Potential dumpster diving opportunity.

[Mike O'Dell]

there is a fundamental question as to whether the "break-even point" is 
meaningful
since the energy required to make something is only weakly connected 
with the
power it produces, both as to type and amount.

economics would argue that this is all rolled into the model as 
reflected in the price
of the energy supply device, but that assumes the manufacturing energy 
cost is
"fully loaded" and is evaluated to the same level of completeness as the 
post-hoc
evaluation of the energy output of the supply device. this kind of 
analysis is what
leads to the conclusion that when all the energy manufacturing costs are 
included,
the Volt (and Leaf, Prius, etc, ie, most hybrids) is extremely energy 
expensive, sold
well below cost from an energy perspective and the break-even point of 
energy-saved
vs mfg-energy is way out there (most won't last long enough to reach it 
without
replacing batteries and that will put them back near the bottom of the 
hole).

i was just reading about the next generation off-shore turbines which 
are targeting
10 Megawatts per turbine. The blades for those suckers are 100 METERS long,
so the diameter of the blade swept area is 200 meters.

the industry is making 60-70 meter blades now, but they are right at the 
edge of
being unmovable. a couple of large projects have built blade plants 
on-site simply
to deal with the incredible logistics headaches.

to make the 100 meter blades viable, the first company trying to make 
them is
going to full carbon fiber construction in sections which can be joined 
in the
field to make handling them more logistically manageable. (It wouldn't 
surprise
me to hear that the high-stress areas around the hub get done with the new
carbon-fiber/titanium-fiber hybrid materials which are stronger and even 
more
rigid than carbon fiber structures.)

There are a lot of issues with wind power, not the least of which is 
grid-scale storage.
It turns out the wind blows most when we don't need it - at night. Even 
then, it doesn't
blow steadily, so there are big challenges taking a highly-variable 
source and driving
what are comparatively-speaking, stable loads. One thing that might help 
would be
distributed storage - essentially UPSes in buildings and dwellings which 
can charge
at night when there is more, cheaper power, which then take over some 
substantial
fraction of the power demands during the day. That produces a different 
kind of scaling
problem, however. People don't know how to own large battery banks and 
they don't
want to learn about it (I don't blame them a bit). At the end of the 
day, the total number
of batteries use (at constant unit-cell performance) will be smaller in 
the case of
concentrated, utility-managed storage systems than putting UPSes in 
everyone's house.
SO that leads to the model that is being looked at the hardest - putting 
the storage
components in regional substations so they get scaling in O&M costs but also
get distribution so I-squared-R losses hurt less.

note that I did say "batteries". there are a number of people attempting 
to develop
alternative energy storage techniques, but nothing else is anywhere 
close to using
battery technology, with the exception of gas turbine peakers. With the 
free-fall
in the cost of natural gas, the natural-gas-fired turbine peaking units 
are even more
compelling as the source of lowest-priced kilowatt-hours. Aside from 
pure unit economics,
gas turbine peakers can dispatch in just a few minutes even if cold, and 
can go from
idle to max output in less than a minute. That makes them a viable 
"gap-filler" for
the variability of wind output.

one thing that will help wind is to get enough geographic diversity (and 
transmission
transit capacity) that the output of the "wind grid" is the average 
behavior over
a large enough area that the variance is reduced - most of the time.  
That will take
a lot of time, though, and people willing to tolerate building new 
transmission
facilities - something even the greenest advocates have trouble with.

sigh

     -mo


On 2/8/13 12:15 AM, wb5mmb wrote:
> I was wondering the same thing. Also what is the energy break even 
> point for wind mills?
> Also the plant opened in 1981.
>     Sandy
>
>
> At 11:56 PM 2/7/2013, you wrote:
>> Uh, no. Even if they made the wafers somewhere else,
>> a silicon fab takes a lot of power.
>>
>> that brings to mind an interesting question:
>> given the amount of energy required to fabricate a polycrystaline
>> solar cell, how long does it have to operate at max power output
>> to recover the energy used in making it? IE, how long before it is
>> net-energy positive?
>>
>>     -mo
>>
>>
>> On 2/6/13 8:26 PM, wb5mmb wrote:
>>> Did that factory ever come close to providing enough power to run it 
>>> self?
>>>      Sandy
>>>      WB5MMB
>>>
>>>
>>> At 06:51 PM 2/6/2013, you wrote:
>>>> The B P Solar factory in Frederick M D is being demolished. One 
>>>> section of roof is laying crumpled on the ground. Half the 
>>>> remaining roof is intact with huge solar arrays ready for destruction.
>>>> 73 Karl W4KRL
>>>> Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE DROID
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