Wind Boom

Wind energy generation is booming [pdf].

Brussels, 2 February 2007. The booming wind energy markets around the world exceeded expectations in 2006, with the sector experiencing yet another record year. On the day of the publication of the 4th Assessment Report on Climate Change by the IPCC, the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) released its annual figures for 2006. These figures, which include wind energy developments in more than 70 countries around the world, show that the year saw the installation of 15,197 megawatts (MW), taking the total installed wind energy capacity to 74,223 MW, up from 59,091 MW in 2005.

Despite constraints facing supply chains for wind turbines, the annual market for wind continued to increase at the staggering rate of 32% following the 2005 record year, in which the market grew by 41%. This development shows that the global wind energy industry is responding fast to the challenge of manufacturing at the required level, and manages to deliver sustained growth. In terms of economic value, the wind energy sector has now become firmly installed as one of the important players in the energy markets, with the total value of new generating equipment installed in 2006 reaching €18 billion, or US$23 billion.

China is getting into the act. One of the resons for this is that China uses coal for most of its electrical generation. One of the major sources of air pollution in China.

Asia has experienced the strongest increase in installed capacity outside of Europe, with an addition of 3,679 MW, taking the continent over 10,600 MW. In 2006, the continent grew by 53% and accounted for 24% of new installations. The strongest market here remains India with over 1,840 MW of new installed capacity, which takes its total figure up to 6,270 MW.

China more than doubled its total installed capacity by installing 1,347 MW of wind energy in 2006, a 70% increase from last year’s figure. This brings China up to 2,604 MW of capacity, making it the sixth largest market world wide.

The Chinese market was boosted by the country’s new Renewable Energy Law, which entered into force on 1 January 2006. “Thanks to the Renewable Energy law, the Chinese market has grown substantially in 2006, and this growth is expected to continue and speed up. According to the list of approved projects and those under construction, more than 1,500 MW will be installed in 2007. The goal for wind power in China by the end of 2010 is 5,000 MW, which according to our estimations will already be reached well ahead of time,” said Li Junfeng of the Chinese Renewable Energy Industry Association (CREIA).

How is North America doing?

22% of the world’s new wind capacity was installed in North America, where the annual market increased by a third in 2005, gaining momentum in both the US and Canada.

For the second year running, the US wind energy industry installed nearly 2,500 MW, making it the country with the most new wind power.

“Strong growth figures in the US prove that wind is now a mainstream option for new power generation,“ said Randy Swisher, President of the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA). “Wind’s exponential growth reflects the nation’s increasing demand for clean, safe and domestic energy, and continues to attract both private and public sources of capital. New generating capacity worth US$4 billion was installed in 2006, billing wind as one of the largest sources of new power generation in the country – second only to natural gas – for the second year in a row.”

2,500 MW of new capacity is roughly equivalent to one nuke plant. How many nuke plants were added last year? Zero. How many are expected next year? Zero. How many are projected to be built in the next five years? Zero.

A 25% a year increase in the rate of capacity installation means that within three years or so we will be installing two nuke plants worth of wind a year. In six years that will be four nukes worth of wind per year. etc. An astounding rate of increase for such large systems.

You don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows.



Cross Posted at Classical Values

More Power From Less Wind

Wind power is currently limited by the fact that there is a minimum wind speed required for a wind turbine to begin operation. We could harvest a lot more energy from the wind if that minimum speed was lower. Plus it would help a lot if the wind passing the turbine was speeded up to make generation more effective. There is a new design for wind turbines which does exactly that.

FloDesign Wind Turbine, a spin-off from the aerospace company FloDesign based in Wilbraham, MA, has developed a wind turbine that could generate electricity at half the cost of conventional turbines. The company recently raised $6 million in its first round of venture financing and has announced partnerships with wind-farm developers.

The company's design, which draws on technology developed for jet engines, circumvents a fundamental limit to conventional wind turbines. Typically, as wind approaches a turbine, almost half of the air is forced around the blades rather than through them, and the energy in that deflected wind is lost. At best, traditional wind turbines capture only 59.3 percent of the energy in wind, a value called the Betz limit.

FloDesign surrounds its wind-turbine blades with a shroud that directs air through the blades and speeds it up, which increases power production. The new design generates as much power as a conventional wind turbine with blades twice as big in diameter. The smaller blade size and other factors allow the new turbines to be packed closer together than conventional turbines, increasing the amount of power that can be generated per acre of land.

The idea of enshrouding wind-turbine blades isn't new. But earlier designs were too big to be practical, or they didn't perform well, in part because the blades had to be very closely aligned to the direction of the wind--within three or four degrees, says Stanley Kowalski, FloDesign's CEO. The new blades are smaller and can work at angles of up to 15 to 20 degrees away from the direction of the wind.

One of the questions that will have to be answered is does the turbine wind up sounding like a jet engine? If so it will limit the places it can be deployed.

There are other problems as well. Like how will the rig stand up to 100 mph winds? Still it is a promising development.

H/T Helius at Talk Polywell.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Wind in Rockford

Note to my readers. I live in Rockford, Illinois. This was written about two years ago or so. It pertains to the problem of government impeding the process of letting people get what they want. Rules need to be fixed but variable. I hope that is clear.

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What are the prospects for wind energy in Rockford? In the short term not very good. The United States Government at:

Wind Power Maps

has maps showing the wind potential of every state of the union. Even though Illinois is rated as the 16th best possible production state for wind power most of the state is rated as marginal to fair in terms of site economics. The best general site is between Springfield and Quincy which runs in the fair to good category. Local conditions such as the amplifying effects of hills can increase the economics of certain sites even if siting windmills across the landscape is not feasible.

Generally what you have to do in these cases is to do a year long site survey. You do this by erecting a tower and mounting instruments on it. If there is already a long history of instrumentation at a site but not at the right place or height it may be possible to do a correlation with existing data and reduce the time it would take to do a survey with reasonable confidence of the results.

Since Rockford is in the marginal category we would need quite a bit of field work done before siting our first wind turbine. What we want to look for is wind amplifiers. Places that channel the prevailing wind from a wide area to a narrow one. A topographical feature that doubled the wind velocity would change a site from marginal to superb. An increase of as little as 25% could change a site from marginal to good.

To make wind energy more than a hobby in Rockford will require that we do some intelligent prospecting. Fort Collins, Colorado which is in an outstanding area (just short of superb) has had a wind energy program for some years. They handle the whole thing in a most democratic way. Those who want wind power pay 2.5 cents more per kilowatt hour and the power can be bought in blocks of five dollars. Thus those on a fixed budget need not pay more and those who want to pay for a move to renewables can do so in affordable increments. For those who wish the company can also charge all your useage every month to renewables. To find out more about their energy program and their installed wind turbines go to:

What the paper work looks like

and

Wind Turbines

The thing to do here in Rockford is to try and get Com Ed to take more of our money based on the source of the electricity we want to buy. They should do something like this state wide it is true. But since they have to start somewhere let it be Rockford.

Which brings me to the question of subsidies. In past years the Federal government has provided a subsidy of about 1.5 cents a kilowatt hour for wind electricity. This just about covers the cost difference between the current cost of coal electricity and the cost of wind. It is one of the reasons 1,700 Megawatts of wind was installed last year in the US of A. 1,000 Megawatts in Texas alone. In fact Enron is slated to deliver a very large percentage of those megawatts. The people Enron employs on these wind projects are still at work. So what should be done about the subsidies? As you know I am very anti-tax and pro-small government so I want to announce here that I am about to violate my principles. Since the industry is addicted to the subsidies and I believe wind energy converted to hydrogen is critical to reducing the amount of military effort we need to defend our energy supplies, I am in favor of a declining subsidy. Fix it to start at current levels and let it decline to zero over eight years. By that time through increased manufacturing efficiency wind will cost less than coal even without a subsidy.

In the long run the best answer to all this is to let well educated consumers make informed choices. If every household in Rockford signed up for a $5 a month boost to alternative energy there would be wind turbines sprouting at all the favorable sites in Rockford almost over night.

Unfortunately ComEd is a regulated utility so any change in the billing structure may require government approval. Can you believe it? We need government approval to pay more for our electricity! And they call this a free country.


M.L. Simon is an industrial controls designer and independent political activist

(c) M. Simon - All rights reserved.

BTW The subsidy was slated to be 1.8 cents per KWH this year but I don't know if it was approved by Congress. I'll update ya and have more good links.

Wind Power Monthly is from NZ but covers the world.

American Wind Energy Association covers the American scene plus they have a nice map and data on current projects.

This map shows what has been done so far - more than 6,000MW peak - roughtly 2 nuke plant equivalents!

John Atkinson over at winds of change linked to this. Some other nice energy updates there as well

John's Blog is here

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They Can't Make Them Fast Enough

Wind energy has hit a snag. The companies involved can't make the turbines fast enough.

"The worldwide demand for wind energy equipment is outstripping supply," says John Dunlop, senior technical services engineer for the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA). The manufacturing base that produces the huge structural components, blades, generators and gearboxes that make up today's high-tech windmills simply can't keep up with the number of planned and ongoing installations. Dunlop points out wind turbines purchased today won't likely be delivered until 2011 or 2012. "That's the lead time right now," he says.

Those lead times are confirmed by key components suppliers too. "It's more like 2012 in most cases," says Parthiv Amin, president of Winergy Drive Systems, a subsidiary of Siemens Energy & Automation and maker of the gearboxes and power transmission components used in wind machines.

A sizeable chunk of this demand is coming from the U.S. AWEA figures put the annual growth rate of wind energy capacity in the U.S. at 29 percent for the five years ending in 2007.

Wind turbine manufacture is hard to ramp up because the parts are very hard to make.

Wind energy does have some adoption barriers unrelated to the supply chain for turbine components. For example, transporting and installing wind turbines that now routinely reach 100m and have rotor diameters ranging from 60m to 100m is one such barrier. So is power transmission over our existing grid infrastructure. "The windiest locations tend not to be located near our population centers," says Dunlop. And with wind, whose available energy is a function of wind-speed cubed, "location is everything," he says.

Yet the barriers that may matter most to engineers can be found in design departments and factory floors. In particular, Dunlop mentions a lack of wind-friendly gearboxes, generators and bearings as a current bottleneck that could affect wind energy growth in the short term.

That's not surprising. Wind turbine components have a lot more in common with aerospace components than industrial ones. Consider gear boxes, for example. Amin says a 1.5 MW wind turbine would have a gearbox that weighs about 16 tons with both planetary and helical stages. On a wind turbine, these gearboxes act to increase speed rather than reduce it. Amin says they typically take a 70 or 80 rotor rpm up to 1,400 rpm or so to run the generator. In short, these gearboxes have to be big and robust.

Yet they also have to be as lightweight as possible given the stresses they see, and they have to be more precise than many ordinary industrial gearboxes. "In the industrial world, you want a gearbox to be as robust as possible. You might have a 1.5 to 2.5 safety factor," Amin says. On a wind turbine, though, such a big safety factor would add up to unacceptable weight penalty that could propagate through the turbine design in the form of heavier tower sections, foundations and bearings. "We have to design to razor-thin factor of safety because the weight issue," he says.

And it is not just gear boxes. The blades are difficult to make too.

The same goes for composite blades. "You're starting to see some failures in the field," says Bill McCormick, business development specialist for composites at MAG Cincinnati Automation & Test. He attributes them not to design but to lack of automation still common in the production of the huge turbine blades. "There's still a lot of hand layup and eyeballing the placement of reinforcing layers," he says.

Imagine trying to make a 150 ft. long blade by hand placing fiberglass. It would be hard to keep acceptable tolerances. And as the turbines get bigger fiberglass won't be strong enough. Carbon fiber will be required. And ordinary copper and steel generators will get too heavy. Superconductors will be required.

However, for immediate manufacturing problems hope and help is on the way.

All that may change as more money flocks into wind energy. Amin says he's starting to see "tremendous investments" in the kind of advanced manufacturing capabilities needed to ease wind energy's supply chain bottleneck – perhaps as early as 2011 in his opinion. Winergy itself plans to invest $30 million in its Elgin, IL facility this year and another $70 million over the next four years. And Spain's Gamesa, a leading maker of wind turbines, has opened manufacturing plants in Pennsylvania to make blades, nacelles and towers.

Elgin is about an hour's drive from where I live. I probably should take a camera and visit the plant some day.

Superconductor Generators For Wind

American Superconductor is making 100 superconducting generator sets for China.

DEVENS, Mass. --Jan. 22, 2009--American Superconductor Corporation, a leading energy technologies company, today announced that it has received a multi-million-dollar order for 100 sets of its wind turbine core electrical components from China's CSR Zhuzhou Electric Locomotive Research Institute Co.(CSR-ZELRI), Ltd. The company will use the components in 1.65 megawatt (MW) wind turbines designed by AMSC's wholly owned AMSC Windtec™ subsidiary. Under the terms of the contract, AMSC expects to ship all of the core electrical components by the end of calendar 2009 to support CSR-ZELRI's increased production of wind turbines.

AMSC's core electrical components include the company's proprietary PowerModule™ PM3000W power converter and enable reliable, high-performance wind turbine operation by controlling power flows, regulating voltage, monitoring system performance and controlling the pitch of wind turbine blades to maximize efficiency. Introduced in late 2008, the PM3000W is a fully programmable, flexible and modular power converter developed specifically for wind turbines with power ratings up to 6 MW.

The advantage of superconducting generators is that they weigh less. And the less the weight at the top of the tower the less material that is needed to make the tower. Doing more with less. Since capital costs are a very big component of the cost of wind energy lowering them lowers the cost of wind energy.

China has big plans for wind.

According to the Chinese Wind Energy Association [written in Chinese], China will grow its base of wind power from 5.9 gigawatts (GW) at the end of 2007 to more 10 gigawatts in 2008. In its Global Wind Energy Outlook 2008 report, the Global Wind Energy Council estimates that China's installed base could grow to 101 GW by 2020 under its "moderate" outlook scenario and 201 GW under its "advanced" scenario.

I think you have to divide those numbers by 3 to get the average power output. So 101 GW installed is equal to about 33 - 1 GW coal or nuclear plants. Not bad.

According to the Global Wind Energy Outlook 2008 report about 30% of the US investment in new electrical generating capacity is going into wind. And Turkey is ordering wind turbines like crazy. Wind is an excellent hedge against rising natural gas prices as the two types of generation are complimentary.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Update: 02 Feb. 2009 02:41z

Commenter Keith says there are no superconductors involved. He is right. I let my wishful thinking run away with me. He does say AMSC is developing a 10 MW generator for offshore wind. Something I would not have known without my error. A 10 MW job is just about the limit with current blade technology. So that is very welcome news.

For The Birds

There is a move afoot in Congress to require new wind turbine project developers to do envionmental impact statements on potential bird kills by turbines and to monitor wind sites for bird deaths.

The Energy Policy Reform and Revitalization Act, a wide-ranging energy bill introduced this month, would create new standards for the placement and construction of turbines and mandate post-construction monitoring of their effects on wildlife.

Mark Rodgers, a spokesman for Cape Wind Associates, the Boston-based firm proposing 130 wind turbines in Nantucket Sound, said his company already has performed much of the due diligence contemplated in the bill.

But he said he was concerned about a provision that would forbid construction of new turbines until the Department of the Interior drafts the regulations prescribed by the bill.

"Any kind of de facto moratorium on renewable energy at a time we need to take action on global warming and energy independence is blatantly poor public policy," he said.

How is this bill a de-facto moratorium?

The legislation, introduced by Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., the chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources, calls for development of the regulations within six months of passage of the bill. But wind energy industry officials say they are skeptical that federal regulators will move that quickly.

Supporters of the bill said careful regulation is important with a relatively new industry.

So just how important is it to prevent bird kills from wind turbines? Here are some numbers that accompanied the article:

Human-caused bird deaths

Domestic cats: Hundreds of millions a year

* Striking high-tension lines: 130 million - 1 billion a year
* Striking buildings: 97 million to 976 million a year
* Cars: 80 million a year
* Toxic chemicals: 72 million
* Striking communications towers: 4 to 50 million a year
* Wind turbines: 20,000 to 37,000

Source: National Research Council

So how bad is it? Let us go with the low end numbers for each category mentioned. Rougly 500 million bird deaths a year due to human additions to the landscape. Let us say bird deaths from several thousand wind turbines is 50,000 a year. That comes out to .01% of the total.

A recent study released by the National Research Council found that fewer than 0.003 percent of human-related bird deaths are caused by wind turbines — a fraction of the deaths caused by house cats allowed to roam outside. The council is part of the National Academies, which also comprise the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering and Institute of Medicine. They are private, nonprofit institutions that provide science, technology and health policy advice under a congressional charter.

Gregory Wetstone, senior director of government and public affairs for the American Wind Energy Association, a trade group, said the wind industry takes the issue of bird mortality seriously.

But the wind provisions of the Rahall bill could scare away investment, he said. "This would strangle wind power in the United States," Wetstone said.

We are currently erecting about one nuke plant equivalent of wind turbines every year in America. With the building rate increasing at such a furious pace that in three or four years we will be installing two nuke plant equivalents of wind every year.

So who might be trying to kill the wind power industry in America? None other than that great protector of the environment Senator Ted Kennedy

The list of opponents is a regular lawn party, starting with our own senior senator - and alleged ardent environmentalist - Ted Kennedy. His nephew, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. , who has made a career out of tree-hugging is also violently opposed.

Also aligned with the innocuously named Alliance To Protect Nantucket Sound, according to the book, is longtime Kennedy pal Bunny Mellon, the Listerine heiress who jets back and forth to her Osterville estate all summer in a gas-guzzling Gulf Stream; her former son-in-law, Virginia Sen. John Warner, who was once married to Elizabeth Taylor; ex-Gov. Mitt Romney, doing the bidding of top GOP fundraiser Dick Egan; U.S. Rep. William Delahunt, doing the bidding of the Kennedys; Former Reebok head Paul Fireman, who has a summer place on the Sound in Osterville; and a deep-pocketed bunch of Fireman’s neighbors including, oil baron Albert Kaneb, Cape Cod Times publisher Peter Meyer, who has a $1.2 million house on Wianno Avenue and whose newspaper led a jihad against the project, and oil heir and ex-America’s Cup winner Bill Koch.

“The sight of them bothers me,” Sen. Kennedy is quoted as telling retired utility exec - and wind farm supporter - Jim Leidell.

So why does the sight of wind farms bother Senator Kennedy?

When told that most of the time the turbines - which would generating enough energy to power Cape Cod during peak usage times - would be either invisible or barely visible from the Kennedy Compound, Ted reportedly replied, “But don’t you realize, that’s where I sail.”

Being a sailor myself I'm all for sailing. I'm currently short a yacht at this time. If some one wanted to rectify that I'd be eternally grateful.

In any case it really looks like another case of the rich and powerful depriving the little people of a clean source of low cost (considerably lower than natural gas fired power turbines) energy all over the country in order to protect their little corner of the world. You can read Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics, and the Battle for Our Energy Future on Nantucket Soundto find out more of the details.

H/T Instapundit who has some thoughts and more links.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Green Energy Kills Jobs

Durango, Colorado is having economic difficulties. And what are they giving up to be able to pay for city workers? Green energy.

For two years, the city of Durango, Colo., bought electricity for all its government buildings from wind farms. The City Council ended that program this year, reverting to electricity derived from coal-burning plants and saving the cash-strapped city about $45,000.

“It’s very hard for us to lay off an employee to justify green power,” City Manager Ron LeBlanc said. “Those are the tradeoffs you have to face.”

As long as wind and solar electricity cost more than conventional (coal, nuclear) electricity they are going to be a job killers. Now imagine what a plan to reduce fossil fuel use by 80% by 2050 is going to do if they are not replaced by low cost alternatives.

Plus, it seems wind is having reliability problems. Not just the intermittency of wind. The gear boxes connecting the turbine blades to the generators are falling apart.

Engineers at DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory want to know why some gearboxes and other key wind turbine components wear out too soon. Wind turbines are expected to operate for 20 years. Early equipment fatigue threatens to reduce performance and drive up wind power costs. "The end users and the owner-operators say we're only getting five years, or in some cases, three years out of these gearboxes," said NREL principal engineer Sandy Butterfield, who is leading the Gearbox Reliability Collaborative. Initially, the gearboxes are being tested at NREL's National Wind Technology Center before testing at a Colorado wind farm under real conditions.

Well that is going to raise the cost of wind power. A lot.

In good economic times the extra cost of wind electrical generation made some sense in order to develop wind to see how it worked in practice. Given the hard times we are having it makes sense to phase out the subsidy for wind so that wind turbines are installed only where they make economic sense. The same goes for solar and all the alternative energy subsidies. They are a job killers.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Another Green Boodoggle

Instapundit links to an article on underwater turbines for electricity generation.

Underwater wind turbines — it's an idea so simple you wish you’d patented it. Actually, they're called tidal turbines, and their rotors are propelled by tidal currents instead of wind. The largest test of this new type of power production is under way in New York City's East River, with six 35-kilowatt turbines scheduled to be installed by mid-March in a channel that's off-limits to large vessels.

Our major rivers all have significant barge traffic. So most of the best sites are off limits to these turbines because generating electricity is not the only use for a river.

Utility scale wind turbines are now being produced in the 3 MW (peak) range. About 100 times more output than these 35KW jobs. Even if you count the fact that winds are not constant, a standard wind turbine will produce about 30 times as much electricity as one of these water jobs.

As the 16-ft.-dia. rotors spin, as close as 6 ft. to the water's surface, they'll provide power to a supermarket and a parking garage. Once the test wraps up in June 2008, Virginia-based Verdant Power hopes to add hundreds more turbines, potentially reaching a total capacity of as much as 10 megawatts — enough to power 4000 homes.

Ten 3 MW wind turbines can provide the same amount of electricity. Probably at a much lower cost with fewer maintenance problems. You don't need a commercial divers license to maintain a wind turbine.

The test should answer real-world questions, such as whether the rotors will become encumbered by barnacles. But with researchers estimating that our rivers and estuaries could provide up to 130,000 gigawatt-hours per year — about half the yearly production of the country's dams — it's only a matter of time before major energy utilities begin testing the waters.

This sounds like a lot of energy. In fact it is about 3% of total US energy production from a system that would be a cost and maintenance nightmare.

The whole idea is a boondoggle.

America is the Saudi Arabia of wind. Wind is now lower cost than natural gas electricity and at the best sites costs the same as a coal fired electrical generator. With costs continuing to decline as wind turbines get larger.

Wind is intermittent you say? That is true. However, the wind is always blowing somewhere. You get enough turbines in an area and the electrical production averages out. In a large enough wind system you can use the wind for base load at 20% of the turbine's rating. Not very good? Actually year around production from a well sited turbine is only 33% of nameplate rating.

This test is a PR gimick.

If we were really serious about getting off fossil fuels and we didn't want the landscape covered with huge moving sculptures we ought to be researching and developing Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion.

Alarmism

More than six billion humans face extinction every year. And every year millions die. If the death rate accelerates it is hard to predict the overwhelmingly catastrophic consequences.

Inspired by Ecologist who says:

More than 25% of flowers face extinction – many before they are even discovered

I wonder if he didn't spell his name wrong. Mistakes happen. I'm just wondering if it shouldn't be Ecoligist.

And where did I find this person? At the Guardian UK's enviro blog where they claim Germany will get all its energy from renewables (or France) by 2050.

I wonder what their plan is for days when the wind doesn't blow? Or days when it blows too strong? Solar I guess until the sun goes down.

Except for one minor problem, German subsidies will be shifted from solar to wind.

The German photovoltaic industry knew bad news was on the way, and it could have been worse. Last week, Germany’s Environment Ministry recommended a shift in subsidies from solar energy installations to offshore wind farms. The solar sector breathed a collective sigh of relief because the subsidy could have easily been significantly cut or completely eliminated. Nevertheless outraged, the German Solar Industry Association issued a statement complaining that its members were in “a sensitive phase of development and [face] harsh competition with Asia.”

With Germany's impressive track record of renewable energy legislation, we have to wonder if the future will cause fickle investors to flock to wind now that solar subsidies have been cut in Germany. On the surface, this might look like a victory for wind power, but if you do a bit of digging, a different picture emerges.

Germans get 13% of their energy from renewable sources, but little of this energy comes from offshore wind farms, and the technology has been struggling to get out of the starting blocks. "The development of the offshore wind industry has gone forward more slowly than expected," said Michael Schroeren, a spokesman for Germany’s environment ministry. "And the cost of these new technologies is also higher than was expected." By shifting subsidies from solar to wind, the German government is essentially signaling to the market that wind isn't doing that great, and that the technology needs all the help it can get.

And why is a subsidy even necessary? Simple. Solar and wind are not competitive without lower cost collectors and really low cost storage. Otherwise you have to keep coal and natural gas plants on hot standby to make up for instantaneous declines in output. And of course on a really good day when solar and wind are producing more electricity than needed the excess is just wasted. And you still need the fossil fuel plants on hot standby - just in case. So where is the subsidy for storage? Not in evidence.

It looks to me like a classic case of ignorant politicians leading a stupid people. Well, in the long run the Germans (and every one else for that matter) always get what they deserve. Let us hope they get it good and hard and soon. Pour encourager les autres. Nothing like a Greek tragedy to wake people up.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Power From Wind

I think it might be a good idea to look at how a wind generator's output varies with speed. Wind power varies with the cube of wind speed. That is basic physics. No way around it that we know of.

So let us look at some wind turbines. Typical are turbines that start generating power at wind speeds of 2.5 meters per second and max out at wind speeds of 16 meters per second or 20 meters per second. First let us convert that to miles per hour to get a feel for the speeds involved.

2.5 m/s = 6 mph
16 m/s = 36 mph
20 m/s = 45 mph

Now let us look at output.

If you consider 2.5 m/s minimum output then at 16 m/s maximum output the max/min ratio is 262. At 20 m/s the max/min ratio is 512.

Or consider a wind blowing at 90% of maximum turbine rating. Output is 73% of maximum. At 80% output is 51% max. At 70% it is 35%. At 60% it is 22%. At 50% it is 12.5%. At 40% you are down to 6.4%. At 30% you are down to 2.3%. At 20% you are at less that 1%.

Economically it is probably useless (other than to impress the rubes) to design wind turbines that can handle max/min ratios more than 5 or 6 to 1. And from a practical stand point useful effectiveness is actually in the 2 to 1 range.

So it is not just having wind. You really need a very stiff breeze to generate useful power. I think our experiment with deploying massive amounts of high cost wind power are just about over. If the costs come down that improves the situation some. But not a lot.

Evidently Mr. Obama and his Green friends have never run the numbers.

Inspired by Glasgow Looking To Freeze In The Dark

Cross Posted at Classical Values

More wind: I was wrong

I'm tired of politics for a few minutes so let us talk about wind, taxes, politics and capitalism. A welcome change from politics no?

Link to Wind in Rockford - the previous in the series

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I was wrong to endorse the Federal Government subsidy for wind energy production. I was wrong because it is not a subsidy. It is a production tax credit. It is a tax reduction. As a tax reduction the money does not flow to Washington and back with the usual bureaucrats getting their cut.

The money stays with the people who took a risk and produced the wealth. Congress has extended the tax credit for at least two years. As far as I'm concerned it can last until wind electricity unsubsidized matches the cost of other energy sources (about three to five years). Now I admit it is a distortion of the tax system. Like a balloon if you push it in one place it expands in another. The problem here is the size of the government. The less air there is in the balloon the less it expands when squeezed. And as we all know from filling out the forms this year that those guys in Washington really want to squeeze. Not only that but the forms were so complicated that even Einstein couldn't figure out the "simple" forms from his day. It is not just the money (it's the money), it's the agravation.

Now many of you alternative energy enthusiasts believe that government is the answer to the lack of alternative energy in America. That if we only put a gun to people's heads (government) and extracted a few extra billion all will be well, we will be on the road to energy salvation. We are all good people here (I assume) and would never go over to our neighbors house and put a gun to his head and tell him if he doesn't invest in alternative energy in the correct amounts (given in this here table) that you will confiscate his property. But as soon as we put the government in charge of the guns the transaction becomes clean. I don't buy it. But a lot of people do.

Now of course you will tell me that the government has already distorted the market by subsidizing oil,coal, and nuclear. This may be so. So I ask you. Do you like the gun being put to your head to make you support something you don't believe in? The answer here is to remove the subsidies. Limit government to it's constitutional function of keeping the peace, and let the people (who are smarter than the government) go back to making decisions on how best to spend their own money. It may take a while to get to that point but it is way more moral than putting another gun to people's head. If we really believe in living in harmony with the environment we cannot morally achieve that end by coercing people with the power of government guns to achieve our ends.

Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman estimates that if government was limited to it's actual constitutionally limited functions the American economy would be growing at 10% a year. Think of the resources available for wind, fuel cells, solar and all other kinds of good things with out the weight of government on our backs.

Morality aside it won't work. During the last major energy shortage almost thirty years ago a credit was given by the government for the installation of solar hot water heaters. A lot of them were installed in the hopes of saving energy and the certainty of a government tax credit. This lead to a wave of shoddy installations. The solar hot water business has never recovered it's reputation. Too much money chasing too little expertise. Honest growth is organic. You can force it a little. If you try to force it a lot you get death. Too much fertilizer can stunt growth or even kill your plants. The very same is true in an industrial economy.

Now I will grant you that there is enough wind in America to support all it's electrical needs. In theory if we wanted to we could get all our energy from wind in a year. In practice we will be hard pressed to get to 100% in fifty years. We have problems. The first is that it takes time to build industrial capacity. The faster you try to build that capacity the more it costs. If you try to build the capacity too fast the system will collapse. The second is energy storage which I will cover at another time.

From what I know of industrial systems and their rate of growth possibilities I think a feasible rate of growth for wind installations in America is a doubling every year or two until the installed base of wind plants supplies about 2% of America's electrical power. Once the production of wind turbines becomes a significant fraction of GNP the rate needs to slow to a doubling every three or four years. If we try to do much more we will have a lot of wasted production capacity when we have installed near 100% of the useable sites and the demand for them goes down. A lot of people who earned a living will be out of jobs. We want to minimize this.

None of this, however, needs to be explicitly planned. If we keep the government out of the wind market the market will adjust to real conditions instead of manufactured incentives. I still think that even the production tax credit ought to be phased out over time. We don't want to be priming the pump when the flow is sufficient. It is a waste.

M. Simon is an industrial controls designer and Free Market Green

(c) M. Simon - All rights reserved. (originally published around 2002)

BTW Congress has not passed the PTC (Production Tax Credit) this year. Tell them to get on the stick. Wind is a key component of America's energy future.

Link to the House of Reps - contact your Rep.

Link to the Senate - contact your Senators

Link to the White House - contact your President. If he is not your President, don't bother.

Something To Study

This is an update on my previous post Superconductor Generators For Wind where I stated that American Superconductors were working on superconducting generators for wind. That turned out to be incorrect.

It turns out that the DOE is now sponsoring a program to develop superconducting generators for wind and American Superconductor Corp. is in the thick of it.

American Superconductor Corp., Devens, Mass., recently announced that it has entered into a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and its National Wind Technology Center (NWTC) to validate the economics of a full 10MW-class superconductor wind turbine. Under the 12-month program, AMSC Windtec, Klagenfurt, Austria, a wholly owned subsidiary of AMSC, will analyze the cost of a full 10MW-class superconductor wind turbine, which will include a direct drive superconductor generator and all other components, including the blades, hub, power electronics, nacelle, tower, and controls.

The NWTC will then benchmark and evaluate the wind turbine’s economic impact, both in terms of its initial cost and its overall cost of energy.

OK. It is just a study. But it is a start.

Why is this important? A couple of reasons. First off is that the superconducting generators proposed will eliminate one of the high cost and high weight items in a wind turbine generator set. The gear box. It should also lower the weight of the generator as this article on superconducting motors shows a weight reduction of 50% for a 36 MW motor is possible.

And the weight reductions have multiple benefits. It lowers the weight of the generator support structure at the top of the tower and also lowers the weight of the supporting tower. There are big cost savings possible if American Superconductor can turn the study into an actual generator.

Ten megawatts is probably above the size where wind power costs less than coal fired electrical power. If only the mopes in Congress had been putting more into research we might not be spending a fortune on wind generators that produce electricity (unsubsidized) at a cost of 2X of coal fired electricity. Better late than never.

Houston We Have a Logistics Problem

If you are interested in developing wind power on a large scale, tens to hundreds of megawatts, you have a problem. A logistics problem.

In what has to be one of the biggest ironies surrounding alternative energy, many of the objections to wind energy focus on its effect on nature. Yet while the critics fret about the birds, the views and the noise, there's a much bigger barrier to wind on the horizon, one that many of its biggest proponents haven't yet taken into account. Wind energy, it seems, is starting to become a victim of its own success.

"The worldwide demand for wind energy equipment is outstripping supply," says John Dunlop, senior technical services engineer for the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA). The manufacturing base that produces the huge structural components, blades, generators and gearboxes that make up today's high-tech windmills simply can't keep up with the number of planned and ongoing installations. Dunlop points out wind turbines purchased today won't likely be delivered until 2011 or 2012. "That's the lead time right now," he says.

Those lead times are confirmed by key components suppliers too. "It's more like 2012 in most cases," says Parthiv Amin, president of Winergy Drive Systems, a subsidiary of Siemens Energy & Automation and maker of the gearboxes and power transmission components used in wind machines.

So how long does it take to build a factory that can take steel forgings and turn them into suitable gears and gear boxes? About three or four years. The tolerances are tight and the weight limits are similar to those found in aerospace. How about the generators? The same. So for the next four years or so wind installations are going to be limited to those already contracted for. Some one should tell Boone Pickens before he gets carried away with delusions of grandeur. Ramping up wind is not something that will get done in a few years. Not even in the decade Mr. Obama promises. It will take five or ten decades and any politician who promises you different is lying to you.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

The Wind Power Express

Since there is so much Green Money coming out of Washington it looks like a lot of people want in on the act. There is a lot of wind in the upper Mid-West but not many power lines. So a company is proposing that the government get behind building some new power lines.

ITC Holdings Corp., over the past year, has worked to develop the "Green Power Express," a network of transmission lines that would facilitate the movement of 12,000 MW of power from the wind-abundant areas in the Dakotas, Minnesota and Iowa to Midwest load centers, such as Chicago, southeastern Wisconsin, Minneapolis and other states that demand clean, renewable energy. This new project addresses the recognized lack of electric transmission infrastructure needed to integrate renewable wind energy.

"We are proud to announce the Green Power Express after almost a year of studies, stakeholder discussions and development," said Joseph L. Welch, chairman, president and CEO of ITC. "The Green Power Express will create the much-needed link between the renewable energy-rich regions of the Midwest and high-demand population centers. The plan is consistent with efforts supported by organizations such as the Upper Midwest Transmission Development Initiative and promotes a national energy vision. ITC looks forward to continuing to work with them and other stakeholders in the region to move forward with this long-term solution to our national energy challenges."

The Green Power Express is just one step in ITC's broader efforts to modernize the overburdened, aging electricity grid. This project will be an integral component to ITC's efforts to create a high-voltage backbone that can meet America's renewable energy goals and eliminate costly inefficiencies in the grid.

Lots of wonderful goodness there. Until you get to the fine print.

The Green Power Express transmission project will traverse portions of North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana and will ultimately include approximately 3,000 miles of extra high-voltage (765 kV) transmission. The entire project is currently estimated to cost approximately $10 to 12 billion. Portions of the Green Power Express fall within the service territory of ITC Midwest, an ITC subsidiary. ITC has been working with many of the Upper Midwest wind developers over the last year in assembling a realistic accounting of their wind development plans and sites, which resulted in the design of the Green Power Express.

That transmission is going to be done with AC which is not the most efficient over long distances for a number of technical reasons. DC also gives you something for wind generators - it can accept variable frequency AC easily (because it is converted to DC. In addition the power quality of the AC does not need to be very good. So what does that mean? Cheaper (and possibly lighter) generators for all those wind turbines. The savings in wind turbine costs might very well pay for a significant part of the line costs. Unfortunately we have separated generation from transmission (it does have its good points in diversifying sources of supply) so that the system costs are not properly accounted for.

I suppose that political pressure could be brought to bear to get the transmission companies to do the right thing.

Contact Government:

House of Representatives
The Senate
The President

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Wind Power To Be Collected More Efficiently

It will be done by optimizing siting.

Evolution is providing the inspiration for University of Adelaide computer science research to find the best placement of turbines to increase wind farm productivity.

Senior Lecturer Dr Frank Neumann, from the School of Computer Science, is using a “selection of the fittest” step-by-step approach called “evolutionary algorithms” to optimise wind turbine placement. This takes into account wake effects, the minimum amount of land needed, wind factors and the complex aerodynamics of wind turbines.

What a Nice Bit Of Work. Collecting energy which is mostly useless more efficiently is a big advance. Evidently storage – which is the real missing ingredient is more difficult.

Not useless you say? This story says otherwise.

Today in Scotland, as the Great Recession rolls on, and as newly reprimitivized “wind farms” replace more tried and true — and apparently predictable – methods of electricity generation, history rhymes rather nicely. The BBC reports, “Six Scottish windfarms were paid up to £300,000 to stop producing energy, it has emerged:”

I guess wind is different. With normal power plants you pay for the energy used. With wind plants unusable energy now has value. Well not to civilization of course. But the wind farmers do quite nicely.

H/T Instapundit

Cross Posted at Classical Values

The Next Big Thing

In Secular Decline I looked at where we are in the business cycle. What I said basically was that semiconductors and the microprocessor advance were no longer providing excess profits. To a pretty fair extent the world has been computerized. Profit opportunities are declining.

So then comes the question: What will be the next big thing? The The Online Investing AI Blog linked has a nice graph of the business cycle. But let me cut to the chase.

Solar power. Fusion power. Mind-Machine interfaces. Nano-technology. Personalized medicine. Rapid prototyping.

They also mention "Smart AI-powered investing for the masses". Now I don't see how that can work. If they can identify above average opportunities reliably, the masses will all invest and there goes your above average opportunity.

As to the others. There are lots of opportunities in nano-technology. Which one? And yes, solar is probably one or ten breakthroughs away from being low cost enough to start capturing a lot of the electrical energy market. Except wind is currently lower cost and the cost reduction curve is more reliable. I can tell you, almost certain, that wind will become lower cost than coal fired electrical plants when wind turbines reach the 8 to 12 MW (peak) size. Right now the 5 MW (peak) size is just going into series production. That means that at the best wind sites the cost is below coal and at the worst it is above coal.

There are two problems with wind. All the best sites are in places (like North Dakota) where grid connections are sparse. And wind is intermittent. Which means that without storage its contribution is limited to about 10% of grid power.

Which points to two investment opportunities. The first company (GE? Westinghouse? Siemens?) to come out with 2 MV DC transmission equipment and 2 MV DC to AC conversion equipment (AC to DC is easy) will help bring wind from the upper Mid-West to the loads in the more populous states. It also gives rise to the possibility of wind going above 10% to perhaps 20% of grid power because of both wider generation averaging and load averaging.

So what is the second opportunity? Low cost very high power energy storage. Will it be batteries? Fuel cells? Flywheels? No one knows. What we know is that the technology will have low turn around losses (generation - storage - generation), very high energy capacity, reasonably long life (5 to 20 years), low losses over 24 to 72 hours of storage, and low cost per KWh stored (below 2¢ per KWh with the possibility of getting below .5¢ per KWh). A pretty tall order.

As for solar - because it is better matched to grid demands (high in the day low at night), and because of its greater predictability (when the sun shines) it can probably go to 20% to 30% of grid power before storage is a necessity.

In addition wind peaks during the low demand season of winter and sun peaks during the high demand season of summer. So the two forms of production are to a certain extent complimentary. However, solar peaks at noon and the load (air conditioning mostly) peaks at 3 PM. So economical 4 to 6 hour storage would be good. However, that storage would be mostly idle in the winter except for load leveling.

So what else will be needed? Smart grid equipment which can turn on and off loads like electric water heaters, refrigerators, and air conditioners to match supply and demand better over short intervals (say 15 to 30 minutes). If plug in hybrids become big they could be used for load leveling over short intervals as well allowing motor fuels (cellulostic ethanol?) to be used to arbitrage the high cost of day time electricity with the low cost of night time electricity. Everybody will become demand metered. And that is another opportunity.

Fusion power? There is no working prototype yet. Personalized medicine? Another 100 to 500 breakthroughs are needed. One of which is much lower cost genetic sequencing and the ability to produce required molecules in mass quantities (1 to 5 grams - which is a lot if you are making them a molecule at a time). Rapid prototyping? I saw a machine for sale a month or two ago that fits on a desktop that costs $5,000. A little pricey for a home that might only need 5 to 50 custom parts a month. And only good for small plastic parts in any case. To make such a system work you also need to be able to make metal parts too. Which means a small milling machine and a small lathe. Each of those is going to run another $5,000 or so with current technology and auxiliary equipment like clamps measuring tools etc.

Mind machine interfaces? Another 1,000 to 5,000 breakthroughs required.

Now what can we say about all these things? Progress is being made and some day in the next 5 to 20 years each will cross the 2% penetration threshold where they take off rapidly. OTOH there is danger too. If you can make your own molecules in a well stocked home lab, virus making is just a few computer codes away.

How will man, with his hunter gatherer brain, with all his passions, survive such access to power? That is the $640 trillion dollar question.

Biodiesel Stalls Bus

Cold weather is the bane of alternative energy. Wind turbine blades ice up, solar panels get covered with snow, and biodiesel congeals.

In January 2007, a bus stalled in the middle of the night on Interstate 70 in the Colorado mountains. The culprit was a 20 percent biodiesel blend that congealed in the freezing weather, according to John Jones, the transit director for the bus line, Summit Stage. (Biodiesel is a diesel substitute, typically made from vegetable oil, that is used to displace some fossil fuels.)

The passengers got out of that situation intact, but Summit Stage, which serves ski resorts, now avoids biodiesel from November to March, and uses only a 5 percent blend in the summertime, when it can still get cold in the mountains. “We can’t have people sitting on buses freezing to death while we get out there trying to get them restarted,” Mr. Jones said.

Winter may pose even bigger safety hazards in the vicinity of wind turbines. Some observers say the machines can hurl chunks of ice as they rotate.

“It’s like you throw a plate out there and that plate breaks,” said Ralph Brokaw, a cattle rancher in southeast Wyoming who has 69 wind turbines on his property. When his turbines ice up, he stays out of the way.

The wind industry admits that turbines can drop ice, like a lamppost or any tall structure. To ameliorate the hazard, some turbines are painted black to absorb sunlight and melt the ice faster. But Ron Stimmel, an expert on small wind turbines at the American Wind Energy Association, denies that the whirling blades tend to hurl icy javelins.

Which would tend to indicate that at this stage of alternative energy development that cold weather is a hazard to energy production. Not to mention life and limb.

This could be a difficult problem especially for wind which produces its highest output in winter when the winds are the strongest.

...as renewable energy becomes a bigger part of the nation’s power mix, the seasonable variability could become more of a problem. Already, power developers are learning that they must make careful plans to avoid the worst impacts of ice and snow.

Trey Taylor, the president of Verdant Power, which has put small turbines in the tidal East River in New York City and plans more for the St. Lawrence River in Canada, said that ice chunks could slide over one another “like a deck of cards,” pushing ice below and harming turbines. That may rule out parts of otherwise promising sites like the Yukon River in Alaska, he said.

Kevin Devlin, the vice president for operations of Iberdrola Renewables, a wind developer, said that winter was probably the hardest time of year to maintain turbines, because workers must go out in snow and ice. Occasionally, he said, the turbines will shut down or set off alarms if it is too cold, and workers must brave the elements to fix them.

For homeowners, the upkeep of their power sources can also be a bother.

Mr. Stankevitz keeps his panels tilted 40 degrees or higher, but they still become covered with snow — and experts say that if even one cell in a panel is covered, the panel will not produce power.

With alternative energy only at about 1% of grid power the variability of the sources with the weather is not a big consideration. However, as the proportion rises the difficulties in maintaining the flow of electricity in all weather conditions will get more serious.

No doubt solutions will be found over time. However, forcing the introductions of these technologies before the problems are solved is a waste of resources. And you know what wasting resources does, don't you? It causes pollution.

H/T My Climate Buzz

Picken Apart Pickens

Bob Zubrin discusses the T. Boone Pickens plan to replace natural gas electricity with wind based efficiency. He seems a bit weak in understanding how wind and natural gas electricity are complimentary. So I wrote a comment:

Bob,

Evidently you don't know what natural gas is used for in America. It is not for base load, it is for peaker plants. Wind and natural gas are dispatchable in the same time frame. About 15 minutes. So if the wind is blowing you can shut down the peakers. When the wind declines you can start them up again.

In addition distributed wind can supply about 20% of nameplate rating as base load. Not bad since a wind plant delivers about 33% of nameplate rating on average.

Love your flex fuel plan for autos. Your understanding of the electrical generation market indicates further study is required.

==

Let me add here that using natural gas for home heating is its most efficient use. Wind would lower natural gas demand and thus lower heating bills. That would be a good thing.

H/T Instapundit


Cross Posted at Classical Values

Wind Scam

In a comment on my post Green Energy Kills Jobs stressdoc had this to say about his experience with wind power.

I am a mechanical engineer and quite knowledgeable about wind power and the reliability problems. They are many!

Wind power has a longer history in the EU, but the experience has been similar. Wind power has been subsidized in the EU for longer than it has here in the states. The results have been similar. Power from wind turbines is more expensive that the more traditional sources (coal, gas, hydroelectric, nuclear and oil). The only way that it viable is with government subsidies.

In the EU, turbines cannot be installed without monitoring system to watch their health. This is due to the many failures that have occurred. They cannot operate without insurance and the insurance is unavailable without monitoring. Here in the states, very few turbines are installed with monitoring.

Why? Simple. Turbines here are normally owned by investor groups that exist primarily to market the tax credits. The total cost of the turbine can be recouped in 3-5 years with these credits. The investor groups contract with the turbine manufacturers to install and operate the turbines for the 5 year warrantee period. By the time that the warrantee has expired, the turbines are paid for and any further running time is pure gravy. When they fail, shut them down and there is no loss.

Except, of course, to the tax payers that support this scam.

I have always thought that the subsidy for wind power ought to be phased out. I'm more convinced of that than ever. I am still in favor of wind power, where it makes unsubsidized economic sense.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Energy Panics

We have been having energy panics for as long as I can remember. We have yet to come to a point where the market if allowed to react to prices couldn't adjust.

Well I'm over at Winds of Change, where they are discussing tide power. The article they point to is discussing what a great thing it will be by 'n by. One commenter wails that he thinks millionaires are wasting their money on rides in space when they could be funding wave power. This point of view has a number of faults, however, in the comments section there (reprinted here) I deal with the technical aspects.

=========================================================

The way to get millionaire capitalists to invest in any kind of power is to show an above average rate of return. Preferably in a year or less.

Of course with all the environmental regulatory hurdles they have to go through plus government permission for use of a section of the coastal ocean you have a number of barriers to progress with wave energy.

Fairly applied regulations slow every thing down. Not just the bad guys.

My guess is that the money is going into wind because the payback is good and well established. In addition a wind plant can be put up in six months and the electrical grid need not be extended (at least for on shore wind).

There may be maintenance factors as well.

Every time I come here I find a number of folks untutored in energy, mechanics, science, control theory, production, logistics, etc. hoping for a miracle cure. It is as much fun as listening to flat earthers. Amusing occasionally. Boring for long stretches.

The major energy systems of 40 years hence are already in significant production.

That would be wind (1,000s of Megawatts per year [peak] installed every year) and solar voltaic (10s of Megawatts per year [peak] installed every year).

In the automotive sector it would be the gas/electric hybrid. (something like 1/2 million or a million will get made this year.)

Every thing else is experimental.

There is no magic cure. Progress as usual will be slow and steady. The best we can do is nudge it in the right direction. There is a lot of inertia in any industrial system.

If we had the magic cure tomorrow it would still take 40 years to build out. Even if the magic cure produced free energy it would still take 5 to 10 years. That would be design and test time. Time to ramp up production. Time to teach people how to install it. etc.

Take wind:

The first major installations (Tehachapi in CA I think) happened 25 or 30 years ago and were not very cost effective. It has taken that long for the size to get up to the range where wind power can compete with coal and nukes.

Photo voltaics have been in the pipe line longer but are not yet economical for large installations due to the slower rate of cost decline. Still it will be a factor. Just not as big as wind for quite some time (perhaps as long as 100 years).

Pretty much we have to make do with what we got and work for incremental improvements.

BTW if we convert to renewables in 100 years that still leaves us with 400 years of coal. Probably 100 years of oil (I think that point will be controversial) and several hundred years worth of nuclear power (I know, I know - the plutonium).

Plenty of time to make the changes (already in progress).

Don't panic. Unless of course you enjoy that sort of thing. Personally I worried about these sorts of problems 45 years ago. I became an engineer. I have operated nuke plants. I have studied wind. I first used solar voltaics in 1962. I have designed aircraft electrical system.

Quit complaing and get educated.