(no subject)

[commodorified]

Snaffled from ars technica

Stanford researcher Mark Jacobson likes to take current thinking about renewable energy and supersize it. Rather than aiming for 50 percent renewables, like California is, he has analyzed what it would take for each of the 50 states to go fully renewable. It would apparently involve so many offshore wind turbines that hurricanes headed toward the States would be suppressed.

I feel like that's an unalloyed good, am I missing something here?

Comments

[sara]

Enh, my understanding is they've had some successful pilot projects in the Mediterranean. It might be a go. And the whole appeal of the floating ones is you can re-moor them when sea level rises, which is hard to do with fixed offshore wind like they're building in the UK.

That said, when I was asked to review a proposed set of floating windmills recently, I didn't feel that the project proponent could explain very well what would happen if the turbines came detached from their moorings, about 1/4 to 1 mile offshore, and washed up on the beach. Or washed up on the liquid natural gas shipping terminal. I thought the answer might be "extremely bad things," and they insisted that nothing would ever go wrong, and I declined to consider that an adequate answer.

Aluminum manufacturers are actually pulling a lot of their juice from wind farms in the Columbia Gorge right now, that seems to be working fairly well for them. If they've got the wind in the day and the hydro at night they chuck along ok. It's better during drought years to limit the water releases through the dams and the availability of wind helps them moderate that.

[graydon]

I salute and thank you for declining "nothing would ever go wrong" as an adequate answer. That is laudable good sense too rarely lauded.

As I understand the floaty ones, you've got an inescapable choice between "can sink?" (buoy stability) or "can flip?" (plank/raft stability) and neither lets you not have to adjust the anchor placement if the depth changes significantly. (Which can be just from scouring, never mind actual sea level rise.) And neither gets you around the nasty corrosion problems inherent in salt water. I've got a preference for leaving those as close to the really well understood problem domains as we can possibly get them.

Pulling some juice from wind farms is good. Can't plan the plant around it, though. Which is why Iceland will likely keep exporting electricity in the form of aluminium for a long time. And why we've got an interesting problem replacing all the stuff that currently solves "process heat?" with "gas, natural, shedloads of, fire, for the lighting on".

[sara]

Yeah, I think they can actually tack a second, longer cable on there if they have to.

There are enough submerged cable projects that I think the engineering is not insoluble; I just don't know that I think the failsafes for this particular application were sufficient. I also didn't think they'd done enough to address visual impacts -- there are coatings you can use in a marine environment that will make things more-or-less disappear visually on an overcast day, but the pilot project wind farm people REALLY want you to be able to see their EXCITING GREEN ENERGY PROJECT from a distance (ohboy).

This is the second phase of the Portugese pilot. It is at a much shallower depth than the proposed project I reviewed, but it's still interesting to watch it built out.

There is no one solution with renewables but it's good to see people playing around with different options.