(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

[clanwilliam]

Everyone else gets blown to bits; sufficient climate disruption to have unspecified effect on world ecosystem; rocks fall, everybody (may) die?

[recessional]

. . . what is it doing to the milder weather-systems that come out of the same area as the hurricanes? The same air-currents/etc send "normal" weather and rainfall down there; disrupting them seems like asking for trouble, and the turbines etc would need to run even when it wasn't a hurricane.

[graydon]

You can't build wind turbines that strong that are also useful when light zephyrous breezes are blowing. You really can't build offshore wind turbines in quantity without knowing how much and how fast the sea level is going to come up over their operating lifetime, and no-one knows that. You totally do not want to concentrate zones of extraction for that much energy because that's going to do something else screwy to the already increasingly screwy weather.

You absolutely cannot do everything with renewables because renewables are intermittent and need is not; particularly things like glass and aluminium and steel refining/remanufacturing.

So there has to be some kind of storage mechanism and even if it's very efficient (~70% in and ~70% out, really quite good for batteries) it about doubles your energy needs. (So you don't want to do this for primary refining even if you do, desperately, want to do this for transport.)

So in general offshore wind turbines are a stupid waste of resources; building a lot of fragile fixed infrastructure and laying submarine high tension cable and otherwise spending a lot of money you shouldn't.

Ocean wind is a great energy resource, and you can perfectly well capture it by using sailing ships; drag the prop ("shaft alternator") to generate electricity, use the electricity to make ammonia, come to port, pump out the ammonia, crew gets a couple pub nights, repeat. All those pylons and other fixed infrastructure not required. Sailing ships well-understood. Diffuses the energy extraction, provides ongoing jobs, and would be a dandy, dandy industry for Newfoundland and the Maritimes generally. (Alberta is tougher. But someone smarter than me can probably figure it out, too.)

(Ammonia is a good pumpable fuel; it's pretty much the best pumpable fuel for fuel cells. Combination first demonstrated in a car at highway speeds in 1968. Well-understood ammonia handling technology already developed. Three different catalytic processes for ammonia synthesis from air and water (good old NH3, right? No carbon at all...) around 70% efficiency have been demonstrated, despite funding on a shoestring scale. There are people claiming .2 CAD/litre costs of production...)

[mmegaera]

This whole discussion reminds me of the butterfly effect. I know fuck-all about the validity or not of the butterfly effect, but I can't help but see something like this having serious unintended consequences -- especially to places that had nothing to do with the construction of the wind turbines in the first place, and that don't benefit from them directly. Turning some poor developing nations with nice shorelines into another Bangladesh or something, all because a first-world country wanted to go all-renewable.

I'm all for renewable energy, but this particular proposition seems more than a bit not thought through.

[clanwilliam]

Also, the person you need to ask is swaldman. (On DW with that username, IIRC.)

[krait]

Well, presumably if hurricanes are muffled, what would happen to nice normal winds? The ones that bring rain to crops and move boats around, that are significantly weaker than hurricanes?