Electric cars, unclean at any speed

[UFO]

Yeah, fusion power. In addition to powering the future, we will be able to fill our helium balloons again.

[NachtRitter]

So the best you can do with Paul Gipe's article is throw ad hominems at it?

Sounds like:

Originally Posted by t vago

Can't attack the information? Attack the messenger!

Originally Posted by t vago

So, this guy's the infallible expert on all wind turbines, everywhere?

Do you want me to google some more stuff for you? You apparently are unwilling or unable to do so, yourself. Oh wait, that's what you said.

How much of an expert on wind turbines is "Mr Anonymous" from Craigs List?

Originally Posted by t vago

Interesting article about 14000 abandoned wind turbines

MMM-mmm! Love that clean energy! Especially the part where it says that more energy goes into creation of wind turbines, than is ever recovered by their operation!

No reference to the source of the "14,000 wind turbines abandoned" information, yet you bought that without question?

Your first linked article:

Originally Posted by t vago

Wind Turbines & “Green” Subsidies Under Fire

Magically grows the number of abandoned wind turbines to 15,000, and sources another blogger: 14000 Abandoned Wind Turbines In The USA | Tory Aardvark, which sources another article: http://www.zimbio.com/member/StoryRe...s+Reflect+Hoax, which sadly has been removed making it a non-source.

Your next linked article:

Originally Posted by t vago

14,000 wind turbines have been abandoned in the United States

This also has no source, though someone asks for the source in the comments under the article:

I'm having difficulty finding any factual basis for the claim of Don Surber that some 14,000 U.S. wind turbines have been abandoned. I'd like to objectively verify that number. Any ideas?

Max Redfire Wheeler

Editor's response: We would suggest you contact John Droz

http://www.northnet.org/brvmug/WindPower/articles.html

A little about John Droz here: John Droz | DeSmogBlog. While he certainly does his best to make a case against wind power and global warming, I could not find any reference about "14,000 abandoned wind turbines" on his site or in any of his material (granted, I did not go through every single word of every single article he has posted).

Your last linked article:

Originally Posted by t vago

End of tax credit a blow for wind power industry

Did you actually read that one or did you just throw it in with the rest to make the others look more legit? There isn't anything even mentioned in that article about "14,000 abandoned wind turbines" Two statements come close to having the same words and numbers in them, but the words are not at all related to the point I think you're trying to make with the your first two links:

The move is expected to have major ramifications in states such as Illinois, where 13,892 megawatts of planned wind projects ... are seeking to be connected to the electric grid.

and

Many of those projects will be abandoned or significantly delayed without federal subsidies.

So, I still challenge this mystical "14,000 abandoned wind turbines" story; you can attack Paul Gipe (and me) at a personal level all you want, and you can throw out another 10, 20, 30 links of which not one has a credible source, but I'm going to call that figure BS until you come up with an actual real source for that number. I looked, and I certainly can't find it.

[IamIan]

Originally Posted by jamesqf

Dead wrong. It is absolutely certain that the world will run out of fossil fuels sometime in the near (in historical terms) future. That's just basic science and simple math: there's only a finite amount down there, the creation rate is infinitesimally slow, so eventually you get to zero. (Of course it will become economically impractical to use for fuel before then, as recovery costs rise.)

While I agree with the bold part ... I will disagree with actually getting to zero part.

To actually get to zero would be extremely difficult if not actually impossible ... at least as long as there is a non-zero production rate ... and it continues to happen in so many diverse locations all over the world.

Originally Posted by t-vago

And it's strange that nobody has actually challenged the sheer number of abandoned wind turbines that currently exist. 14,000?

What I think is strange is why you think wind turbines would somehow be immune to human's historical liter / abandonment trend.

Humans abandon buildings and things all the time ... we've been doing this for thousands of years ... food , ships, houses, forts, tools, mines, clothes, roads, animals , fellow humans , etc ... etc.

The existence of 14,000 abandoned wind turbines doesn't effect the functionality of the non-abandoned wind turbines ... any more than if I went out and found 14,000 abandoned cars would effect the functionality of non-abandoned cars ... or if I found 14,000 abandoned houses would effect the functionality of the non-abandoned houses .... etc... etc.

I'll agree human historical trend for abandoning and littering is a negative thing ... negative weather it is done with wind turbines , houses, cars, or soda cans ... but it is not a function of the wind turbine itself ... it is a function of we humans , we do it all the time with all kinds of things.

Originally Posted by t vago

They're not alternatives to petroleum, which is what the EV crowd is dead-set against.

Well ... I can think of several alternatives modern science has come up with for just about every petroleum product ... so I wouldn't go along with their aren't any ... that goes too far.

I instead would say something like ... we use petroleum instead of other alternatives for various reasons ... be they cost, scalability , etc... the choice is intentional even if not deliberate.

I would also disagree with the overly inclusive comment about 'the EV crowd' ... I am part of the EV crowd ... and I don't share what I think you are suggesting.

I'm not looking for a zero fossil fuel use condition ... I am personally in favor of a more net energy efficient system ... and a more long term sustainable system ... sense fossil fuels are naturally replenished automatically in this world , it would actually be less net efficient to not use them at all ... But on the same token of energy efficiency and sustainability ... I don't think all of the methods and magnitudes that we currently use fossil fuels for , are correctly in line with net energy efficiency and long term sustainability.

[RustyLugNut]

Originally Posted by UFO

Yeah, fusion power. In addition to powering the future, we will be able to fill our helium balloons again.

When fusion becomes common place, the byproduct of the reaction ( helium ) can find a market in a newly designed class of airships that can change our transport choices.

I can dig this.

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by t vago

Ah, so it's faith.

Scientists Use Sunlight to Make Fuel From CO2
Sunlight to Petrol – A real solution or just a catchy phrase
Gasoline from water, CO2 and sunlight

Dead wrong. Sure. Whatever.

As others have pointed out, those aren't petroleum. They're biofuels and/or synthetic fuels, no different in principle than biodiesel or corn-based ethanol.

Further, there's an efficiency/conservation of energy thing that you have to consider. Suppose you can capture sunlight to create biofuels from CO2 and water (hey, plants have been doing it for a billion years or so, so it's not impossible - where do you think petroleum came from in the first place?). When you do get it working, you will not be able to capture more energy than is in the incident sunlight. In fact, you are going to capture less, because any process is less than 100% efficient. Now plants have had that billion years to perfect such processes, and they're about 5% efficient: Photosynthetic efficiency - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Good commercial PV panels are currently about 20%, and improving.

So your alternative is to capture solar energy at 5% efficiency, and use it in engines that are at best about 33% efficient (but usually much less), and you're claiming this is better than PV capturing sunlight at 20% efficiency, and using it in an EV at about 80% efficiency?

Wind Turbines & “Green” Subsidies Under Fire
14,000 wind turbines have been abandoned in the United States
End of tax credit a blow for wind power industry

Do you want me to google some more stuff for you?

Why, yes, I do. Such as some actual evidence, not just a few articles repeating claims without any substantiation. How about a list of 14,000 abandoned wind turbines, with locations? And not including antique Aermotors :-)

PS: On the tax credit story, looks like that's just another case of typical industry poor-mouthing about how they can't possibly survive without existing subsidies, or meet new emissions regulations, or whatever. But somehow they always manage to...

[Occasionally6]

Coal, oil, NG (so fracking) are irrelevant. They will not be part of the energy mix in even 50 years time, let alone 100. They will simply be uneconomic to use.

That won't be because they will be more difficult to find and extract, although that is so. That won't be because the rate at which they can be extracted cannot keep pace with exponential economic growth, regardless of the absolute quantity available, although that will be so. It will be because using them will destroy wealth at a faster rate than it will increase wealth. At some point the general population are going to realise that.

We're already at 400ppm CO2, from the pre-industrial baseline of 280ppm. (And CO2 is not the only anthropogenic greenhouse gas but it's a proxy for the others). 450ppm is the agreed upon target for a reasonable probability of not exceeding 2C of warming (which will have costly impacts but we think we can deal with them).

If it took just 150 years or so to add 120ppm CO2 to the Earth's atmosphere, from a much lower human population base, with much lower per capita industrial output, with Carbon sinks more effective (colder temps., more biomass absorbing), how long do you think it will take to add just 50ppm more? 30 years? 20 years? How long will it take to build the energy sources and industries that will replace the emitting ones?

We are going to stop using fossil fuels and it will happen soon. Yes, it will be difficult to do. That's what we get for procrastinating for 20 years.

[Frank Lee]

That's what we get for procrastinating for 20 years.

I'd say it's more like 40 years.

[P-hack]

solar is the only game in town, that sun is friggin awesome. There are applications for liquid fuels, but rolling on wheels commuting does not need to be one of them, at least not primarily.

More efficient regen braking would be nice (as long as we are looking at the big picture) given how little patience other drivers have already, electrical might not be the best choice there.

[NachtRitter]

Originally Posted by jamesqf

Why, yes, I do. Such as some actual evidence, not just a few articles repeating claims without any substantiation. How about a list of 14,000 abandoned wind turbines, with locations?

So apparently this is the original story that stated the "14,000 abandoned wind turbines" falderal: Archived-Articles: Wind Energy's Ghosts. Here, Andrew Walden, who was apparently irked by the "37 skeletal wind turbines abandoned to rust on the hundred-acre site of the former Kamaoa Wind Farm" states:

In the best wind spots on earth, over 14,000 turbines were simply abandoned. Spinning, post-industrial junk which generates nothing but bird kills.

No reference, no source, nothing. Which is strange, considering the rest of the article has a lot of references to several other articles, including quite a few referencing Paul Gipe's material. As best as I can tell, he simply made up the number based on nothing (or he moved a decimal point?), and bringing up the unsubstantiated number in this thread was nothing but a red herring.

While I could not find any information about the actual number of "abandoned" wind turbines in the world (which seems to be the scope of Andrew Walden's quote) or in the U.S. (which seem to be the scope of the links t vago provided), this article seems to have a sensible approach to an estimate of "inactive" (not the same as "abandoned") wind turbines: More wind energy myths debunked: Madigan claims put to the test : Renew Economy. The relevant part of the article:

So what is the real number? Nobody really knows precisely at any given time, but the worst case scenario was in California at the Tehachapi Pass Wind Farm. It was built in the 1970s with the worst of speculation and the most poorly designed subsidies. At one point about 100 of the 5000 wind turbines or 2% were inactive. This was the highest ratio on Earth. Most of those have been replaced with larger wind turbines in a process called repowering, which is typically done where a good wind asset exists and old wind generators are not making as much profit as they could be. Let’s take the worst ratio on Earth and halve it to get a conservative – that is to say overestimated – number of possible wind turbines that might be permanently inactive and multiply it by the 200,000 wind turbines in operation today. That would give us roughly 2,000 wind turbines. These wind turbines are usually much older and smaller, so might represent 0.25% as a conservatively overestimated percentage of possible power generation.

Even if we used the worst case of 2% inactive wind turbines throughout the world, for both the oldest wind farms and the newest, it would still be only 4,000 inactive... less than a third of what is being claimed by all "Mr. Anonymous" on Craigslist and the bloggers that reference other bloggers that have no idea where the 14,000 number came from....

[Frank Lee]

I looked for data on disabled wind turbines too but did not find any. :/

As best as I can tell, he simply made up the number based on nothing (or he moved a decimal point?), and bringing up the unsubstantiated number in this thread was nothing but a red herring.

Reminds me of Hermie a.k.a Aeromodder getting all bent out of shape over a magazine article that claimed some car generated 500 lbs of front end lift, when logic tells us the real number was 50.

According to the American Wind Energy Association, there are 45,100 U.S. turbines. I rather doubt that 1/3 of them are disabled. Personal observation sure doesn't support that assertion.