Interior secretary says windmills off East Coast could replace 3,000 coal-fired power plants

Interior secretary says windmills off East Coast could replace 3,000 coal-fired power plants

WAYNE PARRY, Associated Press Writer
7:45 AM PDT, April 6, 2009

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (AP) — Windmills off the East Coast could generate the same amount of electricity as 3,000 coal-fired power plants, but oil and natural gas drilling will continue to be part of the nation's energy equation, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Monday.

The secretary spoke at a public hearing in Atlantic City on how the nation's offshore areas can be tapped to meet America's energy needs now that a moratorium on offshore oil drilling has expired. A decision on whether to allow drilling for oil and gas off the East Coast still has to be made. "We know there are some people who want us to close the door on that," he said. "We need to look at all forms of energy as we move forward into a new energy frontier."

In 2007, the Outer Continental Shelf, a zone extending roughly three to 200 miles from shore, accounted for 14 percent of the nation's natural gas production, and 27 percent of its oil production. Salazar said it is essential that the nation fully exploit renewable energy resources to reduce its reliance on imported oil. By buying oil from countries hostile to the United States, "we have, in my opinion, been funding both sides in the war on terrorism," he said.

Wind power offers a great opportunity along the East Coast, the secretary said....

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sns-ap-offshore-windmills,1,3788930.story

With an installed capacity of about 390GW. In 2006 they burnt about 1,026,000,000 short tons of coal.

I love fundie math, almost as I love year after year after year after year after year after year of endless "could" statements and other soothsaying.

Hey, kiddie, did you hear that while you were talking a huge ice shelf broke off?

No?

Where did you learn, by the way, of even ONE coal plant on this planet being shut by a wind plant?

Last I heard, Germany wasn't shutting them, it was building them:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,472786,00.html

The capacity utilization of wind plants is less than 25%. That of coal plants 72% (in this country.) Most electricity is used on hot, <em>stagnant</em> days.

Didn't know that?

Why am I not surprised?

Being abysmally uniformed, and producing as usual, no references to any real data, you are off, predictably by 13% on your claim about how many plants there are, under estimating them by 170 coal plants. But what's 170 coal plants to someone who doesn't give a rat's ass about them any way.

There are 1470 coal plants operating in the United States:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epaxlfile2_2.xls

You spend all of your time, when not making stuff up, trying to destroy, out of ignorance, the only infrastructure that has <em>ever</em> operated on an exajoule scale with a higher capacity utilization than coal, nuclear energy.

Nuclear plants operate at 89%+ capacity factors in this country, but you wouldn't know that, because you don't understand the first fucking thing about electricity demand and utilization, preferring hand waving to knowledge.

>negative 1700 plants...
You've apparently never heard of an illustrative example. If you have a problem with Sec. Salazar using average coal plant capacity as a means of conveying the size of the offshore wind resource, I'd suggest you contact his office and offer him your opinion. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a response if I were you, however.

>no coal plants shut down...
Point 1) How many coal plants have not been built because of the growth of wind capacity in the past 5 years?
Point 2) This is an example of the bald man fallacy I educated your sock puppet on earlier: your assertion is the same as saying that since Jack has hair now, that is proof that Jack will never go bald. Moral? It is idiocy of the first order to ignore changing circumstances as you routinely attempt to do. Since you make the same moronic claim with all renewables, it is clear that you are somehow impaired, or you just have nothing to shoot but blanks.

>wind capacity factor is 25%...
Wind technology has been improving primarily in the area of wind turbine size and wind forecasting and siting evaluation. So while a 25% capacity factor may result from including wind farms built and sited 30 years ago, your use of it is another example of the bald man fallacy. This is especially true since the topic is specifically offshore wind where we have decades of consistent reliable data telling us that a capacity factor of 44% is the norm.
So again, it must be asked, if you have a valid argument to support the technology you favor, why do you feel compelled to falsify the situation? I'm just guessing, but I'd say it's probably because your favored technology sucks when a legitimate appraisal compares it with renewables.


>you are off, predictably by 13% on your claim about how many plants there are...
Well, that might be true since the data I found was from 2000 and didn't include coal plants with less than 100MW nameplate capacity. It is, however, a valid statistic from the same source you are citing. Again, since the source was cited, the real significance of your over reaction is what it tells us about the abundance (or lack of) and legitimacy (or lack of) the arguments you are forced to employ. If you actually had a legitimate point to make, would you be carping on bullshit?
I don't think so.

>Nuclear plants operate at 89%+ capacity factors...
Yes they do. And if that was the ONLY criteria by which energy resources are evaluated, then people would probably be lining up to build nuclear plants in every state in the union. Since that ISN'T HAPPENING it is an indicator that other factors are causing people to put their money and efforts into wind, solar, wave/tidal/current, and geothermal.
Of course at the Nuclear Energy Institute, the propaganda arm of the nuclear industry, they attribute this preference solely to ignorance on the part of everyone but their disciples. I'm sure there is a name for that type of faulty reasoning, but I'll just label it with the common term - crazy as a shithouse rat.

and the "failed" global PV industry grew by 110% last year - to 5.95 GW/yr

Sting is coming to get you.

:rofl:

If Americans built the windmills.

Wind has no fuel costs, but it does have ongoing operations and maint. that provide more jobs per megawatt than centralized generating facilities like coal.

Sounds like a good-paying job in the fresh air and sunshine to me.

:shrug:

but I'm a little long in tooth and short in desire, myself.

In all seriousness, I expect it will attract the same sort of people
who are happy to maintain oil & gas rigs in the middle of the sea
as those are pretty tall, rugged pieces of machinery too.
:shrug:

...the sort who like lying in an upside-down helicopter at the bottom of the North Sea?

Seems to be a popular passtime, that. :(

And we're assured the wind is pretty constant in the likely spots...

http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/coalvswind/c01.html


So the numbers don't jive so well.

I culled the above numbers from the Energy information Agency website using data from 2000; the latest date for which information is provided. 1032 are utility owned and the rest are classed as "non-utility" owned.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epav2/html_tables/epav2t23p1.html
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epav2/html_tables/epav2t45p1.html

Counting is always a consequence of what qualifies to be counted.

I needed it a few months ago and it took a while to track it down. UCS is a good group and as you say it depends on what is being counted. I'd bet they are referring to the number of coal facilities, many of them having multiple large generators.

... at first, smaller mills (<100 kilowatts?) popped up along their windy coastlines. Our friends there became shareholders in one early on and they broke even in no time at all, after that made tons of $$$ out of it.

Now, the companies have industrialized and optimized the windmill parks into arrays of multi-megawatt generators (that's several 1000 households per mill at peak output!!!) . Denmark generated 20% of its power (!) through wind in 2007.

My little town in Germany was the first one to build a community-owned wind park, and it became a raging success, both financially (big bucks), in terms of image, and we use green energy. Many of our hills (we are inland, 80 miles N of Frankfurt) have generators on them now.

If you stand below them, seeing their futuristic white shapes against the pale-blue sky on a winter evening, turning majestically, they look like beautiful, peaceful things from a better future.

Only, they are real now.