A Changing Landscape – Moon of Alabama

October 22, 2007

A Changing Landscape

Back home from my too rare rides through the north-German country side. Indeed, the landscape is changing.

Folks there build windmills to repel elephants – thousands of huge windmills. The newest rage is to tear down the smaller ones even when they are only ten years old. They get replaced with bigger windmills – "repower" is the word. Aside from being better in holding off pachyderms, the new types generate about ten times more windy energy than the older ones.

Additionally every farmstable which has a roof somewhat towards south is now packed with sun collectors. Farmers literary rent their roofs away. My brother plastered our parents old house, a bigger business building, with 2,000 square feet of collectors and the electricity he sells will recoup the investment within 8 years. After those the panels will generate safe net income of several thousand Euros per year.

Lacking big powerstations, the area I visited has always been an electricity importer. Now the regional electricity utility is exporting lots of megawatts to other parts of the country.

On the way home I listened to a radio interview with the chief economist of Deutsche Bank. He expects the German export boom to continue despite a looming recession and pointed to the global run for alternative energies. Asked if a higher Euro would be drag on German exports of windmills and the like to the U.S. and elsewhere he said flat out: "No. They can’t buy this stuff anywhere else. We are two generations ahead of everyone else on this."

Fine with me – now can we please stop exporting arms?

There are some interesting aspects in how decentralized electricity generation effects energy transportation and the general architecture of grids. ‘Balancing the grid’, i.e. the just-in-time on-demand control of electricity generation, needs to be more localized and must involve many more generating sources than before.

While these changes are very desireable, energy monopols that own big powerstations plus major parts of the grid are holding things back. There is a case to be made that electricity grids should be state owned monopols and their architecture determined by energy security in the widest sense (i.e. no wars for oil), not by profane profitability.

But now, after two long nights, I need some rest and I may pick on that issue in a later post.

Posted by b on October 22, 2007 at 17:35 UTC | Permalink

Comments

All good things are profitable, else not good. They just also should be for the common good, else be smashed. A great bulk of us have been trained to think communist/impractical trust fundee when we hear “profit” as noun or verb, because it’s used negatively yet one always needs income. How can anyone criticize income? The people are less stupid than stupefied.
At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that incompetency rays or vibrations penetrated many bureaucratic bedrooms, to make people prefer corrupt privatization to imbecilic government. All a sham, all the same controllers.

Posted by: plushtown | Oct 22 2007 18:03 utc | 1

Electrical sources across the countryside are profitable, are good. I just mean that we’d be better off if another word, or non-economic crimes, were used to attack those greedy for money, power, water and other’s pain.
Or, get economic. But people ignore it. This is what you get if you google “Global warming policy is not complicated”, a phrase none but I have put on line.

Posted by: plushtown | Oct 22 2007 18:13 utc | 2

The burgeoning development of alternative energy sources seems likely to split the green movement where I live.
Some people object to the visual pollution of windmills along the ridgelines which for me is a non starter. When the ridgelines were cleared of vegetation over the past century to turn bush into grassland was when the objection should have been, not now.
The noise issue will resolve as it is an energy drain, but there are other issues exclusive to windmills as well as general ones around all alternative energy forms.
NZ once had birds and lizards, throw in a wide range of interesting large insects such as the Weta and that was our fauna.
The Northern Whitefella’s decadent predilection for keeping other animals as slaves, in particular the Felis silvestris catus or domestic moggie, has already wreaked destruction on the ground dwelling avians. The kiwi is one of what was once many ground dwelling birds from the tiny quail to the 2 metre Moa (extinct by man a food source) living in NZ. Over a 100 species of birds have become extinct since the arrival of the Northern Whitefella ( Nebulonis Aquilonis Albico). Cats and other imported predators have taken out those whose habitat wasn’t totally destroyed by clear felling. Those birds which could fly generally fared better than the ground dwellers, but windmills proliferating about the country-side should clean them out too.
The issues with mixing these various current pressures and speeds into the network isn’t insurmountable but the massive deregulation of the power industry back in the 90’s makes it tough, especially when the network owners see little real benefit for themselves.
Same same for the problems of excess capacity storage. During wintertime when power demands are highest is the also the time when generating capacity (particularly from solar cells) is lowest. The winds here tend to occur in season change time spring and autumn in particular, a time when demand isn’t at it’s peak.
These are minor problems which will eventually be overcome but there is one big problem that may be insurmountable.
We misname windmills and solar cells by calling them generators as if they create energy, when in fact they are merely energy converters, taking one form of energy and converting it into another more portable form and transporting that energy away from where it was being expended.
Our reliance on fossil fuels; products of the sun’s excess energy gathered over hundreds of millions of years has protected us from most of the negative impact of diverting massive amounts of energy away from natural systems in real time, as the energy is being absorbed by our planet.
How many windmills pulling energy out of an integral part of earth’s natural weather system does it take before natural weather patterns are disrupted?
All those solar cells B spoke of, if replicated everywhere will prevent the ground from warming as much as it once did.
How many big rafts of wave machines drawing energy out of the ocean can the ocean handle before a major disruption of the most important part of our planets natural energy grid occurs? We know that the effect of these types of change is rarely good for us, our existence or the continued existence of all the other life forms.
Yes it would probably take a great deal more than we currently have in operation, though we may be at the limit in some areas with windmills, even solar cells, particularly if they are in proximity. Thing is though, as fossil fuels run out, the need for more and more ‘natural’ energy systems will increase, until we do impact on our environment in really unpredictable and unplanned ways.
We need to consider this before we go mad sticking energy conversion systems all over this old rock. That way the impact can be minimized. Mostly we need to accept that the big energy consuming societies must reduce their individual per capita consumption by large amounts.
There is no ‘cure’ for lack of fossil fuels, there are only alternatives with their own sets of problems.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Oct 22 2007 21:04 utc | 3

Indeed, b, decentralized power generation is a keyword here. This is, besides a lot of other no-brainer stuff, why I was against nuke energy from the word go.
Actually, I have always been negative about nuke energy because it is a misnomer — nuke energy is primitive, just a heat source, like coal or oil to heat the water to make the steam to drive the turbine.
Just a bit north of where you were, the Danish island of Langeland (I think that’s the one) is now energy positive, that is it generates more power to the grid than it uses. I remember distinctly 30+ years ago when the power companies said that windpower was not feasible, that it could not be coupled to the power grids for a number of reasons that were, as we later saw, pure bullshit.
The big problem now is developing technology to store energy, whether the source is wind, water, sunshine or cowfarts is moot — the problem is storing it in a manner which is transportable. Trees and the like have been doing this for hundreds and hundreds of millions of years, so it should be possible. There is a pilot project underway (again in Langeland, I think, where they are trying to use the energy not needed locally to generate hydrogen from electrolysis and store it in fuel cells — it’s inefficient, but the source of power is there for the taking)
If less than a tenth of the money wasted on an illegal invasion had been diverted to research of this sort, there would now be at least a glimmer of a chance to sidestep the coming catastrophes of energy crunch combined with global climate change. Unfortunatlely, the collective intelligence of the human race apparently is just a bit above that of a well fed cockroach — no offense intended to the insect!
When all is said and done though, we must remember that there are no free lunches –EVERY thing has a downside, be it nuke, wind, water, sun or cow fart energy, there will always be side effects, waste products — and these must be taken into cosideration.

Posted by: Chuck Cliff | Oct 22 2007 21:29 utc | 4

Lol Debs is Dead. No shortage of Weta in my basement. We call them cave crickets.
Good idea for discussion b. Mmmm Northern Germany. Beautiful!

Posted by: beq | Oct 22 2007 23:58 utc | 5

In Mammon-corrupted America the Greens are promoting LEED certification of buildings, at extraordinary unrecoverable cost, revolving around really pedestrian band-aids like mossy roofs and rain cisterns for landscape irrigation, converting HVAC from 95% efficient natural gas to 78% efficient (when you consider generation and distribution losses) electrical heat pumps, R-22 refrigerant to hugely expensive and troublesome R-401, the sum total of which, if released all at once into the atmosphere would have less effect than a single day’s oilfield flare-offs in far-away Saudi. The Green movement is like florescent bulb replacement, using technology already 20 years old, while most humans are still cooking over fossil fires! This has become just another uniquely American “whatever you do, just keep shopping” marketing plan, while at the same time, Australia and Indonesia are supplying China with literally TRILLIONS of tons of LNG to fuel their takeover of global manufacturing. Google Woodside Energy.
Timothy Leary had it right. ‘Turn on, tune in, and drop out’. Get a bicycle, a tiny cabin of clay and wattles, a solar panel, a laptop, a tele-commute link, and a good endlessly renewing wood stove. Then sell LED’s to all the insane green whitefellah’s.
The ice caps will melt, the oceans will boil, then we’ll have a nice nuclear winter.
What’r ya gonna do? Feed the children!

Posted by: Bruce | Oct 23 2007 3:45 utc | 6

Yes, the LEED certification program is generally an exercise in buying points to prove your “sustainability”. Most of the points are centred around buildings’ mechanical and electrical systems tweaks; few deal with local realities, or more importantly, our North American model of 20 year buildings-then demo and replace.
This area (Americans call it the Pacific Northwest; we call it the Lower Left Hand Corner) is relatively green, being the birthplace of Greenpeace and Ballard hydrogen cells, and there is a general sensitivity towards preserve and conserve, but we’re still sloppy and indulgent, and do it for the money and out of habit and because we still have the physical resources. Actually they are being pushed – we’re close to the edge of current hydro electric capacity, less mountain snow means less runoff to fill the resivours, increasing population, warnings of environmental refugees.
I work with a large AE&C firm that gladly designs and builds ethanol plants, wind farms, rapid transit systems, highways and coal mines – whatever pays the rent. That model seems to support conflicting attitudes across the globe and won’t change in at least the short term. Brace for the coming energy Wars.

Posted by: Allen/Vancouver | Oct 23 2007 4:56 utc | 7

Another small step for mankind: some whiz-bang kid in America took a (mostly German-built) windmill and, instead of hooking it up to a generator, which only generates electricity when the wind blows, hooked it up to an air compressor.
Brilliant. Energy on demand.
We are installing a solar unit on our house in Germany that should turn out about three times as much electricity as we use. This is not so much out of environmental consciousness as out of economic considerations: when we are older and living on our pensions, we want to be spared some of the nastiest surprises in rising energy costs.

Posted by: ralphieboy | Oct 23 2007 6:00 utc | 8

great question, bernhard, one i spend a long time pondering on myself, especially after reading a report in the local rag here in rural-ish central italy, talking about the town hall meeting about global warming, where they said (again) that the time was here for action not words….
and then they go out and nothing changes…
it’s taken me a year to puzzle out the baroque bureaucracy in order to put 3 kw on my roof, and still no panels, and electricity bills ratcheting up inexorably.
it is nothing short of stunning how passive and ignorant the people remain in the face of this global tragedy, as if all will end up well like a spielberg movie…
why isn’t barroso over this like chili on rice?
this is an emergency people, let’s wake up from this masochistic trance and get with the program!

Posted by: melo | Oct 23 2007 6:24 utc | 9

Nice Bernhard, reminds me, that I can’t help reflecting on my summer trip to Ohio where instead of the signs of awareness and conscientious change, there is instead a malignant growth in people living in trailers, the fuckers are everywhere like dandelions, and the quaint little Americana towns would have tumbleweeds blowing down main street if they had tumbleweeds, they’re so vacant, or to get back to energy, the big news (down there) is that the humongous Cheshire (good name huh?) coal fired electric plant down on the Ohio river emitted so much pollution, that they had to buy the whole town. American ingenuity HA!

Posted by: anna missed | Oct 23 2007 8:30 utc | 10

Debs@3 is spot on. The idea that it is possible to transform winds into electricity may be in the long run very dangerous. I have been bothered by this thought for a long time. What will happen to the spin of the Earth if the winds are modified by millions of wind mills? In my case the question is purely hypothetical because I am old but from the intellectual standpoint one cannot dimiss it. Debs is completely right in showing that “generators” do not generate they merely transform. I don’t know, it is so terrible, there is no exit. Who said that there should be an exit? Perhaps the serpent in Eden.

Posted by: jlcg | Oct 23 2007 9:03 utc | 11

Debs@3 is spot on. The idea that it is possible to transform winds into electricity may be in the long run very dangerous. I have been bothered by this thought for a long time. What will happen to the spin of the Earth if the winds are modified by millions of wind mills?
As wind (and waves) are caused by temperature differences which result from sunshine the question of exausting wind is a question about exausting the sun. I don’t see any need to be concerned with that limit.
On birds and windmills the very active Audubon equivilant here has made lots of studies on the issue and are unconcerned. The 19,000 windmills are estimated to result in 1000 dead birds per year total while car/railway/air traffic and regular electricity lines result in 10 millions of dead birds.

Posted by: b | Oct 23 2007 9:45 utc | 12

@b #12
The bird collison problem can be significant in some areas. Sites for windfarms in the US are, naturally, often placed in the paths of known, regular currents. Often, but not always, these currents assist in the yearly migrations of particular species of birds. The death tolls in those cases easily exceeds a paltry thousand per annum. Not every site, however, is located in a migratory path and so people can deliberately produce studies that show a catastrophic or benign result regarding this issue with just a cursory glance at a regional wind current map crossreferenced with a map of known annual migration routes (both of these are often obtainable from many public libraries for a nominal fee).
Bird migration can be very complex, so blanket statements about how “it’s not a problem” are a little glib and somewhat irresponsible. “It’s not a problem” in some areas. As for others, well, consult your local listings.

Posted by: Monolycus | Oct 23 2007 14:28 utc | 13

The sun does produce the winds but the winds are of such nature and quality as a given from a certain solar output.. The atmosphere is a mass of gas that glides over the surface of the earth and that friction has poweful effects, witness the Santa Ana winds that are bringing disaster to southern California. My point is that that mass of moving air, should it be disturbed by a large number of wind mills will have some effect on the spin of the earth, perhaps, or through so many other possibilities that for the moment is impossible to guess.

Posted by: jlcg | Oct 23 2007 15:08 utc | 14

the new generation of windmills turn really slow which reduces the noise they make and I would think giving birds a chance to get out of the way.
I had thought about the affect of these big guys taking the energy out of the wind but then I decided it really wouldn’t make any difference if the wind was slowed because of a bunch of trees or buildings or a windmill. I suppose if all winds were blowing in the same direction in reference to the rotation of the earth it could possibly make the earth spin a gazillionth of a second faster. the ole blue marble is pretty heavy and wind blowing on the surface is not going to have that much impact.

Posted by: dan of steele | Oct 23 2007 15:21 utc | 15

dan of steel: I am commenting on your post not because of stubbornness but the reason is wonder. I have always been amazed by the precession of the equinoxes. The axis of the Earth turns around the heavens once every 26000 years. There are movements that are imperceptible but nevertheless produce enormous changes. My birth day that used to be under the sign of Gemini now falls under Cancer. This detail is truly trivial but I present it as an example of motions and processes that though imperceptible have enormous consequences. Who would have thought that motion of oceanic plates would produce eruptions earthquakes and create continents. It seems to me that nothing in Nature is done in vain including the winds.

Posted by: jlcg | Oct 23 2007 16:30 utc | 16

@jlcg: I would expect changes in weather patterns caused by windmills and wave machines far sooner than a change in the earth’s rotation.
And thank you for being the one of the few people I know who notice that precession (which is caused by the 26,000 year wobble in the earth’s axis) actually makes our generally accepted horoscopes out of sync with reality.

Posted by: catlady | Oct 23 2007 23:50 utc | 17

The The Solar Decathlon is on just a few miles from where I am. I wish I had the time to go see it.
Bernhard, the German house “dazzled”everyone.

Posted by: beq | Oct 23 2007 23:53 utc | 18

Regarding the limits of wind power, the most likely problem as I see it is that it can not be expanded beyond a certain point, as we are already getting problems in certain areas where if more windmills are built upwind owners of windmills downwind complain. So I do not think windpower can expand enough to cause weather destabilisation (or slowing the earth circulation for that matter). On the other hand that means that we anyway need to cut down on our energy usage.
World energy resources and consumption – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In 2004, the worldwide energy consumption of the human race was 15 TW (= 1.5 x 10¹³ W) with 86.5% from burning fossil fuels.

And most of the non-fossile today is nuclear and hydro, divided roughly equal (on supply side).
Say – just for the sake of discussion – that we could get rid of fossile and get wind, solar and wave up to the same level as hydro today (and hydro on todays level has caused some significant environmental and social (as in drowning villages) disruption). Then we have about a fifth of todays power. If we keep nuclear (which I am not arguing for) at todays level we have a fourth.
So I agree with the general thrust of DiDs comment, conservation is in any way the most important issue. We need so save some 75-95% of worldwide energy consumption while we still suffer through the consequences (global warming) of earlier bad decisions.

Posted by: a swedish kind of death | Oct 24 2007 11:06 utc | 19

Great thread.
This is something that should be everyone’s concern, but obviously isn’t – hence the thread
I have heard from otherwise very intelligent people, a mantra of two variations on a theme:
God will provide
Science will provide
The problem is, only we can provide or we will disappear, as our ultimate survival depends on our getting off this little rock. That’s why we’re here, to go out and explore our neighbourhood, because no home lasts forever and neither does the ‘hood apparently.
Far into the future, if the stupid monkey still exists, it will be huddled around black holes, mining the energy to power our genetically modified lives (might have to do that to withstand the radiation that permeates space – how does a little cockroach DNA sound?) and the sky will be dark save for the hole(s).
Mass of the Earth:

The mass of the Earth may be determined using Newton’s law of gravitation. It is given as the force (F), which is equal to the Gravitational constant multiplied by the mass of the planet and the mass of the object, divided by the square of the radius of the planet. We set this equal to the fundamental equation, force (F) equals mass (m) multiplied by acceleration (a). We know that the acceleration due to gravity is equal to 9.8 m/s**2, the Gravitational constant (G) is 6.673 × 10-11 Nm**2/kg**2, the radius of the Earth is 6.37 × 106 m, and mass cancels out. When we rearrange the equation and plug all the numbers in, we find that the mass of the Earth is 5.96 × 10**24 kg.
F = Gm(sub1)m(sub2)/r**2 = ma
Gm/r**2 = g
m = gr**2/G
m = (9.8 m/s**2)(6.37 × 106 m)**2/(6.673 × 10**-11 Nm**2/kg**2)
m = 5.96 × 10**24 kg
(** = exponent)
For comparison: atmosphere = 5 × 10**18 kg; the sun = 2 x 10**30 (This is about 343,000 times the mass of the Earth). The beauty of math.
The Earth gains mass each day, as a result of incoming debris from space. This occurs in the forms of “falling stars”, or meteors, on a dark night. The actual amount of added material depends on each study, though it is estimated that 10 to the 8th power kilograms of in-falling matter accumulates every day. The seemingly large amount, however, is insignificant to the Earth’s total mass. The Earth adds an estimated one quadrillionth of one percent to its weight each day.

Notice the use of Newton’s Law of Gravitation. One of the irksome qualities of articles like that one recently referenced from LRB regarding Darwin, is they imply theories change faster than most people change their ginch. Well they don’t – largely due to healthy skepticism (and of course, human frailties).
(the fact that we don’t have a particle that “carries” gravity like a photon does light, in no way validates things like horoscopes. A newspaper (that felt slimy typing that) recently apologized for one day running the incorrect ‘scopes. How would have anyone noticed? Sadly someone once told me that astrology = astronomy)
Another quality of these articles is to treat science like a series of isolated incidents (true for history I find, as well – a certain marxist had a habit of this) in which new discoveries always supplant older ones. True in many cases such as Lamarckism and homeopathy but, not so with einstein or quantum things – these have enhanced existing ideas and our understanding. (but not our wisdom to wield that knowledge – if religion is to provide that, it ain’t doin a very good job)
Nothing will change the fact of the periodic table or that those elements are created during the life cycle of suns. H-O-H is and always be, comprised of one O and two H’s – it was made of these atoms well before the stupid monkey came along to name them. It has a crystalline structure when frozen and is a dynamic fluid in it’s normal phase. Fluid dynamics describe the antics of liquid water and it has no permanent structure (any is fleeting, as in nanoseconds).
New, future quantum discoveries will not change that and do not account for things like homeopathy – an industry that uses a lot of precious water to make pills with a lot of nothing in them and a lot of precious fuels to put them in a lot of pharmacies all over the place.
As stated by Debs is dead, no free lunch. No panacea. No Free energy. Sets and subsets. It’s all cause and effect. It all adds up (if you knew the weight of Nagasaki and were able to place a dome over the cataclysm – you could weight the ashes of all the homes and the cracked eggs and very, very nearly get the original number)
What has really been discussed is the universe, but just our little corner of it.
Let’s say for the sake of argument, that the stupid monkey can learn to love itself and stop wasting all that supposed brain power on weapons. Instead it figures out how to reasonably use what little Gaia provides. Are we safe? Not by a longshot.
The resources will still run out.
The universe is a very dangerous place without the stupid monkey. 5 mass extinctions so far and more to come guaranteed. Whether it is down to the stupid monkey or not. It will happen. Whether a big chocolate sundae from space or the iron core of the beautiful blue marble cools and slows the 1000mph spin (think Mars) down to naught, it will happen.
But we’re here now and we’re going to have to go out there (which means resolving b’s conundrum) or we will end here.
But we’d rather make weapons.
The nasty winds in Calif are caused by the mountains cooling and compressing the air moving off the deserts (after being heated by the sun). This heavy air picks up speed as it falls and is dried and heated again. The dry air masses are funneled through the canyons and valleys as through fuel injectors, sucking the moisture from the vegetation and spreading any embers for miles. And once the fires start, they add to the devastating power and chaos of the winds and…

Posted by: jcairo | Oct 24 2007 15:08 utc | 20

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