Finally, an explanation for why it was in Simmons Flashback that Peak Oil made windmills not work

[james_davis_nicoll]

“Now, to add insult to injury, The University of Maine, Presque Isle – anybody here been up there to see that damn windmill in the back yard? Guess what, if it’s not blowing wind outside and they have somebody visiting the campus, they have a little electric motor that turns the blades. I’m serious. They have an electric motor so that they can show people wind power works. Unbelievable. And that’s the government that you have here in the state of Maine,” said LePage.

Comments

[mishalak]

What I would really want an answer for is why Swanson's law stopped being a valid observation. Did we also run out of silicon ore?

[kithrup.livejournal.com]

I saw that; is it true?

[resonant.livejournal.com]

My company makes wind turbine controllers, so I have a squid in this race.

Many turbines do have an electric motor that turns the nacelle to face the wind. For ones with variable-pitch blades, the swash plate can be moved with an electric actuator. Some Darrieus-style vertical-axis turbines have a starter motor to start them moving. But I know of no horizontal-axis turbines that have a motor to make them spin.

You COULD take grid power and use it to turn the blades. However, the inverters my company makes for wind applications only work one way; you'd have to completely rewire it (and the generator on the turbine) to do so.

[kithrup.livejournal.com]

I thought that would be the case.

But I don't know enough.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

So LePage may be in fact using that little technical detail in order to confuse the issue. In whose service, if the suspicion's correct, has yet to be determined.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

Yes - except the photo in the link shows a horizontal-axis turbine that doesn't need a starter motor.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

"if it’s not blowing wind outside ..."

Having grown up in the region, I can say that it's never true that it's not blowing wind outside.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

When I have given such people evidence that refutes their statements, in private they have told me that they will keep giving the incorrect statement because it is a better story.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Indeed. (http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/3619665.html)

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

Indulge me here: why is it a better story, precisely? Or did you mean "better"?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Serves their interests better.

How do you know when a politician is lying? His lips are moving.

[resonant.livejournal.com]

As ffutures commented, the speaker felt that the incorrect anecdote supported their interests, so they knowingly and deliberately kept saying something incorrect, rather than give an anecdote that was less effective at supporting their interests.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

Another story of that kind is "it takes more energy to make solar cells than they ever produce".

[resonant.livejournal.com]

Agreed. Our company makes solar panels too, and I hear that a lot. Our power bill is huge, but not THAT big.

(yes, we do put solar panels on our roof to generate some of our own power, but only the rejects from our manufacturing line with inclusions, laminate defects, or a few dead cells - the good ones get sold)

(the total cost of photovoltaic solar power is now the same as that from a newly-built coal power plant with modern pollution controls)

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

I'm REALLY hoping the handful of companies bringing out new zinc-air batteries (and some other technologies) will be able to drive down the cost of electrical energy storage. Batteries are tough, but I'm very hopeful.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Our power bill is huge, but not THAT big.

Presumably you'd also need to include the energy embodied in all the materials produced upstream of your plant. But the people making these life-cycle claims always seem to imagine that they're novel arguments that proponents never considered before, rather than a basic part of the cost-benefit analysis for any alternative power source.

[redbird]

You never hear such discussions of the upstream power/energy costs for a coal plant--how much energy it takes to dig and transport the coal, and build and maintain the power plant, including getting the miners and plant workers to and from their jobs, let alone the energy side of medical "externalities" in the form of lung diseases: what is the energy cost of treating X number of asthmatic children, including fuel for ambulances, hospital electrical bills, and so on?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Similarly, the people complaining that renewables can't compete without subsidies generally ignore subsidies to fossil-fuel industry.

In the specific case of solar, they tend to have ideas left over from the 1970s about the cost of photovoltaic production. I just saw an article about solar reaching grid parity in India and Italy. The article defined grid parity as cost competitive with fossil fuels before subsidies. It sparked a discussion on G+, and one of the first things somebody said was "yeah, but that's just because of subsidies, right?"

[icedrake.livejournal.com]

You may be a good person to ask, then: Any thoughts on vanadium flow batteries for grid storage?

[resonant.livejournal.com]

Sadly, that's outside my field of expertise - we only do mechanical and electronics. We'd make the inverter that connects to the battery, and we'd make the control module for the pumps and sensors, but the rest is not our core competency.

[icedrake.livejournal.com]

Gotcha. Well, it was worth a shot :)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

This is a very, very popular false belief about wind turbines as well, I think in part because the popular doom-as-entertainment website Exit Mundi promulgated it as a reason there is no escaping the peak oil apocalypse. (They also prevented the Jevons paradox as an inexorable reason that all energy conservation efforts are worthless.)

There's actually a category of wind turbines for which it is, as far as I know, true: the little toy ones that you can buy to put on your own house. They're ridiculous, and have nothing to do with utility-scale wind power generation.

I've even heard it claimed that nuclear power plants are more carbon-intensive than carbon-burning power plants, with a similar life-cycle argument. I cannot see how such a claim could possibly be true.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

I've also heard the lie about nuclear power, that all the energy invested in the large amount of steel and concrete isn't paid back. Last I checked, this material is about the same as used in the foundations of wind turbines of the same effective capacity.

(The other energy lie about nuclear is that the cost of isotope enrichment makes the energy payback negative. This is false, even with very energy intensive diffusion enrichment, and gas centrifuges use far less energy per SWU than that.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I suspect that some people may be confusing an argument about energy or carbon with an argument about money. At the current moment, in the United States, it's really hard to beat natural gas for cost, environmental issues aside.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

prevented the Jevons paradox

"presented," that is. In general, Exit Mundi shouldn't be taken as a reliable information clearinghouse, since, while it does give sources for its claims, its basic schtick means that it will always be unapologetically biased toward the most doom-laden sources available.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

The Jevons Paradox demonstrates that if we keep making better windmills we will inevitably make so many that the wind is totally used up!!!11eleventy!1

[martinl-00.livejournal.com]

I guess that's one way to run a weather control system.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Wasn't there a paper on this sometime in the past few years-- somebody trying to calculate the maximum limit on wind power capacity, and what it might do to weather patterns to have that energy being captured? It got spun as "dark side of wind power/Peak Wind looms," but if I recall correctly, the limit they calculated was quite high.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

It wouldn't surprise me, but I haven't seen such a thing. If asked the right way, such a question could make a good XKCD What-If...

[dbdatvic.livejournal.com]

...so then if we make MORE than that it starts blowing BACKWARDS, right?

Dave, or perhaps straight down?

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Worth noting that our idiot governor got elected because the Democrats wouldn't field a competent alternative. Their old party warhorse came in a distant third in a five-way race. Splitting your forces in the face of the enemy often turns out badly.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The "rusting windmills" trope was the first thing I thought of when I heard that.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

There are a remarkable number of people in the comments simply asserting that LePage is telling the truth. They seem to be split about fifty-fifty between good Republicans and NIMBY-style environmentalists.