frflyer

A-Power Energy Generation Systems: Headwind or Tailwind?

"Wind power business is very capital intensive. To build a wind power turbine business from scratch, it takes significant upfront capital outlays to acquire land, equipment, technology licenses and other necessary manufacturing facilities. For example, Beijing-based wind turbine new entrant Shengguo Tongyuan recently invested RMB 460 million ($65million) in the first phase of a wind turbine project with annual output of 1,000 units of 1.5MW wind turbines."

"The second phase will cost an additional $90 million."

I'm a little confused by the above paragraph. How is $155 million dollars expensive for 1.5 GW generating capacity? A nuclear plant of same size would be about 50 times that much, at maybe $6.5 billion to build.

Or am I just misreading what is being said here?

A-Power Energy Generation: Chinese Company with Huge Growth Begins to Move

I agree, Dave. But the number I saw for China's 2020 wind energy goal was 100 GW, or 100,000 MW. They increased wind energy by over 6 GW last year, second only to the U.S. increase of 8.3 GW. I think and hope that China will surprise us with renewable efforts. They also have tremendous solar potential in their western regions.

adt
Maybe what you call looking in the rearview mirror is looking a little further ahead than just the next quarter. Sure you can trade renewable energy stocks, but the long term picture is why I picked up a small piece of APWR recently. We're probably about due for more profit taking like we saw today, so I'll try to pick up more on a pullback.

The Differences Between Chinese and U.S. Economic Recoveries

yes the Ozone hole did close up
and move
and it has opened up again but not like it was before.

If you hear someone argue against global warming theory and they mention the name Al Gore, you can be sure they are not basing their ideas on science, but using Gore as a scapegoat because they don't have anything else to back up their talk. And you can be sure their opinions are almost entirely based on politics, not science.

Yes, I do understand how greenhouse gases operate.

As far as the burning of ethanol, if true, it doesn't surprise me since this is the worst of alternative energies, unless we can develop algae or cellulose based methods that are better environmentally and economically.

But guess what the Bush administration put the most money into.
Why?- because big industries wanted it. Big Agriculture, auto makers, etc.

The Differences Between Chinese and U.S. Economic Recoveries

paulaut

I admit I'm not a climate scientist, I'm a layman, one with about 1500 hours of research behind what I say. The links are mostly to science websites, not political sites. The fact that I'm a layman is why I point people to the actual science, rather than a bunch of politically motivated opinions.
Most skeptics read other skeptic opinions and don't even bother to see what the actual science says. They gobble up the pseudo science that most of the deniers cling to, out of pure political belief,


The fact remains that the scientific evidence is getting stronger everyday and is overwhelming. The consensus is also overwhelming. It is supported by just about every major scientific organization in the world, including the academy of science of every country that has one, and the earth sceince faculty of every major university in the world.

Believe what you want. Opinions are not worth much. The science is. Do you read what the scientists I reference have to say? I bet not. It might undermine the urban legends about climate change that are the talking points of most skeptics.

The Differences Between Chinese and U.S. Economic Recoveries

fireofenergy
I apologise in advance if I misunderstand you. Everything sounded good till the last paragraph.

"Enviro's need to care more about all the damage POST OIL CRISES will do than worry about pretty lands and their backyard."

That is not the case. It's not about pretty lands. It's about the suvival of ecosystems that are critical to all species, including ours.
They are not separate things or separate interests.
Man's welfare IS the envirnonment's welfare and vise a versa.
We can't survive in a bubble, separate from the rest of the species on earth. We are part of those ecosystems, interdependent parts of the web of life. This isn't some hippie enviro delusion. It's scientific fact.
And it's the fundamental concept that anti environmentalists don't get. If half the species on earth go extinct in the next century or two from global warming, how would man be a special case? Do they think nature will give us some special dispensation because we are human? Yes it is that serious.

The Differences Between Chinese and U.S. Economic Recoveries

mr. burns

Water vapor is indeed a greenhouse gas, but it acts as an amplifying feedback mechanism that accelerates warming, not as a cause of warming itself. The science is very clear on this.

No, volcanos produce about 1/100 as much CO2 as man, and they also produce sulfer oxides and such that have a cooling effect. Volcanos are not a big mystery to climate scientists. They had an excellent chance to study them when the big volcano erupted in the Phillipines in the 90s.
Again, the science is very clear on this also.

No, the earth is not cooling. That is more misinformation. That conclusion is only reached by cherry picking the data and manipulating the charts. It is false 100% false.
Just because someone makes these claims doesn't make them true, they are contrary to the science.

Excellent spoof/demonstration of how deniers cook up their phony claims, like that the earth is cooling now.
greenfyre.wordpress.co.../


Since this is such a popular skeptic argument presently, here are more links on supposed cooling of late.

scienceblogs.com/delto...

www.realclimate.org/in...

climateprogress.org/20.../

climateprogress.org/20.../

Like I said before you won't get real information from the sources you are getting these lies from. Go to the science websites I list in the previous post.

Every argument you have raised has been completely and absolutely debunked by science.

It is not a natural cycle.
It is not cooling.

It is the rapid rate of change that is so dangerous, not just what temperature it is.
Neither man or other species can adapt fast enough.

Global average has risen 1.4 F in 100 years. In the Arctic temp has risen 3 C or 5.4 F
The small change so far is enough to melt the polar ice caps, change timing of seasons, screw up the migration/feeding/bree... patterns of many species, acidify the ocean and much more.

You have been listening to a bunch of nonsense so far. Don't be so gullible.

The Differences Between Chinese and U.S. Economic Recoveries

wind4me

I think you misunderstood me. I said wind energy had expanded by 8.3 GW capacity. Wind has a capacity factor of about 35% because of it's intermittency. So the 8.3 GW can't be compared directly with 8.3 GW from coal or nuclear, which have capacity factors of about 90%.( they need some downtime for maintainence etc., but otherwise run 24/7)

So the 8.3 GW of wind capacity can generate about as much in kilowatt hours as 3 nuclear plants of 1 GW capacity each.

This is correct, or close at least. The average nuke in the U.S. is 1 GW capacity. The average coal plant in the U.S. is about 600 MW capacity.

Capacity is how much a power source can produce at peak power.
What we need to know is how many kilowatt hours it will produce, or Gigawatt hours if you like. That's what the capacity factor is used to figure out. Solar PV is about 25%. Wind 35-40%
Solar thermal with heat storage could approach the capacity factor of nuclear and coal, if enough heat storage is built in to run all night.

The Differences Between Chinese and U.S. Economic Recoveries

The ozone hole closed up after we banned CFCs. A Nobel prize was awarded to the three scientists who dug up the evidence. The ozone hole hasn't closed entirely, but CFCs haven't been entirely stopped, regardless of the Montreal Protocol that banned them.
And there are other gases that contribute to the problem. Nitrous oxide from vehicle exhaust is one if I'm not mistaken.

And the same right wing "think tanks" that fought against the science on tobacco smoke, and the science of CFCs and the ozone layer, are now fighting the science of global warming.
And they often use the same fossil fuel funded scientists, to state their case, like Fred Singer who has taken money for all three of these unworthy causes.

The Differences Between Chinese and U.S. Economic Recoveries

raising4daughters

"I'm not smart enough to argue with you on this topic, but I continue to suspect that the global warming crisis is overstated like all other political-economic crises in order to get attention and money."

You're not smart enough to argue, but like 79% of Republicans, you think you are smarter than the 97% of active climate scientists who agree on global warming?

That is the best example of the dumbing down of America that I have ever heard of.

The scientists are not alarmists. That is just not true. They have been overly conservative if anything. That is the truth. It's the nature of science to be conservative, plodding and skeptical. That's how the scientific process works.
But that is not the skepticism of the denier crowd. Not even close. They continue to repeat arguments that were decent arguments ten or twenty years ago, but that the science has left far behind. That is not scientific skepticism. It is deceit, plain and simple. And it is all those with certain political ideology need to hear, as they are gullible enough to believe anything that fits their political bias.

The idea that scientists are in it for the money is so ludicrous it defies common sense. The idea that the science is wrong because it is government funded is equally absurd. Who do you think does most basic research? Academic labs and government funded research, in every branch of science do the yeomans work of basic research. Scientists are really motivated by science, not money. Any respectable scientist will tell you that.

Have you seen the latest on climate change? It is more proof that the scientists have been overly conservative, not alarmist. You are just repeating an accusation which you have no clue is true. The fact that you use the term alarmist when by your own admission you don't understand the science, should tell you something is amiss. On what do you base this assumption of alarmism? According to who?

news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20...
Global warming seen worse than predicted

You are being fooled by one of the largest and best funded propaganda campaigns in history. And what is really sad, is that it is working.

It's about a heck of a lot more than the plight of the polar bears. How about a drought that effects one third of the planet for 1000 years, with no surviving agriculture in California, because there won't be any irrigation water. That's just one small outcome of what will happen if we do nothing.

We are in danger of exceeding tipping points, like the melting of the tundra, that can accelerate global warming beyond our ability to mitigate it. These aren't alarmist delusions, they are real dangers.

Did you read what I said about the carbon cycle? That's not science fiction. It's fact.
There is no way you can release 60 million years of carbon accumulation from the carbon cycle, in what is the equivalent to a nanosecond in geological time, and expect a good outcome.
Common sense would tell you that. You don't need to fully understand the science to get that.
It does help if you know what the carbon cycle entails. Very few understand this.
Read the book. It's a fascinating look at the making of a planet, the development of an atmosphere and life, and of how life and the atmosphere are one system that revolves around the amazing unique properties of carbon.

CO2 from man's activities is acidifying they ocean, at a rate unprecedented perhaps in the history of the planet. Armored plankton, called coccolithophores that make their shells from calcium carbonate can't survive in an acidic ocean, and they are critical to life as we know it on this planet. They are the bottom of the food chain, and they balance the CO2 in the atmosphere by taking excess carbon out of the cycle. They are maybe the largest carbon sink on earth and we are threatening their very existance with the CO2 we are pumping into the atmosphere. Did your skeptic information sources tell you about this?

If you got your information from actual scientific sources instead of political blogs with an axe to grind you would be much closer to the truth. The next time you read something by a supposed "expert", check them out at Desmogblog or Sourcewatch. If you want to know what real climate scientists think, go to
Realclimate.org
Newscientist
Logical science
Skeptical science
Open Mind
Deltoid
Rabbet run
Desmogblog
Greenfyre

It's time to wake up.

The Differences Between Chinese and U.S. Economic Recoveries

know nothing

If you want to live up to your name, keep watching Fox news.
The most unfair and unbalanced "news" network in history.

There you'll learn enlightening facts like the OMB report that Sean Hannity keeps talking about. This report supposedly forcast dire consequences of Obama's stimulus package.
The only problem is that THERE WAS NO SUCH REPORT.
But Hannity kept harping on it a full week after other networks let the public know that the report doesn't exist.

you rely on these clowns for information?

The Differences Between Chinese and U.S. Economic Recoveries

Ferdinand

"I didn't hear the kind of nonsense about renewables that I hear in Europe. Maybe it's because the Chinese government has too much respect for its citizens."

I would think the opposite is true. One difference, and probably a major one, is that the Chinese are free to make decisions based on good sense(not that I would choose their non democratic system). We on the other hand, have a system that placates the fossil fuel industry, which pays for that favor, and allows them to fool the public about climate change and energy solutions. And for the last eight years they may as well have been the government. It amounts to the same thing.

The Bush administration had a lot of respect for our citizens. That's why it censored and squelched any scientific evidence of global warming, while doing the bidding of the oil and coal companies. They even stifled research by cutting funding to NASA etc, and never launching a completed satellite, meant to study climate change, while burying reports on climate change. They spent many billions of taxpayer money on the climate study that they then censored.

That's because the science is getting stronger all the time, despite the lies you believe, and because the evidence is overwhelming and has overwhelming consensus among climate scientists, despite the lies Sen. Inh0fe etc. want you to believe. They didn't want the citizens to know, nor did they want any more evidence.


Ferdinand, the world really isn't flat.

You probably believe some nonsense about the warming being a natural cycle.

The coal in the earth took 60 million years to accumulate, through the natural carbon cycle. We are now releasing that 60 million years worth of accumulated carbon into the atmosphere in the blink of an eye of 150 -200 years. Explain how that is a natural cycle, like anything the earth has ever been through before, that didn't kill off 90% of life on the planet. Read the new book, "The Carbon Age".
Education does wonders.


"The target audience of denialism is the lay audience, not scientists. It’s made up to look like science, but it’s PR."
David Archer

That's what organizations like the Heartland Intitute are for.

"It's no coincidence that the Heartland Institute has also received funding over the years from companies that stand to benefit from delaying government regulation in the areas of tobacco and greenhouse gas emissions."

"No group typifies this more than the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based 'think' tank that simultaneously operates the 'smoker's lounge' and 'global warming facts" sections on their website. The former arguing for 'smoker's rights' and railing on about the need for 'sound science' on tobacco issues and the latter arguing that global warming is not a crisis."

www.desmogblog.com/cli...


Wind energy grew by 8.3 gigawatts last year in the U.S. That's the equivalent of 3 nuclear reactors, or 4.5 coal plants, taking the capacity factor of wind into consideration, and comparing with the average 1 GW nuclear plant
and 650 MW coal plant. And wind energy jobs grew by 70% to 85,000.

That's a near term solution. Nuclear or "clean coal" will take a decade at least to produce any new power. Those are maybe mid term solutions. And they both will be expensive ones. And they will still be among the dirtiest of solutions.

Wind and solar will create 4-5 times as many jobs as the equivalent in coal or nuclear.
And they will provide cheaper power than either coal or nuclear.

"The time to plan and construct a coal-fired power plant without CCS equipment is generally 5–8 yr. CCS technology would be added during this period. The development time is another 1–3 yr. Thus, the total planning-to-operation time for a standard coal plant with CCS is estimated to be 6–11 yr. If the coal-CCS plant is an IGCC plant, the time may be longer since none has been built to date."

"..... based on the most optimistic future projections of nuclear power construction times of 4–5 yrs. and those times based on historic data, we assume future construction times due to nuclear power plants as 4–9 yr. Thus, the overall time between planning and operation of a nuclear power plant ranges from 10–19 yr."

"The median construction time for reactors in the US built since 1970 is 9 yr."

"For CSP(solar thermal), the construction time is similar to that of a wind farm. For example, Nevada Solar One required about 1.5 yr for construction. Similarly, an ethanol refinery requires about 1.5 yr to construct. We assume a range in both cases of 1–2 yr. We also assume the development time is the same as that for a wind farm, 1–3 yr. Thus, the overall planning-to-operation time for a CSP plant or ethanol refinery is 2–5 yr."

www.rsc.org/delivery/_...

"Wind power's ecological footprint is so small — a million times smaller than ethanol's — that if all the cars driven in the United States were battery-electric, they could be fueled by wind turbines whose total land footprint, not counting spacing in between, takes up less than 1.2 square miles, Stanford University environmental engineering professor Mark Jacobson found."

Wind farms only use about 2 1/2% of the land they are sited on, coexisting with agriculture, and conceivably with solar power.

solveclimate.com/blog/....

If you go to the first link, you will learn that nuclar and coal with CCS come in dead last in life cycle carbon footprint, compared with other
alternative energy sources. Coal with CCS is still off the charts in this regard.

14 Stem Cell, Renewable Energy Opportunities for the Obama Era

SolarMan

Yes, distributed energy from PV on rooftops etc. is a good thing. We need more of that, a less centralized grid.
If we think of it as a quality verses quantity issue, the distributed energy addresses the quality, but we also need a large quantity of renewable energy, if we are to reduce CO2 emissions enough to get the job done.

I believe we need to encourage this as well as large solar and wind farms.

Solar thermal with heat storage is the only renewabe that can replace the base load from coal plants, and it has to be large scale to work and be cost effective. And it has to be in areas of intense sunlight like the southwest. It doesn't require storage sytems in the grid, as it has it's own storage.

A smart grid will not just encourage large projects, as small distributed systems like rooftop solar will need to be smoothly integrated into the grid, so you can sell your excess electricity back to the utility, for instance.

We should remember that analysts are usually looking at the fairly short term picture. Renewable energy is obvously in the beginning of a macro trend that will span years and decades.

14 Stem Cell, Renewable Energy Opportunities for the Obama Era

Correction:

kWh is correct for electricity prices, but I should have written kW for the price of power plant construction.

14 Stem Cell, Renewable Energy Opportunities for the Obama Era

While I acknowledge that we will need some new nuclear power in the energy mix, I'm not a big fan of it, because it has a lot more problems than anything but coal, tar sand and shale oil.

What I find interesting is the statement that nuclear is cheap. Not according to estimates for new nuclear plants. Prices are expected to be 12-17 cents/kWh from new nuclear, with prices as high as 22-30 cents/kWh for at least the first year that a plant goes online. The estimates for building new plants have skyrocketed. FPL raised the estimate for two new plants proposed for Florida from
$4100/kWh to $5500-$8100/kWh. Another estimate for new plants is as high as $10,000 per kWh.

climateprogress.org/20.../

Another point is that we can build wind and solar plants much quicker. It will probably be a decade before the first new nuclear plants go online. By then, solar and wind could already be producing hundreds of gigawatts of power.

Building wind and solar also creates 3-4 times as many jobs as building nuclear or coal plants.

APWR does look good. The deal with GE is a good confirmation for them.

This Week in Renewable Energy

billb37

When talking about the land that wind farms use, you need to realize that they don't actually use all the land they are sited on.
The turbines have to be spread out so they don't interfere with each other's wind.
I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I think I remember reading that they only use about 2 1/2% of the land. That means they can coexist with agriculture.

I don't think any large wind farms are being sold without the realization of capacity factor. Yes wind has a capacity factor of 35-40%. So you would need about 300 MW to replace the power from 120MW of coal power. I don't see that as a game stopper.
Power is power and the grid needs all of it. As long as the power from wind and PV can be stored or shunted around the grid to whereand when it is needed, what does it matter if it isn't there 24/7?
Many existing power plants don't run all day, in fact many only run 20% of the time as peaker plants or load following plants.

Biofuels are said to produce 10,000 to 18,000 miles per acre.
Solar thermal plants could produce 2 million miles per acre.

The numbers for the land needed for solar plants may seem astronomical, but so is the land used for coal mining and coal plants. It's been said that solar thermal plants with heat storage could power the whole country with less land than now used by the coal and coal power industries. And coal only provides half of the country's power!