construction coming up in the next few weeks that should be interesting.

So yes we have some real challenges, but so does nuclear power. Let's spend the money on real R&D now, and let them all compete on as fair a basis as we can make it. It's my belief that one of the primary energy technologies (probably not wind, and not once-through nuclear fission) will become the dominant energy source of the future, with a majority of the market thanks to cost effectiveness. But none of them are there yet; we need a lot more R&D.

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apsmith on January 9, 2006 - 11:09pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Oh, I forgot to add a link on the geothermal solution:

http://www.geoexchange.org/

The Comparing Systems page gives some useful numbers.

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george in vermont on January 10, 2006 - 3:22pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Thanks for the link. I'll keep it. I do know of one company up here in Vermont that has that type of system (it's a wind measurement company), which I think they use mainly for cooling. They refer to the pond at their energy-efficient headquarters as a "heat sink."

I asked Stoneleigh, a person with some first-hand knowledge about these types of systems, for his perspective with regard to providing heat, especially in colder climates. Our exchange is under the Open Thread News Drop section.

Here's the link to the company up here NRG Systems.Just passing it along in case you haven't seen this particular site.

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