
Wind power: Even worse than you thought - edcobb
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/07/wind_power_actually_25_per_cent/
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roblund
Interesting article. I hadn't heard of the UK's ROCs (renewables obligation
certificates) before. That sounds like a fairly convoluted and silly system.
Wind power is a bad idea IMHO.

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teamonkey
I suggest skipping The Register's diatribe and going stright to the PDF. Not
that The Reg is miscommunicating anything per se, just that it's annoying.

<http://www.jmt.org/assets/pdf/wind-report.pdf>

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r00fus
All this article says to me is that the efficiency claims are not realistic
(what's new in marketing?) and that Wind can't be use for baseload power due
to it's variability.

The second point is not new knowledge, so any article trumpeting these claims
in red and bold is sensationalist and suspect.

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methodin
Couldn't they just strap solar panels all over the surface or on top of the
wind mills to mitigate some of the inefficiencies? On a related note, whatever
happened to the spray-on solar material using nanotechnology?

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unwind
I don't think the top surface area of a typical wind turbine is even close to
being large enough for that to pay back.

The largest turbines (Enercon E-126 [1]) are rated at 7 MW of wind power. The
largest photovoltaic solar plant (Sarnia [2]) in the world is rated at 80 MW,
i.e. about 11 of the largest wind turbines. The cell surface area of that
plant is 966,000 square meters.

Again, I don't think the surface area of the top of a single wind turbine's
gondola quite suffices.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine#Largest_capacity> [2]
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarnia_Photovoltaic_Power_Plant>

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Jetlag
Insert molten salt battery between erratic power source and grid.

Nobel prize please. _outstretched hand_

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antidaily
So the beta sucks?

