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At 15:36 -0400 4/18/07, Richard Tarara wrote:First of all a 5MW unit is REALLY big. Second, you need three of them to average 5 MW over the course of a year. Third, you 600 of these monsters to be equivalent to a 1000 MW coal plant. Fourth, you will probably have to replace all of the generators at least once over what would have been the life of the coal plant--that ups the cost considerably. So what you are saying is that we need to be installing several hundred such units a month. Good luck. The other thing that I start to wonder about if we really start thinking large scale wind (my project needs 1,500,000 1.5MW units in place by 2107 to handle 30% of the U.S. energy needs) is do we have enough copper for all these generators? I understand the big pit outside Salt Lake City is projected to start giving out pretty soon.
Of course we are presently building new coal-fired plants at a
----- Original Message -----
From: "Chuck Britton" <britton@ncssm.edu>
Is anyone interested in CO2 sequestration?I hope so. That is what looks to me to be the most promising of any short
(being tried in some Scandinavian country IIRC)
term schemes for reducing greenhouse gasses. Solar, wind and biomass are
not going to be able to take over the load from the fossil fuels (currently
90% of energy supply world-wide). They can help but as my yearly student
project shows, trying to turn just the oil and natural gas usage over to
renewables involves millions of large wind generators, 10s of thousands of
square miles of solar collectors, 100s of thousands of square miles of
farmland and trillions of dollars of capital expenditures. The fact that
there is probably enough fossil fuel for 2-300 more years (at about double
today's cost) and the fact that the infrastructure is already in place for
its use, suggests that figuring out how to use the stuff with minimal
emissions is probably a more prudent way to go at this point in time. Doing
so will give us enough time to either pare down the world population to
something that can be sustained with acceptable damage to the environment or
else to really figure out some new energy source--maybe even fusion (was it
this list where somebody described fusion as 'The Energy of the
Future--always was, always will be!"
comparable rate (proportional to energy output per unit) of one every
few days, world-wide. If we diverted that effort to a comparable
effort on new 5 MW windmills, we might be able to get along without
expensive and still experimental capture and sequestration, or we
could concentrate on retrofitting the existing coal-fired plants
rather than putting all the effort into keeping up with just the new
ones.
Hugh
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