Why did we wait so long for wind power?
The first mention of using wind to generate electricity is credited to William Thomson (better known as Lord Kelvin). In an 1881 address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Thomson noted that a windmill connected to a dynamo and a battery could be used to provide electric power, and speculated that, while wind had largely been superseded by steam generated by burning coal, “When the coal is all burned…it is most probable that windmills or wind-motors in some form will again be in the ascendant”.
It didn’t take long for windmills connected to electric generators to be built. James Blythe, a professor in Glasgow, built a windmill in 1887 that used a generator to charge batteries to power the lights in his vacation home. The same year a similar system was built in La Hève Cape in France to provide power to homes. In the US, inventor Charles Brush built a huge windmill to power the 350 lightbulbs in his Cleveland mansion in 1890. (For context, Edison patented his lightbulb in 1880, and the first central electric power station was built at Pearl Street in 1882). And in 1893, arctic explorer Fridjtjof Nansen commissioned a ship that included windmill powered electric lights for a voyage to the North Pole.
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However, these efforts were ultimately derailed by the steady march of cheaper electricity. In 1882, Edison’s Pearl Street Station operated at a thermal efficiency of 2.5%. By 1920, steam turbines were operating at 20% efficiency, and by 1960 they had reached 40% efficiency. Fuel prices similarly fell — between 1949 and 1965 the real price of oil and coal fell by 20% and 33%, respectively. Larger power plants were able to capture greater economies of scale. Between 1920 and 1970 the cost of coal-generated electricity fell by approximately 80%.
In order to provide “green” power to meet the present needs of just California, the entire land area of the states of Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico would have to be covered by solar panels. And they wouldn’t provide any power at all at night, so you’d still have to have other sources.
Power from wind turbines is less dense than solar.
Even though the swept area of the modern wind turbine is twenty-five times that of a turbine twenty years ago, the cost per megawatt hasn’t fallen much even in real terms. All the aerospace geniuses who were fired when the Space Shuttle stopped flying have had a go at improving efficiency and come up against the limit. Wind technology was obsolete a century ago and this is putting lipstick on a pig. I see quite a lot of potential for solar, in fact the problem is that prices are coming down so fast that the payback period has to be under two years, at which time your contract ends and you have to bid against cheaper solar.
Years ago when I was in a top tier university (the kind that had weed out courses) we researched ideas like wind power, etc. and found that no matter how much weed or money we threw at the concept…they just didn’t work. When you had honesty in the lab, none of these happy hippy horseshit ideas ever worked. Science fiction is what they were. Science fiction. We did manage to have a pretty good run with these concepts in the entertainment industry.
No one will tell you this, but the true reason that the dark forces of the U.N. et al. overthrew the inestimably great President Richard Milhous Nixon is because he would have brought clean, cheap, and infinitely abundant nuclear energy to the United States of America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Independence
Nuclear energy is the holy grail and ark of the covenant.
I have heard it said that the problem with wind turbines is not just the vast amount of concrete and steel and other materials required to make it, but also that each generator-on-a-stick will not produce enough energy in its useful life to make another wind turbine.
If this is true then entropy takes over. In other words, we are screwed.