In the fall of 1984 California photographer Thomas Braise filmed Fayette Manufacturing’s wind turbines in the Altamont Pass. Braise was … Read more
News on Large Wind
Californians pay some of the nation’s highest electricity rates. They’re also being devastated by the consequences of fossil fueled climate change, including more deadly and expensive wildfires, droughts and heat waves.
Politicians need to stop promising they’ll confront these challenges and start doing it.
The recent fires in Los Angeles County should serve as a political rallying cry to accelerate the phaseout of oil and gas. Instead, they’re threatening to derail Sacramento’s long-promised focus on more affordable energy.
From the regulator’s perspective, merchant projects do not provide any price protection for consumers even though their cost base is fixed – renewables projects will make “super profits” during price spikes. But they appear to be “subsidy-free”.
And if they lead to PPA-backed structures, the benefits of the fixed price will go to the buyer – which these days is most likely to be one of the GAFAs (Google, Microsoft, Amazon). Thus relying on PPAs rather than CfDs is akin to indirectly giving subsidies to some of the richest corporates on earth…
The Canadian fabricator, DAF-Indal, installed a second generation 50 kW Darrieus turbine in 1981 at the the Romero Overlook Visitor … Read more
NREL’s Owen Roberts reports that FloWind’s prototype 100 kW Darrieus wind turbine installed in early 1982 is still standing inoperative … Read more
Even in not-always-sunny UK solar pv could provide up to 40 per-cent of annual electricity production. That is without a significant amount of curtailment of production or even the need to convert the electricity into stored energy such as hydrogen. Of course this is dependent on there being enough provision of batteries. Solar plus batteries will be the dominant energy system in the world in future decades, but they will also be centrally important in UK.
On paper the composite bearingless rotor seemed too good to be true: a wind turbine rotor that enabled the blades to change pitch without bearings in the hub. And the wind turbine would passively use aerodynamic forces to orient the rotor downwind of the tower. It was the height of simplicity and would be cheap to build. What could go wrong? The short answer: everything. Eventually the nearly 400 wind turbines using the concept in California during the Great California Wind Rush of the early to mid 1980s were scraped off the face of the earth for scrap. And therein lays a sprawling tale.
For details on development of the Composite Bearingless Rotor and its derivatives see my accompanying article Failed Dream: the Bearingless … Read more
The hollowing out of these once great American industrial giants is a sad story, and unfortunately that story has repercussions that will be felt for years to come as the country tries to come to grips with its intractable emissions problem. Although not the only root cause, a remarkable amount of the culpability rests on Jack Welch and his destructive take on capitalism.
The Ford government spent $231 million to cancel the green energy contracts it tore up after taking office, but said the move would save ratepayers some $790 million by not paying for power the province didn’t need.
The government currently spends about $6 billion of taxpayer money each year to subsidize Ontario’s electricity rates. About half of the province’s electricity supply is generated by nuclear plants, roughly one-quarter by hydro dams, and the rest by a mix of gas plants, wind and solar.
