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"wind power"
by Christopher Mims. Yes, renewable energy is more living-thing-friendly than fossil fuels, but given a choice, animals would probably prefer that we take our damn opposable thumbs and go back to living in caves. Wind turbines don’t sully a hilltop the same way mountaintop-removal mining would, but they do have a footprint. That’s why a new study published in the journal PLoS One is such good news: It finds that there is enough already-disturbed land in the U.S. suitable for wind to produce 3,500 gigawatts of power. That’s more power than is consumed by the entire U.S. Disturbed land means agriculture, mining, oil and gas drilling, stuff like that.
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America has way more ‘disturbed’ land for wind power than it needs, says report
by Christopher Mims. Last month, a wind turbine on a North Dakota wind farm suffered a “catastrophic failure” when “oversight” and “human error” — features of energy infrastructure which scientists suggest are unavoidable — led to the enormous turbine falling off its mount. The most recent reports indicate that so far the only casualties are a wide swath of grass and possibly a family of voles. So far no evacuation zone has been declared. There are no threats to sea life , and the fallout from the disaster was not detectable thousands of miles away . Cleanup efforts are in progress, and will not include covering the area in a giant concrete dome . No workers have been asked to give their lives in order to save their countrymen from the menace of this fallen wind turbine. Engineers warn, however, that this is certainly not the last time this will happen.
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Wind turbine suffers catastrophic failure; no one is irradiated
New Calif. law mandates more electricity from renewable sources California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a new law today requiring power companies to generate 33 percent of all electricity from renewable energy sources like wind and solar power by 2020. The new law is a major incentive for clean technology companies in the state to begin ramping up their production of clean energy sources. Previous laws required power companies to fill 20 percent of their output with renewable energy sources by 2010 with a 3-year grace period.
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April 13 news: California sets highest renewable power goal; 2011 budget deal slashes EPA budget 16%
And the winner of the most egregiously error-riddled paragraph published in a presumably fact-checked newspaper op-ed this year: According to some recent number crunching by the Breakthrough Institute, a centrist environmental think tank, phasing out Japan’s current nuclear generation capacity and replacing it with wind would require a 1.3-billion-acre wind farm, covering more than half the country’s total land mass. Going for solar instead would require a similar land area, and would in economic terms cost the country more than a trillion dollars. No, it’s not Charlie Sheen weighing into the energy debate. And no, there aren’t any typos. Sadly, this breathtaking collection of whoppers is by none other than Mark Lynas, author of the excellent book, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. I’m not quite certain what is more depressing — that Lynas wrote this paragraph in the first place and has since reposted it at the Economist ‘s online nuclear debate (a debate that is, typically, poorly framed). Or that not one person at the LA Times , Economist , or McLatchy thought the numbers looked funny or self-contradictory enough to spend even 10 seconds on Google to fact-check them. Or that even two days later the head-exploding errors are still there. See how many errors you can count before reading the rest of the post. While I realize that “acres” is not a metric most people work with often, presumably if you are going to use acres you would at least check on Google to make sure your answer is not wrong by, say, a factor of 1000 ! Or that you haven’t gotten the area of Japan wrong by a factor of 30! But I’m getting ahead of myself. As bad as the analysis is from The Breakthrough Institute, I was pretty confident they wouldn’t make a numerical mistake this huge. While it may be mostly a red herring to bother calculating what it would take to phase out Japan’s current nuclear generation, their April 5 post, TBI’s post, “The Costs of Replacing Japan’s Nuclear Power,” states: … replacing the generation lost from a complete phase-out of nuclear power entirely with wind energy … would require 152 GW of installed wind capacity, at a total installation cost of $375 billion (using an estimate of $2,466/KWe)
Originally posted here:
Mark Lynas pens error-riddled, cost-less nuke op-ed
Wind on even playing field with gas, industry declares Though the U.S. wind industry installed half as much capacity last year as it did in 2009, production streamlining and efficiency improvements mean wind can compete evenly with cheap natural gas, wind industry executives said today.
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April 8 News: Wind now on even playing field with gas; GE to build nation’s largest solar panel factory