Designgeek
Well-known member
- Joined
- Dec 12, 2004
- Messages
- 865
I did some design work on a utility-scale wind installation, and we were in pretty close contact with the bird data. Turns out the hazard is near zero with modern turbines.
The old ones got a bad rap because they used lattice towers (inviting place to perch) and high-speed rotors (invisible while spinning). The crude joke about those old machines is, you could open up a Seagull McNugget stand nearby and serve 'em fresh every day
.
But the new ones are on smooth cylindrical towers (no place to perch) and turn at 15 - 20 RPM, so the blades are visible to birds. Birds avoid the blades just as they avoid tree branches waving in the breeze, and similar objects.
As far as "appearance" is concerned, I never understood that one. Industrial stuff is cool. Wind towers are cooler because they're huge
300' high is typical of the larger ones. And noise isn't a factor, you can barely hear 'em when standing underneath. People should have more appreciation for the infrastructure that makes their lives comfortable. I think of that when I drive by the oil refineries in Richmond, and the tank farms on the hillsides. Especially at night, they look like something out of science fiction, with lights twinkling amidst the towers and tanks and networks of pipes and so on. I would have no problem living near one of those, or a nuclear or wind installation.
The only real problem with wind is intermittency, even if you're in a class-5 wind area. For that reason, wind can be about 20% of the grid in most places, because other generating resources have to be able to respond to increase or decrease production as the inverse of what the wind generators are putting out. If you have hydro nearby, all the better, because the reservoir acts like a battery, and can respond quickly to changes in wind output and power demand.
It's going to take a lot of wind and a lot of uranium to make the future hum, particularly as oil starts to peak out in a few years. Fortunately the US has good uranium resources, as does Australia, and we don't have to worry about terrorist nutcases taking over in Australia.
When you hear abou the "hydrogen economy," what's implicit is that it will require major nuclear and wind development. Hydrogen is not an energy source, it's simply a transport medium, i.e. a carrier of embodied energy. The energy to produce the hydrogen has to come from somewhere, i.e. wind & uranium. You can take the entire output of a windfarm or a reactor, and put it into producing hydrogen: this lets you site the turbines & reactors in places where the grid is either insuffiicient or is already well-supplied with electricity. So it adds up to a greater degree of freedom of location when choosing places to build the generating facilities.
The old ones got a bad rap because they used lattice towers (inviting place to perch) and high-speed rotors (invisible while spinning). The crude joke about those old machines is, you could open up a Seagull McNugget stand nearby and serve 'em fresh every day

But the new ones are on smooth cylindrical towers (no place to perch) and turn at 15 - 20 RPM, so the blades are visible to birds. Birds avoid the blades just as they avoid tree branches waving in the breeze, and similar objects.
As far as "appearance" is concerned, I never understood that one. Industrial stuff is cool. Wind towers are cooler because they're huge

The only real problem with wind is intermittency, even if you're in a class-5 wind area. For that reason, wind can be about 20% of the grid in most places, because other generating resources have to be able to respond to increase or decrease production as the inverse of what the wind generators are putting out. If you have hydro nearby, all the better, because the reservoir acts like a battery, and can respond quickly to changes in wind output and power demand.
It's going to take a lot of wind and a lot of uranium to make the future hum, particularly as oil starts to peak out in a few years. Fortunately the US has good uranium resources, as does Australia, and we don't have to worry about terrorist nutcases taking over in Australia.
When you hear abou the "hydrogen economy," what's implicit is that it will require major nuclear and wind development. Hydrogen is not an energy source, it's simply a transport medium, i.e. a carrier of embodied energy. The energy to produce the hydrogen has to come from somewhere, i.e. wind & uranium. You can take the entire output of a windfarm or a reactor, and put it into producing hydrogen: this lets you site the turbines & reactors in places where the grid is either insuffiicient or is already well-supplied with electricity. So it adds up to a greater degree of freedom of location when choosing places to build the generating facilities.