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theWatt Podcast 79
Submitted by ben on Mon, 05/19/2008 - 22:21.
Mike Jablonicky from Canadian Hydro Developers is on the show giving us the inside scoop on building a $410 million, 198MW wind farm.
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Re: theWatt Podcast 79
Neat - a pretty slick front trying to make it look like the residents on Wolfe Island don't want the turbines!
http://www.wolfeislandresidents.ca/
I liked the bit about all of the canceled wind turbine projects.
http://www.wolfeislandresidents.ca/windturbines.html
I'm sure that there is some truth to what they've said and it would be interesting to dig into it and find out.
I'm betting that some of it had to do with a ratio of wind to baseload to on-demand sources of electricity. One can not have a huge wind farm without some baseload generation that is 100% reliable; and some variable source (typically gas, oil) that can be turned off/down as wind picks up.
In particular they point out how other countries are cutting subsidies because, apparently, the wind turbine benefits don't exist.
Whatever happened to scribble - the idea that you could scribble over someones web page? If you fact check the hell out of their web page and find that they're misrepresenting everything; you can't shut them down or get them to change what they've got up.
I'm quite dubious of their information - they provide no references or dates
Myself, I see more unreliable generation in the future and we'll have to tolerate it. A freezer doesn't need power all day long. Living without a fridge is possible - but there again - it doesn't need electricity round the clock.
With all the fluff I've seen about battery systems to buy cheap electricity at night, and then sell it back to the grid in the daytime .... you'd think that there would be something reasonable available that the electricity companies could use to smooth out wind turbine and other variable sources - super capacitors, flywheels, ... there is always hydrogen if you don't mind throwing away lots of the hard earned energy though.
Re: theWatt Podcast 79
As far as their comments about wind going out of style:
I don't think there'd be a 2-3 year backlog on turbine orders if wind was falling out of favour. They cite Denmark as an example:
http://www.windpower.org/composite-1458.htm
Denmark is replacing many older turbines with fewer newer turbines and has likely already reached it's limit in wind power production, they're already producing ~25% of total electricity from wind power...most people would acknowledge that you can't go much above that limit. Canada has a tiny fraction that is wind. One thing Denmark does have though is good connection to the rest of Europe which can be used to stabilize wind fluctuations.